Introducing: Cid: cyborg, cab driver, your best bud
More of the novel from my Patreon
This week we round off Chapter 1 by introducing our final perspective character. I have to say that if there’s a character I enjoy writing from the most, it’s Cid. For one thing, he has an intense 20th century media archive that he draws from constantly, which puts a little of my Dad in there. And I don’t know what it is about ex-military guys, but I kind of collect them. Guys who have been trained, who have seen some shit and been damaged, who have humor and grace and brokenness and a hard time talking about it — I’ve got a number of friends like that, and I’ve always felt a certain kinship even though I’ve never even been in a fight. Cid being mostly metal at this point also allows me to inhabit him without some of the problems of gender being quite so loud. Anyway, I love him. I hope you do, too.
THREE
Cid
“Dubai.”
“What?”
“Dubai, Cid. Tell me about it.”
The screen in my face cracks and fizzes to life. A curved spire. Unearthly desert landscapes.
“Dubai,” says a soothing, artificial voice, “was once the crown jewel of the Arabian Peninsula. The wealthiest, most modern city on the planet, it boasted a cosmopolitan population of 5.1 million, most of them expatriates, until—”
“Cut the shit, Cid,” says Ray, not unkindly. If anything, it’s more kindly than I’m comfortable with, or quite used to. It’s still weird, the way everybody just...feels for me.
Ray, my old superior, my oldest friend (as far as I know), is sitting across from me. He smiles, his lips pressed together, pinched. My neural net breathes, searches for the pattern. Exasperation, I conclude. But tempered with patience. Because he loves me. Or because he can afford to be patient.
“Just tell us about it, Cid. How you found out about it. What the hell you were doing there. Please.”
Well that’s interesting. “Us?” I say in my own voice.
Too long a pause. “What?”
“Tell us about it, you said.”
Ray shifts, flicks his eyes away. Goddammit.
“Ah, come on, Ray!”
“What are we gonna do about it, Cid?” Seriously? A whole city. An important one. Off the map. Then, you go blundering in there with your gang of…”
I flash several vintage visual suggestions for the last word of his sentence across my face-screen: stop-motion puppets, one an angry-looking Jack-in-the-box and the other a toy train with square wheels on its caboose. A very early film reel of disturbing human forms, before mods became available, on display in a circus. A brief clip from an antique music video, “Loser,” circa 1994. Ray’s face is increasingly blank.
“Beck,” I explain.
Ray sighs, runs his hand over his close-cropped, silvering hair. When did he get old? He tries a new tack.
“Dude—”
“Dude me not.”
“Listen to me,” he says.
I give him a minute. I make my face impassive, though it’s hard to tell. A blank vidscreen is seldom anything other than impassive. But Ray’s known me a long time, and I know he’ll see that I’m trying to hide. That’s just how things are, now.
I’ve started releasing my not-quite-finished-but-really-quite-long novel for paid members of my Patreon. I’m cross-posting the teasers here in hopes that some of my readers will make their way over there and perhaps support my fiction writing. Thanks as always for reading!
I’m really excited to see you working on this again! I would love to check in with out about it and remain at least a tangential part of the process even if as the narrative diverges and deepens.