What th' frag?

[DoS Archive]

From: pslyderfta@aol.com (Pslyder FTA)
Date: 18 Apr 2003 00:30:10 EDT

Location: SeaTacEve Metroplex

Year: 2056

Date: Late August, 03:35, overcast

"Ah, th’ Sprawl. Nothin’ like revvin’ up the ol’ Thunderbucket and goin’ fer a thrill ride right after a good acid rain. ‘N if Ah’m lucky, some squat’ll pop up n’ mouth off so’s Ah c’n ease a li’l stress . . ." With that in mind, the young elf packs up his gear and heads down for his ride. Homo Sapiens Nobilis. The Media tagged his kind "Elfs" way back in the twenties, right after the VITAS plague. He never paid that distinction much mind. What he did pay mind to was the price on his head. Yaks, Mafia, Lone Star, it really didn’t matter. "When yer best chummer dials ya up at oh-dark-fraggin’-thirty in th’ mornin’ squawkin’ abou’ more zeroes than he c’n ever remember seein’ bein’ on yer hide, ye jus’ head fer th’ hills and hang low fer a while" he thought.

He casually yet stealthily made his way down to the parking garage where he kept his "baby", a cherry red 2055 Kawasaki Mystic Racing Cycle, which he nicknamed "Thunderbucket" after the wonderful roaring sound it made when he started it. Not much for stealth, but its tweaked-out engine practically guaranteed that nothing short of a jet would be able to catch him. He grinned as he smashed the local speed laws to up quarks on his way out of the Sprawl. He chuckled to himself as he paraphrased a quote from an old 20th century flatvid. "It’s a couple hundred clicks to Tir turf, I gots a full tank o’ juice, a carton o’ smokes, it’s dark, an’ I’m wearin’ sunglasses. Hit it."

Once on I-5 southbound and screaming past the local Eye-Fivers gogang, he kicked on the autonav and relaxed a bit. He checked his weapons out of reflex and settled in for some shut-eye. The onboard "dog-brain" shouldn’t have any problems, even at 250 kph, or so he thought. He awoke a short while later to a piercing alarm, and saw a weird bluish fog that enveloped him before he could hit the brakes. When he finally careened to a smoking halt, three things immediately struck him as out of the ordinary. One was the unpolluted sunlight filtering through the forest canopy, two was the sudden absence of the blue fog, and three was the road, which just moments before was black ferrocrete, but was now only packed earth. He sat there and blinked for a while, then mentally called up his phone display. He wasn’t surprised when he saw that both his local and long distance functions reported no carrier, but had a slight hit of relief when he saw the connection to the bike still up and running. He checked over the rest of his gear in rapid fashion, weapons first, of course. He noted with only slight dismay that neither his DocWagon band nor his telecom had service, but he’d expected as much.

"Well, Toto. . ." he drawled, "looks like we ain’t in th’ UCAS anymores. . ." He sighed, then his cyber-enhanced vision picked up a small plume of smoke about five clicks up the road. He gunned the throttle, slewing the bike around in that direction and spraying the forest with dirt clods and white smoke. He continued to glare at the road in front of him, then he muttered to himself "When Ah fin’ th’ drek-suckin’ sewer mage who fragged me this time, Ah’m gon’ nail his sorry hoop to th’ mothafraggin’ wall. . ."