Cyberpunk
Authors: Bruce Bethke
Cyberpunk 1.0
(BETA)
A novel by
Bruce Bethke
©1998 Bruce Bethke
All Rights Reserved
This version ©1998 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
Portions of this work have been previously published in different formats. This
work incorporates material copyrighted in 1980, 1982, 1988, and 1989 by
Bruce Bethke.
Inquiries regarding publication and/or subsidiary rights to this material should
be directed to:
Ashley D. Grayson
Ashley Grayson Literary Agency
th
Street
San Pedro
,
(310) 548-4672
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living, dead, or
undead (“We prefer the term
transmortal
”), is purely accidental.
Cyberpunk 1.0
1
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
0/ 0/ : Warmstart
Okay, so it’s morning. Sparrows are arguing in the dwarf maples
outside my bedroom window. Metallic coughs and sputters echo down
the street; old man Xiang must have scored some pirate gasoline and
tried to start his Mercedes again. Skateboard wheels grind and clatter on
cracked pavement. Boombox music Doppler-shifts as a squad of middle
school AnnoyBoys roll past.
Ah, the sounds of Spring.
Closer by, I flag soft noises filtering up from the kitchen: Mr.
HotBrew wheezing through another load of caffix. The pop and crinkle
of yummy shrinkwrap being split and peeled. Solid thunk of the
microwave oven door slamming closed, chaining into the bleats, chimes
and choppy vosynthed th-an-k-yo-us of someone doing the program job
on breakfast.
Someone? Mom, for sure. Like, nuking embalmed meadow muffins
is her domestic duty. Dad only cooks raw things that can be immolated
on the hibachi. I listen closer, hear her cheerful mindless morning babble
and him making with the occasional simian grunt in acknol, or maybe
they aren’t even talking to each other. Once Mom gives the appliances a
start they can do a pretty fair sim of a no-brain conversation all by
themselves.
I roll over. Brush the long black hair back from my face. Get my left
eye open and find the bedside clock.
.
Okay, so it’s not morning. Not official, not yet. School day rules:
true morning doesn’t start until0/ 7:0/0/ :0/0/ , exact. I scrunch the covers up
around my cheeks, snuggle a little deeper in the comfty warm, work at
getting both eyes open.
Jerky little holo of a space shuttle comes out from behind the left
Cyberpunk 1.0
2
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
edge of the clock.
Chick. Chick. Chick.
Stubby white wings flash as the
ugly blunt thing banks to pass in front.
Chick. Chick.
Numbers change.
.
I hate that clock.
I mean, when I was a twelve, I thought that clock was total
derzky
.
Cooler than utter cool. The penultimax: A foot-high lump of jagged
blue-filled Lucite, numbers gleaming like molten silver poured on a
glacier, orbited forever by a Classic Shuttle. Every five minutes the
cargo doors open and a satellite does the deploy. Every hour on the hour
the ‘nauts come out for a little space spindance.
Shuttle swings around the right side of the clock.
Chick. Chick.
Stupid thing. Not even a decent interfill routine, just a little white brick
moving in one-second jerks. A couple months back me and Georgie
tried to hack the video PROMs, reprogram it to do the Challenger every
hour on the hour. Turned out the imager wasn’t a holosynth at all, just a
glob of brainless plastic and a couple hundred laser diodes squirting
canned stillframes.
Chick.
The shuttle vanishes behind the right edge of the clock. Gone
for thirty seconds.
I lie there, looking at the clock, and mindlock once more on just how
Dad
the thing truly is. I mean, I can almost
see
the motivationals
hanging off it like slimey, sticky strings: “Is good for you, Mikey. Think
space, Mikey. Science is future, honorable son. Being gifted is not
enough; you must study ‘til eyes bleed, claw way through Examination
Hell, and perhaps one day if you are extra special good just maybe you
get to go
Up
!”
Yeah, up. To the High Pacific. Get a Brown Nose in
nemawashi
—
the Nipponese art of kissing butt—and become a deck wiper on the
Nakamura industrial platform. Or maybe the PanEuros will decide they
need some good public relations, let us and the Soviets kill a few more
people trying to get to Mars again. Boy oh boy.
When you’re 13.75 years old and almost a sophomore in high
school, you start to think about these things.
Cyberpunk 1.0
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
Outside my window, old man Xiang’s car door creaks open with a
rusty squeal, slams shut with a sharp
krummp
. The sparrows explode in a
flutter of stubby wings and terrified cheeping, fly off chased by a boiling
stream of Chinese obscenities. I hear a deep grunt and the scrape of
shoes on pavement as he gets behind the car, starts pushing.
Shuttle comes back out from behind the clock.
Chick. Chick.
Cargo
doors pop open, in prep for the
satellite deploy. I roll over, pull a
pillow onto my head, try to find another minute or two of sleep.
No good. There’s light seeping in; not much, but enough to show
that I’m lying between Voyager sheets and pillowcases. Wearing dorky
NASA Commander America
TM
cosmo-jammies (only ‘cause all my other
nightclothes are in the wash, honest). Close my eyes, and I can still see
Mom and Dad smiling stupid at me as I tear open the Christmas wrap,
recognize the dumb fake roboto and cyberlightpipe pattern and start to
gag, then scratch my true response and give them what they want to
hear: “Geez, Mom, these are real
neat
!” Almost said
far out
and
groovy
,
but figured that’d tip them off.
Rayno explained it to me real good once, how Olders brains are
stuck in a kind of wishful self-sim’d past. Like, his bio-dad used to build
model privatecars. Whenever his mom kicked him out for the weekend
he’d go over to his bio-dad’s, get bored to death and halfway back again
hearing about Chryslers,
Lincolns
. Wasn’t ‘til he was fifteen years old
that he finally met his bio-grandfather, learned that the family’s true last
privatecar was a brainless little 3-cylinder Latka.
Chime
. Downstairs, the microwave announces that breakfast is
ready. The oven door opens with a
sproing
. Mom says something
cheerful as she slaps the foodpods on the table; Dad rustles his faxsheets
and grumbles something low in reply. I make a tunnel out of my pillow,
peek at the clock.
.
Nope. Still isn’t morning.
Anyway, that’s where Rayno’s bio-dad’s brain got stuck. Georgie’s
old man scrounges parts, rebuilds obsolete American computers, never
stops ranting about how great they really were and it’s all Management
Cyberpunk 1.0
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
and Wall Street’s fault that the domestic industry is dead. My Dad’s too
busy to build/rebuild anything, what with his job and his first wife’s
grownup kids, so he buys me space shuttle clocks. Flying model Saturn-
Five’s. Apollo Hi-Lites video singles. A full-bandwidth membership in
AstraNet and a Nitachi telescope.
A
telescope
? Hey, this is
Dad
we’re talking about! No mere hunk of
glass could be
half
expensive enough for the trophy son of David
Richard Harris, Fuji-DynaRand’s Fuku Shacho of Marketing
(American). He bought me a zillion-power CCD-retinated fused-silicate
photon amplification device with all the optional
everythings
. Set it on
this monster tripod out on the deck—looks like Mung the Magnificent’s
fritzin’ Interplanetary Death Cannon—and every night when he’s in
town and not working late we have to go out there, burn our ten minutes
of Quality Time shivering in the cold and damp and trying to spot
something educational.
Of course, being Dad, he’s also got to shut off the programmables
and insist on using the dumb manual controls. Meaning most nights we
wind up looking at cloud projos, comm satellites, wreckage from the
Freedom
, and other stuff that might be stars or planets but he’s never
real sure which. Then he swings the ‘scope around to point at the
Fuji-
DynaRand platform, hanging there fat and low in geosync like a big
green ‘n’ gold corporate logo—which, thanks to a gigundo holo laser on
the platform, is just exactly what it
does
look like through the ‘scope—
and he launches into the standard lecture about why I should want to Go
Up.
Smile? Yup, I can feel a true smile coming on. No doubt about it,
I’m going to wake up this morning with a smile, ‘cause right now I’m
thinking deep about Dad, and the Death Cannon, and Dad’s library of
standard lectures. Last winter, when he was out of town for a week, me
and Georgie started putzing with the telescope’s brainbox. Discovered
we could run a lightfiber from my bedroom to the deck, patch the Death
Cannon straight into MoJo —my Miko-Gyoja 260/0/ /ex supermicro—and
auto-aim the thing just by clicking on stuff from the encyclopedia. Pipe
Cyberpunk 1.0
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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
the images to any screen in the HouseSys, or better yet, compress ‘em,
save ‘em, and look at them “later.”
When I showed Dad what we’d done, his reaction was classic. First,
that little vein on the side of his forehead started throbbing. Then, his
face shifted down to this deep magenta beet-look, and I thought sure he
was gonna blow all his new heartgaskets.
And then, running on pure improv and with absolute no rehearsal at
all, he proceeded to coredump a truly marvelous all-new version of his
famous lecture, That’s What’s Wrong With You Damned Kids.
Brilliant
performance. There are fathers and there are bio-parents; there are
Olders and even a few dads; but only my old man can be so total, utter
Dad
.
Solid proof that I’m a mutant, you ask me.
A burst of static. A crackle, a buzz or two, and then the clock speaks
up in that stupid pseudo space-radio voice it uses: “Good morning,
captain. Rise and shine. --
crackle
— It’s oh-seven-hundred —
pssht
—
and you are
go
for throttle
up
.” I cop a glance at the clock, flag that the