Empty plastic packaging crunched like autumn leaves under Raz’s boots with each measured stomp, deliberately synchronized to the blaring classical music thumping in her antique Sennheisers. In the dim light of the neon HOT LIVE MONSTER GIRLS sign (cybernetically mangled/restructured fetishists and their admirers, primarily) across the way, she could make out the familiar logo on the blanket of rubbish--Rapture Red. Maybe Mini Kowloon really was where she belongs, she thought, chuckling quietly and swallowing a capsule of the discontinued Cyan variant of the potent nanodrug herself.
The sukajan clad punk walking the other way shot her an incredulous glance--what kind of fucking dipshit would pay that much for a pair of shitty headphones!? he thought, unaware she could hear every word even louder than the Bon Jovi bouncing around her skull.
The kind of fucking disphit who’s used her freaky Projie powers to get richer than your punk-ass could even comprehend, Raz thought in reply, unintentionally broadcasting the words back to his mind. She only realized her error when the roided up thug panicked and turned his confident stride to a panicked run. Oopsie, guess the Rapture already kicked in, she giggled, ducking into the alley on the right and cranking up the volume on her first-wave antique Telepod for atmosphere. The VR chats in the Darkworld were right--this place really is “hackin’ as fuck.”
Most folks would be terrified out of their wits to end up on this side of town, so close to the sinking ruins, to the swamplands–but for Raziel this maze of antique neon and unsavory characters meant freedom from TELECOM jurisdiction and the hordes of third-wave Drorbs flying around seeking out Projies and citizens without NeurOSes (unofficially dubbed ‘Chunkers’).
Of course, these things sort of went together--any-wave NeurOS implant neutralized the vibrations required for a Projie to leave the body, enter the Plane, or otherwise utilize their etheric double (or “ethdub”) for tasks, extraordinary or mundane, so while not all Chunkers were Projies, all Projies were Chunkers. Rapture Blue, on the other hand, cranked these vibes up to eleven--officially discontinued when the mandatory second-wave NeurOS implemented anti-vibe tech. Rapture Cyan was the same but with some added Rapture Green to also buff stats of the physical body (or “fleshbod”)--also discontinued due to the Blue elements, and even harder to find on the black market, but pretty much a required prescription for a Projie.
At the end of the alley, Raziel could make out a supporting brick or two beneath the skyscraper of vines. Dilapidated red halogen-lit sign labelled “CYBERSTATION”--this was definitely the place. Raz switched her padded leather gloves off, powering down the couple million volts of electricity that were ready to jump from the ZPE battery in her Kilroy Lives backpack into the chest of any punk-ass bitch who made contact with the rivets on the knuckles--overkill for a place like this. The Drorbs patrolling the border of Mini Kowloon scanned meticulously for NeurOSes, so only Chunkers were on this side of the border anyway--and no NeurOS means no stupid “chan” implant weapons driven by it. Raziel took a deep breath, cut the music on her Telapod, threw open the double doors, and stepped into the dimly-lit wonderland.
It was even more amazing than the other Chunkers on the Darkworld had described. Pounding rock from the late 20th-century blared loud enough to be heard even over the constant digital beeps and explosions from the priceless collection of antique arcade machines, with dozens of cabinets ranging from original Dig Dug and Pole Position units to deluxe dance machines of the early 21st century. At the bar in the corner, a very large older biker-type with a cascading white beard served the finest craft beers from the main Kowloon District halfway across the globe and sold every variation of Rapture--even the Blue variants. A dance floor in the next room over oozed smoke and runaway lasers as dozens of Chunkers donned cardboard skull-masks in a traditional Lagrimas Del Sangre-style dance party, paying homage to their ancient fallen leader and demigod, Kilroy.
Hopefully her contact wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to skip town, because all Raziel really wanted to do right now was pop a couple more Rapture Cyan caps and party here until she passed out.
You’ll know me when you see me, Raziel thought, snapping back to the mission and recalling the last thing KaiserW had said to her before exiting the Plane and returning to her own fleshbod last night. Easier said than done, you cheeky bitch, Raz thought, struggling to pick out any one individual at all among the waves of wildly-dressed anarchists, thugs, and Neo-Yakuza gangsters.
You’ll find me, sweetie. Raz knew the voice in her head immediately--KaiserW for sure. Just enjoy the scenery. I meant what I said--you can´t miss me.
Damn it, I didn’t mean to think that out loud. Still not used to this dose of Cyan. You were right, though--it’s crazy how much of a difference it makes. As this silent conversation continued, Raziel ducked between each aisle of games, desperately looking for any sign of her contact, but this was a stupid fucking wild goose chase. Don’t you worry about someone else listening in on us like this?
Who? Nobody but other Projies could, and you know how hard we are to find. Sometimes Ace pops in here but I haven’t seen him outside of the Temple in weeks. Sorry to cut it short last night, Ace sensed MIBs coming for us. Come on, look a little harder, sweetie, I don’t exactly blend in.
I’m fucking trying, Kaiser, she continued, passing a row of massive two-player Virtual On cabs and groaning. This is a maze of machines. Y-you never worry about them lurking around here? The MIBs, I mean.
They’d stand out like a sore thumb, Raz. You know they have to dress like that all the time, right? All black with those stupid shades?
Yeah right, real fuckin funny. I’m sure they could go incognito if they wanted to.
They wouldn’t dare to, not here. They can’t have NeurOSes or they couldn’t chase us in the Plane like they do, so they can’t have any implants to fight with--and a bunch of bougie TELECOM agents know better than to fuck around with no chans to save their ass in a place like this. Not the most popular bastards with Chunker thugs. They’re only able to get us by finding us on this side of the brain, catching our fleshbod--but that’s about to change.
Oh yeah? How--wait--
Well, Kaiser was right, Raziel knew her when she saw her. 6’3” black bodybuilder chick built like a tank--word around the Plane was she’d trained her ethdub so much it had grown larger and stronger than her fleshbod, but no, she was just a fucking human tank all the way around. When Raz approached her, she was in the middle of an S20 difficulty song on Pump it Up, an antique South Korean dancing simulation machine. Her legs moved so fast they were impossible to follow, and almost every arrow--all 1100+--were hit flawlessly. The machine proudly proclaimed that she’d received an A rank.
Raziel tried to pull her jaw from the floor as Kaiser stepped off the machine, wiping the sweat from her brow and exhaling. “Sorry, I usually get an S on this one, but I missed a couple from trying to talk to you in mindlink while playing. Always throws my game off a little bit.” Though Kaiser was imposing and muscular, there was a softness to her face that surprised Raziel, seeing it in real life. They locked eyes and Raz was taken aback--Kaiser had wide, sweet eyes that seem to glow in contrast to the beautiful dark complexion of her face; with subtle, soft lips adorned with glowing blacklight-reactive green lipstick. There was just something about her--maybe it was the radiance of her face, the way her toned fleshbod glistened with so much sweat, or just the sheer dominant and nurturing pressure of her aura--but Raziel blushed in spite of herself, flustered in a way she’d never expected from their encounters on the plane.
“It’s nice to actually meet you,” Raziel gulped, extending a hand.
“It’s switched off, right?” Kaiser replied, playfully raising an eyebrow and motioning to the homemade taser gloves. She said it teasingly but Raz could tell there was a genuine concern.
“Oh, n-no, er, yeah, I turned ‘em off before coming in, sorry.” Kaiser nodded and eagerly and firmly took Raz’s hand, pulling her into a casual one handed embrace. Raziel realized at this moment that she only came up to the chest on Kaiser’s fleshbod, and was very cautious not to broadcast any of her resulting thoughts. Raz liked Kaiser a whole lot.
“It’s nice to meet you then too, Raziel,” Kaiser replied, leaning forward and motioning to the top of her shaved head. There was a distinct surgical scar over the area her NeurOS implant used to be and a slight depression under the skin where a chunk of her skull had been removed with it--the origin of the term Chunker. “Not that I distrust you, sweetie, but I’m gonna have to ask you to show me yours as well. Just protocol I go by when meeting other Projies on this side of the Plane. MIBs are getting trickier and trickier and it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“Of-of course.” Raziel removed her beanie and pulled her purple-died hair to one side, revealing a shaved patch with an identical scar and depression. “Sorry, I just--don’t like to advertise it. I still have some business back in the TELECOM districts and it’s… easier this way.”
“I would do the same, but I’m too damn tall for anyone to see mine anyway,” Kaiser quipped, laughing an uproarious, deep guffaw that was far too infectious for someone laughing at their own joke. “I appreciate you coming out all this way.”
“It’s not too far, just one district over,” Raz replied, quickly putting her beanie back on. “Sorry, I know we’re surrounded by other Chunkers here, just--force of habit. You had something to show me?”
“Ah, yes! Please, follow me. And then, of course, I can show you around my little home here--we can hang out all night if you want, this is my little slice of paradise.”
“You run this place!?” Raz blurted, dumbfounded. “And what do you mean by hang out? Do you mean like, a date, or--”
“No, I’ve been flirting with you in the astral plane for a year and a half for the hell of it. Yes, as a date, you nerd.” Raz blushed a little, secretly hoping that would be the answer. “But first things first. I promise I didn’t just bring you here to dance and to see what a great kisser I am. This is gonna blow your mind, sweetie.” Kaiser grabbed her hand and led her through the horde of gamers, past the entrance to the dance floor, to another door labelled “DARKWORLD IMMERSION PODS.”
“Is--is that possible?” Raz asked, bewildered as Kaiser scanned some sort of identification card on the lock and slowly opened the worn out wooden door. “It shouldn’t be possible to access the Darkworld through the normal TeleNet at all with a NeurOS, and immersion pods rely on the NeurOS to hijack brain impulses to grant the immersion, so it should only be accessible through custom non-immersion headset and glove rigs--”
“Yeah, and first-wave pods aren’t exactly encrypted with modern TELECOM encryption, sweetie,” Kaiser scoffs, locking the door behind them. In the center of the old wood-paneled room, four classic first-wave Teleworld Immersion Pods sat, their white Flexiglass exterior as vibrant as the day they rolled out of the factory. “These are old enough that it wasn’t too hard to find a group on the Darkworld detailing how to break the encryption.” She approached the first in the lineup and opened the door as the lights inside blinked to life. “These things are too old to rely on NeurOS tech. First wave TIPs directly connected to the brain itself--it was dangerous as shit if it got hacked, so they were patched later to connect via NeurOS, with upgrade kits shipped to add the necessary interfacing units, but the original firmware leaked decades ago and I was able to reflash these back to that original image. Then it was just a matter of uninstalling the NeurOS interface gadgets, hacking it to bypass normal startup checks and boot right into the Darkworld, and… here we have it.”
“That’s amazing, but I’m not sure how it relates to astral projection,” Raziel replied, leaning into the open door of the pod and looking in awe at the mint condition vintage tech inside.
“Because,” Kaiser replied, climbing into the next pod over, “well… it’s easier to show you, I think. Do me a favor. I’ve got a basic Projie setup in the corner there, yeah?” Raziel bumped her head on the way out of the TIP and turned to see a simple magnetic-North-aligned bed along with magnetic headphones, sleep mask, a Telapod loaded with binaural beats tracks, and KENDRATech crystal pods on each corner forming an aura forcefield. “Yeah, that. Go ahead and project. Normal procedure, just meet me at the Temple.”
“How is that going to work when you’re in--”
“Trust me, sweetie. I’m closing the pod now and jacking in. See you in a few.” Raziel sighed and popped yet another Rapture Cyan, activating the crystal pods with a quick swipe of her ethdub and putting on the mask and headphones. In ten minutes, she was outside of her body, in another five she’d shifted down to the first DeepPlane where the Projie Temple lay.
She wandered around the imposing glowing crystal fortress beneath the glowing purple sky, watching impatiently for something amazing to happen. There was a time not too long back when the very concept of leaving her fleshbod and joining a cavalcade of other powerful Projies in this spiritual plane to help build this gigantic construct of astral matter and energy was the most amazing thing in her life. Now, it was a part of everyday life, the least interesting thing about projecting and about the planes.
She spun around in excitement as she heard someone else spawn behind her, but tempered her excitement when she saw it was just Ace--or, well, his ethdub, at least. Ace was of average build, definitively male and seemed to have a pleasant if not naive aura with a hint of a light blue tone to it and a texture like steam rising from a warm cup of tea. He seemed like he would probably be blonde in his fleshbod but it’s always hard to tell for sure, in Raziel’s opinion at least. There were physical features that transferred, but a construct of pure energy, no matter how powerful, just lacked some physical detail a fleshbod did. No way around it.
“Don’t look so excited to see me,” he teased, floating up to the second level of the Temple to resume work on his portal. Nobody was sure where exactly this one went, but Ace was damn good at making them, so everyone was eagerly awaiting its completion… and had been for a month now. Raz was getting a little tired of eagerly awaiting it, to be honest.
“You know it’s always good to see you, Ace,” she sighed. “I’m sorry, I was just supposed to be meeting Kaiser here, she was gonna’ show me… something? Something related to Darkworld stuff. Something that would change the way the MIBs can chase us.”
“The MIBs? Man, that’d be nice. They were fucking with me earlier, I should’ve been here already twice over. They spawned out of one of those black portals they make and followed me through three of mine, but I think I finally lost them.”
“You should be fine as long as they don’t get your fleshbod,” Raz replied. “It’s why we don’t use our real names here. One name for fleshbods, one name for ethdubs, one name for your Teleworld avatar and one name for your darkworld ID, that’s the rule I’ve always gone by. It’s a lot of ‘worlds’ to keep up with but it’s how you gotta’ go about it these days. Why are they after you anyway?”
“Aside from the fact that I’m a Projie?” Ace replied, shrugging. “Who knows. I’ve never used it to map out robberies or do assassinations or crazy shit like you. Maybe they don’t like me making portals, since that’s supposed to be a MIB thing. Who fucking knows. There aren’t many of us left, maybe they just want to get rid of us all full stop finally, I don’t care. Let them come for me. I couldn’t go back to just being a fleshbod. That sounds like a worse hell than wherever I’d go if I die.”
“You worry me with that bullshit talk, Ace,” Raz replied gruffly, forming a basic ball out of astral matter and tossing it to hit him gently in the head. “WE care if you die. It’s gotten lonely enough around here, we’re already outnumbered by MIBs a dozen to one and by astral species and forms a million to one. We’re not losing anyone, bucko.”
“We won’t have to anymore,” a deep feminine voice called out. Raz recognized the voice as Kaiser and floated round to face her, but the ethdub… wasn’t. It was a much shorter and smaller representation of Kilroy, exoskeleton and bleeding-eyes-skull-mask and all, something that shouldn’t have been possible to transfer into the Plane at all.
“Kaiser…? Wh-what the fuck?”
“It’s really me, Raz, don’t worry. But you know what I figured out? If you make an avatar in the GUI on the TIPs I showed you, either on the TeleWorld or the Darkworld… and if you let it hijack your mind before you project… it’s like your ethdub gets stuck in the machine or something. You project, but your consciousness isn’t in your own ethdub, it’s in the avatar from the pod!”
“Holy shit,” Ace replied, barely audible. “So then, there’s no possible way that--”
“That they can get you by finding you here and then in real life? Yep. Bingo, sweetie.” Kilroy crossed her arms smugly, nodding as if to say, Yes, I am indeed amazing.
“Has that ever happened before?” Ace asked. “Like, have they ever actually succeeded in tracking someone down from the Plane and killing their fleshbod?”
“What do you think happened to the other hundreds who used to congregate at this Temple, Ace?” Kaiser snapped grimly in response.
Raziel looked to Ace, expecting an answer, anticipating a half-assed comeback like usual, but none came. His ethdub just floated there, unmoving, not emoting at all, totally frozen.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you THAT upset over it,” Kaiser replied, laughing nervously. “I, uh, I do actually wonder why they don’t still wander here at least, since in theory your ethdub should live on here after death…”
Raziel, her intuition boosted by the overdose of Rapture Cyan, immediately got a sick feeling in the pit of her ‘stomach’ and leapt to the second floor of the temple, rushing over to Ace’s ethdub. It slowly faded into nothing, and when Raziel looked into the portal, now almost fully stabilized, she instinctively threw her hand into her mouth and bit down as tears streamed down both her etheric and physical faces.
Kaiser leapt to her side and watched alongside her as the dim vision in the portal continued--perfectly pale men in black, in the plane overlying the physical plane, using some sort of energy weapon on the shape of Ace. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, barely audibly, tears filling her eyes. “I was too late.”
No doubt, the phantasms they were viewing were the etheric shadows of what was happening in the physical plane on the other side--the MIBs, in their ethdubs, had located Ace in the physical plane and tracked him down to his body at his projecting setup… and had projected to his bedroom in the astral plane, attacking his very life force with a weapon that had entirely destroyed it. To anyone who found his fleshbod, it would simply appear he had a heart attack and died in his sleep. To the two Projies watching, a far more horrific reality had been made apparent--their old friend had been killed, not in the real world, not his fleshbod, like they’d expected, but his ethdub itself--vaporized. No soul remained, no aura, no afterlife in the Plane. His very existence and life force had been somehow nullified. Their systems of facial/chunker recognition cameras and Drorbs had matched whatever the MIBs had sketched out about his physical identity from their encounters with him in the Plane, and now he never existed.
Raziel shifted back into her fleshbod and immediately fell out of the bed, shaking and weeping uncontrollably in fear and in anger and in grief, punching the old wooden floorboards until the skin on her hand split open and only briefly pausing even then. The door to the TIP opened as Kaiser stumbled out, tears streaming down her face but her anger and grief currently steeled, overpowered by her sheer resolve and the burning in her heart. She walked over to Raz, lifted her to her feet, and silently and powerfully embraced her, leaning down and pressing their foreheads together to calm Raz’s aura with the energy of her own.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Kaiser said gently, gingerly wiping the tears from Raz’s face.
“Yeah,” Raz replied, pointing to the pods and clenching her fist.
It means war.