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sablin27. Partially inspired, at least aesthetically speaking, by the art and fanart of Tianzi Yang. Cyberpunk angels, yes.
Title: Neon Angels
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Dresden Files bookverse
Characters/Pairings: Harry, Sanya, mention of Marcone and the Denarians. Harry & John, Harry & Sanya
Summary: There's a viral infection about to poison the city cybersphere, demons in the neon. And whether he likes the man or not, Harry Dresden, cyberwizard, is going to give the local mob boss a heads up before the cascade failure hits
Wordcount: 1243
Warnings/Notes: AU, cyberpunk, implausible technobabble, concept sketch
Disclaimer: Not mine
sablin27. Partially inspired, at least aesthetically speaking, by the art and fanart of Tianzi Yang. Cyberpunk angels, yes.Title: Neon Angels
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Dresden Files bookverse
Characters/Pairings: Harry, Sanya, mention of Marcone and the Denarians. Harry & John, Harry & Sanya
Summary: There's a viral infection about to poison the city cybersphere, demons in the neon. And whether he likes the man or not, Harry Dresden, cyberwizard, is going to give the local mob boss a heads up before the cascade failure hits
Wordcount: 1243
Warnings/Notes: AU, cyberpunk, implausible technobabble, concept sketch
Disclaimer: Not mine
Neon Angels
I waited for Sanya in one of the chic little cafes in the downtown business district, hunched at a little outdoor table where I could scan the street without having to engage cybersight. There were places you just didn't want to do that unless you wanted to inundate your nets with annoyingly unkillable adverts for the next three cycles. And cybersight went straight to hard memory - digitally enhanced, stereo surround-sound recall. Some of the stuff that popped up out of the adsphere, you did not want it cycling around your nets in all its pristine glory until your next hard purge.
Still, sitting pretty without having at least a low-level wireless scan engaged was making me antsy. I kept flipping through my firewalls and ward-protocols, thumbing absently at the hardware backups on my wrist. Downtown wasn't my usual milieu. I'm more your beat-up old bar kinda guy, black-market microbrews and enough white noise generators to keep everyone the same level of blind, and consequently the same level of polite. Downtown, with its constant buzz of high-security info-transfer and the low-level net barrage of a hyperactive adsphere, was not my typical scene.
That's what favours got you, though. That's where you ended up after playing sometimes-nice with bigshot crime kings. Sitting twitchily at buzzed out go-juice vendors, shelling out frankly obscene numbers of credits for tiny cups of coffee that you couldn't even mark down as a business expense because that wasn't how favours worked.
Well, it could be. With the de facto kingpin of the Chicago underworld, maybe it even should be. But ever since Marcone passive-aggressively opened his doors to me and offered the deluxe treatment anywhere he had his sticky little fingers, damned if I was asking so much as the price of a coffee off him.
Though if the automated waitress kept shooting those dirty looks at me and racking up the prices to soothe the offended sensibilities of the local clientele, I might have to change my mind on that ...
"Evening, Harry," came a smooth, bass rumble, right in my ear, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I yelped, jumped half a foot in the air and all but fell backwards off my expensive plastic chair.
Two seconds later, when I'd managed to scrape some shards of my dignity back together and Sanya had managed to squeeze himself into the tiny space between chrome table and plastic chair, I shot him one of my dirtiest looks and ordered him the cheapest coffee on the menu. The bastard just smiled sunnily at me, bracing his legs and inexorably sliding his chair back whether it wanted to go or not. Not that a chair could have stood up to him. Not that I could have stood up to him. Sanya made professional weight-builders cry just from looking at him, and it wasn't cyborg either. Sanya had been put together purely by the Great Programmer in the sky.
Quite possibly literally, I thought, glancing at the empty hilt with its embedded circuitry slung across his shoulder. But the angels in the neon weren't something I preferred to dwell on. The cybersphere had enough strange shit to worry about without getting theological on top of it.
"You're jumpy," he noted mildly. "Left your blinkers on?"
I hunched over my coffee. "No choice," I grumbled. "Downtown's a bad place to be opening doors in. Don't know what might end up coming through."
He raised an eloquent eyebrow. Man of few words, was Sanya. "Going to a lot of trouble," was all he said, an impassive comment that from anyone else might have been a hidden condemnation, but with Sanya was more likely to be just a general observation, like saying it was raining pretty heavy. As far as Sanya was concerned, whatever trouble a man wanted to go to was his own affair. He was just there to mop up the mess afterwards.
Which was, yeah, part of the reason he was here. I sighed heavily, looking over at the upscale but very tasteful lobby of the building across the street. Pure class and good money, you'd think. If you couldn't sense the truly lethal firewalls and wardmaps sheathing the walls. Or if you didn't know the man who sat in a nice office somewhere on the upper floors, quietly and discreetly running a criminal empire the size of the Second City, and maybe a hell of a lot more. If you didn't know Marcone, you might have thought that building entirely innocuous.
I did know him. I knew him better than I'd ever wanted to. They said if you managed to burst through someone's firewalls, deep enough to touch the top layers of their nets, that you'd find their soul staring back at you. Wave into the abyss in someone else's head, and you'd find their base nature waving back. Once upon a time, years ago now, the modified digital handshake that helped mark me as a wizard had bust through Marcone's firewalls. What I'd found behind them ... had been the most ruthlessly, serenely organised neural architecture I'd ever seen. A calm, intricate focus that could and would annihilate anything that got in its way. If a soul was what you saw in that handshake, then what I'd seen looking out at me from Marcone's nets had been the soul of a tiger.
But he'd been there for me when it counted, too. He was one of the most lethal men you were ever going to meet, even in a cityscape marked by cyberwizards and cyborgs and rogue AI, even in a city where anyone you met might be capable of jacking your soul out through your nets or ventilating your hardware to the point where souls became an academic question. Marcone was lethal, but he was also necessary, a bulwark against the chaos that would threaten in his absence, a firewall against system failure.
And more importantly than that, to me personally if not in the general scheme of things ... I owed the man.
There were a lot of messes waiting behind the walls of that building. Some of them were mine. Some of them Marcone's. And some of them, obliquely, Sanya's too. That was why I was here, paying exorbitant money for tasteless coffee and getting the shit scared out of me by friends because I'd had to leave my blinkers on. That was why I'd asked Sanya to be here, too.
There was trouble in town, the kind that waved up at you from a far deeper abyss than the ones inside a man's nets. The kind that had made Sanya the last knight standing. The kind that had cost Marcone his ear and a good chunk of his ability to sleep. The kind that had cost me more friends than I wanted to count. A viral infection that preyed on the fears and the hates humming across the airwaves, a chaos from the depths of the cybersphere or maybe deeper. Demons in the neon, wearing the shining faces of angels, threatening to seed a cascade failure across the whole of existence just for the fun of seeing it burn.
The Denarians were back in town. And whatever the hell I thought about Marcone a lot of the time, and no matter how twitchy or broke it made me, damned if I wasn't giving the man a heads-up when it counted.
That much, at least, I did owe him.
I waited for Sanya in one of the chic little cafes in the downtown business district, hunched at a little outdoor table where I could scan the street without having to engage cybersight. There were places you just didn't want to do that unless you wanted to inundate your nets with annoyingly unkillable adverts for the next three cycles. And cybersight went straight to hard memory - digitally enhanced, stereo surround-sound recall. Some of the stuff that popped up out of the adsphere, you did not want it cycling around your nets in all its pristine glory until your next hard purge.
Still, sitting pretty without having at least a low-level wireless scan engaged was making me antsy. I kept flipping through my firewalls and ward-protocols, thumbing absently at the hardware backups on my wrist. Downtown wasn't my usual milieu. I'm more your beat-up old bar kinda guy, black-market microbrews and enough white noise generators to keep everyone the same level of blind, and consequently the same level of polite. Downtown, with its constant buzz of high-security info-transfer and the low-level net barrage of a hyperactive adsphere, was not my typical scene.
That's what favours got you, though. That's where you ended up after playing sometimes-nice with bigshot crime kings. Sitting twitchily at buzzed out go-juice vendors, shelling out frankly obscene numbers of credits for tiny cups of coffee that you couldn't even mark down as a business expense because that wasn't how favours worked.
Well, it could be. With the de facto kingpin of the Chicago underworld, maybe it even should be. But ever since Marcone passive-aggressively opened his doors to me and offered the deluxe treatment anywhere he had his sticky little fingers, damned if I was asking so much as the price of a coffee off him.
Though if the automated waitress kept shooting those dirty looks at me and racking up the prices to soothe the offended sensibilities of the local clientele, I might have to change my mind on that ...
"Evening, Harry," came a smooth, bass rumble, right in my ear, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I yelped, jumped half a foot in the air and all but fell backwards off my expensive plastic chair.
Two seconds later, when I'd managed to scrape some shards of my dignity back together and Sanya had managed to squeeze himself into the tiny space between chrome table and plastic chair, I shot him one of my dirtiest looks and ordered him the cheapest coffee on the menu. The bastard just smiled sunnily at me, bracing his legs and inexorably sliding his chair back whether it wanted to go or not. Not that a chair could have stood up to him. Not that I could have stood up to him. Sanya made professional weight-builders cry just from looking at him, and it wasn't cyborg either. Sanya had been put together purely by the Great Programmer in the sky.
Quite possibly literally, I thought, glancing at the empty hilt with its embedded circuitry slung across his shoulder. But the angels in the neon weren't something I preferred to dwell on. The cybersphere had enough strange shit to worry about without getting theological on top of it.
"You're jumpy," he noted mildly. "Left your blinkers on?"
I hunched over my coffee. "No choice," I grumbled. "Downtown's a bad place to be opening doors in. Don't know what might end up coming through."
He raised an eloquent eyebrow. Man of few words, was Sanya. "Going to a lot of trouble," was all he said, an impassive comment that from anyone else might have been a hidden condemnation, but with Sanya was more likely to be just a general observation, like saying it was raining pretty heavy. As far as Sanya was concerned, whatever trouble a man wanted to go to was his own affair. He was just there to mop up the mess afterwards.
Which was, yeah, part of the reason he was here. I sighed heavily, looking over at the upscale but very tasteful lobby of the building across the street. Pure class and good money, you'd think. If you couldn't sense the truly lethal firewalls and wardmaps sheathing the walls. Or if you didn't know the man who sat in a nice office somewhere on the upper floors, quietly and discreetly running a criminal empire the size of the Second City, and maybe a hell of a lot more. If you didn't know Marcone, you might have thought that building entirely innocuous.
I did know him. I knew him better than I'd ever wanted to. They said if you managed to burst through someone's firewalls, deep enough to touch the top layers of their nets, that you'd find their soul staring back at you. Wave into the abyss in someone else's head, and you'd find their base nature waving back. Once upon a time, years ago now, the modified digital handshake that helped mark me as a wizard had bust through Marcone's firewalls. What I'd found behind them ... had been the most ruthlessly, serenely organised neural architecture I'd ever seen. A calm, intricate focus that could and would annihilate anything that got in its way. If a soul was what you saw in that handshake, then what I'd seen looking out at me from Marcone's nets had been the soul of a tiger.
But he'd been there for me when it counted, too. He was one of the most lethal men you were ever going to meet, even in a cityscape marked by cyberwizards and cyborgs and rogue AI, even in a city where anyone you met might be capable of jacking your soul out through your nets or ventilating your hardware to the point where souls became an academic question. Marcone was lethal, but he was also necessary, a bulwark against the chaos that would threaten in his absence, a firewall against system failure.
And more importantly than that, to me personally if not in the general scheme of things ... I owed the man.
There were a lot of messes waiting behind the walls of that building. Some of them were mine. Some of them Marcone's. And some of them, obliquely, Sanya's too. That was why I was here, paying exorbitant money for tasteless coffee and getting the shit scared out of me by friends because I'd had to leave my blinkers on. That was why I'd asked Sanya to be here, too.
There was trouble in town, the kind that waved up at you from a far deeper abyss than the ones inside a man's nets. The kind that had made Sanya the last knight standing. The kind that had cost Marcone his ear and a good chunk of his ability to sleep. The kind that had cost me more friends than I wanted to count. A viral infection that preyed on the fears and the hates humming across the airwaves, a chaos from the depths of the cybersphere or maybe deeper. Demons in the neon, wearing the shining faces of angels, threatening to seed a cascade failure across the whole of existence just for the fun of seeing it burn.
The Denarians were back in town. And whatever the hell I thought about Marcone a lot of the time, and no matter how twitchy or broke it made me, damned if I wasn't giving the man a heads-up when it counted.
That much, at least, I did owe him.
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