Digital Underground - uXu - Underground eXperts United #uxu-187

### ### ### ### ### #### ### ### ### #### ### ### ##### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ##### ### ### ########## ### ### ########## ### ### ### ### Underground eXperts United Presents... ####### ## ## ####### # # #### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## #### ## ## #### # # ## ####### ## ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## ## ## ####### ####### # # ###### ####### ## [ Two-Two-Six-Eight ] [ By Phearless ] ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ Two-two-six-eight. The PAST visit. by Phearless for uXu Morning He woke up early that morning. The blanket that had covered his body up to his chin when he fell asleep, lied like a pile of dirty laundry at his feet. The air was hot and dry, and easy to breathe. The sunlight shining through the window made one side of this blanket mountain look brighter and warmer than the other. The opposite side seemed cold and dark. He turned his head to the other side. Half the room was bathing in sunlight, the other half was dark and gloomy. Every object in the room had one light side and one dark side. The time display on the desk had a great light side, absorbing all the sun light, and a very small dark one. Clean The high pitched tone lasted exactly one third of a second, and the metal bars surrounding his bed immediately began their way up through the ceiling. He sat up and stretched both his arms straight up and forward. "Current time; two-two-six-eight, five-one, oh-six-double-oh. Time remaining; one, oh, one-eight-double-oh." The automated voice message echoed a few times between the walls. He sat up and turned away from the bed, his legs bent over the edge, slowly reaching for the floor with his toes. They reached their goal, and he felt the hot surface warming up all of him through his feet. When he stood up, the bed behind him immediately disappeared into the wall next to it, just to be replaced by the cleaning unit. He entered, and felt the light, body tempered liquid flowing all over him. It made him feel good and relaxed. Ten exhales later, hot air filled the small cabin. After that, he left, clean and dry. He felt satisfied. Hunger When he turned around, the cleaning unit was gone, in it's place was a belly leveled desk, and there were three, hand-high, metal, cylinder shaped objects visible on top of it. Each one filled with different kinds of colored liquid. He reached for the leftmost object, grabbed it, put it to his mouth and emptied the cylinder into his thirsty throat. It made him feel comfortable. He put the thing back on the desk. The liquid in the second cylinder made him feel happy, the last one made him feel strong. After the third metallic object had been put back in position, the desk fell to the floor, not leaving a single trace of it's recent presence, nor making any kind of sound. Play He turned around and walked in direction of the opposite wall. When he got closer, a control panel was made visible. He reached for the thin wire to the right, hesitated for a second, then plugged the end of the wire into the tiny hole in the middle of his chest. The panel was lit and he checked, without actually being aware of it, four of the lights before hitting the red square, clearly marked with the letters BEGIN. He rested his arms along his side, and leaned his head forward, waiting. Blackness. He got two options. PLAY or TRANSMIT. He chose PLAY, and the vision went blank again. Another menu. PAST 1.00 PRESENT 1.00 HISTORIC 2.00 EXTREME SURVIVAL 2.00 PLEASURE 3.00 FUTURE 4.00 SURREALISTIC 4.00 "One, oh, one-eight-double-oh," he said to himself and took a deep breath. PAST was highlighted just to be faded away along with the other options. Bright light turned slowly into a great green valley. Nothing had changed since he left last night. The two huge cracks in the ground after the last earthquake were still there. Both with their big mouths wide open and their throats ending deep inside mother earth. He walked towards the hole in the ground and stopped two feet away from the edge of the hungry darkness. His eyes looked up and searched for nothing in the great, endless blue sky. Control One big leap and he was on his way. Falling. It was a long way to fall, but he felt no fear. The blue sky, trapped between the edges of the crack above him, got smaller and smaller. Thirty seconds. The breathtaking wind flying pass him stopped, but his stomach told him he was still falling. "I did it again. The other side of everything. The dark side." Some parameters were quickly changed to avoid suspicion of the global guards. A phantom was created with his own personal data, and placed at the bottom of the valley, dancing around bare feet in the wild grass. After a quick but very advanced use of a hidden "feature" in the time controller, he transferred time two, eight, double-oh-double-oh to himself. The receipt was labelled as a 'gift from anonymous'. He then transmitted himself to another location of PAST. "One-nine-nine-four, two-five-oh, oh-one-double-oh... let me see what you look like." Travel He safely got to his preset location and he could see a thousand small lights in the distance. Three white lines marked the beginning, center and the end of the warm, grey ground. A quick and sudden yell somewhere in the dark surrounding made him jump. He tried his best to relax. A white "t-shirt", a pair of blue, strong trousers model "jeans" with a black cow-skin "leather" belt, and finally a pair of comfortable shoes, that ought to be enough he thought when the shoelaces were in place. Some minutes of walking later he reached the city. There were a place named "Palpo Gapla" in the corner of a huge building where a lot of people went in and out. He thought it looked quite interesting and he entered the bar. "This will be entertaining." Bar "May I have a big alcohol drink, please," he said to the man behind the counter. He had learned how to talk the old way by studying the oldest information he could find on the topic. "One alcohol drink coming up. Seven dollars and fifteen cents." Money. He always forgot the money. He put an attache beside himself at his feet, and stuffed it with one-dollar bills. He then opened it a little, counted eight notes, and put them on the bar disk. "Say, issat really yours?" said someone sitting beside him. A fat man with a big beard and long, dirty, dark hair, drinking a dark brown/orange drink with white foam on top. He pointed at the attache. "Yes, it is mine." "Ya didn't haveit when ya came hea. I sawit. I think it's mine," the fat man with the beard said, slightly drooling when he took another sip of his drink. "You can have it." He reached down and grabbed the attache, and then handed it over to the fat man, who was so surprised he almost fell off his chair. The fat man immediately put the case in front of him, and opened it, though the dollar bills he expected to see were not there anymore. "Howdidya dodat?" the fat man asked, with his eyes wide open. Though the alcohol in his brain made it hard for him to focus on anything specific. "This is my world. I control it, you live in it. Simple as that." "Yourlike God or Jesus orwhat, you fagget magician bastard. Whereya hide dat money? Tellme or I'll messup yar pretty lil face real good." The fat man had switched from a happy child to a potential murderer. "I think you are one of those who like to look down on people, but listen, I do not like being insulted. Do not worry though, I will make us both happy." He then changed the fat man's location parameters, and added five hundred feet to his current altitude. "Have a nice trip." he said to himself, trying his best to keep a smile off his face. Hunt "Darn." His personal alarm beeped twice. He noticed two global guards scanning all the PAST memory banks. "I better improve that parameter box. They noticed it again, this is getting annoying," he thought to himself, grabbed the alcohol drink and drank it all up. "I will try another phantom reality." He created a copy of his own personal PAST, slightly modified to avoid any suspicion. "An interesting impossible physical event should do the trick." His other scanning devices followed the guards' search. They found his copy in a matter of seconds, froze and terminated it. The copy itself disappeared, then the guards themselves. For a short moment he thought of the billions of people he just sent to a certain doom, but he got over his emotional feelings when he remembered the fact that it was not real people, just a bunch of structured data deep inside the biocity. "Lucky me they do not scan all memory every time something unexpected occurs. It is far too expensive, ha h..." Pain His laughing stopped when he recalled something that happened a long time ago. A close friend had his time reduced to oh, oh, two-four-double-oh, which is practically a death sentence. He also remembered why his friend got this sentence. "Not being loyal to the city. Creator of chaos and disorder. Abusing public material. No respect for the laws of moral. Enemy of the people." He was a great friend, and good at what he did. With time though, he lost more and more contact with the top level reality. They found out when he got a memory flash during a party, and almost strangled his wife. After a quick scan of his personal data and some cooperative drug shots, they had an almost complete picture of what he had been doing. That had not been the first case of this kind. The first incidents happened when they started the system way back. People had created a copy of their own personal reality one time too many, and went out of their mind. Since there is no difference, except when you die in a reality other than the top level one, everyone must be very sure of which one they are in. He stared into the empty glass, and he could feel the alcohol changing his way of thinking, and he loved it. Alcohol "Another alcohol drink, please." The bartender sighed and poured up another drink. This time he did not fill the glass with the black liquid he did the first time, now it was only the transparent water-like liquid. "Here's your alcohol drink mister. This one's on me," the bartender said with a big grin. He accepted the drink, looked at it for a second, and then emptied the glass to the last drop. It then fell to the floor and smashed into tiny but extremely sharp pieces. His first thought was that he had been poisoned, but as the pain in his throat eased out, he relaxed, and the warm feeling spread through every part of his body. "Gah... are you trying to kill me?" he said to the bartender who had been watching him with his everlasting smile all the time. "Give me one that taste good next time, okay?" The bartender nodded, not giving up his smile, and gave him another drink, apparently of the same kind as the first one he made. More Two drinks later he was talking to a brown haired, well dressed woman sitting next to him with a strange looking drink in front of her. "See dis hole in my chest?" he said, and pulled his t-shirt over his head. "Through dis hole I can connect meself to yer pitiful world, n'more, I've got full control o'whaddis happenin everywhere. The world you all live in exists only because I want it to. I can make it all disappear n'no one will ever know yaevah existed. Gives ya'nother perspective of life, doesn't it?" "Oh yeah?" the woman replied, not sounding especially interested. "Yes my friend. I only have to concentrate on something, and thus creating a mind link to a process I've got running, that hides everything I do and want to do. If it's sumthin extra ordnary, I have to hide it meself." "Sure." the woman said. "But something puzzles me." the woman said. "Why are you here, in this bar, drunk and babbling, when you say you can be anywhere you want to? There must be a million places better than this one." "First of all, nuthin beats alcohol when it comes to exploring da mind on yer own. Second, of sum strange reason, I prefer places like dis. You never know when something unexpected will happen. Third, I wanna experience what inspired people in dah end of dis century. Most of dah rules and laws of me own time is based on what is found out at dis very moment. They are extremely difficult to understand for most of dah people. I guess dats why it was accepted by dah leaders of dis time." "Intriguing." was the only response from the woman, who obviously found more interest in her drink than in what he was saying. Trap He woke up in a soft bed. He was freezing, and with a smashing headache. No, his whole body was aching. When he looked up and saw the white walls, he thought he was back home, but changed his mind when he noticed a wire going from a small plastic bag filled with some transparent liquid. The other end of the wire was attached to his arm. "Oh no, enough for today," he said and pulled out the wire from his arm. He decided to go back. He sat up and took a deep breath to clear his mind a little. His chest was feeling a bit strange. When he scratched the itchy spot he felt something that he could not believe, nor understand. He looked down on his chest, and where he expected to find the small hole, he saw nothing but a big, red scar. It hurt him just looking at it. A door opens and a man with a thin white coat enters, and walks up to the bed. The friendly looking type. "So you've decided to wake up now? You've been sleeping for almost three days." He could feel the cold sweat running down his back. "Please, help me! What has happened to my hole?" "Don't you worry. You're gonna be just fine now. The metal object we found in your chest has been successfully removed, though it was very critical at the point we cut it away from your spine. That thing must have hurt! For how long have you been walking around with it?" He forced himself to remain calm, though he could feel the fear sneaking up on him. "Listen now, this is very important. Where is my hole now? I must have it back!" "Take it easy now. We sent it to the lab, but they came up with nothing. It's been destroyed or sent to another lab by now I guess." He couldn't help it any longer. Memory flashes attacked him. He saw the connector being destroyed, himself being terminated by the global guards, and getting an oh, oh, twenty-four-double-oh sentence. Without any chance of hiding. The only thing that would be left of him would be a stupid phantom dancing in the nude. The other possibility was not especially kind to his mind either. He saw the connector being put on some lab's shelf, to never be noticed again. If it remained intact, the global guards would never find something wrong, and he would be a prisoner in this world for as long as his character was alive. When he died here, his top level reality would terminate his true self as well. He cried and begged the white coat man to find his hole and to put it back into his body, but he only got a funny look for a reply. Then the man slowly backed away from him, towards the exit. The doctor closed and locked the door when he left the room. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #187 Underground eXperts United 1994 uXu #187 Call CYBERPUNK SYSTEM -> +1-316-942-0064 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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