The Retro-Junky's Hard Burn (Cyber Punk short story)

READ FULL VERSION HERE. https://medium.com/lit-up/the-retro-junkys-hard-burn-888418cd211b?source=friends_link&sk=87b62836f29eb5f61129a9e9edcfe837 They were the worst. A demolition crew on their lunch break. Flageuring Demos, the type of dirty, violent men that drove brutal hover lifts, loaded with broken machinery and chunks of the mountain, down narrow roads at dangerous speeds.

My persona-drone hovered just above my left shoulder. And I was sitting in this little mountain cafe, in the ass-end of the Japanese wilderness, trapped at a table right in the pissed-off-drunken-middle of them. I don’t know why Korpa chose this spot. Usually we met in the Bukowski Cafe, a little retro place in the heart of Old Tokyo. We had been meeting there for three years now without a hangup.I grew, produced, and sold retro-narcs, one hundred percent, all natural, old world drugs: opiates, psychedelics, and stimulants. Retro-junks were pretty rare this days, but they paid well, so a guy like me, a rarity myself, transferred some serious crypto-credit every month. Korpa was my biggest client. I preferred the implant synthesized stuff myself. A few electrical impulses here or there and I could tweak my brain chemistry to feel anyway I wanted. All with zero side effects.A break in the rowdy crowd gave me a chance to go to the bathroom. I came back from the toilet and Korpa was sitting at the table. The demo crew were shouting and banging away loudly behind him at some old game with a huge table, sticks, and ceramic balls, but he was calm, like the tiny, real bamboo forest just behind this cafe. My persona-drone, a tiny fruit fly model, buzzed just above my shoulder. It fed visual and audio data to my optical implant while another implant analyzed and stored all the info.He was a tough read. I was an old hand at the Duket tables in Vegas VR Land, but Korpa gave me nothing, even with my scans. Just a flat, boring heart rate, normal body temp, and minimum bio-electrical muscle twitch response. All normal bio-signs from this flageur.“Gamma! You arrived,” Korpa’s scratchy voice croaked out as I sat down.“Yeah, I made it. Had to take four Uber Hovers to get here. Most of those AI’s get lost north of Ueno Park. Why this rural adventure today? Thought you loved the Bukowski?”“I took a train. Three lovely hours chugging along through what’s left of the countryside. You scrubs need to get out more often. Old Tokyo with all its gizmos and electronica is scrambling your brains. When’s the last time you smelled a real flower, Gamma?”“Smelled your poppies after I extracted your package here, Korpa, ” I said, pointing to the battered briefcase at my feet.Scrub was Old World Slang for amateur, I thought. I didn’t know for sure. I didn’t like Korpa’s archaic lingo, but I had to take it because I liked his crypto-credits. He had this weird, aloof slickness that matched his weird look — a long blue silk robe, long manicured fingernails, and an ass-length, pure white, braided pig tail that was a style even more ancient than his one hundred and twelve natural years. I was told he’d picked it up when he lived on the original surface levels of Hong Kong, over fifty years ago.His face, though, was weathered and Nordic, an emaciated Viking. There weren’t many pure whites like him left. Ninety-five percent of the population were a mix like me. Africans, Nordic, Mongol and who-knew-whats, all souped together. And everybody DNA patched now, so ethnics didn’t mean anything to anybody except for throwback Retro-freaks like Korpa anyway.