There is no true way to define the focal point of my rage.

On the flip side, however, the opposite is true. There isn't one facet of the City I can use to illustrate why I love it as I do.

This has always been my home, these streets the very ones I stomped around within my teen years. The days when bashing in ones skull was the only way to prove your point. True, that is still the way today, but then there weren't any worries regarding insurance against provoked slayings. There seemed to be less red tape back then.

This is my City. These are the reasons I love and hate it, all in the same breath.

Walk with me.

*ihateithere*

METROPOLITIAN: DCFS

"Welcome to my City"

Written by: Alex Cook

*ihateithere*

Walking the equivalent of miles in minutes was the age-old rage, humans attached to pods of all shapes and sizes, as stimuli and mental interface plugs induced the same stringent exercise anyone with the time or inclination could archive through the old-fashioned means. A manicured foot, red nail polish painted across the hardened tissue that made up the surface, stepped out of the chamber slowly, wrapping a nearby towel across her tanned and naked frame.

It was almost as if the lady bunched her brown with blonde highlighted hair together, hiding her face with her head hung low, obscuring her puffy eyes as she hurried out of the area.

Anyone nearby would have heard the small sobbing sounds the woman made as she scampered away from the scene of the crime.

Yes, there was a crime, and yes, I was there to hear her.

It was the nature of the crime that sickened me. My guts twisted in horrid realization at the extent of what I'd witnessed while the beauty slumbered.

I've seen the same ads you all have. Don't you dare say you haven't, I know you have. You were surfing those same feed sites I was when the holo-vid encrypted porn wasn't not enough for you, or me for that matter.

My excuse was a drug-induced need to spew the fruit of my loins against a digital construct of Jeanne d'Arc's face. What was yours?

You fucking liar.

Anyways, you saw her china doll-like face, flashing in front of your cornea while the holo-girl of your dreams was buffered into your deck. Your eyes increased in size proportional to your equipment, my mind in the same gutter as yours as you pictured what acts of decadence the Corp was about to unleash onto your credit account.

A station hand, janitor's gear denoting his supposed job swept the tile floor near the woman's departed pod, head bobbing to the nanite swarm around his head, vibrating to his eardrums alone the music of his choice. Most would have missed his hand reaching out quickly, flipping back a cover and depressing a small button. Producing a cloth from his belt, the 'janitor' buffed the chrome trim of the unit, his motion acting as a distraction while his other palmed the disk that ejected once the button's contact was no more.

Most people would never have put two and two together.

Most.

Missy Roberts, age twenty two, holo-construct with a release date mere days from the writing of this article, just ran past me tears striking her make-up as all the facts were shown to her.

Truthfully, I wanted to find out all I could about Missy Roberts, her highlights interesting me once Jeany proved uncooperative to the midget and chocolate sauce routine I tried to interface with her matrix. When I uncovered nothing but fake addresses and forged records, my journalistic gonads took over where my libido controlled organs proved unable to perform to the task at hand.

The reason the young model that the Corporation, or MatrixCreations actually, had recreated was weeping as she left the high-tech gymnasium was my own fault. A few more shelters offering no work exercise opened as the other patrons of the film I'd just looped into their REM patterns dared to enter the world again.

The facts were broadcast to them all, a few of the male patrons turning to look at the still crouching 'janitor'. Sadly, the man was unaware of the facts displayed for all but himself. Being no more then an errand boy for MC, I could give a dog's crap less about how he felt as two patrons suddenly tackled him to the floor.

I snapped a few slides through the shades as I walked out, the doors parting automatically with a whisper of noise as the sound of fists hitting flesh screamed my departure.

MatrixCreations was the legitimate company representing thousands of porn feed sites around the globe. A legitimate company with a few legitimate subsidiaries that were providing a wide range of products. Products including the TissueExcel 3K, the very same exercise model used in this facility. The same model rigged with observation devices that digitally scanned each and every patron, filing them away for review and possible use at a later date by any of the divisions making up MatrixCreations. One being the holo-girl feed-site of some renown, lesSangMadame. The corny foreign sounding name is on purpose people. Yes, I will kill their marketing team for you.

Missy Roberts was digitally raped, her body soon to be defiled by thousands according to the pre-order logs MatrixCreations recently 'published'.

The Word was going to pay for this story, I promise you.

*ihateithere*

Promises were everything that made up his life. Promises of care, promises of a large credit line, all promises equaling to a cush lifestyle for the man.

All broken empty promises that lead him to the squalor he now lived in.

The thousand credit leather couch was a bear to sit in after a day at the computer, clicking keys and inputting numbers.

Therein lied the problem, the reason that all the promises that constructed his life turned out to be false in the end. While on the surface they appeared true, as I initially disbelieved his drunken rants of discomfort, they were in fact lies.

He was not cared for. He was not whole.

He was not a person.

I'd meet the lackluster man, Albert Ruthferson, in a dive bar near the westside of the city. True, the place was turning into a changer hangout, sections of people drinking in celebration as the sub-dermal patches rewrote their DNA so they had cat eyes rather then human ones, but it still served the best anthrax laced Jack Daniels in the City.

He rambled on about his life non-stop, forcing me to nearly decapitate him simply to end his inane prattle. His words started sinking in then, the buzz settling in as his voice added to the track the alcohol and viral implants were playing in my head.

He had it all. He really did. I was nearly soiling my pants with jealousy as he described the home entertainment his Corporation had installed for him. I didn't catch the name of the faceless monopoly that owned the man, honestly. It didn't seem important at the time. Doesn't now either.

He hated every single piece of it.

Albert looked at it all each and every morning with disgust. He woke up, dressed for work, went to work, worked, had lunch, worked, left work, undressed, dressed in his evening attire, sat in front of the vid for three hours, went to bed, and repeated the process each and every single day of his life. Fourteen years of that was bound to drive anyone insane, if they weren't already. His final question before he left the bar still gives me a chill.

"When did we forget what living was?"

Albert Ruthferson died four hours ago, the Word publishing his obit to my latest offering.

When did we forget how to live?

*ihateithere*

Living within the concrete walls that make up the City's borders, one forget there is anything past your confines.

There is a mountain out there that I hope to see one day. It's supposed to be breathtaking, the nearest thing to what I hear one of the primordial colonies the City had recently started funding.

That was why little Ixania Faphion, eight years old, was stricken so suddenly ill on her first trip into the City. Living outside the City, the Faphion paternal figures had failed to keep up on the latest inoculation protocols. Due to the City's leader spraying us hourly with the recent CDC viral update, we were oblivious to the disease that attacked Ixania's small frame.

No one blamed them, the fault resting on the entry Guards that failed to inspect them properly. That however wasn't the point, as who to blame seemed wrong as Ixania rapidly neared death.

A hybrid of Ebola and cancer, a designer biological weapon that had been unleashed on the City a year previous during some riot bemoaning the current fat cat city leaders, was to blame. The Police had a field day stamping out that one, bio-protection suit masking them from the airborne contagion the protestors had unleashed and were rapidly dying from themselves. CDC came to the rescue and three hours later a new pollen piggybacking vaccine saved us all. I don't think I even was cognizant of the events outside the strip bar I was sitting in at the time.

I was very aware of little Ixania this time around however.

I came to learn about the same child through a friend of mine, one who'd gone up missing actually. While this in itself wasn't unheard of, the person in question taking sporadical sabbaticals from time to time, what was abnormal was the missing departing message.

Rupert was a fogglet, his mind's engrams had been uploaded into a huge swarm of advanced nanites that were controlled by his very consciousness. Addicted to technology, Rupert never left his website without some note of his time away, and only then if he was going to be so remote that he would have no connection to the cybernetic world he enjoyed.

After running a few hacks on the CPD's security video mainframe, I located the last place Rupert was surveyed. The area in which Rupert's program stopped running.

The video attached shows it better then I can describe, but I'll try to anyways. Call it testing my journalistic might.

Ixania laid on the ground, and her parents and two City CDC attachés were surrounding her as the local Guard K9 units kept the crowds controlled.

Rupert had been held up by the traffic, unable to exit the City and to see the comet he last posted about due to that. He floated above the crowd, looking around to see what was the cause of such a scene.

Ixania spasmed the hardest she had yet as Rupert took notice of her.

I almost saw the fogglet bastard weep as his scanner senses told him all they could. She was dying, of something no one ever had due to its rapid cure.

I threw my bottle at my monitor when I saw Rupert glide past the CDC and screaming parents. I knew what he had planned before his pink cloud form enveloped the girl. I'm sure the electrical storm seen within his center was a great visual, but one I failed to witness.

Rupert sacrificed nearly all the nanites that made up everything he was to eradicate the cancerous growths that were eating Ixania alive from the inside out.

If he had never done the same for me, three years ago as we had ventured out of the Coty's borders to see the very same comet Rupert had hoped to glimpse that day, Rupert would have had more then enough substance to stay online. However, he didn't. Rupert used the same damn trick when I fell from the rock I'd scrambled up post haste.

It was my first time outside. Ever. I was dumbfounded by the very taste of the air, not to mention everything else around me.

I'd snapped my spine in quite a few places, Rupert later told me after I came to. He only had one choice, one he didn't regret making. Selfish bastard.

Ruperts cloud dissipated shortly before Ixania's gasp for breath signaled her return from Death's embrace, new and whole. No one ever bothered to find out who the fogglet savior had been, the parents and even Ixania too shocked to process much more then her survival.

The City workers were just that. They were paid enough to care.

I'm sorry this is the way the fogglet community will learn of their departed hero, and a friend to not only me, but Ixania Faphion as well.

*ihateithere*

This community is why I stay here. This fractured gem of a society, rife with drama and comedy, joys for the eye to witness and horrors for the mind to reel from.

Each day I watch the City eat at the people making up this microcosmic society, the corporations and Police physically and mentally knocking each of them down inch by inch. I witness the very reason we are still called humans, redeeming events and parts of ones personality salvaging my view of it all.

Welcome to my City. Welcome to my paradox.

*ihateithere*

Why did I write this?

I was pissed.

Begone.

10.23.01