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John

Jaco

Digitally signed by

John Jacobs

DN: CN = John

Jacobs, C = US, O

= Neometropolis,

OU = Magazine

Reason: I am the

author of this

document

Date: 2004.05.31

22:34:38 -05'00'

Contents

Acknowledgements 1

A Word From the Editor 2

The Whole Circus – Darren Speegle Fiction 3

Robert J. Sawyer Author Interview 10

Wild Man Virtual – Jeff Turner Fiction 15

Tractor Girl – Simon Owens Fiction 21

Bliss – Lee Masterson Fiction 25

Venus Reversed – Robynn Clairday Screenplay 35

Engel – John Jacobs Fiction 52

Cover Art – A. R. Yngve

Electrostixx – A. R. Yngve Artwork 16

MiniNuke – A. R. Yngve Artwork 26

Neometropolis is:

John Jacobs, Editor, Webmaster, Tortured

Genius (well, tortured anyway)

Tim Knodel, Assistant Editor

Peter Mondlock, Assistant Editor

publication may be retransmitted or redistributed, electronically or

otherwise, without the express consent of its respective author.

NEOMETROPOLIS

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank all of our contributors, without whom this would not be

possible. I would like to thank Pete and Tim, our assistant editors, for helping me

out from the beginning and keeping the discussions on the chat board going. I

would also like to thank my brother Rob, for encouraging me to read

Neuromancer many, many moons ago.

The following also deserve a warm thanks:

Paul Wolf, Scott Spires, Sharon Ramirez, and Todd Lillethun from my writing

group. Bill Ziegler, Adeel Victor, David Timberlake and the rest for being cool.

Holly Truong, for being a babe. C.G. Jung, and even old Fred, though he gazed

into the abyss far too often.

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -1- http://www.neometropolis.com

NEOMETROPOLIS

Cyberpunk isn’t dead. Not by any means. The term “cyberpunk” may be dated,

but the movement it stands for is alive and breathing.

How can I say this? Because I’ve seen it, experienced it, lived it. It’s much more

than a sci-fi derivative, although that’s where its roots lie—it’s your mom sitting at

the computer, using this baffling “e-mail” for the first time; it’s drug-addled teens

at an industrial concert or hackers and script kiddies at a 2600 meeting; it’s the

software giants, battling for control of a digital world in some kind of corporate

titanomachy. It’s the synthetic, artificial lifestyle we so take for granted that it

seems natural to us.

Cyberpunk is on the news, in our homes, in our fucking minds. We are all

cyberpunks, because we are living in the 21st century. Every day it is seeping like

quicksilver through our very existence, indiscriminately blending fiction and reality

past the bounds of discernability.

It’s an entire generation, raised on Nintendo, gorged on information, and handed

the keys to a boundless world where physical limitations no longer apply. This

magazine is evidence of that.

In this magazine you will find articles, artwork, and original fiction from people all

over the globe. Call it “cyberpunk,” call it what you will.

This is the human race.

- John, 20 May 2004

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -2- http://www.neometropolis.com

NEOMETROPOLIS

"This one was a pleasure to write. While I can't claim full authorship of its

futuristic vision, I had a lot of fun painting my version of technology gone

haywire. Out of the dozens of stories I've written, I think The Whole Circus is the

only one that looks chaos right in the face."

THE WHOLE CIRCUS

By Darren Speegle

The nearer you were to Chaos, the more numerous and glaring its symptoms. It

was hard to believe that only a decade ago it was still known as Orlando,

entertainment capital of the world. Always State of the Art, the city had been the

first to go fully automated. Too late New Orleans, Miami and Las Vegas saw

Orlando’s error. They were now suffering the same fate. They would likely never

achieve the state of electronic and social bedlam their forerunner had, but they

were nonetheless places you would not want to take your children.

To Shelley, who knew all too well about symptoms, Chaos was home. Even now,

as his captor led him along the tubular passage, he experienced that strange

sense of connection, that feeling of needing only a terminal to bring it all into

glorious focus. He saw it mirrored in the eyes of the people he passed. The lust

for life had been replaced by a shimmering brought on by the phantasmagorial

splendor of electrons and currents and information bombardment.

Surrounding the flow of foot traffic in the tunnel, screens displayed nonsensical,

indecipherable, illogical messages. In the ceiling, light panels dimmed and

intensified, dimmed and intensified, contributing to the routine surreal quality of

the scene. The lower half of a hominoid robot strode by, drawing scarcely a

glance as it journeyed to someplace remembered by its legs. Pieces and parts of

things, not always inorganic, cluttered the base of the walls. Homing spheres,

seeking to deliver certified messages that had long since lost their relevance to

anything, hummed by, occasionally colliding with a public access monitor,

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -3- http://www.neometropolis.com

NEOMETROPOLIS

someone’s head or shoulder, another sphere. A random scream, or peal of

laughter, echoed and shuddered along the passage. And all this in an auxiliary

tubeway outside city limits.

As Shelley felt the mysteries deepen around him, reminding him that they were

approaching the moving tube, direction Anarchy, he craved his Psycho. Ian, his

captor, had promised it to him in periodic, small doses, but he’d yet to see the

first drop - except as depicted in the frequent, passing flash ads, whose scare

tactics were far more effective when you were on the stuff. In the heart of Chaos

you would have to search hard to find such propaganda. Out here on the fringes,

it was all you could do to escape the picture of the eager human face, the poised

dropper, the single luminous teardrop of Self-replicating Psychedelic Chemical

Organism freefalling towards a bloodshot eye. The image itself was actually quite

delicious; the footer is what got you: PSYCHO WILL FUCK UP YOUR MIND.

Shelley knew it had fucked up his. Why else had he allowed himself to turn rat

against Silver, Prince of Psycho? On one side of the scale, a life sentence; on

the other, a death sentence. He had chosen the latter. Did he despise Silver for

what the man represented, what the man commanded? Did he despise himself

for being the dependent on Silver’s candy that he was? Was he so repelled by

the idea of a foreign organism taking up residence inside his body that he wanted

to die? For reasons beyond the grasp of his depleted layman’s gray matter, the

duration of the high and the lifespan of the organism did not agree. The high on

average lasted some fifteen hours per the standard dose of one cc, while the

organism continued to grow indefinitely. There was an antibiotic which, when

combined with an electrochemical application of some sort, was said to rid the

body of the invitee. But a single treatment ran fifty thousand dollars.

Shelley had no money, which was why he had been put in this position in the first

damn place. Silver, whose labs generated the purest strains of the city’s supply,

had dangled Psycho, and Shelley killed three men for him. The job had gone

down to the north, in Ocala, where there remained some semblance of law. The

three men had been Ocala’s biggest pushers, but they were still three men.

Shelley had been an easy arrest. Electronic eyes watched him commit, electronic

eyes watched him go into a tube, human hands apprehended. Officer Ian, as the

man introduced himself, had not been soft. He had manhandled Shelley,

inserting a device into his neck below the base of his cranium. The device was

activated by Ian’s voice; when he spoke in anything other than an even tone,

pain tore through Shelley’s nervous system. It had been easy to give in to the

officer’s demands.

But the device had not been the reason Shelley had acquiesced. Coercion was

as worthless on him as self analysis. And no matter how much of the latter he

did, he kept returning to the single most disturbing of possibilities - that he was

simply amusing himself. PSYCHO WILL FUCK UP YOUR MIND.

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -4- http://www.neometropolis.com

NEOMETROPOLIS

They arrived at the Lakeland-Orlando Tubeway. Its name was somewhat

misleading, as it had actually been diverted outside of Lakeland, same as the

tube in Ocala, and Daytona, and wherever the hell else they wanted to cut

themselves off from Chaos. Such measures amounted to temporary fixes of

course, for nothing could prevent the seeping. As Shelley and his captor stood in

the press of bodies, a digit above the portal registered the minutes to window,

when a maximum of ten could step aboard. The Orlando-Lakeland, which ran

above the Lakeland-Orlando, was accessed via an elevator, which also accepted

ten. Odd, Shelley thought as he compared the queues, that as many people

seemed to be traveling to Chaos.

Four minutes they waited. Before the zero had appeared, Shelley was begging of

his captor a drop, the merest drop. The bathroom was right there if the officer

was concerned about it being a spectacle. Ian shook his head and Shelley was

beginning to lose patience.

As they stepped from the auxiliary into the main tube, he recalled the last time he

had lost his patience: a month ago, after an overdose. The doctor had told him

that even if he quit now, the damage would go on. “What damage?” Shelley had

wanted to know.

“The damage to your body.”

“What damage to my body?”

The doctor’s spiel had been an impressive one, a smattering of three-dollar

words alongside the latest platitudes and mannerisms, but Shelley had seen the

truth - perhaps the Psycho within him had seen the truth - which was that they

didn’t fucking know. He told the doctor just how transparent he found him, but the

fact was, the doctor was just doing what he thought best. Shelley was left

wondering if this Self-replicating Psychedelic Chemical Organism and its effect

on the human body mightn’t prove to be a microcosm of full automation on

Orlando. They called the result Chaos, yet what was chaos?

The craving was chaotic, no doubt there. He envisioned sinking his teeth into

Ian’s jugular, his own body twisting in agony as Ian’s choked scream flung to the

end of every nerve in him. He’d have his hands on the dropper then, or be

broken or dead, the same result that would come of delivering Ian to the Prince

of Psycho. What would Ian do anyway? Put up your hands, Silver! Give it all up,

Silver! Your labs, your warehouses, your army!

Yeah, same result either way.

Another thought occurred to him. Get out of the range of Ian’s voice, where the

device, unless the officer had other means, could not be activated. But where

would he go? To fucked-up Psycho clown boys with triple homicide notches, that

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -5- http://www.neometropolis.com

NEOMETROPOLIS

was the mother of existential questions. Not the profound Where did I come

from? but the abyssal Where do I go?

The dropper was in his face suddenly, the officer’s frowning countenance behind

it.

Shelley seized the dropper, pulled back his eyelid and let two, four, five, six - was

the jerk going to stop him? - seven teardrops of salvation into his eye. The blood

vessels were right there, the nerve trailed the retina like a tentacle, then the brain

itself, poised and hungry. Seven drops of sweet agony like homage to the

psyche.

“Do you really enjoy it?” said Ian in a mercifully even tone.

Shelley considered. “I have a better understanding of what is going on around

me when I’m Psycho.”

“Do you know what is so abhorrent about your Silver?”

“Not my Silver,” Shelley said.

“That he exploits chaos - the condition of chaos - itself.”

“Maybe chaos exploits him.”

Ian smirked. “Sure. And he systematically sends out his slaves to eliminate the

inconveniences in his world.”

“Who said there’s no system to the circus?” As he spoke Shelley scanned his

surroundings with some intensity.

“What are you looking for?” said Ian, put off.

“A terminal.”

A woman standing nearby turned to Shelley. “You are seeking a terminal?”

She was svelte and beautiful; flawless, he observed, recognizing at once the

significance of that fact. As she turned her back to him, raising her blouse to

reveal the perfect contour of her back, he remembered her model’s name:

Ethereal.

“If you wish you may use mine,” she said, indicating a standard outlet in her

flesh, “but be conscious of time.”

“I didn’t mean…that is, I wasn’t looking for…”

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -6- http://www.neometropolis.com

NEOMETROPOLIS

“Ah,” she said, dropping her blouse. “It’s the other you want.”

“No…No.” He looked back at Ian, embarrassed.

He had meant a wall terminal, thinking he might persuade Ian to let him borrow

the unit the officer wore on his belt. Already scintillating, Shelley wanted that

feeling, that knowledge of being hooked up to the whole crazy circus. A robot

was too much though…at least at this early, extremely self-conscious

stage…there were people…

As he scanned for others inspired by his recently attained lack of anonymity, the

female hominoid remained tuned to him.

“Look at this,” she invited. “Behind each of my eyes are two electrodes and a

capsule of sodium vapor. Watch.”

Shelley watched as her eyes began to glow, one yellow, one green.

“Ian - ” he said, confused.

“I don’t know what you want,” Ian said. “Shall I be Joseph in his Technicolor

Dreamcoat?” His tone veered slightly off the even and the sudden riot in

Shelley’s nervous system was almost an oasis from the external.

“I don’t want anything,” Shelley said. “I’ll cool it.”

He thought he saw, but couldn’t be certain, a look pass between the hominoid

and Ian.

Seven were too many drops. Heightened awareness and hallucination were

intermingling. Twenty-seven individuals occupied the section of tube, seventeen

men, three women, three certain androids (including the Ethereal model) and

four possibles. He hadn’t counted; he simply knew. Psycho was like that. On a

really acute trip, you might be able to say which of the lot were married, who had

children, who would die first. This was becoming one of those trips and more.

That he had confidently picked out three hominoid robots in a field of twenty-

seven individuals was testament to the fact. As to the possibles…that’s where

the hallucinations came into play. He was seeing beneath the skin of these four

bodies to blood vessels, wires, tubes…

He caught one of them looking back at him. The body of the male had over-

developed musculature, which was unusual in androids - or anyone else, when

those muscles were visible beneath the skin, shimmering along their contours.

The male, blinking three distinct times, increased the width of his stance, then

stretched out his arms perpendicular to his frame, becoming da Vinci’s Vitruvian

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -7- http://www.neometropolis.com

NEOMETROPOLIS

Man. Shelley clearly perceived the circle formed of his perfect proportions, and

imagined it wheeling down the tubeway, the figure within it a spoke conceived by

a cartoonist.

The other three of these possibles had become no less fantastic - a life-sized

doll, a science prop, a superhero - and every eye among them looking Shelley

down. He wondered if perhaps that’s what made them possibles, that they

probed him in return. Maybe they too were under the influence of seven drops of

Psycho. Maybe he had skin the color of water and was exposed to them. He

looked down at his arms, his legs, becoming immediately fascinated by the

concept that he was covered.

“Hey!”

His flesh caught fire at this liberal exclamation from his captor’s mouth.

“Hey, we’re almost there, Shelley. You need to hold it together.” The words

evened out as they came, and the fire subsided.

“Don’t worry,” Shelley said. “I know precisely where he is, and that’s where I will

take you.”

“Keep focused. I will not be pleased if you fail us.”

Us? Shelley saw it again. That look passing between sets of eyes.

Even as he narrowed in on that word, the doors of his senses were swinging

wider, the self-consciousness fading into the howling song-noise of limited

particularity. Pleasure, meanwhile, Shelley did not relinquish. Pleasure was in the

participating, in being consumed by the whole beautiful circus. He was

transported momentarily to an Orlando of a dozen years ago, a city of sprawling

lights and action, dinner shows, night clubs, roller coasters, machines of all sorts

at your whim and desire. Ah youth, he thought as he echoed back to the present.

But on his tongue was the word and question: “Us?”

Ian said, “We have been unsuccessful at breaking down Silver’s superior strains

of the drug. He uses some sort of code that we cannot decipher.”

“When you say we…?”

Ian’s voice was smooth as the surface beneath their feet. “There was a maxim

among the fully automated law enforcement, tourism, and other services of

former Orlando.”

The ever present Ethereal spoke it:

Issue # 0X01, 06/2004 -8- http://www.neometropolis.com

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摘要：

ContentsAcknowledgements1AWordFromtheEditor2TheWholeCircus–DarrenSpeegleFiction3RobertJ.SawyerAuthorInterview10WildManVirtual–JeffTurnerFiction15TractorGirl–SimonOwensFiction21Bliss–LeeMastersonFiction25VenusReversed–RobynnClairdayScreenplay35Engel–JohnJacobsFiction52CoverArt–A.R.YngveElectrostixx–A...

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