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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: What happens to all the cyberpunk heroes? The high-tech cowboys? How do they get on with their lives, now that technology has passed them by? The answers can be found during two weeks at Rubin's "non-tech health facility" to get off the drugs and unplug. But whether or not the treatment actually works is anyone's guess...

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: SpaceWays Weekly, 2000
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2003

38 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [26 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [84 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [12 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [58 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [13 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [93 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [84 KB] , hiebook (KML) [36 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [40 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [11 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [14 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [42 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [21 KB]
Words: 3960
Reading time: 11-15 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

I'm on the front porch of Rubin's place, staring across the lawn at the silent cars slashing past, feeling old and empty inside, when the new guy walks out. He's got the cowboy twitch, the uncontrolled jerk of the head to the right or left, that all of us have when we first arrive here. I suddenly want to scratch the back of my head, down at the base, but I fight the impulse. The new guy sits next to me, sighs, then pulls his head up suddenly. It goes down and up again three times before I look away. Nobody likes watching someone else short circuit.

"Hey," he says after a few awkward seconds. His hand is held out to me, close but not touching. "My name's Jonathan. My two weeks just started." He gives a quick laugh, and I shake his hand. His palms are dry and cracked, but his grip is strong.

"Mickey," I say, watching him. The first two days are the worst here at Rubin's non-tech health facility. Staying unplugged is not an option for a lot of cowboys, but the alternatives--stims coursing through the nervous system or triggering the built-in lightning viruses just about every system has nowadays, not to mention the unnatural act of plugging metal into the back of your head--the alternatives aren't so tasty, either.

Jonathan relaxes slightly next to me. At least he's stopped twitching. "I knew that flack would catch up to me," he mutters. His voice is high, unsteady, and his scalp is bright white under buzzed black hair. "That's what got me here. I had the cheap stuff put in me when I was sixteen, just starting out. How was I supposed to know it melted after prolonged use?"

"Yeah," I say, the veteran cowboy trying to clean up his act. For the second time. The treatments after my first interment at Rubin's held for about six months, then I started sneaking trips to Lia's com line for a fix when she was asleep. Pretty soon I was popping her stims and jacking in every time she was gone. Lia found me in the bathtub, the stripped com wires attached to the miloprene plugs in the back of my skull jolting me with enough juice to cause paralysis. "Should've left you in there to dance yourself to death," she'd said. To break the connection she'd had to prop my head up with an antique wooden chair.

"What's your story, Jonathan?" I say. I keep my gaze away from him, following the traffic instead. Rubin's is surrounded by transparent soundproof baffles at the edge of the front lawn, so the silence is complete. Rubin likes the rustic feel, even though there isn't much peace and serenity left to spare these days. Behind the baffle, the ten lanes of satellite-guided traffic are only a few feet away.

After a few seconds, Jonathan flicks his gaze over to me. "My story?"

"Talk, man. We've got to talk to get through this, to pass the time." A wave of nausea passes through me, and I fight off fresh, unfamiliar panic. "You know?"

Jonathan gets up and leans on the porch railing. "Yeah. Guess you're right." He adjusts his white jumpsuit with a quick, smooth arc of his hands. Despite the erosion that must've hit his synapses when the flack at his brainstem melted, I can tell he still has some of the old moves left in him. "I started jacking in back when the weather controllers started malfunctioning, and everything went cold for a couple years."

"I remember that. You've been in that long?"

Jonathan shrugs, smiling. "Oh yeah. Had the best rig in the New England systems, which isn't saying a lot. But it was something. My buddies from the old webscapes helped me get the specs right. It was rock and slide, grab and go for about five years. Then I met Marta."

"She Russian?" I ask. The west Europeans and Russians had a stranglehold on the sturdier old-tech that had outlived the flashy plastic-and-laser tech from the past decade. Once the flack was installed inside your head, you no longer needed to worry with virching lenses and rings on your fingers; all you needed was your head, and lots of adrenaline. Flack had landed most of us here at Rubin's with battle scars melted into our heads. Prolonged use was what we were all about.

"German," Jonathan grins. It takes me a second to figure out what he's talking about. "But she was a real girl, no prosthetics on her or in her. She made me go back to my old face." His skinny hand flicks toward his chin, where I can make out a tiny white line that sweeps back to his ear. "Anyway, she came over to get away from the old ghosts in the eastern corridor. Her family was wiped out by an old nuke in Berlin that detonated by accident. Some baby cowboy, thirteen years old, thinking he was downloading some American Defense Department holos, activated it with his rig."