Case

or, a semi-fragment of Precipice

Another shipment had arrived. It was at Lok’s feet, a metal container with battered edges and a sealed lid. OCKABAN SUPPLIES was plastered across its side, the text a faded stencil of black and grey. Lok hadn’t heard of OCKABAN SUPPLIES. Chances were no one had, but it made it look legit, made it seem like something he’d receive. He positioned a crate of dried noodles on top, setting it down to try and obscure what was underneath. Like that made any difference. Like anyone could even see it.

It was still early, the last commuters down to the stooped walk of the overworked, their suits and corporate wear and scent of cred dripping from sleeves of high-price synthetics. Soon, night-goers would take their place. The street would become a seething mass of the inebriated and the drugged, the organisms of a drowned city. It would teem with those that clung to false hope, that the hurt of each day could be obliterated by submitting to the night.

Soon, it would be full of Lok’s customers.

Lok moved with the fluidity of routine, filling pots with water, chopping vegetables, setting pans ready to receive the flesh of fabricated meat. The roller shutter was half open, affording him his view but preventing anyone from bothering him. They knew the score. Most of the vendors here were the same. A few were already serving, hoping to eke out an early profit, but Lok didn’t care for that. He liked the chaos of full busy, the way time would dissolve as his hands worked from wok to pan to wok, pandering to sate the needs of the hungry as spice and oil laced his tattered clothes. In truth, though, he liked the calm that came before just as much. He liked the moments when everything was under his control, when his only customer was the steady patter of rain upon the street.

Tonight he could find no such calm. Any attempt was broken by the shipment. It made him nervous. It made him worry that the front of his stall wasn’t strips of corrugated steel but instead a panel of glass, transparent and with flashing arrows that pointed right at the box that shouldn’t be there.

He glanced at the time and then down to the packets of noodles, glimpsing the sealed lid beneath. Another two hours before Zinn arrived. Another two hours of knowing what lay at his feet.

---

Hello.

I’ve done that thing again where it’s early Saturday morning and I haven’t written anything. I hate that. I hate how the week has been obliterated by work once more. I want to be writing, that’s all I want to do. So here I am, committed to simply writing what seems to be there in a flurry of “I don’t care” before the skies lighten with dawn. What’s in Lok’s container? Honestly, I don’t know. He wanted to tell me about it, he wanted to let me know who was coming to collect it and give me a brief glimpse of Siridan in the process, and he almost told me, but didn’t quite. So I don’t know, even though I think I know. Welcome to my process, haha.

So, yeah, I guess this is another vignette (and hey, third person for once). It’s all I seem capable of at the moment. Or perhaps it’s because all I’ve been doing in my spare time is reading. I’ve just seared William Gibson’s Neuromancer into my eyes. Don’t ask me how I’ve never read it—I don’t know the answer to that—but I read it, I sucked on the ginger lozenge of each page and let the matrix of that world dissolve onto my tongue. Damn it’s good. So very good. The style, tone, world and story aren’t for everyone. I respect that. But that’s precisely what I love in a book. I could write a whole post on Neuromancer now, his approach of “suck it up and jack in for the ride, choom” in his prose.

Of course, the world of Precipice that I have been drip-writing for a while is all inspired by Neuromancer in some way or another, despite having not read the book before now. The flecks of cyberpunk trace their way through Gibson to those before and after him, influencing me in various ways (I’ll take any opportunity to mention Android: Netrunner. The best card game ever created, by the way). PKD’s Do Androids Dream… is on my shelf. It’s another book I’ve never read. Oops.

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