Cyberpunk demo chapter

Downtown New Istanbul pulsed with life, music blaring out of tiny nightclubs, the screams and whoops of the drunk and drugged forming a treble to accompany the baritone boom of the muffled music.

Internet hotspots, installed on the exterior of buildings pinged all the foot traffic passing through, sending popup advertisements straight to the front lobe of anyone with visual cybernetics. The odd person falling on their face, blinded in exchange for force uploaded information was considered an acceptable risk by local law.

A babble of languages swirled through the air, Turkish, Chinese, Arabic and English, all shouting to be heard over everyone else, as the street thronged with people, flush with their payday and trying to put aside the tedium they’d had to endure to earn it.

Titanium alloy limbs glinted under the colours of the myriad advertisements that weren’t simply uploaded straight to people’s mind. Holographic displays, projected from store fronts, onto the smoky air, smaller businesses having to make do with ancient and outdated glass screens to display their video, boasting how their products can and would change lives, today! Make them more virile, make them live longer, help get the promotion they deserved, let them unleash the true beast within them, make them feel oh so good.

Swilling the dregs of a can of Torque energy drink, crushing it and dropping it in the street, Beyza Liu wandered through it all, slipping down one of the hundreds of myriad spiderweb back alleys, checked to make sure she wasn’t being followed, before slipping into her bosses office.

Hassan’s office was a cramped, tiny space, overflowing two things; Bobble head dog knick knacks, littering every surface, and server banks, the large, black structures humming and whining away, dominating the back half of the already tiny office, he was given kickbacks on the rent for the place for cramming them in.

Unfortunately for Hassan, and everyone that came in here, they made the place feel like standing in a fiery pit. Dabbing drops of sweat off his brow to keep them from running into his chrome eyes, he fixed Beyza with a smile, “Beyza! So wonderful to see you! Come in, come in, take a seat.”

She slouched into a seat, rolling the sleeves of her jacket up to her elbows. “Have you got my pay for the last job yet?”

He chewed an edge of his walrus moustache for a moment, “It is coming, my dear girl, it is coming! Do not worry.”

She put a foot over the opposite knee, “Of course, ‘Hassan always gets the money’. ‘How can I ever doubt you’? ‘I wound your pride as a man’!”

“Exactly!” Hassan nodded, pointing a fat finger at her, “You understand, yes. Good. Now…” He turned to his computer, the end of his pinkie finger rotating, to reveal his universal plugin, a discrete, but very illegal cybernetic enhancement, that allowed him to have all sorts of fun with computers, especially ones that weren’t his own.

The old processing unit that had replaced half his brain whirred a little, something mechanically clicking inside of it, as he plugged himself into his computer and instantly started navigating through folders, faster than Beyza could follow.

The old man knew what he was doing, that was for sure, and soon enough, he had a picture of a man pulled up on the monitor that Beyza could see. A tattoo on his neck depicting an Eight Trigram coin. A member of the Cobalt 900, the triad that all but ran things, in the eastern dock districts. “Who’s this and what’s being done to him?”

Hassan smiled, “Diwu Nian.”

“Mhm. So? What’s the deal? Rob him? Cut a finger off and mail it to his boss? Put a bullet in his head?”

Hassan shook his head, “Always so violent, young one, always so violent… No.” He dabbed at his sweat again, “Nothing so dramatic.” He reached into his desk and pulled out a small envelope, “Simply take this, and escort it to Mr Nian’s home.”

Beyza narrowed her eyes, “Do I look like a fucking courier, Hassan?”

“Er-no, of course not….” She certainly did not, short, muscular and with far too mean of a look in her eye to ever work a job that involved exchanging pleasantries. “Just, well, the pay is extremely good for relatively honest work.” He pushed the envelope towards her, “Come now, Beyza, for this, we will get paid immediately. Twenty thousand lira, nothing to sneeze at, I tell you.”

That would cover her rent for a while… and whoever wanted this done was supposed to be paying right away, unlike most of Hassans’ jobs…

“Fine.” She slid it off the desk and tucked it into her jacket pocket. “What’s in there that’s worth so much, anyway?”

Hassan chewed his moustache, “I do not know. It was delivered to me by a man in a red suit earlier, bearded fellow… Rather unsettling, didn’t talk much. But he showed me the money.”

“Really instilling confidence, Hass, buddy.” Beyza muttered, getting to her feet and stretching, giving one of the server towers a little parting slap. “Don’t suppose we can open it first? Make sure I’m not carrying a bomb around?”

“Absolutely not.” Hassan shook his head, “The man in red, he was very clear that the package was not to be opened, until it has reached Diwu.”

“Okay, okay, don’t stress.” Beyza waved at him soothingly, “I won’t open it, I promise.”

“Good. Thank you.” He dabbed his forehead again, “Come back in a few hours, and I should have the money in my hand.”

She clicked her tongue and shot him a little thumbs up, before stepping out of the little office, back into the noise of the city night.

She considered the mystery package in her hand for a moment…

And then ripped it open, to find out what was inside.

Just a thumb drive.

“Oh, come on.” Beyza tutted, “What? No secret vial of drugs? No bomb? No doomsday virus in a vial? Where’s the fun in this?”

She plugged it into her left arm, the cybernetic one, and took a rifle through its’ contents. Blueprints, for… something, she thinks. All very technical, with 3D diagrams and models that were fully rotatable, but that she had no idea what she was actually meant to be looking at.

One of the 3D models, shaped like a bullet, it seemed, had words printed along the side reading out ‘Project Babel’.

There was nothing else of even remote interest she could glean from the drive though, so she unplugged it with a disappointed groan.

She pocketed the drive and studied the envelope it had been in. Easy enough to replace, it was a generic postal package, only cost about fifty lira.

Stealing one from an all-night post office, she packaged it up tight, and set out for Eastern Istanbul. She’d have to get across the Eurasia tunnel, preferably while dodging all the stupid fees they try to impose for using it.

Taking a hover taxi that could just fly over the strait separating the halves of the city, now that was for people who actually got paid regularly, and not people who were employed by Hassan.

Down in the dirty, mean streets, she had to find a way across without being asked to hand over her money, or being checked for weapons. That second one was the real problem.

Slipping through the raucous crowds, Beyza left downtown behind. She knew a place that, if you were really careful of camera movements, and sure of grip, you could propel yourself into traffic and hitch a ride across the tunnel, on the roof of one of the thousands of trucks that crossed the tunnel every day.

She used a sky bridge near the tunnel’s entrance to oversee things, the Bosphorous stretching out, all the way to the other side of the city, more than ten kilometres away.

Drumming her fingers against her thigh, she waited, spotting some fellow riff raff like her that were waiting for the exact same thing, a truck to hitch a ride on. Though most of them looked too nervous to actually make the jump, the bridge high above the nearest road.

Some had even been cautious enough to bring magnetic grips, to latch on better, or dampeners to break their falls.

Not Beyza though. She was the first to act, before anyone else, hopping the bridge’s railing and plummeting down, enjoying the moments of weightlessness, as she plummeted towards a box truck, tucking into a ball and rolling cleanly onto her cybernetic arm to soften her fall, coming to a rest on the back of the truck.

No slowing down, so they didn’t know she was up here. This was good.

She waved back at the potential stowaways she’d left behind on the bridge, enjoying the rush of adrenaline through her system, as the truck angled down, descending below the sea, into the phosphorous yellow light below.

Billboards along the way advertised all sorts of thing, as traffic kept up it’s pace, speeding along, Beyza’s hair whipping behind her, she took her time to take a look at what was on show on the billboards.

Two girls for the price of one at mid-tier brothel, the new Super Triple Decker Cheesy Beef Nightmare was twenty lira off and firms were offering great mortgages on paying for cybernetic arms, with only a fifteen year contract to pay off the artificial limbs, and, on top of that generosity, the job still offered minimum wage.

What a bargain.

She’d have quipped that out loud, if the air in the tunnel wasn’t absolutely disgusting, the smell of trapped diesel and smoke hanging in the air always made her want to retch. The people all tucked away in their vehicles had their air filtered, not a luxury afforded to the plebes catching a ride.

Not that she ever breathed truly clean air, really, but down here, it made the perpetually grey smog of the Istanbul sky seem like unspoiled land, a place that had never seen so much as a campfire to obscure the sky.

In all honesty though, Beyza pitied the poor bastards who were pushed into cybernetics contracts. Forced to get enhancements, so that you could work to pay off your enhancements. A real cash cow of an industry, kept the rich so deeply entrenched in the means of production, that they could legally take a workers’ arms away.

Not her though, Hassan might be late with payments a lot, but the questionable industries he got himself involved in usually paid decently. And she’d been working for the pudgeball since she was ten, so she’d managed to scrape together a good enough nest egg to get some pretty nifty enhancements. Some legal, most not.

They passed another sign for a brothel, rent two girls, get a guy free.

“Oooh, now I’m listening.” She curled onto her side, and her eyes glaze over, the stream of advertisements forming a comforting neon stream that whizzed past, the smoggy air making her chest sting a little from having spoken.

The truck bounced into a pothole, jostling her out of her tiny moment of zen, as she had to grip onto a bar to keep herself from flying into traffic.

No comfortable ride then.

She let her legs hang off the back, one hand gripping the truck, the other she used to wave at the kids in the car behind the truck, who were excitedly pointing her out to their mother.

Here’s hoping she wouldn’t contact the cops about it.

Way back, behind the mother and children, her eyes caught something, an armoured car was slicing through traffic at speed, cutting impossibly close, into gaps that seemed to small, car horns blaring in shock, as the neon lights glinted off the vehicles chrome paintjob, the windows tinted so dark it was a wonder the driver could see, as it pulled into the microscopic space between the mother and the car that had been behind her.

Beyza gulped, and made a swiping motion at the mother, to get her car the hell out of the way. Cos whatever this was, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

The passenger seat window lowered as the family got out of the way, but from her angle, all she could see was a gold-plated arm, aiming at her with an enormous hand cannon.

Instinct had her swing her legs up and splay herself flat across the truck roof, a split second before a bullet was occupying the space her skull had been occupying, the enormous ‘BLAM!’ of the cannon enough to make most drivers around them panic and slam the brakes, while the truck below her stepped on the acceleration.

Beyza’s let go of the breath she’d been holding, loosening her grip on the truck, while reaching into her jacket and whipping out one of her firearms- in this case, her sawed off shotgun, a semi-automatic monster that she’d shortened to the length of her forearm- She blasted right back at the chrome truck, the buck biting deep into the chrome hood, she was trying to focus on destroying the engine.

But it was reinforced by the looks of it, enough that the car could keep thundering after her.

Her cybernetic eye fed her with the fact that the armoured vehicle had no licence plates, a fact she stored for later, as she ducked low to avoid another blast from the passenger, rolling across the roof of the truck, towards the driver’s side, making it a harder shot for whoever was trying to blast her, she whipped up to a knee and blasted at the trucks tires.

The reinforced hubcaps deflected most of her shot, and the situation was only getting worse, two vans rolling up behind the armoured truck, flanking it on either side, before their side doors were flung open, men and women with their faces covered by headscarfs carrying pistols.

Gulping, Beyza dumped two shots in through the van door on the armoured cars’ driver side, turning it into a bloody mess before they’d even got a shot off, before she had to hit the deck, bullets whizzing through the air above her.

Fumbling at her waist, she got some spare shells from her ammo belt and fed them into the top of her shotgun, before pumping it.

She needed to make space for herself to breathe here, and had an idea on how to do so, ensuring she had least had a clear spot for the next few seconds.

Rolling towards the van she’d shot, she grabbed a bar that ran along the trucks top and let the rest of her body roll off the edge, tumbling for a moment, until she braced her legs against the trucks side, while with her free hand, she dumped a shell right into the tire of the van, able to hear the screams of pain inside, before the blast of her gun turned their wheel to shreds, and it veered out of control, the driver desperately trying to maintain control, slammed on the brakes and fell away. The other two cars pursuing her fell back too, dropping their speed and giving her space to gain some distance.

Hanging off the side of her truck, she heaved a sigh of relief, for her short lived moment of victory.

And then the truck angled up, heading back towards the surface, police sirens wailing that she was going to be in deep shit, if she didn’t move quick.