wb :

They said that it was for the suicidal. They said you'd have to be crazy to play it - stark raving mad. They said (the ones who'd survived the trip, tapping their noses knowingly) that it was the greatest thrill a person could, right before you were dead. Crushed insect at the bottom of some metal canyon in an expanse of city, and nobody would glance twice. He was headed straight for it anyway, shake heads and move on. Nothing to see here.

It was all that. The socio-psychologists were having a field-decade, giving talks and writing articles about this hyper-counter-culture. Nihilism, they called it - super stars for a day, then wasted.

Bander was a nihilist. It wasn't obvious; he had eye-bags, below eyes greying slightly from the use of stims, black hair, spiked punk-style. He had a reinforced, two-millimeter steel plate beneath the skin of his forehead, and the bridge of his nose was entirely a chrome rod protruding from the bit of his face between his eyes. That wasn't it, and neither were the black leather jacket and jeans he sported. He stood loosely, but completely still.

The greying eyes peered downwards through the transparent window at Earth below. He'd seen some pictures in the museums about how it used to look: vast and green-blue, topped with an icing of swirling white clouds. No such luck this side of the millenium. The swirling currents looked closer to silver, on a backdrop of almost uniform grey.

Practiced of experience and sheer instinct to survive, the eyes swept the clouds, taking note of the movements. He knew the grey cloud-cover wasn't actually uniform; the silver currents pulled at the clouds, swirling them into incomprehensibly complex vortexes and eddies, pushed one way or another by incoming streams.
Humanity had given up the surface a century ago, battered by the endless sonic boom of a hundred million aircraft, personal craft, liners and military jets tearing across the sky at once.

Bander took stock once more, visualising the descent silently. In five minutes the adequacy of his preparation would be at the greatest stake.

Labels: prose