Cyber Punk is still predicting the future

Hello World!

Welcome to Datura Blue the new home of cyberpunk and technophiles on the web. I'll be posting excerpts from my new novel "A Digital Ghost" and also just commentary oon and links to various topics about digital media and web 3.0 interactivity. My novel "A Digital Ghost" was originally titled "MotherGoose: A Digital Fairytale" or possibly "Datura Blue". Funny enough I started this novel in 2004 and the original "psudo-cover" that I used for the title page of all my drafts was a photoshopped picture capture of Tori Amos sitting by a bed from the videos she released on the DVD that came with "Scarlett's Walk". One of the most beautiful and saddest Tori albums ever. So, I was just now thinking of a new title for the novel - since I decided to nix MotherGoose (though it still does apply since all the chapter titles are references to fairytales - mostly from the original Mothergoose tales).

I thought that "A Digital Ghost" would work nicely, since that is essentially the theme that dominates the story. And also Molly and Jane are technically exactly that: digital "manifestations" of the "people" they were before they "died" - trying to survive in a real world that's gone digitally septic.

Now, I know what Tori fans are thinking - that's a rip-off from a title of a song on Tori's 2007 album "America Doll Posse". Well, the funny thing is that although I love and worship Tori I don't actually "follow" her digitally. I don't go on all the forums, don't check her site except when I suspect she might have released an album (I literally just found out that "Abnormally Attracted to Sin" was released four months ago. I just ordered it today and pre-ordered "Midwinter Graces"). I don't even know the name of most of the song titles - unless it's a song I really like and the title is obvious. So, when I thought of "Digital Ghost" I had no clue that is was the title of a Tori song. No idea at all. I figured the name would already have been taken for a some sci-fi novel I never heard of...So imagine my surprise when I googled the title and up pops a page to a site with the lyrics and a link to get the song as a ring tone. And then I looked at some of the forums discussing the song and I thought - wow- well it seems like Tori was thinking some of the same ideas as I was when I first created this story as a comic book in 1994.

So, here's to Tori and here's to the first publication of "A Digital Ghost: Charlotte’s Web (Chapter One)


“GIVE ME MY LIFE BACK!!!” – Jean. That’s a boy’s name. Jean!
The concrete smells like dust and stale urine laced with motor oil; someone has turned off the soundtrack and the silence feels as though it has actual weight; dull cadaverous volumes of negative space, anti-matter perceived as a buzz that rattles the base of the cerebellum, manifesting as a primordial throb behind her inner eardrums; the sound of time dawning, like a symphony of the big-bang played in Schoenberg’s atonal twelve note scale. That’s the sound of her eternal soul; the Geist is rising to haunt the machine. She feels like shit but it’s just another day at the office.
“Yo, Molly. Get the fuck up! Com’on, you bitch! What the fuck have you been smoking?”
“Back-off!” My voice. Her command.
“Yo, you’se hardware’s flipped, sister. You just dropped like the Bigman’s called your number!” Itch is staring at me like I’m a piece of road kill he’d rather not have to identify.
“Shit. Where is Jean?” - Who’s Jean for that matter?
“Who’s Jean!” Itch is yelling. – Why is he yelling at me? We’re barely a fingers breath apart and I can smell the sour acidity of his breath. Shit, Shit, shit! My head is out of control- distorted images flashing and flickering, running the gamut of the color spectrum like those old style techno chromatic flat screened movies the Retro Hipsters are so into. I can’t fucking focus my eyes.
“What do you mean you can’t focus, bitch! Were you hit? There’s no blood that I can see, Sister.” Itch is dragging me across the asphalt away from the light, and I try to regain my footing, planting my heels and lunging forward. I know I can stand.
“Molly, stop pulling away from me. For the sake of the all holy Bigman, please stop fighting me. I’m trying to save your motherfucking life, bitch!”
Then the curtain descends once again, signaling the intermission [or is it the end?] of a play about nothing but the darkness of forgotten acts.

We’re out of the light and my head is trying to realign itself with the help of my hands. Away from the light I can see. I think. I think I can see. I’m on my side against a brick wall. I can feel the rough texture of baked clay against my fingertips, clinging to the smooth groves of concrete filler indenting the surface between bricks. My legs and hips are trapped beneath something heavy that rests its head against my pelvis, brushing my thigh. My hand unveils my sight and touches the head. Itch, resting in my lap. Itch, I love you. Itch, I’m so sorry, so, so, so sorry. I can see the blood, feel it flowing from the cavity that was the back of his scull, staining my hand, and stomach, and thighs.


I feel the sharp fragments of bone mingling with the vermillion liquid and soft tissue of what was once his brain. The tender center of my palm is cut by something sharp and solid; it’s what’s left of an implant; the titanium wire casing having melted from the heat of the laser that tore away the side of his face and the right hemisphere of his scull. Itch is dead. His body pins me to the ground, trapped against a wall and I look around, desperately trying to get my bearings. I think I’m in an ally or a recessed alcove, the stench of filth and refuse, piled high against the brick where it rots away too fill the stomachs of infectious, diseased vermin and bloated insects, assaults my nostrils, making me retch involuntarily. What the fuck happened? Someone snipered us from the roofs! I’m sure of it because of the way Itch got his head blown apart. Angled from the sky, like fire from heaven. How fucking trite! I’ve got to get up, find a point of orientation and get the hell out of this mess. Itch is heavy, being so full of titanium, silicon and stainless steel. A warrior of the streets, once the property of some security agency, he earned his freedom through faithful service in so many bloody, horrifying corporate campaigns. We were allies, partners, friends, and occasionally we were even drunken lovers. He knew his duty, - this time we weren’t scoring a deal together, he was mine. His contract bought to serve and protect, to protect me, and he did. He was my shield.
I close my eyes and try to reconnect my hardware unit trough an auxiliary fiber optic that runs a backdoor hotwire to my CPU, thinking if I scan my total recall memory chip I’ll be able to remember what the fuck just happened. As goose bumps rise across the gossamer surface of my soul, I perceive the immensity of the danger and abruptly terminate the interface. There is something terribly wrong with me. Bending forward across Itch’s back I grab the military grade light armor cutter/LAC from his belt with my right hand. Leaving the cut palm of my left still cradling his head, I activate the powerful laser blade and cut through the surface of my shield, diagonally, in a steady downward motion across the back from right flank to left shoulder. His light body armor is easily severed, the heat of the blade incinerating cloth and soldering the metal to the lacerated skin as flesh, muscle, bone and tissue separate and are immediately sutured; staying the flow of blood. From the position I’m in the angle is difficult, but when I feel the heat against my thigh I deactivate the blade, knowing I’m through his final armor and close to cutting my own. I place the LAC between my lips, biting down hard against the pain I am now beginning to feel, realizing, as I separate and push away the upper half of Itch’s body, that his weight has broken or crushed bones in my right leg and I am in danger of losing consciousness again. I drag myself along the stained ground and try to get to my knees, grabbing onto the brick facade for purchase. My head begins to spin from nausea as the foul reek of burned flesh and melted circuitry, coupled with the pain, causes bile to rise into my esophagus, making me almost vomit into my bloody hands.
But I’m standing now and I know the killers are coming; I have to move fast. That unidentified menace raging through my software, the Geist, tempts me, but I suppress the urge to connect and reach instead into the medipac on my belt. I know I shouldn’t but the pain is killing me, breaking my will. The Geist fucks my psyche. I know that I can’t risk releasing it, which means I can’t interface with my own motherboard for fuck’s sake, never mind the damned Net! Severed from the Grid I’m nothing, because the Grid is Paradise to the console jockey, who lives to navigate the Lines, hacking the Web like a thief in the night. I have to find a way… The Oxy-C strip lies so comfortably in the bloodied palm of my left hand, like the familiar touch of
a lovers fingertips caressing my lifeline; so gentle, so forgiving. I press it directly into the open wound, feeling immediate relief from all the pain; cleansing my system of exhaustion, masking the agony and raising my endorphins to chemical levels of intensity that Norms would never survive. Suddenly its there. I feel its intensity ascending, pushing my buttons, demanding release. The Geist. “I need it to survive.” I whisper to myself. And then I hear my voice, the shouted words reverberating back through the canyon of buildings, harsh against the night sky.
“I need it!” followed closely by a mocking plea, “to survive!”
I know they heard, the assassins in the sky, racing across the top of the world. A ploy, trickery to make my plight more desperate; more in need… Desperate satiable need. Run, run, run, run. No. No more.
My head clears as the drug sharpens all my senses and I calmly asses my surroundings. The ally is short, dark and filled with scattered debris. I have two points of egress; the entrance leading to the street that Itch had dragged me from, or through a steel door set into the back wall of a squat building. Going through it might lead to a possible escape route, but its unknown interior could easily swallow me in a maze that would be the end. Fuck it, Molly. The building could be anything; the streets are an old and acknowledged friend. I move towards the perpendicular outline of the two buildings flanking the ally and crouch down into the shadows where they meld with the sidewalk. Peering across and down the abandoned Avenue of the Americas I remember where I am and where we had been. The Old Town section of New York, what had once been the center of a prosperous urban Mecca. Times Square, once the crossroad where sin transmogrified into a dazzling display of human achievement; bright lights, big city, writ large across the monumental buildings displaying a cornucopia of earthly delights that mesmerized the masses thronging its wide boulevards, was now still, freeze framed and forlorn. Itch and I ran south down Broadway, turning left onto 39th street, and made it to 6th Ave. before we were tagged by the assassins. They came fast over the roofs, probably using some sort of hovercraft with infrared detection capabilities to track our movements.
Itch dragged me into this alcove on the east side of the avenue, a recessed entryway midway between 39th and 38th street leading to what probably was once a delivery entrance servicing the adjacent department store. There is a concrete overhang above me that lends some protection from anyone positioned on the opposing rooftops. Unfortunately it also serves to block my view. Suddenly, a short strobe laser pulse blasts a chunk of brick from the wall across from and behind my left shoulder. The imminent danger kicks my adrenalin into stratospheric heights, and before I can regain control the interface auto engages, letting the Geist out of the machine. The world is transformed instantly from solid to grid, mapped as a virtual matrix; all stark lines, angles, and coordinates; a geometry of algorithms and sensual data. I feel its pulse, the white noise controlled and rhythmic like the buzzing of a hive, my nerves dancing to the steady count of electrodes racing along every micro fiber of neuro/biotechnological wiring that runs through the Meta corporal entity that is my being. The assassins become a statistical liturgy of information; location; biostats; hardware; software; man reduced to data that is about to be erased, deleted, purged forever from the system. My gun, a light 66c Colt Cannon is gripped firmly in my right hand. I upload the virtual data into its search and destroy operation, which powers to extreme destruct mode as I roll forward onto the sidewalk, and coming up into a prefect firing stance, I blow the motherfucker out of the sky. I rotate clockwise, raising the gun a fraction higher to accommodate the eighty seven degree angle and fire at the second attacker coming down the face of the department store. Hitting him square in the chest the force of impact smashes him through a massive window, then as he disappears into the interior cavern of the building shards of splintered glass rain down from the gaping hole, forcing a mad sprint towards the shelter of the overhang and as I dissolve along the line the Geist exults in satisfaction at the violent bloody carnage.