Twitcher: An Illustrated Dystopian Cyberpunk Tale of Revenge and Redemption

by Kaleb Schad

  “Nah, the boy is for the banging, right?” Crupps humped the air with his hips. What would the man’s neck muscles look like under Tyler’s fingers?

  “What’s banging mean?” the boy asked.

  “Ping the Silent Uprising for me. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Don’t know ‘em.”

  “Don’t want to know those flag fappers.” Crupps made a stroking gesture.

  “Frag that. Lower Skims got noise you ain’t hearing? And I saw their mark all over Cerebus.”

  “What if they not interested in talking to you? Hmm? They’s got their own wars to wage, for some rabid-bitch reason.”

  Big S1m didn’t build this empire on balls of steel alone. Considering him anything close to stupid had gotten more men launched forty stories to splat than Tyler cared to remember. The things that happened to a body hitting the ground at or near terminal velocity…it was the stuff of the really dark syncasts. Tyler had seen it enough times to know his kit wouldn’t do boo with something like that. So when Big S1m said “what if they not interested,” Tyler couldn’t help but think the man was hiding something. That the question he was asking wasn’t the question he wanted answered. And in that case, it was usually best not to answer at all.

  “A JACKK and them’s crusaders holding hands,” Big S1m said when it was clear Tyler wasn’t talking. “They headaches enough. Might be worth a lot to keeps you twos from talking.”

  “Mr. Tyler, what’s banging mean?” The boy tugged at Tyler’s pouches.

  Evee was back to Sherlocking Tyler’s face. He needed to wrap this up fast.

  Tyler pulled out Eddie Fahrs’s credit chip.

  “Thirty-thousand,” he said.

  “Maybe chips don’t interest me.”

  “Maybe chips don’t interest him,” Crupps said.

  “Get off it. We both know you’d sell your own daughter.” Or a son.

  Big S1m stabbed a finger at Tyler. “That be a hell of a thing to say to someone you’s just met. Maybe I take the chips and toss you’s out of my home. How be Twitchers at flying?”

  Behind Tyler, Crupps was pulling back his coat. Tyler could hear the drag of the nylon over a metal gun grip. Evee tried not to look at the movement, tried not to reveal the ambush, but it was too late.

  Then it occurred to Tyler: if he were making a list of people who’d fucked him in this life, the pole position went to Staerns, that’s solid, but that number two slot? Tyler was in a room filled with them. Sure, a couple innocents, too, but don’t kid yourself. Nobody is ever truly innocent. After all, wasn’t Tyler the present?

  “I don’t relish the idea of killing everyone in here,” Tyler said, “but if that bit-monkey behind me moves another centimeter I will lose it and all of this—“ Tyler waved at Big S1m’s wife and daughter, “—all this family shit you’re playing at will come tumbling down with us. All I want is a meet and greet. Ping the Silent Uprising. That’s it. Thirty-k richer.”

  Tyler could sense the boy’s attention swing from the kids playing outside to Tyler. A studied fear searching for the bluff in his words.

  “Maybe not so wise of a Twitcher, eh? Talking like that.”

  Big S1m clacked his metal teeth together. The DANGER sticker glistened.

  “Thirty for a ping. Sure. Turns out, they want to meet you, too. Already called in case you showed up. Offering chips for a talk. And the boy. Good chips on meeting the boy.” Big S1m settled back into his seat, signaling Crupps to settle as well. “But I do wonder what a Twitcher does killing LCP and talking to crusaders?” He dabbed again at the drool on his jaw. “I teach mine not to bite the hand that feeds them.”

  “Kid,” Tyler said, “banging is what happens to suckers. I’ve learned that while one hand is feeding you, the other is probably pulling a knife to slit your throat.”

  Outside of B.S.’s container, Tyler waited for the Red Lithiums to make contact with the Silent Uprising and coordinate a meeting. Crupps and three others stood guard. He watched the boy running with the other children, leaping over small crates, climbing the nets. They had accepted him into their play group without hesitation, someone new, with new ideas for the game, new tactics they’d never tested. Nothing demanded. No tests of loyalty or schemes of what they could convince this new child to do. The only requirement was that he play to win.

  This was how man was built, Tyler thought. This is what had sucked Tyler into the Red Lithiums. Yes, you had to accept murder with the love, but didn’t everyone? Didn’t the High Laners accept the murder of the Lower Skimmers in exchange for the connection and love of their own families? But the Lower Skimmers didn’t murder and they didn’t love. They didn’t connect. Electrodes in their brain mimicked connections, but the lives they touched and that touched them were only buffered bits. Data. Simulated selves.

  The boy ran up to Tyler, breathless, burning cheeks from the Autumn air. Already the cut on his forehead looked better, the bruising yellowing and fading. He wasn’t moving like he was in an explosion several hours ago.

  “We should stay here.” Stated. As if it were that simple.

  “What?”

  “With your friends. And I could play. And they could help you not die.”

  Like a car rolling down a hill, his reaction caught itself up in its own cascading gravity and Tyler knew it was too much, but didn’t want to stop himself. This was how they’d gotten him last time, this facade of family that hid real betrayal.

  He jerked the boy by the arm, smashing his nose into the child’s. “Listen, you little shit. They’re not my friends. And they’re not yours. They’ll sell you outside the LCP to a rape farm in a second. Be grateful I’m here to protect you. We are leaving. Get ready.”

  The boy’s eyelids had slackened into a resigned gaze while Tyler was yelling. He wasn’t afraid. All of that anger for nothing. If anything, Tyler thought the boy offered a look of pity.

  The other kids had stopped running and were watching them. The wind moaned through the suspended base.

  “Not everyone hates everyone else, wants to be alone all the time,” the boy said. “Just you.”

  It was possible to imagine everyone in the Lower Skims were dead, an apocalypse erasing all life, that’s how empty the streets were. Big S1m, Crupps, Tyler and the boy rode in the back of B.S.’s Mananz MRS, facing each other.

  “They said, ‘No time like the present,’” Big S1m said. “But seemed to Big S1m they maybe hiding their antsy.”

  Tyler held his weapons, so why did he feel so vulnerable right now? He had to keep pushing the kid away from him, keeping space to move should he need.

  “Especially the boy. They said, ‘No deal without the boy.’ Your mama in the crusades?”

  Behind them, Tyler watched the two black motorcycles of the rear escort, their two riders each covered head to toe in black armor, like bulbous shadows. He knew there were another two in front.

  “Didn’t talk like a bunch of gomps who spray paint skulls, none neither,” Big S1m said. “No noise. Just meet and time and place. Crispy.” He wiped at his jaw with a cloth, waiting for Tyler to say something.

  The boy had bunched the bottom hem of his “Together in Hope” t-shirt into a ball and was twisting it.

  “Don’t operate like gomps neither. Make Red Lit biz harder, more expensive. Crusaders always blowing up LCP trucks and trains, spreading their syncast noise. Big bosses start cracking down on Skimmers leaving their holes, shorter relapses. And for what? Skimmers don’t care none. They’s none care. Hundred years things be what they be with Resource Gap and all and now some crusaders cracking the boat.”

  “Rocking the boat,” Tyler said.

  They sloped downward into a tunnel and the inside of the car darkened, the signal lights coloring everything amber. Big S1m was searching Tyler’s face, seeking any answers he might divine there, like casted bones. For a man used to being the center of everyone’s interest, the catalyst, Tyler knew Big S1m must hate this diminishing ignorance.


  “You familiar to me,” Big S1m said.

  Tyler felt his heart drop, as if it dragged along the pavement beneath the car.

  “You have a brother?”

  “Maybe their minds changed,” Big S1m said.

  They had parked at Enimel Industries’s wharf in the Eleventh district. Several warehouses and an office building ringed the outside perimeter and no ships were moored to the quays. Big S1m’s soldiers leaned against their motorcycles yapping, wagging their hands as they made jokes with each other. Tyler was annoyed at their complete lack of readiness.

  Ben was rubbing at his left arm, above the IV port. He said, “My arm hurts.”

  Tyler heard the craft approaching up the Little Marek river long before the others did. Once it was in range, they could see it was a small insertion craft with a forward mounted 20mm autocannon and five men on board. It was LCP military gear.

  Tyler loosened his Mark 37 off of his shoulder and moved next to the boy who was still massaging his arm. “Stay close,” he said.

  “It really hurts,” the boy said.

  The boat glided up against the quay and a magnetic clamp snapped out and reeled the craft in. A ramp automatically extended out from the ship and four soldiers and a woman disembarked. The soldiers moved well, their weapons ready, but not raised. They wore helmets that covered their eyes and their noses and mouths were covered by nylon masks. A white skull with an “x” over the mouth was painted on each. Synmap cables looped from their helmets like braids.

  The woman was meaty, middle aged, with grey stains in her brown hair. For some reason the grey hair reminded Tyler that growing old was something he would never do. She had a granite face with a straight line for a mouth.

  They stopped some distance from Big S1m and the Red Lithiums.

  “Incredible.” The woman was looking at the boy.

  “What’s not incredible is that we bring them to you,” said Big S1m, louder than he needed to. Nervousness? Tyler couldn’t believe it, but maybe? “On time. What is incredible is that you think we turn over the boy and the man for so little.”

  “This is,” the woman took a deep breath and held it, then let it out slowly, “frustrating.”

  The Red Lithium soldiers weren’t leaning on their motorcycles anymore. Tyler eased the boy behind him.

  “LCP pays big bucko’s for rogue Twitcher and little boy,” Big S1m said.

  “You don’t…” The woman laughed and looked at the Silent Uprising soldier next to her, then back at Big S1m. “You don’t even know who the buyer would be. Liberty isn’t looking for them. Staern Life Sciences are.”

  “Same shit. Different asshole.”

  “No,” she said, her voice like embers. “They’re not.”

  Tyler wanted to scream. How could he be so stupid? How could he have thought that this once, just this once, Big S1m would actually do what he said he would do? He flicked off the safety on his rifle.

  “My stomach hurts,” the boy said to Tyler. He was holding his belly now.

  “Your people are already taking delivery,” the soldier next to the woman said to Big S1m.

  “You’ve had that treehouse for what? Fifteen, sixteen years,” the woman said. “And the police never bothered to look up in all that time? Never wondered what that mess of cables and plastic was up there?”

  “Not very curious, those ones,” Big S1m said.

  “You should go home,” the woman said. Tyler was impressed with her composure, the way she clipped each word with finality, but never hurried, not a whiff of fear. “Bundle up your wives and kids. They’re important to you people, right? I’m worried the LCP has gotten inquisitive. And in case you think I’m not being fair, you can keep the Twitcher.”

  “No dice,” Tyler said. “Package deal, lady. And you,” he turned to Big S1m, “You always were full of BS. But you know the difference between us? I’m not. I swear to you on my left fucking nut, I will use my final hours on this earth to ravage everything you hold dear in life and then I will end that life. That goes for both of you.” He turned back to the woman. “This is a simple swap. Keep it that way.”

  Big S1m was squinting at Tyler, working his metal jaw back and forth. “Squeak?” he said to Tyler. “That you? You go and get JACKK’d?”

  “Please, Mr. S1m,” the boy said in a pinched voice. He was still holding his sides. “He’ll do it. He kills everyone. He—“ The boy screamed, then buckled forward, landing hard on his knees and kicking his legs out. He lay thrashing on the concrete wailing.

  “The fuck—” Big S1m started to say.

  Tyler moved first, of course. He stepped next to Big S1m and slammed his rifle’s barrel up against the man’s prosthetic jaw, the clink of metal on metal. “It won’t hurt going in, but it’ll probably hurt coming out,” Tyler said.

  Behind Big S1m, Tyler watched as the air folded in on itself, warping like a mirror starting to melt, then swept backwards to reveal four more Silent Uprising soldiers in flanking positions behind the Red Lithiums. Adaptive camouflage. This wasn’t kid stuff. Whoever was funding the Silent Uprising had connections. This gave Tyler hope they would actually be able to get him through the Veil after all. If they didn’t all die here first.

  Another Silent Uprising soldier ran up to the boy and put handcuffs on him.

  “He might explode,” the woman said. “We’re leaving.”

  The soldier cradled the boy in his arms and began walking to the boat while the other Silent Uprising soldiers backpedaled slow and steady, their weapons never leaving their targets.

  “Explode?” Big S1m said.

  Tyler followed their lead and backed up to the boat as well. At the edge of the wharf, he turned to get on, but a soldier stopped him and held up a pair of manacles. They were larger than handcuffs, designed for a Twitcher’s strength.

  “Piss off,” Tyler said.

  “It’s the only way you’re getting on this boat,” the woman said.

  He needed her more than she needed him and they both knew it. If he still wanted to get through the Veil, this was his way. He handed his rifle to the soldier and then cuffed himself. The soldier leaned out of the boat and took Tyler’s MK-9 out of his hip holster.

  As Tyler climbed into the boat, Big S1m called out to him. “Hey Squeak.” Tyler turned. “Once a sucker, always a sucker.”

  Water sprayed across the bow, crystal globs catching the moonlight. The boat’s engines were silent, so all Tyler heard was the slap of the water on the hull and the buzz of drones. One of the Silent Uprising soldiers knelt next to the boy who was laying on the deck and plugged a monitor with a long tube into the port in his left arm. The boy had stopped spasming and was now whimpering while he held his stomach. The man had to force his arm open to reach the port.

  “Get away from him,” Tyler yelled.

  The man ignored him, looking instead at the display connected to the boy’s IV.

  Tyler hated being handcuffed, feeling weak. He put his boot to the man’s shoulder and shoved hard. The man crashed into the side of the craft.

  “Please stop,” the woman said.

  The man righted himself and said to the woman, “It’s not the steg. We’re okay.”

  She nodded, then to Tyler, “He’s not hurting him. He’s echoing the signal SLS is using to track the boy so we can mask it.”

  “What’s happening to him?”

  “They’re endeavoring to slow him—and you—down. Probably preparing a larger assault team to eliminate you and recover him. That Malcolm Staern.” She smiled as she said this.

  Water was pooling around the boy’s face, but he didn’t seem to notice. Tyler eased his foot under the kid’s head like a pillow.

  Power was a real thing in a vague word. It was the thing Tyler had at one time and wanted back, the thing he had spent most of his short adult life taking. He knew this. Some people didn’t know why they did what they did, but not Tyler. He knew.

  So when they arrived in a warehouse, the bay doors dropping l
ike jaws into the canal, and Tyler saw the men with the set-up they were assembling, he knew his power had been stolen.

  One of the soldiers with the white “x” painted over his mask carried the boy across the warehouse towards a stainless steel table on wheels. It had been rolled over a clear tarp, the plastic bunched up around the wheels like snow drifts. Two men in green smocks hovered over a utility cart setting out tools: a reciprocating saw, scalpels, and a long glass canister with a steel base and tubes inside of it. Its hatch was open, waiting.

  The soldier laid the boy on the table.

  Tyler tested the handcuffs. He wouldn’t be able to break them.

  “I’m going to need that boy back,” he called.

  The rest of the Silent Uprising soldiers had disembarked and the woman smiled at Tyler, then offered her hand to help him up. He didn’t take it.

  “Let’s talk.” She waved at one of the soldiers and he set out two metal stools several meters from the table with the boy. She sat like a man, hunched forward with her legs spread, intense, though Tyler noticed, even spread, her thighs still touched. A High Laner who loved and could afford solid foods, then. You don’t get thighs like that on nutrient sacs.

  “You seem like you’d have a fascinating story,” she said.

  “I don’t have time for stories. I need to get into the Veil.”

  “Humor me. How did you find the boy?”

  Tyler tried, as slowly as possible, to pull on the handcuffs to test them again. Six centimeters between his wrists and they’d left his hands in front of him. That gave him options. He counted soldiers in the warehouse. Sixteen. That limited his options.

  “He found me,” Tyler said. “Old man and him were stealing my shit.”

  “Outside the wall? Why’d you come through Cerebus like that?”

  Six soldiers next to them. Two behind Tyler, four around the woman. They carried Jackson & Sons 7Ms, close-quarters alternates to Tyler’s Mark 37. Military grade shit.

  “In Wisconsin.”

  “Wisconsin.” She was good at controlling her expressions, Tyler noticed, that half smile never flagging under her surprise. “What were you doing on the edge of LCP territory?”