I’ve decided to up my flash fiction output after trying out two of the prompts from Jolene’s site. I need to try and stretch out that muscle and strengthen it a bit after letting it atrophy for a long spell.
Unless otherwise specified, I am leveraging Google’s Gemini AI to give me daily prompts. I don’t currently know the frequency at which I will actually post the flash fiction developed as a response to the prompts, but probably not on a daily basis.
In this current series, I am going to explore random subgenres of speculative fiction, fantasy and horror.
Required Plot Elements (per Gemini)
- A rain-slicked neon alleyway
- A prototype “memory drive” that contains an animal the protagonist has never seen [edit: I replaced “sunset” with “animal”]
- A debt collector who accepts childhood nostalgia as payment.
Genre: Cyberpunk / Noir
Someone felt the need to share their affliction for retro-premillennial oldie covers with the alleyway. As if the neon were not headache-inducing loud enough on the eyes by itself, they blared some nonsense song that echoed though the narrow chasm between decrepit brick buildings built around the same era as the music.
“It never rains in Southern California,” crooned the singer of whatever hot dreck band was playing. It was complete nostalgic nonsense, as far a Vesper was concerned. All it ever did, all day and all night, was rain in the SoCal sprawl. There were periods where the acid rain was more mist than rain, she would grant someone that. But a large balance of the weather was rain, and always had been since Vesper had been dragged kicking and screaming into this world. If there had been a time where the sun emerged from behind the clouds and haze, it had not happened in her lifetime.
She tuned out the squawking, raised the tint on her glasses to combat the flickering neon and made her way through the black sheets of rain to the drop, her form-fitting onyx colored poly just managing to keep her dry in this weather.
The drop had been empty the past few visits and Vesper wondered if she might not have to unretire and take up working the gloam just to make ends meet next month. New X was getting harder to come by, at least something someone would pay for. And she didn’t deal in snuff or sex — she’d enough firsthand experience with both to last a lifetime and saw no need to feed someone else’s kink along those lines. Besides, life and love was cheap in the sprawl and X for either paid for shit. Nil profit in the stuff, homes, though everyone thought you were getting good bank on the stuff.
She thumbed the biosensor lock as she keyed the remote for the drop. Both were needed to open it, and no one bothered to break the drop. Most drops had concussion sensors and enough EMP to kill memory if anyone tried to steal the contents by bashing, so it was hardly worth the effort to try to steal from a drop that had two-factor locks. The only time Vesper had lost a drop was when some joyboy crashed his bike into her box, triggering the microburst. Most clowns left them alone, though. Nothing worth dying for and the gangs like to make examples of folks messing with their drops.
Vesper was pleasantly surprised to see she had something to pick up. She locked up and slotted the card into the portable reader she carried. She knew X-brokers who chipped in right off the bat to check contents and quality, but she could not name an old X-brokers who did. Those who did not follow basic safety protocols were the ones to pick up bugs or worse. Sometimes a joker thought it would be funny as hell to spike a card and watch broker turn burnout, leaving them sitting in a puddle of their own shit and piss until someone got tired of looking at rotten vegetables and took the forcibly retired broker to the nearest compost bin. Vesper had no intention of leaving the world that way. So she chipped in via portable to see how valuable a memory the debtor had left her and to note who to send payment.
The portable made an unfriendly beep at her. “The fuck?” she asked of no one in particular, checking the error code. There was no remittance routing on the chip.
The only thing Vesper saw less of than sunny days in the SoCal sprawl was a lack of remittance routing on a submitted X-chip. Everyone wanted to get paid for their experiences, usually expecting far more than the recorded experience was worth. Or they tried to sell copies to multiple brokers but the agreed rule among the dealers was one X, one dealer. It was in everyone’s interest, as it kept the slop and repeats from showing up, raising profits higher for quality or fresh X. And a street war about ten years back might have had something to do with it as well. It boiled down to mutual respect and a disinclination against continued turf battles. Everyone agreed there was no profit to be found there.
She booted the X, expecting slop or a virus, but was greeted by a high-definition five-second clip of something furry and on all fours skidding across hardwood floors in a sunlit room. At least, Vesper was pretty certain that’s what sun used to look like before the Fell. The floors looked cleaned than she had seen, but she knew wood when she saw it.
After five second clip played, the X glitched. She played it again. And again. Each time, it would glitch five seconds into playback. “Dreck.”
She hoped her regular dealer, Lux, could make something usable out of the chip. He was handy with editing code and could probably tease it to its full runtime. If so, Vesper might have something that would keep her going for a couple of months based on what little she had seen. The sunlight was enough to raise the value, but whatever that thing on all fours was, that might just the thing to make her rich. Unless it was a long haired rat. No one wanted to pay for a rat experience, long hair or not. You could not give those experiences away. But Vesper suspected she had something no one had seen before.
~x~x~x~
”Yo, Ves. You ready to come work the gloam?” asked Wire and she rounded the corner by Lux’s shop. “You tired of getting ripped off by this asshat yet?”
“I’m good, Wire. This collection gig has been enough to get by,” she said, slipping past him to enter Lux’s den.
Wire snorted. “But it got no juice, and we know you liked your juice before you went chickenshit.” Vesper had indeed been a bit of an adrenaline junky but her last gig landed her in the chop shop recovery for weeks and she was still paying off the butcher’s bill for that. She hurt every time it rained, hardy har har — as her newest joke went. She did not answer to Wire anymore and elbowed him in the ribs in a none too kind manner as she passed.
”Still a bitch though,” Wire said, rubbing his side.
Lux was old fashioned in some ways and one of those ways being that he liked having real bells that jangled when the door opened, not those electronic chimes or AI voices letting him know someone was walking in. Those bells jangled as Vesper slipped in, though she’d made it her personal goal to see if she could eek through in silence. It never happened.
Lux looked up from his deck and nodded to show he had seen her with his meat eyes. “With you in a millisec, Ves.”
True to his word, Lux terminated the call he was on almost right away. “Got some X, Ves? Unless you’ve been selling to The Moor up the block, things must be getting lean ‘bout now. I haven’t seen you in a week.”
”Fuck The Moor,” said Vesper, sliding the chip over to Lux. “He always lowballs the X I collect as if I don’t have my own overhead to take care of. My margin is too thin to sell to him.”
Lux chuckled. “You ever consider you might be overpaying on your remit?”
Vesper looked down her nose at him. “Those people have got to eat too.”
”You’re not running a charity.”
”Yeah, but I have to look at this ugly face in the mirror and I don’t need the guilt dragging on my wrinkles. Gravity has already done a number on my good looks.”
Lux snorted. “They look fine enough to me.”
”Flatterer.”
“Whatever Sister Vesper. Whatcha got for me?”
She frowned. “I’m not sure that I have anything. Might be big, might be shit.”
He slotted the chip to review it. “No remit codes? Weird.”
”Tell me about it. But wait until you see the X. Most is—“
”Fragged,” he finished for her as he watched the scene until it glitched out.
“Ever see a memory like it? “she asked after he played it a few times through.
”Hell no. That’s pre-Fell memory. You don’t see dreck like that ever these days.”
”Do you have any idea of what that furry thing is?”
He scratched his chin. “Best guess is that is a cat.”
”You’re shitting me. I thought those plagued out about sixty years back.”
”Sixty-three.” he said as he started typing away at his deck. “There’s some corrupt code here, but if I…”
The X restarted, showing a fluffy-furred cat playing with dust motes in the golden morning sun, trying to catch them between twin paws. The person who the experience belonged to was laughing. The experience seemed to go on for minutes. In reality, the memory was less than thirty seconds but it was a strong memory that meant something to the person selling it.
To Vesper’s disappointment Lux shut it off without letting it replay. “I’ll give you thirty for it.”
”You’re fraggin with me, Lux. That X is worth several hundred. Maybe a thousand or more.”
”Thirty. That’s my final offer. I’m feeling generous.”
”Then give it back, Lux. I’ll see if The Moor has better business sense that you, you tightwad.”
He raised the pistol he kept under his desk and leveled it at her. “I don’t think so, Ves. You’ll take the thirty I offer you or you’ll take nothing and be happy that I don’t ventilate you right here and now. And after I pay you, you can deal with someone else from now on. I hear The Moor pays slightly better than nothing.”
She held his eye. “Really, Lux. Is this how we’re doing it?”
”You fucking bet this is how we’re doing this. The X is mine by salvage rights. It was broke-assed hot dreck until I fixed for you. No one would fault me for giving you nothing for what you handed me.”
Vesper sighed. The two of them had been playing nice until the last few moments and she was going to miss that. “Fine, give me the thirty.”
”I’m glad you can see sense, girly. Here’s your thirty. Now take it and—“
His face became a raged hole of shattered skull and bits of brain. Vesper’s gun smoked just over the edge of the counter. Her other hand took the money he had offered and pocketed it before reaching back to Lux’s deck and ejecting the X chip. She slipped it into her pocket and head back out the door. It would need some closer review before she approached the next dealer. If she was being honest, she might not sell it at all.
The bells jangled as she left Lux’s office, not even bothering to try and keep them quiet.
”Everything alright in there?” asked Wire. “I heard some raised voices and some commotion.
Vesper did not look back as she headed towards home. “Lux has a bit of a headache at the moment. I’d give him some space for a day or three.”
Wire chuckled. “I could use you on the gloam, you absolutely sure you’re not looking for work?”
”Absolutely,” said Vesper. “My prospects just got sunnier.”
Her figure was lost to the downpour as she walked down the alley.
~ roughly 2000 words, about 3 hours of writing time.
Full transparency: this is a first draft with minimal edits. I may do some gentle cleanup for typos or very broken elements in the near future, but intend for these prompted prose pieces to remain in their more raw state until I feel like developing them further (if ever). Little or no planning was undertaken prior to writing down these prompt-driven stories.
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