Cyberpunk

are so small they’re never noticed). There is no recorded evidence of that 50,000 number swelling to unprecedented levels. Please show me my error!
    There is no conspiracy. It’s the 21st Century Red Scare. Our zeitgeist is so preoccupied with apocalypse we’re making one up because the real one isn’t getting here soon enough. Yes, 50K is a small percentage of the population, but it’s a large enough number that if a preponderance of aneurysm cases were to get press coverage, as they clearly are, it gives a multimedia appearance of a pandemic and a conspiracy to cover it up. Unless you can provide some hard data/evidence—like our government and the W.H.O can provide—please stop. There’re plenty more real threats (economic, environmental, geopolitical) that sorely need to be addressed.
    grant says:
    April 24, 20__ at 10:10 am
    Has it been only a year? Fuck a flyin’ fuckin’ duck.
    I was at the CVS pharmacy on Central Park Ave. today--just picking up “supplies” ;)--and there was a huge fucking line in the pharmacy section with two armed policeman wandering around the store. Muscles and guns and sunglasses. Some good, hot, homoeroticism there, Becks.
    My fuck-headed fellow shoppers were shuffling all around the CVS, wearing hospital masks and emptying the already empty shelves of vitamins and who the fuck knows what else. Most of them were buying shit they’d never need, just buying stuff because it was there. It was surreal, and I gotta tell ya, they got to me! I ended up buying some leftover Easter candy. Fucking Peeps. Don’t even like them, but you know, when society collapses, I just might need me some yellow fucking Peeps!
    Stop by the PJ tonight, Becks. I’m working a double shift. I’ll bring the Peeps.
    tiredflower says:
    April 24th, 20__ at 11:36 am
    I’m one of those fuckheads who wears a hospital mask when I go out now. I know it doesn’t protect or save me from anything, but it makes me feel better. I know it scares other people when they see me in it, so I tried to cover it up by drawing a smile on the mask with a pink sharpie. I’d hoped it would make people smile back. I’m not a good drawer, though, and it doesn’t look like a smile. It’s a snarl, bared teeth, the nanosecond before a scream. It’s my only mask.
    grant says:
    April 24, 20__ at 2:15 pm
    Drawing mouths on the hospital masks is fuckin’ brilliant!
    Becks, bring some masks (I know you have some!) to the PJ tonight. I’ll help you decorate them. I’ve got some killer ideas. I’m serious, now, bring some masks. I want to wear one when I go out tomorrow.
    bnl44 says:
    September 23, 20__ at 2:34 am
    I saw someone die today. We were part of a small crowd waiting for our subway train. She was standing next to me, listening to an iPod. It was loud enough to hear the drums and baseline. Didn’t recognize the song, but I tried. When our train arrived she collapsed. I felt her body part the air and despite all the noise in the station, I heard her head hit the concrete. It was a hard and soft sound. Then her iPod tune got louder, probably because the earphones weren’t in her ears anymore.
    I don’t know if anyone helped her or not. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t help her. She fell and I raced onto the train, and waited to hear the doors shut behind me before I turned around to look. The windows in the doors were dirty, black with grime, and I didn’t see anything.
    end

MEMORIES OF MOMENTS, BRIGHT AS FALLING STARS

----
    By Cat Rambo

    The bright orange boxes lay scattered like leaves across the med complex’s rear loading dock, and my first thought was “Jackpot.” It’d been hard to get in over the razor wire fence, but I had my good reinforced gloves, and we’d be long gone before anyone noticed the snipped wires.
    But when we slunk along under the overhanging eaves, close enough to open the packages, it turned out to be just a bunch of memory, next to impossible to sell. Old, unused stuff, maybe there’d been an upgrade or a recall. It was thicker than most memory, shaped like a thin wire. So after we’d filled our pockets, poked around to find anything else lootable, and slid out smooth and nice before the cops could arrive, we found a quiet spot, got a little stoned, and I did Grizz’s back before she did mine. I wiped her skin down with an alcohol swab and drew the pattern on her back with a felt-tip pen. It came from me in one thought, surged up somewhere at the base of my spine, and