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Authors: Bruce Bethke

Cyberpunk

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Cyberpunk 1.0

(BETA)

A novel by

Bruce Bethke

 

 

 

©1998 Bruce Bethke

All Rights Reserved

This version ©1998 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.

Portions of this work have been previously published in different formats. This

work incorporates material copyrighted in 1980, 1982, 1988, and 1989 by

Bruce Bethke.

Inquiries regarding publication and/or subsidiary rights to this material should

be directed to:

Ashley D. Grayson

Ashley Grayson Literary Agency

1342 18
th
Street

San Pedro
,
CA
90732

(310) 548-4672

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living, dead, or

undead (“We prefer the term
transmortal
”), is purely accidental.

Cyberpunk 1.0
1

©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

0/ 0/ : Warmstart

Okay, so it’s morning. Sparrows are arguing in the dwarf maples

outside my bedroom window. Metallic coughs and sputters echo down

the street; old man Xiang must have scored some pirate gasoline and

tried to start his Mercedes again. Skateboard wheels grind and clatter on

cracked pavement. Boombox music Doppler-shifts as a squad of middle

school AnnoyBoys roll past.

Ah, the sounds of Spring.

Closer by, I flag soft noises filtering up from the kitchen: Mr.

HotBrew wheezing through another load of caffix. The pop and crinkle

of yummy shrinkwrap being split and peeled. Solid thunk of the

microwave oven door slamming closed, chaining into the bleats, chimes

and choppy vosynthed th-an-k-yo-us of someone doing the program job

on breakfast.

Someone? Mom, for sure. Like, nuking embalmed meadow muffins

is her domestic duty. Dad only cooks raw things that can be immolated

on the hibachi. I listen closer, hear her cheerful mindless morning babble

and him making with the occasional simian grunt in acknol, or maybe

they aren’t even talking to each other. Once Mom gives the appliances a

start they can do a pretty fair sim of a no-brain conversation all by

themselves.

I roll over. Brush the long black hair back from my face. Get my left

eye open and find the bedside clock.

.

Okay, so it’s not morning. Not official, not yet. School day rules:

true morning doesn’t start until0/ 7:0/0/ :0/0/ , exact. I scrunch the covers up

around my cheeks, snuggle a little deeper in the comfty warm, work at

getting both eyes open.

Jerky little holo of a space shuttle comes out from behind the left

Cyberpunk 1.0
2

©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

edge of the clock.
Chick. Chick. Chick.
Stubby white wings flash as the

ugly blunt thing banks to pass in front.
Chick. Chick.
Numbers change.

.

I hate that clock.

I mean, when I was a twelve, I thought that clock was total
derzky
.

Cooler than utter cool. The penultimax: A foot-high lump of jagged

blue-filled Lucite, numbers gleaming like molten silver poured on a

glacier, orbited forever by a Classic Shuttle. Every five minutes the

cargo doors open and a satellite does the deploy. Every hour on the hour

the ‘nauts come out for a little space spindance.

Shuttle swings around the right side of the clock.
Chick. Chick.

Stupid thing. Not even a decent interfill routine, just a little white brick

moving in one-second jerks. A couple months back me and Georgie

tried to hack the video PROMs, reprogram it to do the Challenger every

hour on the hour. Turned out the imager wasn’t a holosynth at all, just a

glob of brainless plastic and a couple hundred laser diodes squirting

canned stillframes.

Chick.
The shuttle vanishes behind the right edge of the clock. Gone

for thirty seconds.

I lie there, looking at the clock, and mindlock once more on just how

Dad
the thing truly is. I mean, I can almost
see
the motivationals

hanging off it like slimey, sticky strings: “Is good for you, Mikey. Think

space, Mikey. Science is future, honorable son. Being gifted is not

enough; you must study ‘til eyes bleed, claw way through Examination

Hell, and perhaps one day if you are extra special good just maybe you

get to go
Up
!”

Yeah, up. To the High Pacific. Get a Brown Nose in
nemawashi

the Nipponese art of kissing butt—and become a deck wiper on the

Nakamura industrial platform. Or maybe the PanEuros will decide they

need some good public relations, let us and the Soviets kill a few more

people trying to get to Mars again. Boy oh boy.

When you’re 13.75 years old and almost a sophomore in high

school, you start to think about these things.

Cyberpunk 1.0
3

©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

Outside my window, old man Xiang’s car door creaks open with a

rusty squeal, slams shut with a sharp
krummp
. The sparrows explode in a

flutter of stubby wings and terrified cheeping, fly off chased by a boiling

stream of Chinese obscenities. I hear a deep grunt and the scrape of

shoes on pavement as he gets behind the car, starts pushing.

Shuttle comes back out from behind the clock.
Chick. Chick.
Cargo

doors pop open, in prep for the
satellite deploy. I roll over, pull a

pillow onto my head, try to find another minute or two of sleep.

No good. There’s light seeping in; not much, but enough to show

that I’m lying between Voyager sheets and pillowcases. Wearing dorky

NASA Commander America
TM
cosmo-jammies (only ‘cause all my other

nightclothes are in the wash, honest). Close my eyes, and I can still see

Mom and Dad smiling stupid at me as I tear open the Christmas wrap,

recognize the dumb fake roboto and cyberlightpipe pattern and start to

gag, then scratch my true response and give them what they want to

hear: “Geez, Mom, these are real
neat
!” Almost said
far out
and
groovy
,

but figured that’d tip them off.

Rayno explained it to me real good once, how Olders brains are

stuck in a kind of wishful self-sim’d past. Like, his bio-dad used to build

model privatecars. Whenever his mom kicked him out for the weekend

he’d go over to his bio-dad’s, get bored to death and halfway back again

hearing about Chryslers,
Lincolns
. Wasn’t ‘til he was fifteen years old

that he finally met his bio-grandfather, learned that the family’s true last

privatecar was a brainless little 3-cylinder Latka.

Chime
. Downstairs, the microwave announces that breakfast is

ready. The oven door opens with a
sproing
. Mom says something

cheerful as she slaps the foodpods on the table; Dad rustles his faxsheets

and grumbles something low in reply. I make a tunnel out of my pillow,

peek at the clock.
.

Nope. Still isn’t morning.

Anyway, that’s where Rayno’s bio-dad’s brain got stuck. Georgie’s

old man scrounges parts, rebuilds obsolete American computers, never

stops ranting about how great they really were and it’s all Management

Cyberpunk 1.0
4

©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

and Wall Street’s fault that the domestic industry is dead. My Dad’s too

busy to build/rebuild anything, what with his job and his first wife’s

grownup kids, so he buys me space shuttle clocks. Flying model Saturn-

Five’s. Apollo Hi-Lites video singles. A full-bandwidth membership in

AstraNet and a Nitachi telescope.

A
telescope
? Hey, this is
Dad
we’re talking about! No mere hunk of

glass could be
half
expensive enough for the trophy son of David

Richard Harris, Fuji-DynaRand’s Fuku Shacho of Marketing

(American). He bought me a zillion-power CCD-retinated fused-silicate

photon amplification device with all the optional
everythings
. Set it on

this monster tripod out on the deck—looks like Mung the Magnificent’s

fritzin’ Interplanetary Death Cannon—and every night when he’s in

town and not working late we have to go out there, burn our ten minutes

of Quality Time shivering in the cold and damp and trying to spot

something educational.

Of course, being Dad, he’s also got to shut off the programmables

and insist on using the dumb manual controls. Meaning most nights we

wind up looking at cloud projos, comm satellites, wreckage from the

Freedom
, and other stuff that might be stars or planets but he’s never

real sure which. Then he swings the ‘scope around to point at the
Fuji-

DynaRand platform, hanging there fat and low in geosync like a big

green ‘n’ gold corporate logo—which, thanks to a gigundo holo laser on

the platform, is just exactly what it
does
look like through the ‘scope—

and he launches into the standard lecture about why I should want to Go

Up.

Smile? Yup, I can feel a true smile coming on. No doubt about it,

I’m going to wake up this morning with a smile, ‘cause right now I’m

thinking deep about Dad, and the Death Cannon, and Dad’s library of

standard lectures. Last winter, when he was out of town for a week, me

and Georgie started putzing with the telescope’s brainbox. Discovered

we could run a lightfiber from my bedroom to the deck, patch the Death

Cannon straight into MoJo —my Miko-Gyoja 260/0/ /ex supermicro—and

auto-aim the thing just by clicking on stuff from the encyclopedia. Pipe

Cyberpunk 1.0
5

©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

the images to any screen in the HouseSys, or better yet, compress ‘em,

save ‘em, and look at them “later.”

When I showed Dad what we’d done, his reaction was classic. First,

that little vein on the side of his forehead started throbbing. Then, his

face shifted down to this deep magenta beet-look, and I thought sure he

was gonna blow all his new heartgaskets.

And then, running on pure improv and with absolute no rehearsal at

all, he proceeded to coredump a truly marvelous all-new version of his

famous lecture, That’s What’s Wrong With You Damned Kids.
Brilliant

performance. There are fathers and there are bio-parents; there are

Olders and even a few dads; but only my old man can be so total, utter

Dad
.

Solid proof that I’m a mutant, you ask me.

A burst of static. A crackle, a buzz or two, and then the clock speaks

up in that stupid pseudo space-radio voice it uses: “Good morning,

captain. Rise and shine. --
crackle
— It’s oh-seven-hundred —
pssht

and you are
go
for throttle
up
.” I cop a glance at the clock, flag that the

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