Fiction: Submission

This is a short piece I wrote as an audition for the writer position for an up-and-coming game company. They wanted someone who understood cyberpunk fiction (this was the early 90's, by the way), so I whipped this up. As a side note, 'Submission' was merely my working title, as the story was my submission to the company. Once I'd finished it, however, I realized it fit the tale well enough. Enjoy!

* * *

As the night came on, Temple jacked into Jake’s head.

From the shallowly arced monitor before him, the image resolved; a slow scan of the club’s interior from the corner nearest the entrance. Temple always admired the steadiness of Jake’s gaze. The bouncer’s eyes always slid easily to cover newcomers as they entered, filters embedded in his corneas compensating for the laser-brightness of the sign above the door proclaiming EXIT.

“Evening, Temple.” Jake’s voice rode in, as calm as sunset, no distortion through the interface. Temple sat between two multiphase speakers, listening to the way the after work crowd milled and spoke; a comfortable sussurus of phonemes and laughter over the background ambient music. Calming, like the sound of the night surf he remembered from childhood.

“Evening. Who’s front line tonight?” He watched as Jake obliged his request by glancing over toward the bar in the center of the room. A tall, redheaded woman wearing tight white vinyl and buckled straps turned away from a customer and began mixing drinks with an unhurried grace. Brianna, thought Temple, watching her thin form glide behind the massive, black shell of the bartop. Shelves of colored lights supported the rows of various bottles and glasses commonplace in every bar. The colors tinted the customer’s faces, making them look two-dimensional and unreal.

“Good," murmured Temple, "Bri can handle Fridays. Glad it’s not fuckin’ Shooter. Lazy prick’d make us work harder than we have to.” Jake went back to his steady sweep of the floor. Friday night’s crowd was always an interesting mixture of locals and tourists. Temple noted a small contingent of Bethesdan mercs, scarred and leathery in their soft-looking grey fatigues. Potential trouble, but unlikely to instigate anything. Near the back of the club, several kids, early twenties, dressed in carefully picked remnants of the past year’s most popular fashions sat before a wall-sized monitor. Their heads bobbed in unison, moving to the beat of the current Fugue musician-of-the-month. Rowdies, most likely, but easily controlled.

The trick, Temple found, was to step back and unfocus the eyes. The patterns smoothed out into easily predictable vectors; like watching fish, the colors and shapes no more threatening than an infant’s plastic mobile. That was why he liked working with Jake. The bouncer never made quick, jumping motions with his eyes, restlessly, like the last man they’d had. Many security people found Temple’s unseen presence irritating and confusing, but Jake had merged well with the biosoft, making himself a reliable field unit. Temple often wondered what kind of background allowed someone to be ridden this way with such ease. But he knew it was beyond his purview to ask.

From across the shifting sea of bodies, Temple caught violent movement on the left corner of his monitor. He reflexively keyed in a magnification on his private channel. The images expanded and resettled into the center of his screen. A stocky, bald man in snakeskin vest and leather jeans traded shoves with one of the mercenaries Temple had marked earlier, a red-faced man with close-cropped blond hair. The merc’s friends ringed the two on three sides, shouting and egging the men on. Behind them, dim in the floorlighting, random faces watched eagerly.

Temple keyed out of the magnification and flagged the area in red alphanumerics, 2A3P -- two aggressive, three passive. “Jake, problem,” he spoke, cutting the flag into the bouncer’s visual sensorium. “One on one, standard. Got it?” The viewpoint on the monitor slewed around and centered, as Jake angled through the crowd with the ease and fluidity of a shark in deep waters.

“I’m on it,” Jake answered. “Holding?” Temple rattled fingers across his keypads, invoking the eyes of the club. In two seconds a subscreen appeared in the lower right of the monitor, mirroring Jake’s visual input. The combatants flattened into outlines, with various hotspots pulsing yellow on their silhouettes.

“The mercs hold shockwands, baldy’s got dick. Wanna look?”

“Nah, I got it. Record,” Jake requested, and Temple activated the spools, sitting back to relax and watch the bouncer go to work.

The audience parted to let Jake through, and Temple saw that the shoving had progressed. The bald man had been pushed to the ground and was being held in a punishing lock beneath his right arm and neck. The mercenary’s companions were laughing. Jake stepped into the circle and took hold of the blond’s last two fingers on his right hand and pulled the hold apart, his other hand gripping the man’s neck. The merc’s eyes were wide with affront and his chin was wet. “Take it outside,” Jake ordered.

Temple never saw the attack coming, even later reviewing the spool, but Jake stepped lightly away from the merc’s sweeping right leg and used the leverage to snap the fingers still held in his hand. The blond’s face went tight and he tried to stand. Jake brought the injured hand around and bent it easily back between the man’s shoulder blades. Temple got a close-up of the stubble above the merc’s ear as Jake leaned in and said “Stupid.”

Temple’s eyes went to the subscreen and caught a flicker of yellow from one of the figures. “Jake, behind you,” he warned, and the screen became a temporary blur as the bouncer wheeled left and launched the blond away from him. The man fell into the shockwand his companion held glowing before him and grunted once as he dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Jake took the extra second of surprise to piston his left foot into the other man’s left knee, breaking it outward with a clean, sharp crack. The man cried out and toppled over onto his right side, allowing Jake to stomp once on the wrist of the hand holding the shockwand, releasing its hold on the weapon.

“Don’t,” Jake cautioned the two mercenaries still standing, as he crouched to pick up the dead wand from the other man’s hand. “Just get out and take these two with you.” The other men said nothing as they complied, half-carrying the blond and supporting the other man as they limped out.

“Watch them out, Temple. And you,” Jake motioned to the bald man, now sitting at a nearby table. “You’re outta here too.”

The man began to argue and Jake merely guided him to the entrance, the festivities of the club strangely artificial in the wake of violence. Temple followed the four mercs to the periphery of the club’s sensory field until he was certain that they were well on their way, then keyed out the subscreen from his monitor.

“Early for a Friday, innit,” said Temple, watching the bald man storm away in the middle of his screen. A key opened up the bouncer’s telltales and Temple watched the adrenaline and respiratory levels ebb back down to normal. He was glad he hadn’t needed to augment Jake’s chemical flow; the owners frowned on what they deemed unnecessary budget expenditure. Never mind what the process did to the metabolism of the bouncer.

“Yeah, well, it’s a one-whore town. Not much else to do, is there?” Temple chuckled and let the night come on.

Ever did you see me on Ritual Road
I was a king to the flat toad
Almost turned the wheel when I came to see
Wisdom in the words that you wrote
-- "Step Out of Time", Jane Child