Read Online Scary Holiday Tales to Make You Scream by Various - Free Book Online
Authors: Various
Tags: Suspense & Thrillers
Ads: Link
nightmare of despondent depression. Lost and alone among the bile and acid and garbage of the city. The Red Ring was slowly digesting me, melting me, eating me alive. I could barely remember the view of the bottom of 24-G from my cafeteria window. I longed for my cubicle, my numbers, my data, my job, my life…
The chatter of the neural net chided me, mocked me, laughed in my brain and told me that it was a long climb back up-ages long. Lifetimes long. My soul felt as empty and mechanical as the pair of decrepit junk-bots that had taken over the corner of the sidewalk, next to me. One of the 'bots dragged itself slowly, deliberately across the filthy grime-walk towards the grid locked traffic, filthy rag in hand-a vain attempt to smudge-wash windows for a credit. The other hadn't moved in days. There was nothing to indicate that it wasn't dead, broken, dysfunctional. Leaning against the slick facing of the lower level fuel-storage aquariums, it's empty, soulless eyes turned crackwards. Looking at it I was overcome with remorse and sorrow. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I lowered my head into my hands and slumped to the sidewalk.
Cyber-sluts ho-ho-hoing and whore-whore-whoring down the track sidestepped me. Coal-black plastic legs poured into ratty fishnet stockings stepped over me. The cyber-sluts goggled me, ooohing and aaahing, but I ignored them, my body wracked with sobs. Vacu-pump hoses and other various accoutrements of pleasure, degradation, and release were barely concealed on their plasti-flesh torsos, in open and obvious display. The cyber-sluts are the horrid vermin of the lower levels-loud and overbearing, relentless in their pursuit of credits, offering unspeakable depravities in loud mechanical voices-but the human whores are the worst. And human is too kind a word-misshapen half-lives falling out of their rags and crawling and dragging themselves along, desperately grabbing and clawing at the pant legs of drug-addled passers by. Begging for credits and food and sex and drugs, offering dirty sucky-suck access to every natural or augmented festering opening in their ransacked bodies. I'd never seen anything so depraved up on level 12, never heard of such atrocities in the neural news, never knew that such ugliness could exist.
And that's when I decided that I'd had enough. I peeled myself up off of the ground and walked over to the guardrail marking the edge of the central city-shaft. Looking down, I took a deep breath and-
"So tell me, how's it feel to see how the other half lives?" Dexter clapped me roughly on the shoulder and I spun around, startled and unbalanced.
And that's how I came to slip, to fall, to jump, to be pushed out of the Red Ring and down into the Bath.--
***
Neural Log: 23:66-78-
--And I'd landed in a toxic puddle, which itched and burned my skin. I'd broken my neural link when my skull smacked against the slime-coated cement of the Refuservoir floor. And in the choking, smothering quiet that followed I almost didn't notice as my clothes began to disintegrate, soaked in the chemical filth of the Bath.
I was naked, alone.
And now, with the neural net gone quiet, the paranoia settles in. An ad-barge floats by, far overhead, almost lost in the mist and gloom of the city, selling trinkets to the uppers and motivation to the lowers. Though I know that I'm too far away to be seen, and that it's eyes are turned towards the waving customers on the various rings and not the Refuservoir floor, I cower behind a hill of cluttered garbage and wait for it to pass.
Tatters of my melted clothes drip and hang from my shoulders and arms, and the chemical slick stings. My skin erupts in swollen, rosy patches. My nose begins to run and when I make the mistake of wiping it with my forearm I can smell the toxic fumes as the ooze burns my cheeks and nostrils.
Then the ad-barge passes and I begin a desperate search for something to wipe my skin. There are several large puddles of water about, but they
The chatter of the neural net chided me, mocked me, laughed in my brain and told me that it was a long climb back up-ages long. Lifetimes long. My soul felt as empty and mechanical as the pair of decrepit junk-bots that had taken over the corner of the sidewalk, next to me. One of the 'bots dragged itself slowly, deliberately across the filthy grime-walk towards the grid locked traffic, filthy rag in hand-a vain attempt to smudge-wash windows for a credit. The other hadn't moved in days. There was nothing to indicate that it wasn't dead, broken, dysfunctional. Leaning against the slick facing of the lower level fuel-storage aquariums, it's empty, soulless eyes turned crackwards. Looking at it I was overcome with remorse and sorrow. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I lowered my head into my hands and slumped to the sidewalk.
Cyber-sluts ho-ho-hoing and whore-whore-whoring down the track sidestepped me. Coal-black plastic legs poured into ratty fishnet stockings stepped over me. The cyber-sluts goggled me, ooohing and aaahing, but I ignored them, my body wracked with sobs. Vacu-pump hoses and other various accoutrements of pleasure, degradation, and release were barely concealed on their plasti-flesh torsos, in open and obvious display. The cyber-sluts are the horrid vermin of the lower levels-loud and overbearing, relentless in their pursuit of credits, offering unspeakable depravities in loud mechanical voices-but the human whores are the worst. And human is too kind a word-misshapen half-lives falling out of their rags and crawling and dragging themselves along, desperately grabbing and clawing at the pant legs of drug-addled passers by. Begging for credits and food and sex and drugs, offering dirty sucky-suck access to every natural or augmented festering opening in their ransacked bodies. I'd never seen anything so depraved up on level 12, never heard of such atrocities in the neural news, never knew that such ugliness could exist.
And that's when I decided that I'd had enough. I peeled myself up off of the ground and walked over to the guardrail marking the edge of the central city-shaft. Looking down, I took a deep breath and-
"So tell me, how's it feel to see how the other half lives?" Dexter clapped me roughly on the shoulder and I spun around, startled and unbalanced.
And that's how I came to slip, to fall, to jump, to be pushed out of the Red Ring and down into the Bath.--
***
Neural Log: 23:66-78-
--And I'd landed in a toxic puddle, which itched and burned my skin. I'd broken my neural link when my skull smacked against the slime-coated cement of the Refuservoir floor. And in the choking, smothering quiet that followed I almost didn't notice as my clothes began to disintegrate, soaked in the chemical filth of the Bath.
I was naked, alone.
And now, with the neural net gone quiet, the paranoia settles in. An ad-barge floats by, far overhead, almost lost in the mist and gloom of the city, selling trinkets to the uppers and motivation to the lowers. Though I know that I'm too far away to be seen, and that it's eyes are turned towards the waving customers on the various rings and not the Refuservoir floor, I cower behind a hill of cluttered garbage and wait for it to pass.
Tatters of my melted clothes drip and hang from my shoulders and arms, and the chemical slick stings. My skin erupts in swollen, rosy patches. My nose begins to run and when I make the mistake of wiping it with my forearm I can smell the toxic fumes as the ooze burns my cheeks and nostrils.
Then the ad-barge passes and I begin a desperate search for something to wipe my skin. There are several large puddles of water about, but they
Similar Books
