Ok, this is a long one. I mean really long. So long I think I'll serialize it. This time it's fiction. In fact, it's my first (and so far) only attempt at fiction. A story I started long, long ago, back when I was in college and thought writing a weekly Star Wars RPG adventure was the hardest thing imaginable.

I never finished it. I couldn't think of how. But I'm seven, eight years older now, and I think I actually might be able to one day. If I serialize it, and enough (well, one or two besides my mom) express interest, I'll take a shot at finishing it. I'm actually kind of impressed with how good it is, if I do say so myself.

Be nice people. I know I tend to skim fiction on blogs, and you might too. If you do, fine. If you don't, leave some feedback, either with a comment or via the "tell us about it" widget. If you really like it, and run a blog, telling your readers would be very nice. My essays are me just preaching. Fiction is something I make out of my own soul. It'd be nice to think someone else was impressed with the one time I decided to really stretch :).

And props to Ellen, who saved every letter I ever wrote her, including one written just before Halloween six years ago, when we'd only known each other about six months and god knows how weird she thought I was.

So, anyways, a work of neo-cypherpunk fiction:

The Caddie

AND GOD DID SPEAK THUSLY... THAT ANY MAN WHO THINKEST HE IS THE ULTIMATE POWER, WHO BELIEVETH ONLY IN MACHINES AND DEMONS OF HIS OWN MAKING, THAT HE SHALL SUFFER THE GREATEST PUNISHMENT... THAT FIRE AND EARTHQUAKES WILL COME UPON HIM... THAT PESTILIENCE AND WAR SHALL BE INFLICTED UPON HIM... THAT EVEN HIS CHILDREN AND HIS CHILDREN'S CHILDREN WILL HAVE SUFFERING HEAPED UPON THEM..."

And they go on and on like that every single day around here. Can you believe it? Crazy men and women standing on street corners in the husk of downtown, shrieking at the top of their lungs about how it's all gonna be hellfire and damnation for us all if we don't accept "God's Love", that the earthquake of '25 and the fire that followed, that the Ebola that bled what the earthquakes didn't bury and the fires didn't incinerate, were somehow all our fault. How can these people say god is love in the middle of all this, and with a straight face and nearly the same breath preach how He allowed all of it to happen to us for our own good?

But that's the way it always seems to be. I've seen pictures in the TV kiosks of preachers that sounded just like this one, slick sweaty men in custom cut suits preaching to flocks of well dressed, well scrubbed moon-plate faces. What amazes me the most is how well fed everyone looks when the cameras swivel across the cow-eyed audiences.

It really was a typical night in Paradise, or what was left of the center of what they used to call L.A. It's funny... all those books Jose said people used to write about the "big one" causing all this horrible damage. What they seemed to forget, or didn't notice, was the engineers and architects busily designing buildings with shock absorbers. Skyscrapers on springs no less. When the "big one" finally did hit, the buildings just wobbled around like washing machines with an unbalanced load.

Of course, it didn't make much of a difference, and lucky for all my types it didn't. You see, they never took into account the insides of the buildings. The pipes broke, the electricity went, the gas jetted high-pressure flatulence that ignited on the spot and burned for months. So now we're left with this... glittering towers with interiors so mixmastered that it would take billions of dollars to repair it all. And, since the small buildings around them weren't so well protected, they stand alone in rubble, like steel and glass trees in a forest of brick humus.

So rather than repair it all they left it. Just grabbed the insurance money and built somewhere like Vegas. Sure, Satan sunbathed there, but at least the ground didn't try to eat your buildings.

They left it all to the wise guys, and the whores, and the crazies that escaped from the postal sanitariums. And the gangbangers like me.

I'm sure in five or ten, maybe twenty years, all those same Japanese businessmen who bought it all in the first place will come back along with their Japanese money and their Japanese workers and transform this place into something pretty and shiny, castles dipped in chrome with little slanteyed children playing with big cute teddybears, streets safe and oh no dear did you hear about the Wakimotos and the new Zil 959 in the driveway? Watching Trid revivals of Sailor Moon or some other ridiculous thing.

Of course, I'll be dead by then, so who cares?

Typical night, crowds filling the streets, dodging the rubbled remains of the occasional burger joint or corner grocery store to take a ride up into a tower to do god knows what to god knows who. Brownian motion in the wrapped-in-a-blanket heat of a particularly claustrophobic night. We were all hanging out on the streetcorner, me an my gang of droogs (cool slang, eh? Jose says it's from some antique flat flick he saw at one of the kiosks). The leflights, which probably were the only things that really worked in this godforsaken place even before the sandbox got kicked over, were regurgitating their stored sunlight in liquid copper pools up and down the streets. The smells from the various food stands that spring up like roach nests every night carried well in the thick air... especially the brown sweet tang of fresh garlic from Mama's Sicily booth (another place only an idiot would try to hold up, for obvious reasons... I hear a Vietnamese actually owns the chain, but who's gonna risk their lives on a rumor?) We'll have to see if a salaryman gets drunk and stupid and wanders down the wrong alley tonight... the smell makes me hungry.

We were participating in our favorite pastime, mainly shooting the shit, watching the hookers pick up johns, dealers deal smack (drugs and sex, is there anything people won't risk for them?), and listening to this rad fundie standing on his ammo box preaching the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, or some other kind of crap over the muted roar of the crowd and the hawking shriek of the Chinese rice merchants. We didn't even jump when an AK-47 cracked thunder from an upper story window across the street and blew him ass-first into an alley.

You can always spot the newbies because they always try to take potshots at the fundies, thinking they're a little bit of easy target practice. And it is fun, as long as you hit their body armor. A well-aimed shot from a good 7.62 round will plink one about ten meters if he catches a good bounce. The fundies consider it "part of the risks of Working for God."

But God (or Buddha, or Allah, or Jaweh, or whoever) help you if you headshot one. "He" might not protect them, but fundieman got friends you see. Lapsed Russian Baptist gangsters, converted Jewish drug lords with a few too many dead rabbis on the conscience, even the occasional Yakuza who'd burned his last temple and found the face of Jesus in the blood of the nun he raped. Jose says it's because all the different countries unloaded all of the wackos on us way back when, and that other places have the same problems with a different name being prayed to. All I know is, the last new guy the Jewboys were initiating "missed' his marksman test, and they found him crucified upside down with his scrote in his mouth. God may forgive, but fundieman's friends sure as hell don't. An eye for an eye indeed.

Well, whoever it was got lucky this time, hit the chest instead of the head. We hooted and jeered as fundieman herky-jerkeyed out of the alley and down the street like a broken marionette. What's a few shattered ribs in the name of God's Work anyway?

It was as he fumbled from light pool to light pool that I saw the Caddie. I couldn't believe it when it appeared. One of those long, black, lean monsters from the 90s, gleaming smooth like midnight water on a flat roof. Silent except for the burble of its genuine 100% fossyburning engine... and when's the last time you saw one of those outside of a TV kiosk show? Came around the corner big as you please, plowing through the electroscooters and boylecarts like a muscled panther moving through the grass. Just about everyone stopped to stare at it... hell you couldn't help but stare at the goddam thing. Couldn't even see the driver inside... just the impression of pale hands on a wheel.

Jesus and Brahma on a stick these guys had balls. Probably some diplomat up from NewUN or some sort of major player checking up on his troops. My droogies lost interest pretty quickly (if it doesn't explode, fuck, or shoot back they usually do), but I just kept watching it as it oiled its way down the drag. It finally purred into a puddle of leflight in front of Nanz, one of the newer (and nicer) whores that Six-Finger Jonny was running. Damn... had to be a diplomat, those guys will do anything to fuck a black chick (Jose says that means he's British and then laughs a lot to himself... gotta get that kid a life). Well, it certainly was gonna be Nanz's lucky night tonight, or at least his (or, for that matter, hers). I watched as she climbed right in. The Caddie oozed off into the night, taillights a pair of coals as the black trunk flashed in the leflight, lasering back and forth across the fender.

They found Nanz a few days later. Well, part of her anyway.

Flak said that he heard what they found looked like it had been eaten...

Well, if you've got this far you're either my mom, my wife, or someone who thought it was a bit interesting. Regardless, please leave comments. This was my one and only attempt at writing for money. I may yet finish this damned thing.