2300
A Novel
We knew from jump that Puggy was fire
more in the Dantean sense than the zoomer 1.
So when we heard he’d been hired to kill,
twas clear that Tiny’s time was running short 2.
All 313 pounds of the man,
every atom jollier than an advert cartoon.
And man did we fret and flail
girding ourselves for a fight
no non-govt man, like as not, could survive.
We didn’t pack Zammo, bandage, or Kleenex,
such was the dire gallop of the moment.
With Puggy in hot pursuit, guns ablaze,
we stood little chance. Our demise would
spell an end to Tiny’s chance to check
West Taiwan’s reign of terror o’er her trembling
ppl, cowering in the mire, thirsting freedom.
​
Twas an unusual freedom her ppl thirsted 4.
West Taiwan (WT), an asphalted vastness
running from Central Asia
to the orange lapping of the South China Sea,
had long ago, from the fallen empire
of America, filched the technology powering the
Singularity. This coup was welcomed initially
‘round the world, as it brought limits
and protection from digital tyranny.
Twas welcomed still when WT in its teething
idealism outlawed prison and cap. punishment.
In their stead arose a govt monopoly on
Karmic punishment, meted out with
a Karma Gun — the only gun allowed under
imperial law, save those entrusted police —
which verily killed the body of the victim
but, before doing so, uploaded the mind
to a govt network, whence it would be
implanted in a gestating baby. This made
good the promise of deathless punishment
by ensuring the “offender’s” rebirth, tho
invariably at a lower realm of being.
A raw deal, and a much abused one, birthing
a century of movements and resistances.
Among them ours, a band of folx that still
coded by hand, some of the last of our kind.
And the best of our lot was Tiny, who deduced
from a govt network encryption irregularity
a backdoor to the servers hosting the keys
to the kingdom — the Singularity Source Code.
Infosec best practice dictated that Tiny guard
the passwords & procedures in his mind alone.
W/ the same cyberoffensive tactics used to
depose the Chinese, WT’s authorities
fingered us as the culprit and dispatched
a police force under the command of
Captain Pris. Her number gave chase,
grim flak jackets aflutter in the sickly breeze.
The firefight came once our coders’d been
cornered on a dusty greenhouse island.
Our Zammo rounds meant nothing,
our forcefields flickered and failed.
Pris herself, with a smile spelling death,
fired the Karma Gun.
Two of my friends were lost, dispatched
to a grisly rebirth. (╯︵╰,) (╯︵╰,)
But Tiny’d sent Pris a big crypto wallet, so
she called off her men and feigned defeat.
“These degens are good”, Pris said
to WT’s Chairman, “they’ll kill us all
if given the chance”. So they contracted
Puggy, a mercenary whose muscled arms
and well-oiled AR-16s belied a mind wittl’d
to nought but wrath and malice.
He chased us from holodecks
to soot-choked crannies, just one step
and two bits behind our dogged band.
We used the last of our crypto + our most
well-reasoned anti-establishment arguments
to hire Kasha, a stouthearted coder/killer;
her trove of banned cyberweapons
could knock out a small country.
Kasha tracked Puggy thru desolate fens
and bustling squares.
A subtle miscalculation left him vulnerable
2 ambush at a hacker cell in St Petersburg.
Realizing that both had contrived traps
to kill the other should they leave the room,
the pair, rippling abs + marble breasts heaving
decided 2 make the most of their fateful error.
They were disappointed but not remorseful
as their lifeblood drained out.
Few clockcycles elapsed b4 the Chairman’s
Guard arrived and fried all our Neuralinks.
Our brains, internetless, were packed with
fluff and sleepy misrememberings.
Pris smirked, Tiny hung, and we went in-n-out
of history. A year to go until the next century,
our band’s feat of cracking WT’s firewall gave
great hope to dissidents of the 2300s.