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Milky Way Boulevard (standard:science fiction, 54052 words) | |||
Author: Thomas Thompson | Added: Mar 03 2009 | Views/Reads: 3143/2686 | Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes) |
A free science fiction / cyberpunk novel in the tradition of William Gibson and Philip K Dick and a more serious philosophical piece discussing the nature of faith, reality, dreams and fiction in our lives, with comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges. | |||
Milky Way Boulevard (c) Thomas Thompson 2006 "Schopenhaur wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, to leaf through them at random, to dream." - Jorge Luis Borges *** There's no problem a drink can't fix. That's why he was here, in the same seat, in the same bar. This bar was his home now. An island between two worlds, it was the one place where everything was still possible. It was his place to dream. He looked around, scanning the room. There were two others slumped over their drinks in the corner and a lone bartender needlessly polishing glasses. Otherwise, the joint was empty. Of course it was. He motioned with his finger. The bartender reached under the bar and came back up with a straight bourbon in an old fashioned. He slid it across with a nod. He took his drink and stared up at the small black window in front of him. As he sipped the burn ran down his throat and turned into a heat that spread through his cells, making his whole body tingle. That wasn't a good sign. When your body starts crying out for its hit like that it means something. Means it's time for another drink. He looked up but there was already another full one sitting in front of him. Outside it was streaming rain, a steady downpour through the darkness. Just like yesterday and the day before that. Just like tomorrow would be. He looked down at his drink again and moved his hand towards it. An inch from the glass he stopped and switched his brain on for the first time in days, weeks perhaps. The glass slid across the bar into his palm, as if drawn by a magnet. No one else noticed, but it brought a small smile to his lips. As he sat back and got on with drinking he stared out the window and tried to recall if he'd ended up here because he was trying to remember, or trying to forget. He could never be sure anymore. Not with all he had done, all that he knew. He was riddled with rich seams of guilt. He was there to sink down into the mine and dredge them up, polish them into hard, shining jewels. He stared out the window and began to dream. * The car flicked along through the raindrops, fifty feet in the air, seeming to wait till the last microsecond before swerving to avoid the assorted billboards and rooftops that reached up towards it. The autopilot didn't need to see the obstacles to know they were there. Kane let it do the driving, it had far better reactions than he did anyway. Besides, he was lost in his own world, with its own distractions. He sat in the driver's seat, the cable leading from just behind his ear to the car input. The data port. Some still called them radios, but they were so much more. At the moment Kane was sitting around a campfire with friends on a warm summer night, drinking cold beer and smoking good weed. Looking up at the stars. There wasn't a cloud in the sky in his world. In reality he sat in the car seat with a slack, dazed expression on his face. His eyes were open and glazed over. He was fifteen minutes away from where she'd last been seen, and it was best to spend what time he could relaxing. Besides, what was there to look at out there? Darkness and rain, the usual story outside the Grid. And if he dared get close enough to street level a lot of other, nastier things might flicker across his headlights. The car knew not to get too low though. It would stay out of range of the hookers. Music began to leak out of the radio and slowly increased in volume, as if trying to make itself noticed. It was a simple tune, something easily remembered. Something that would stay with you. Kane was lying back on the sand when one of his friends began to hum softly. Then another. When he sat up everyone around the campfire was humming along, staring at him with blank eyes. Then they all disappeared. He shook his head to clear the last of the images from his mind and found himself back in the car. The fucking radio was playing up. Oh well, he could have it looked at later, they weren't far away now. He yanked the cable out from behind his ear and peered out the windows to see if he could recognise where they were. It took him a couple of seconds to realise the song was still in the air. At first he simply couldn't understand what was happening. He'd pulled out the jack, where was this sound coming from if not from there? The car didn't have speakers, there was Click here to read the rest of this story (4476 more lines)
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