Already Dead
“I died for this.”
The tiny data drive pinched between thumb and forefinger. Nearly invisible in the darkness.
He can’t taste anything. Just the bite of the liquor as it burns down his throat. Heat without flavor.
Staring off into memory.
He sits alone in the alcove, nursing a dark drink on ice. Trenchcoat, collar turned up. The light doesn’t reach him so much as bend around him. The glow of a single cyber eye flicks toward the open bar, then away. Quick, habitual. Always tracking.
The other hand still holds the drive.
Sleet drips off his coat. Taps against the rubber floor in slow, uneven beats. Melting faster than it should. Leaving dark marks that fade and vanish.
The place hums with quiet deals. White noise hisses softly at each table. A constant pressure just behind the ears. Not loud. Just enough to blur the edges of conversation. To make listening harder than it should be.
Smoke hangs in the air, shrouding the ceiling. Caught in the slow pull of overhead vents. It doesn’t clear. Just drifts. Thins in one place, thickens in another.
Music pushes through it. An old track, something from decades back. Jazz bent sideways into bass and static. The rhythm familiar enough to feel human. Distorted enough to remind you it isn’t.
The door opens. More chromers push in.
Sleet rattles hard against the steelglas. Sharp. Real. For a second, the outside bleeds in. Wet, gray, immediate. No one reacts to the cold. Chicago. February.
Then it’s gone, swallowed by the electronic bass. By heat. By the slow grind of bodies that don’t care about weather anymore.
Glitgirls move between tables and alcoves. Efficient. Focused. Eyes sharp, movements economical. No wasted motion. No wasted time. Drinks set down. Pills passed. Credits transferred.
No one touches. They are for sale. No one is buying.
Not here. Not now.
The alcoves are half-hidden, set back just enough to matter. Semi-private and deniable. Bodies shift in the dim. Chrome catches light in pieces. A forearm. A jawline. The edge of a spine under synthetic skin. Polished, deliberate. Some of it hidden under black leather. Some of it left bare as statement of intent. Or competency.
Tables cluttered with datapads, plas-sheets. Tangible surfaces. Things you have to pick up, not just copy. Nothing that leaks unless you let it.
Deals happening. Plans forming. Runs that won’t go clean.
He watches without seeing. Or tries to.
The gig was simple. Get in. Get data. Get out.
There wasn’t supposed to be black ice.
Raven hadn’t seen it. Neither of them had.
Mind fucked.
Hard.
He exhales slowly. Doesn’t remember taking the breath. It leaves him anyway.
She’s still breathing. Probably. Somewhere in a corp lab. Opened up. Stripped down to what mattered and sold back in pieces. Meat and metal now.
He can’t get to her.
Not worth trying.
His grip tightens. The synth tumbler flexes instead of shattering. Gives just enough to remind him it won’t break. Not like that.
Her scream over the com.
Unearthly.
Final.
He closes his eye. The real one. The dark doesn’t help.
The cyber eye stays open. Keeps watching. Keeps recording. Doesn’t care.
He rolls the drive between his fingers.
Tiny thing. Worth everything. Cost him everything.
“I died for this,” he says again, quieter this time. The words barely make it past his lips.
The drive catches a sliver of light from somewhere above. Glints once. Clean. Precise. Then disappears again into shadow. Data still intact. At least that part went right.
He could sell it. Walk out of here with enough credits to disappear. New name. New chrome. New life. Something quieter. Something that doesn’t end like this.
He doesn’t move.
Raven’s voice flickers in memory. Not the scream.
Earlier. Laughing. Sharp. Confident. Like she already knew how it would end and didn’t care.
“Simple job.” He exhales.
Nothing about it had been simple.
His thumb traces the drive, just enough to feel the edges dig in. Not enough to break it.
He looks up. Really looks this time. At the bar. The alcoves. The people pretending not to watch each other. Pretending not to measure risk. Value. Opportunity. Same as always.
Only difference—
He’s already dead.
The drive turns once more between his fingers. Then stills.
The room keeps going. Deals. Voices. Glass on tables. Low music grinding through the walls.
None of it changes.
Fixer’ll be waiting. Already late. Already annoyed.
He could still go. Walk it in. Slide it across a table. Take the credits.
Disappear.
People do it all the time.
Raven’s voice flickers again. “This will set us up baby.”
He exhales. Slow. The cyber eye ticks once. Unbidden.
Thumb shifts on the drive. Finds the seam. There’s always a seam.
He could still stop. Still choose the other way.
He doesn’t. Pressure. Small at first. Then building.
The casing resists. He presses harder. A soft, internal give. No sound over the music. No flash. Nothing anyone else would notice.
The drive collapses in on itself. Microlayers shearing.
Nothing left to read. Nothing left to sell.
What’s left fits smaller in his hand. Jagged and useless.
“Yeah,” he mutters.
Fixer’s going to be angry.
Corp’s going to notice.
Someone will come asking.
Eventually.
He slides what’s left of the drive into his pocket anyway.
He stands. Slow. Leaves the drink. Leaves the tab. Leaves the version of himself that walked in.
No one stops him. No one looks.
The door opens. Sleet hammers him. Cold. Real. Immediate. For a second, the sensation wipes everything clean.
Around him the city keeps moving. Lights smeared across wet pavement. Traffic flowing like nothing ever breaks.
He pulls the collar up and starts walking.
Already dead.
Now just waiting for the rest of it to catch up.
You definitely have a style that's yours, one that fits the environment of the story. I love the clipped sentences and how they play into the descriptiveness, which is evocative. I myself have a problem with run-on sentences and over-descriptiveness, so it's refreshing to read something that can teach me a thing or two stylistically. Well done.
Now this was right proper cyberpunk, innit!! Love everything about this. Feels like an excerpt from a world I want to witness in full. Most standout thing about the prose here to me: the very deliberate diversity of sentence/sentence fragment length. The piece itself breathes, the prose has a pulse. You proceed through the story in exactly the pace and path it has insisted upon for you. Marvelously done again, my friend.