My Gift To You

Issue 001 - prelude

"The world had moved on since then.
The world had emptied."
	---The Dark Tower, Vol. 1: The Gunslinger

[Note: All series references (cyberpunk, anime, or otherwise), music
lyrics, etc. in this section are owned by their respective creators and
distributors, as well as anyone I forgot who stakes a claim.]

SAN TRINE CITY
OCTOBER 25th
2031 AD

The machine just _stood_ there, and it was its pose that unsettled Jason
the most. It was crouching, a cyborg version of some ancient greek
statue; muscular metal. 

Its eyes were dead and unactivated. 

Even stranger, there was moss growing like hair on it; as though this was
a gargantuan, filthy, brawny man who was lost and in trance.
 
It looked deactivated, but Jason wanted to be sure, though; you didn't
get far in Street Tech Maintenance without getting all those forms
filled. Usually, Jason would be giving some ATM machine an online enema
around now - but occasionally, HQ would get a report like this, of some
service drone going apeshit and hurting people. Jason had been in the
wrong place at the right time, and so got the task of defusing this
thing. 

Jason did, however, have an ally - his own service drone. His suit was a
small robot - a machine consisting of a cockpit, a single, silent
antigrav engine which hummed quietly, and two claws attached to the
sides: externally, a photogenic match for the space-faring technician
robots.  The claws were his tools: easily as good as the gripper 'bots
they used on the space stations. 

They were also on company payroll, as his bosses had ingrained in his
head before letting him use them on his shift. 

Internally, at least, it was like being in a Yugo, with hovertank-styled
butterfly grips instead of a normal wheel.

The hardsuited public custodial technician (fancy name for
'street-sweeper-inna-tin-can' in Jase's experience; but hey, he needed
the cash for the homecoming dance) approached cautiously. It was just
paranoia induced by being downtown at night, really. Nobody wanted to be
in the concrete labyrinth of Rat City(which was the nickname for San Trin
City's slum area and resident _villas misarias_) after dark if they could
help it, even its own denizens. 

The utter, complete silence in a wired world so full of noise easily
disturbed the youth, while the condemned buildings looked bigger and
bigger, and shadows began to tease his frightened imagination. <There's
something wrong about the place>, Jason realized. <It's like you're in
church.>  And it was like a church, in its sincere silence; albeit, some
church long since wasted, defiled, paved over, and buried...

He set down in front of the 'buma'. "Buma" stood for 'Big Ugly Metal
Android', or so it was said. It was scary, how well he was getting at
this job.

Jason flipped a switch and extended one of the robotic arms towards the
buma's I/O ports and preparing to uplink and see what the problem was.
Then, he took a swig from his Jolt, and tossed the can into the rapidly
growing pile of decimated caffeine drinks. At this rate, he would be
through 3 six-packs by the time he got home. The radio played on during
all this, it's late 20th century song playing at a low volume, though the
song was clearly supposed to be played louder. At its diminished volume,
the song sounded ghostly and sad, a negative image of its original
intention:

"Hey man wake up and smell the concrete
Strangest thing you changed since the LP
Could be 'n identity crisis
But I don't buy this 
Reality bites
But that's what life is..."    

The machines linked, and from a passing bum's P.O.V., the scene would
look like one automaton was performing the vulcan mind meld on the other.
Inside Jason's 'suit, a monitor was flickering to life like an old TV,
showing something reminiscient of Windows 3.0's File Manager(before
Microsoft was bought out by SinTEK, and SinTEK in turn merged with GENOM,
of course). 

The trick was to gain access to the main directories without activating
the AI-OS. First thing they told him that week or training, a week in
which Jason's activities usually included almost falling asleep in class
and mingling with girls, but still managed to pass. And, hey, it wasn't
like he was drowsy during _all_ the classes...  

<Hm, all the directories are in the right place, better do a surface
scan->

What Jason saw in the screen made him drop the can of Jolt Cola right on
his coveralls.  

He didn't even notice.

There were no files in any of the directories. Not a one. He checked
through each with growing panic, and ice cold fear churning through his
small intestines.

<This can't be right - the big lug smashed up 3 whole blocks...what the
hell is this thing?!>

Wait - 
There was one file.

Jason tapped the OCR file. It opened, revealing just what it was - an
amazingly intricate symbol, one that made Jason think of think of the
copied scans of hieroglyphics he had seen back in fifth grade: in fact,
it was all he really remembered from that year. The picture was
beautiful, mysterious - a remnant from whatever phantom worlds had lived
on this land before society ripped them away.

It was then that the buma opened its eyes.

They did not glow in LCD, like they usually did, but a deep red (#990000,
to be exact). It  opened It's mouth and bared It's teeth, in what looked
to Jase like a... <a smile>. 

Yes, exactly like a grin that clearly said, *Got You* ...the same grin
one always saw when they were made fun of, and when you saw that grin you
knew they meant every word, and they knew they had hurt you by that
particular tease and they were _glad_to_see_it_, and you didn't snap back
at them because you were amazed that anyone could be that cruel. And,
because you were a little afraid of that as well.

Then, the buma jumped forward with amazing speed - and ripped into the
service suit. 

Jason felt a deep red pain(in his mind's eye, as red as the buma's eyes)
in his gut. 
The pain was almost familiar; a few years ago, in football, he had been
tackled by the opposing team's poster child for anti-social behavior. The
slam had hurt like a bitch, and he had gotten a red welt across his
midsection for a couple weeks, but this was much worse. 

He looked down and saw, with no little surprise, that the buma had
slammed its arms into the suit - and into him. He felt the buma's hand
move around in there, causing more pain, pain enough to scream - which he
did - and then rip out with the same intensity and ferocity. 

Jason felt a great discomfort, and disturbing _emptiness_ - no pain, now
- and looked into the buma's grinning, vampiric, crimson eyes. The
machine just stood there, watching Jason, waiting for his bloodstained
mass to fall. He closed his eyes in order to escape the buma's. He saw
the symbol - (The word <Egypt> stumbled into his mind, and would be the
last word he ever thought of) - once more. 

Then, he saw nothing ever again.    

End of Issue 001







The B.A. Captain Bungie!
"MiSTings can be viewed as a kind of literary alchemy: we
turn badly-written non-entertaining fanfic lead into chortle-inducing
MiSTing gold- unless you happen to be Dr. Thinker." -- Tom Currie

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