Content Warning: Depiction of intense body modification
Jackal leaped across the street, sailing from one rooftop to the other. The white plastic fell from the sky like the first snowfall of winter, sliding past his sophisticated respirator. It hadn’t stopped in decades. The snow had been a natural part of the world for so long, people forgot what the sun looked like, or rain or green for that matter. They forgot how it first came, and then forgot it was unnatural at all. Thought and memory had become very difficult things decades ago.
The center business district of Mirage shone off in the distance. It blocked all possible light from the sky, turning it into nothing but a black abyss. Over there, screens blared beautiful lies in wondrous colors. A rainbow in a world of gray, blacks and blues which only served to crush any thought of resistance against the order of this artificial nature. It burned the messages on the screen into the cornea of anybody passing by.
They invaded the minds of the people through this, forcing every passerby into submission. Jackal called it the buying district, since that was all you thought about there. And it all came from the Telecom tower. The tower was god to the people of Mirage. Even if the truth was spoken, Jackal doubted anybody would be awake to listen.
He landed on the other rooftop, his right leg slipping and causing him to tumble with a grunt into the infectious sludge. He crawled to his feet and wiped it off. It was getting worse by the day; he’d have to do something soon before it fell off. Something more than this. He scowled at the leg, which he neither owned nor wanted, and continued on. His body would have to continue on, if his spirit wished it.
He couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t.
-
A woman stumbled through a dark alleyway. The world around her slithered, pulsed and glowed. It appeared bright and wondrous to her, like a candy shop or a children’s cartoon. She was hungry, but if she removed the mask to eat, her lungs will deteriorate. She’ll die much slower, but die all the same.
She reached up to her ear and rubbed her neurophone, projecting a map of the city that only she could see. Her hand brushed past a tattoo that ran from her neck to her right shoulder of a crimson vine. She pulled out a piece of paper from her pocket and read the address: 877 Salvation Rd. She was only a few blocks from it.
She turned off the map and adjusted her large goggles. Drawing her coat closer around herself, she staggered out onto the street. Not many people were out this late, given that the plastic fell much harder late into the night. It was so thick it could pass through the electric barriers on people’s doors and blow in. No space was safe in this world.
She walked down the open road, a lot less worried than she should be, and passed by a long line outside of a large store. It was a massive thing; a former supermarket from long ago when food was still available to purchase. Now, it held the newest genetic craze of the people.
She peered inside the body mod shop. A woman’s eye was removed from her head while she sat calm and awake in a chair. The optic nerve was severed and attached to a new eye. That day’s color was green. The next, it would be gray. There were as many aesthetics as there are days in the year.
In another chair, a man’s legs were being lengthened. The skin was peeled back and extra synthetic bone were placed inside- all for a price. His tendons and muscle were exposed, cut apart and then knitted back together with precision. His arms now hung on him like a child.
He’d gotten other modifications as well, of course, diluting his identity to whatever seemed to be relevant. Eyes, hair, nails, feet; whatever he could afford. Ostracization is better than death. If it was available, he would pay for surgery on his mind to change his personality into something unique, but not too different to cause a disruption in anybody’s subjective truth. He changed his body, the doorway to his soul, so much he’d become a perfect nobody.
He was nobody to himself; brain surgery wasn’t needed.
She moved on, glancing back at the tall Telecom tower in the distance. She had the feeling of being watched; the primal pinprick of a hunter stalking her. It wouldn’t have surprised her, to be honest. Given what she had seen happen only a day or so ago, her situation was strange. After the attack, her money had stopped working, something she wasn’t used to, and she wasn’t intending on getting used to eating rats.
Damn, whatever pain killers the cops had given her when she was brought in were strong. She tried to think past the incident, but couldn’t. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember anything past the prior two days. She knew her name at least; Cynthia Newman. Her mother was Marianne Newman, and they lived in the Upper North district. She needed to find the apartment. The man there was important to her mother- important enough she told her to go to him.
She headed south to Salvation road.
-
Jackal slid the knife behind the biometric scanner and ripped it out of the wall. With a solid kick straight to the lock the door broke open, and he descended down into the apartments. He walked down the long, yellow hallway of empty apartment rooms that hadn’t been filled in quite some time. The homeless had disappeared after a little bit, nobody bothering to question where they went. Everyone who lived here had been priced out from the immense cost of utilities and other things.
Housing wasn’t the only industry to go under, as the government was the only source for food, shelter, money or anything else. Only the body mods were the remaining corporation, but it only took a bit of motivated research to find out the truth there. Motivation being key, of course.
Number 710. Yellow police tape covered the front of it, but nobody was actually investigating. He entered after picking the lock to a quite nice room, paid off by the actions of the man who owned it. Three large windows overlooked Salvation Street and the falling plastic, jutting out from the corner of the apartment complex. The room was heavily carpeted and still had next to nothing in it, despite being one of the more well-off rooms. The man he was looking for was sitting in a chair, slumped over. He closed the door and came closer, finding that Carter was dead.
He looked at the indentations on his neck, Strangled. The cuts to the arteries happened after the fact. No blood on the carpet though. They caught all of it. He noticed how pale Carter was, realizing that his blood had been completely drained.
He’d been an informant for Jackal, giving him information about the hidden things governments do. They had served together for a long time, long enough that he might even be considered a friend to anybody else. Jackal knew trust didn’t come to people like him, though. He wasn’t particularly upset to see Carter go.
About the Author
I started writing when I was around ten years old, creating fantasy and superhero fiction. A lot of my writing was to emulate Curtis Jobling's writing in Wereworld and also create stories similar to the movies I watched. I wanted to write this piece as an answer to cultural perceptions of height online. Specifically, I knew I had to write this when I saw people were getting surgeries to permanently lengthen their legs. I also wanted to explore the corruption of the government in our current society. With that, themes of societal expectations, fast culture and governmental and cultural corruption are present in this chapter and the rest of the work. This chapter introduces us to the general strange world of our potential future, as well as the two main characters of our story, Jackal and Cynthia. I originally was going to make a stereotypical rebellion story, however I was heavily inspired by the sub genre of bio-punk, and questions of what physically makes a human. I felt it wasn't a genre explored much in literature.
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