Posted: 2003-01-01 01:38am
by Enforcer Talen
based on gurps cthulhu punk.
Started 25/Dec/2002
\/\/ ][ |2 3
ST 5 -40
IQ 16 +80
HT 6 – 30
DX 5 – 40
Total – 30
Advantages 80
Literacy 0
Mythos Awareness 5
Luck 15
Dream Travel (10) 30
Eidetic Memory (1) 30
Disadvantages – 45
Cortex Bomb – 15
Compulsive Behavior (wants to harness power of old ones)
- 15
Odious Personal Habit, Screaming Mimi - 10
Q – Wants to ride R’yleh
Q – Likes to Party
Q
Q
Q
Cybernetics – 87
Poison Reservoir (screaming mimi, 50) 10
Bio monitor 3
Flesh Holster, 3lbs 2
Wondergland, suspend, 911, 10
Optic Readout 5
Chip slot 5
Cellular link 5
Eidetic Chips, 2hrs, 2
Enviromental Interface 30
Cyberdeck 15
Complex 2 (+50%), SI 5, +3 slots
Runs Stealth (2), Datalock (2) and or News Daemon (1)
Skills – 58
Area Knowledge Cyberspace 24 (8)
Savior Faire Cyberspace 18 (2)
Streetwise 17 (2)
Computer Hacking 27 (26)
Cyberdeck Operation 18 (8)
Occultism 17 (2)
Dreamlands Lore 18 (4)
Latin 17 (2)
Arabic 17 (2)
Computer Law 16 (2)
Wants Hacking 30 (32)
Cyberdeck Operation 30 (32)
Will on Mimi, normal check 8
Mythos check 5
Then modify
Total -150 pts
\/\/ ][ |2 3
In a small apartment room, a man was dying, or thought he was. His eyes held an unhealthy light, and were unnaturally wide, as if they saw things that should not be. His body, frail and slender, trembled under the force of these visions, and sweat had colored the cheap cot he lay on. His weak arms were clasped about him, but in fear or just to hold himself together was not clear.
His pale face was stretched in a grotesque parody of itself, its normally mundane features cast in frightful pose. One can tell if a man is lost in himself, based on subtle details, but you’d only need glance at him to see them. The tightness of the lips, pressing hard against the ground teeth, the pale face coloring as the pulse of terror ran through them;
This man stood, quite possibly, at the gates of insanity itself.
The room he was in reflected his disturbance, as well, with dozens of computer drives lying in disarray, stacked to the ceiling in precarious columns. They whirred querulously to themselves, taking no notice of the man beneath them, their Creator and benefactor. Instead, they continued on their searches he had commanded of them. In the depths of an electronic world, programs flew, looking for dreams and mystery.
The shuddering body in the center of them, his eyes wide but the mind behind them vacant, was a part of these computers, and they a part of him. Some small section of him flew with his programs, navigating a world based in the wires of cities, a world bigger than stars. His body lay forgotten, the personality behind it fleeing from whatever night terrors it had seen.
His partially shaved head lay open to the insertion of computer plugs and disks, and one had been put into his brain. Vistas out of dreams opened to him, until he had seen something he should not. Other plugs and needles had been put in him, running from one computer or another. Some came from nutrient bags, filling his emaciated form with the bare necessities of life, or perhaps a lingering death.
One needle that had slit into his wrist, also fed from a nutrient bag, but the material was clear, and perhaps, if it could be called such a thing, unwholesome looking. It seemed to settle uneasily as the fluid slowly dripped into him, reminiscent of Kevorkian’s bag of tricks, half a century before. Death was available in a pill, and there were always those who thought they needed it. Some deaths were merely slower then others.
His body seemed to shudder as each new drop entered his system, and in the half real state his mind was in, he seemed somewhat aware of what it was doing. Beasts ran through his brain, and even the shadows had serrated teeth. A horror beyond or below human comprehension, and his meager body was blasted under the impact. The needle was halfway out of his vein, and askew. As the drug went in him, blood spurted out, freshening the carpet of scabs on his arm.
The man on the cot did, indeed, seem to be dying.
Outside, in the hall and the city beyond, one more death did not matter. It was a megacity, a poison blossom of ten million people, so many drones in their vast and putrescent hive. Nation states and the assorted ideals that went with them were forgotten, merely the clattering continuation of hopes birthed in the twentieth century. Birthed in blood, and now drowning in its own wastes, cities from horizon to horizon devoured the earth.
Commanding the lock stepping consumers, hidden behind vast walls and countless armed guards, were the korps, ruthless capitalists whose only limit was the bottom line. The nations were in shambles, the plagues and the economic crash having crippled them, and bursting out of their corpse was a ravening horde of companies. Bright eyed and sleek like predators, they set upon the world, and remade it into their own image.
Now they set the rules, with their own currencies and welfares and societies, their workers born in company hospitals, their servants buried in company graves. From dust to dust, their lives were the korps, and all others were left in the cold. Nations only existed to rubberstamp a worldwide policy, and the shadow armies of the korps smashed into each other in the alleyways. Horrifying augmentations left bodies and less on the cracked pavement.
No, one life, more or less, did not matter.
Machinegun fire from one of those minor back alley brawls echoed through the battered and scarred apartment, and the man who lay in a small cot found enough strength to smile mirthlessly. His mind was still connected in some small way to reality, and sometimes the bitterness of life still gave him cause to laugh. A few civilians caught by stray bullets – he could hear their screams now, and the red blue lights of the local police;
No, they didn’t matter.
Another drop of the horrifying poison (and it was a poison, whatever the street dealers said) slipped into his veins, and sent his mind spiraling off into a brief insanity. His smile became stretched across his underfed face, a starved death head’s grin. Sweat bathed his body as the mists of reality shifted under his mind’s eye, and a noxious perfume stuffed the air of the room his brain had left so far behind. Neurons fired frantically inside his head, submerging him into a world of flashbacks and nightmares.
A strange light seemed to form beneath the veil of consciousness, seeming to make the warped world he lived in now in drug soaked catatonia safe and straight-laced. It was not real, and could not be, and his psyche fled from the possibilities, seeking refuge in the memories of the past, an easy to understand world of anger and despair.
He had been born into one of the korps, one of the conglomerates of the Russian-Japanese mix, striding the world like a colossus. It had businesses on every continent and most every city, and was more powerful then America during it’s heyday, being one of the companies that helped bring it down. All nations had used economic power to gain what they wanted, and then it had been turned against them, and was bitter draught.
He had lived without living while in their domain, slowly turning his years to dust as he followed the powers that drove him. He went from his company owned house through the company owned park to the company owned school for every day of his first twelve years. It was believed customer loyalty should be started young, and they used their total monopoly without hesitation.
Typical korp behavior, really.
It was while in school he was discovered to have a simply astonishing mind. He could look at something trivial and remember it days later, and he learned things faster then students half again his age. At first they thought it cheating, with him staring off into space or playing whatever game could be brought to hand, but even in isolation he learned at amazing pace. They increased his age group, and he learned fast there, too.
Such an asset was not to be wasted, and when he was twelve years old, they began implanting him with whatever devices they thought he would need to serve them. Disk slots, so he could record images even better then with mere organics. Cellular links in his inner ear, the implant given to all employees. Programs to check his health and the maintenance of his metal. And the necessity, an environmental interface. A hole in his brain that would receive electrical signals, leaving the real world behind in a flash of binary.
He adored it, of course, and plugged himself in every waking hour. His teachers noticed this quickly, and deeming that a Decker was more profitable then a mere sheep of the middle school horde, they cut down on his class work. He was years ahead of his age anyway. Instead, they left him in a room of whirring computers, lost to reality with his brain plugged into a hard drive and his mind exploring an electronic universe.
He understood it innately, had a feel and an obsession for the chaotic place he had entered, leaving all the cardboard people and programmed life out. Leaving the corporation itself out! A grim and barren wasteland, left behind for the freedoms of a net composed of the brightest minds of the generation. He was placed in a class of a dozen other such gifted children, and even there, he was the brightest.
He learned in hours what took them weeks to understand, and his comprehension only increased as time went on. In a matter of days, he was as proficient as a typically trained Decker. When he was fifteen, he was counted as one of the elites of the korp. And still he sped forward. A life lived in computers, and he was the legend inside them. He took the name \/\/][|23, ‘Wire’ to the untrained, and he made himself into computers’ divinity.
When Wire was seventeen, he skipped out. Left the console, left the citadel, left the korp. He took one of the cheaper decks with him, hacking into the mainframe to order a transfer out, and forget about it. Security was moved for the few minutes he needed, and he was gone, out into the grim and deadly world outside of a safely insulated korp. It was child’s play, for a man of his talents.
He hid away in a cheap room that he bought for a few minor jobs on the Net, and buried himself in insulation of his own. Computers of all sorts, old or battered, faulty or dangerous, they filled his room and left only a space for a cot when exhaustion filled his being. He ignored the aching for food, and bought an IV and nutrient bag, so he would not have to leave the freedom of his world.
Of course, he was building a prison of his own.
He refined his already superb talents into a keen and deadly sharpness on the Net, and literally spent years of his life in the process. Wire discovered parts of the Net only one in ten million saw, ancient locales and forbidden cities, and it only made him thirst for more. He cut down on the sleep he took, relying on drugs to keep him awake.
His body, maltreated by this decade of abuse, fell into expectedly abysmal shape. He was continuously racked by sickness, ignored while playing god of the net, and it only got worse. In the few times a tough code was slowing him down, he unplugged and went to local raves, searching for experience and freedom. A few more needles didn’t matter, a few less hours of sleep.
Wire enjoyed himself utterly, even as he found it increasingly hard to lift objects a preteen could do without care, or place them without falling. More then once, while plugging back in, he scratched himself up, leaving bloody marks in the back of his skull while his neurons fried in the depths of cyberspace. His body died a year at a time, and he couldn’t even be bothered to notice.
An infrequent hospital trip kept him able to walk and talk, but they told him to rest, and he could never do that. The moment the doctors let him loose, he was flying back into binary once again, finding and often destroying entire corporate worlds as a test of his skill. His health demands were paid by hacking on orders, and he began to hold a layman’s skill in computer law. He also learned to deal with the assorted thugs and lowlifes his environ entailed, and he kept himself safe by working for the dollar sign alone.
Sometimes, rarely, on these extravaganzas, he would see odd people, even for the insane world he was imprisoned in, and have a feeling about them, a strangeness, and a quiet malevolent horror. They made his skin crawl, for all he had seen in his life, and he avoided them as best he could. On certain nights, alone in his room, he knew something was being done that was simply terrifying, and so he dived back into his safe place, the world he was self proclaimed divinity of.
In his twenty first year, Wire began to dream. . .
He had lain on his cot, his body trembling for the rest it craved, though he was not aware, and fallen asleep. Water had dripped on him, and he had jerked upwards, sure that the Korp had found him at last; and found himself in an utterly alien place. His eyes were met, not with comforting hardware and the cramped confines of his room, but with a vast storm, racing over head.
It was easily going at hurricane speed, and seemed close enough to touch, but the air around Wire was still, even stagnant. Rain came down lazily, gathering along the edges of the stone roof to come down in sheets. The stone was cracked and broken, with vast gaps letting rain fall onto the man in their center, but the remnants were tiled, with strange colour and design.
The color of the sky, too, was strange, with broiling black clouds scythed with crimson, and the water looked unwholesome, almost slimy. Lightning flashed frequently, the thunder deep and distant, and the storm passed rapidly on, endlessly. Wire had stood up, confused at where he was, for it felt no dream, and he remembered going down to sleep. His clothes began to soak.
He stood and looked about him, placed in an awesome catacomb or temple, with pillars a hundred feet high and fluted with cunning skill. Around them shadows deepened, hiding all in a cloak of sable, the faintly scarlet light from the storm touching them not. He could see into them, lost in the dark, a row of alcoves, where pedestals were set, and on them, strange creatures.
They gave him an uneasy feeling. As he walked into the black, away from the distant hellish storm, a pressure increased about him, of ancient age and a slumbering malice. The shapes set in the alcoves were alien – not the alien of so many computer visuals, but alien to human thought. They possessed curves undreamed of in human mind, and seemed to bend in ways not possible.
Even though they were of stone, layered in dust and long forgotten, he felt they were watching him. Without eyes to see, carved or real, they stared at him, unformed mouths in enigmatic smiles, an aquatic arm raised to caress – or strike? They were only a foot tall for the most part, but as Wire approached them, he felt that he was the child size statue here, and they walked about him, studying. It was just a trick of the light, surely.
Wire walked slowly along them, in a path set in stone. He did not feel tired, indeed, he felt stronger then he did in life, but he felts a worshipper’s respect for this place, or perhaps a heretic’s fear. They stood still, as they had for how ever long they had stood there, but as he reached out to touch one, the heat about him increased, the subtle pressure of air increasing. He could hear his heartbeat echo in his ears, seeming to vibrate down the vast halls of this place. Sweat dripped down his cheek.
There were dozens, each possessing an inhuman and perhaps horrific shape. Such things picked at the mind, that such shapes could be imagined, let alone crafted. What strange creature had formed them, able to chisel at stone without recoiling in fear or shuddering in revulsion? They stood still as you watched them, but in the corner of one’s eye, they seemed to draw towards you, moving in long remembered environs.
He could almost hear them, walking behind him, the twisted hooves clipping against the stone, the slimy limbs dragging along in soft corrupted sounds. . . but when Wire turned to look, there was none there, only the statues, standing as they always had, motionless, lifeless. Sometimes, the temple itself seemed to close in around him, but it, too, reverted to how he remembered in when he looked.
The thick air of the place seemed to warm, the hatred dripping in it increasing to a torrent. The statues did seem to be moving, now, and in the corner of his eye they approached him, writhing obscenely in ancient hunger and malevolent life. Wire’s body trembled in fear, and his breath came in gasps. He ran away from the path, through the stifling air and a hole in the wall, laced as it was in obscene portraits, and was out.
Standing outside the temple now, all his fears seemed laughable, and he assured himself that a momentary panic had beset him. Nonsense, obviously. But his body remembered, and it still shook, chemicals forming in a maelstrom in him. It was best to run, and get away, in all haste. He shook it off, for a moment, but as he looked at the outside of the building, constructed in obscene parody of life, he walked away from it, keeping it in sight.
It was raining still, but the oily slickness seemed far more preferable then the dark horrors that lay in wait inside that desolate place. The storm continued far above, a hundred or thousand miles long and roaring by in quiet thunder. As Wire walked away and down, he saw the museum framed by the unnatural weather, and shuddered. Something about it was grotesquely evil.
The building was set on a rocky hill, the bare bones of the earth pushing up like the fingers of half dead corpses, and Wire tripped over them frequently. They were set in a marsh whose thin reeds came rising out like poisonous ivy, and it tangled his feet, letting the mud sink him low. The rain kept coming down, and Wire shuddered as a razored wind came from the barbaric mountains on his left. Dim light there seemed to move repulsive shadows, or perhaps repulsive beings, and Wire wondered what horrific things lay in wait for him.
About half a mile away, with the temple rising in otherworldly magnitude, he found a path, three paces wide and thinning away at a vast distance. It was dirt and packed down, unlikely for the lack of life to maintain it from the hunger of vegetation, and water seeped into it like the throat of a dying man. Wire stepped onto it, glad to be out of the muck but unsure of this untouched road. It did not respond when he walked on it – why would it? But he kept a cautious eye on it, just in case.
The road led away from the unholy edifice on its lost hill, and Wire followed it at a quick walk. This valley unnerved him more then he’d like to admit, so he walked with a distinctly casual air, and pretended not to notice it was forced. The wind continued raking him with its cold touch, and the storm continued on, endless, keeping him in soaked unhappiness.
There seemed no life here, in this long forgotten path in some unknown corner of his subconscious. He seemed to be living in a recording, with the same wind and same storm and same path, forever and ever, amen. Wire walked for miles, and even though individual plants and patches of stream were passed, the hill seemed the exact distance away, as did the mountains. There were no birds.
In a mire such as this, one would expect a thousand ravenous insects and disgusting water life, but neither were seen. There was nothing here, under the raging gaze of the temple on high, witness of so many horrors and lost tales. Who knew what it had seen, in its millennium long life, cursed and forgotten? An entire city, perhaps, spanning this valley and more, where the beasts inside the alcoves walked, and went about unknown purposes.
Wire shuddered again, his mind filling the spaces of such mysteries he did not wish to know. He was not meant for this, he knew, but his icy intellect, so long praised, looked for it anyway. And so his days passed, walking, looking about the vast and incomprehensible valley, ignoring the needs of his body with long practice, nothing to eat and corrupted water to drink. It helped not, and he stayed, lost on the Endless Path to the broken Temple that sits on Eith-Drannan, fever clouding his eyes and his mind, until sleep sought him out, and brought him to his knees and a welcome awakening.
His eyes opened and took in the safe walls of his apartment, with all their stolen computer hardware. His mouth had a bad taste in it, and the nutrient bag he was plugged into showed he had only been gone a couple of hours. It had been a typical dream sequence. But he knew it wasn’t, and making sure his door was still locked and the plugs in him maintained, he left one dream world for another, the depths of cybernetic reality.
He searched in the nameless places that few knew where to go, and wraiths and dark things awaited him as often as another hacker. Strange beasts spoke with human tongues and trees watched with knowing eyes. The net was alive, fed by an incomprehensible amount of information, and sometimes it gave birth to things undreamt. They spoke to him, and some possessed the form of creatures from his living dream.
Wire learned that such dreams were more real then the shadow existence we think is life, and he learned of the others who had been there before him. It became his new obsession, and his half metal brain was the bridge. He spent his waking hours in the places where such things are discussed, far from prying eyes, for it was often heretical in one form or another. Some would have shown their disapproval with a bullet.
Hackers had much in common with dreamers, and while they were rarely the same person, as Wire was, they had contact with each other, and taught him much. Of Celephais and aged King Kuranes he become knowledgeable in, of the cats of Ulthar and the cold desert of Leng, and in his sleeping hours he found no rest, instead seeking out the places that formed mankind’s dreams, which held beauty and lethality unknown.
And on the edges of the teachings, he heard whisperings of something more and far greater terrifying. The dreamers were only the blind walkers in the dark, and the world they traveled, while brilliant and poignant in its life, was only a shadow. There was another world out there, and like Icarus, those that traveled too close would be burned. Insanity walked amongst mankind.
The occult, those trappings of learning in the wild before the shackling of Christianity, called to him, and their whispers reached his twisted ear. Benevolence and beauty there was none, instead a laughing mockery of life and love, and as he dove deeper into the darkness, he skimmed the edges of the grotesque laws on which life is written. Earth was but a sparkle of sand in a hostile universe.
Strange and almost inhuman people were met by him, dabblers in the worship of creatures from that lost Temple, or worse and more incomprehensible things, and they told him where to look. Such information was expensive to body and mind, but he was unknowingly trapped on its path, and paid them willingly. To find the bedrock of reality, he found increasingly little he would not do.
Into the depths of the past he strode, looking for the true view of the universe, before the petty sciences and neutered religions buried them. He learned old Arabic and Latin, so as better to comprehend the old writings and what horrifying things they told of. Of Abdul Al’harazed and the Necronomicon did he look. It was not to be found, not in an electronic world nor the grimy one in which he was chained.
But he found writings and sketchings of similar, and what once he would have dismissed as madness and conspiracy theory, he studied with intent. Slowly, so slowly, the rocks of ignorance were being pushed away, revealing the world beneath. Verily, the scales were taken from his eyes on his road to Damascus, and the things he learned, man was not meant to know.
He took it upon himself, with eroded reason and twisted intellect, to build a computer. Not of the mere metals that governed Humanity’s ‘mastery’ of this earth, but based in the true rules that dominated. There was knowledge in the dark and there was power, and he deemed that a computer based there would be the next step in binary evolution. And if it was in his control, he would become the god he proclaimed himself.
In his obsessive need to learn how to construct such an obscenity, he became lost to the world. The parties he had frequented became a gray memory, and the friends he had gained there eventually stopped coming around. Wire lived to his name, held into place inside computers, passing information that he barely comprehended, deteriorating under the endless strain.
His health suffered even more, and his body thinned. He forgot the taste of food, relying on the attentions of black market IVs and liquid vitamins. His black hair, once a precious definition of him, became wild and disarrayed, gathering over his gaunt face like the insanity that was beginning to circle his mind.
prologue to be continued. and that;s all you'll ever see! bwhahahaha. . .