Cyberpunk

you. You’ll drive me nuts. But anything else, man, I mean I know your pain.”
    Suddenly he threw an arm around my neck and dragged me up against him. Karla, still holding the soul-player, gasped and took a step back. Kerouac’s voice was harsh in my ear.
    “ I knew a guy who died . That’s what Corso says about me now. Only I didn’t. He’s keeping me in the whirlpool, you are. Let me in, Al, carry me.” I tried to pull back, repelled by his closeness, his smell, but the crook of his arm held my neck like a vise. He was still talking. “Let me in your eyes, man, and I’ll keep quiet till you crack up. I’ll help you write. And you’ll end up in the whirly dark, too. Sweet and low from the foggy dew, corrupting the boys from Kentucky ham-spread dope-rush street sweets.”
    He drew back then, and we stared into each other’s eyes; and I saw the thin hare screamers in the black pit same as before, only this time I jumped in, but really it jumped in me. All at once Jack was gone. I turned Karla’s machine off for her, saw her and Ray to the door, then had supper with Cybele and Baby Joe. And that’s how I became a writer.

MR. BOY

----
    By James Patrick Kelly

    I was already twitching by the time they strapped me down. Nasty pleasure and beautiful pain crackled through me, branching and rebranching like lightning. Extreme feelings are hard to tell apart when you have endorphins spilling across your brain. Another spasm shot down my legs and curled my toes. I moaned. The stiffs wore surgical masks that hid their mouths, but I knew they were smiling. They hated me because my mom could afford to have me stunted. When I really was just a kid I did not understand that. Now I hated them back; it helped me get through the therapy. We had a very clean transaction going here. No secrets between us.
    Even though it hurts, getting stunted is still the ultimate flash. As I unlived my life, I overdosed on dying feelings and experiences. My body was not big enough to hold them all; I thought I was going to explode. I must have screamed because I could see the laugh lines crinkling around the stiffs’ eyes. You do not have to worry about laugh lines after they twank your genes and reset your mitotic limits. My face was smooth and I was going to be twelve years old forever, or at least as long as Mom kept paying for my rejuvenation.
    I giggled as the short one leaned over me and pricked her catheter into my neck. Even through the mask, I could smell her breath. She reeked of dead meat.
    Getting stunted always left me wobbly and thick, but this time I felt like last Tuesday’s pizza. One of the stiffs had to roll me out of recovery in a wheelchair.
    The lobby looked like a furniture showroom. Even the plants had been newly waxed. There was nothing to remind the clients that they were bags of blood and piss. You are all biological machines now, said the lobby, clean as space-station lettuce. A scattering of people sat on the hard chairs. Stennie and Comrade were fidgeting by the elevators. They looked as if they were thinking of rearranging the furniture—like maybe into a pile in the middle of the room. Even before they waved, the stiff seemed to know that they were waiting for me.
    Comrade smiled. “Zdrast’ye.”
    “You okay, Mr. Boy?” said Stennie. Stennie was a grapefruit-yellow stenonychosaurus with a brown underbelly. His razor-clawed toes clicked against the slate floor as he walked.
    “He’s still a little weak,” said the stiff, as he set the chair’s parking brake. He strained to act nonchalant, not realizing that Stennie enjoys being stared at. “He needs rest. Are you his brother?” he said to Comrade.
    Comrade appeared to be a teenaged spike neck with a head of silky black hair that hung to his waist. He wore a window coat on which twenty-three different talking heads chattered. He could pass for human, even though he was really a Panasonic. “Nyet,” said Comrade. “I’m just another one of his hallucinations.”
    The poor stiff gave him a dry nervous cough that might have been meant as a chuckle. He was probably wondering whether Stennie wanted to take me home or eat me for lunch. I always thought that the way Stennie got reshaped was more funny looking than fierce—a python that had rear-ended an ostrich. But even though he was a head shorter than me, he did have enormous eyes and a mouthful of serrated teeth. He stopped next to the wheelchair and rose up to his full height. “I