80s CyberPunk

What makes it cyberpunk?

With retrospect, cyberpunk changed in the 90s when the promised land chrome of post industrial deiselpunk got clean away from fossil fuels and became solarpunk in the 00’s. This zero generation has optimism and wealth whereas the zero generation it replaced had pessimism and poverty. That is the difference in the millennials and the millennial approach to cyberpunk.

The 80s were street life, the 10s had got rid of that as part of the cohesive corporate cover-up. Making the world a better place through eugenics and extermination. Police state brutality forces whats left of the aging drug, gun and 16-bit cyberdeck generation indoors. Have another nicer day. 

For me the question is:

What makes it 80s cyberpunk?

The cable guts are hanging out of buildings as an add-on to concrete cheaply erected without anticipation of electric taking over so fast. Everywhere has metal starting to rust, fans to vent air around an airless overcrowded maze of hi-rise cells and streets which stink of shit, trash, monoxide fumes and cooking of rodents and fish.

Even the concrete is 4-bit down here. You can caste a person by the functioning of their brainwave rhythms: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. We had to keep up with the kids of the morning growing up on sunshine instead of whiskey, moonshine instead of neon. They have wifi so no cables are needed, our cranial datajack are obsolete and even the backstreet pain-docs are quitting or in jail, regulations caught up hard with the new-wave hardware. They are the Giga-corp generation, byting down on us just like we knew it was coming.

Even they are going to be obsolete when the next wave hits, our grandkids have tetra-tattoo’s skinbedded into their cult so far advanced we become dinosaurs or vampires depending on how far we made it, nothing but memories of what life was in the physical world because now we hide away and build our harmless entertainment behind laser doors or so far out into the reserves there ain’t no electric nor cops anyway, earthships and nature, survival lifestyle far away from the cities which spawned technopunk people.

Those western urban wilderness ain’t the first world no more because city life has also been obsoleted. Just such a pity most people still live there. But we loved it for what it was, it was our time, up above the world riding our youthful drive to be something alive.

So cyberpunk has gone retro, and mutated to cope with how things have turned out. This is the era of solarpunk, a return to natural balance, living with ecology. 3D printers making tools out of mud and in the foreign hi-tech labs there are atomic printers making tools out of protons. Meat grown in vats so it has no mind or central nervous system capable of detecting pleasure or pain. Hybrid designer species for surgical, pleasure and amusement purposes. Not so long before they are given human minds. Clones already a reality.

Cyberpunk of the future is a very different thing to its dirty root origins. After a splash fascination with Victoriana so it could pick up on the age of exploration and enterprise, leather and wood, bakerlite brass and glass, the steampunk movement, it is eventually going to merge into mythpunk were supernature and creatures of dream will walk openly amongst us. Something like Shadowrun promised, the Mayan fifth and sixth ages of “urban ways” and “living myth” respectively will happen.

That’s where I’m going next, through the promise of age into sleep and rebirth. I am going to do it the good old fashioned organic way, bypassing digitally copied minds and the delusion of electronic immortality quite simply because my generation learned the hard way, metal rusts, concrete crumbles, even the new nano-brane materials sold to you as lasting forever will not outlive the immortality of transcendental spirit. Who would want to be trapped in flesh anyway or the cruel coldness of passionless machinery? Forever is only a long time when time is involved, and beyond here - beyond here is the dream and the dreamworlds.

The shaman knew all along. We fused it into electronic tools, the sword in the stone, the fire in the cloud. We made our illusions strong. But that is all they are, distractions and delusions. No cold comfort there when you face the harshness of reality. Cyberpunk was. And something new remains. My generation were before the time of the digital pheonix.

UnicornHuntersE2

Preface
Chapter One  Chapter Two  Chapter Three  Chapter Four  Chapter Five  Chapter Six  Chapter Seven   

Unicorn Hunters

Chapter 2


We explored all of the frequencies of light; she and I, using our bodies and chakras as both conduit and catalyst. As we shared our insights we changed the focus of the group. Expanding into one another as with ourselves, we together broke through the same veils which had seen mystery schools form, study and lose cohesion and focus.

We encountered what the Mayans call the 6th Age; a perception best described in its fictional form as Mythpunk, that one will come into better focus as people begin to comprehend how the dimensions work. When we see more truly by acting more purely to our own unique spirits, the environment and its people all become equally alive and enchanted by an essence not to be found in the lower dimensions. We see spirit come alive in our environments; elementals, and in our arts and crafts; totems. Everything is living and obeys only its own natural laws of physics. People look closer to their true nature, everything does. 

This is the realm into which the unicorn hunters had been attempting by their nefarious methods to achieve access. To see everything as it truly is, without the filters imprisoning the human mind. Souls who the guardian collective had imprisoned lest they unleash their wild without refined appreciation enough to use such powers wisely, or at least harmlessly. This is what the higher dimensional extra-terrestials are talking about when they say humans are a species with a lot of power and a lot yet to learn.

Outside of the grid of physics imposed upon the ignorant by collective consciousness, a mainstream which was as yet incapable of comprehending much less yielding such power as is unleashed by integrating awareness more fully, the unicorn hunters as so many other magi before them discovered realms of raw potential, ephemeral realms of dream, ever shifting, populated by denizens more fabulous than we could ever have imagined. Most glorious yet, that we are they; that the dimension in which all walk openly comes as a perceptual shift rather than as a physical relocation. Matter conforms to will. This phrase is a scientific law in the 6th age.

Some places have power and we needed a base, a high energy location to enrich and harness our abilities.The unicorn provided this easily; it opened into our lives the very next day.

The Garden Center has polytunnels, a paddock and high brick walls backing onto a forest which rolled down a steep slope to a narrow river precisely where it met the apex of its curve. Meadow found it while looking for a site for her hand carved caravan. The business was up for sale and between us we could cash all our assets and establish a start-up loan sufficient to meet our needs.

We up-scaled the trap and gave the unicorn a field in which to roam. It stood at forests edge dejected, forlorn, losing its lustre. As we came to know our new surroundings, we felt the energy surging up from the ground. Somewhere below our feet was some type of crystalline mineral, tonal harmonics. The plants, Life, thrives on it. 

The trap is a tether; Meadow calls it a mantel. A twysted cord constructed of materials of rumour, ancient tomes and insight born of experience.

As we got to know the locals in the farm shop and traditional British pub, we were introduced to a legend of the hillside upon which our ranch is situated. In the old days there was a standing stone circle on the site, its quarry is said to be in the forest but nobody can quite ever find it, overgrown as it is. The stones now form a large proportion of the nearby church situated on an ancient spring. The church was bought from the church a century ago by a committee of the local farmers; there are two although there used to be more, three empty farm-houses falling down and four if you count the one down in the valley which is mostly forest now.

I sat in my new room and drew pictures, free-form imagery of urban environments being left to nature, reverting toward forest, as habitation patterns and lifestyle changes take hold during the next centuries, toward a more ecologically sustainable balance with the planet; petroleum and plastic based products replaced with eco-electric, compressed sawdust and bio-plastic. Custom 3D-printed goods replacing productivity infrastructure. Delivery by sky-drone courier companies direct from factory. 

The door knocked. It was Jake.

“Hey man, wanna come up and jam? I got the system set up.” He is an accomplished musician although he believes himself to be crap.

Jake got into unicorn hunting after a revelation that some bits of musical equipment genuinely do have some sort of mystical power and it goes far beyond fetishism in the spiritual sense of objects into conscious entities, demons with whom we can communicate. Jake discovered that group psyche about a type of object can be harnessed when you enter a transcendental state of unity with the flow of the music and the instruments making it. He began experimenting with reading by feeling the collective consciousness and tapping into it by playing. He discovered that he could easily project into it.

The two ways to do this are to create a perfect piece of music which others listen to, or to skilfully plug into it in realtime by playing guitar for example better than anyone else is doing at that time. When you refine your empathic perception into such a focus, any other world masterly players who are simultaneously playing, anywhere in the world, can feel each other, hear each other, they are the ones setting the rhythms by which other intuitive people are picking up on - they don’t even need to hear the music audibly. And then it goes into playing specific rhythms or frequencies anywhere throughout space-time, because music is about resonance.

Jake's playing techniques harness the energies of the world grid. He realized that there was a cause and effect in different areas of life, whatever he had been thinking and feeling at the time, translated by some method of connection he alone knows how to comprehend, the result of which being he thinks he can cause events to happen by manipulating sound. Thankfully he does most of this while wearing headphones. After he started researching the relationship between extra-sensory psychology with observing and interacting other dimensional dream universes, he was drawn into the focus of the unicorn hunters.

Jake’s room is a mattress surrounded by cables and boxes covered in buttons from which lights flash. He has transplanted it almost exactly as it was in his old flat, into his room here. His wardrobe consists of smart designer black clothes and loose baggy black clothes.

“Not right now, man. I’m exhausted and I was about to go to sleep. Tomorrow though definitely.”

“No worries. Have you seen Meadow?”

“She’s outside staring at the moon, probably.”

“Cool. Do you know when the others are arriving?”

Sandy is a banker and has both financially and bureaucratically invested more than any of us in securing this place. Because of her job she will be the one spending least amount of time actually occupying it. Sandy and I have been through a lot together, we were teenage sweethearts, both married and divorced other people, we have an on-off relationship which is currently in off mode due to us both having had a string of other partners since we got back together for a brief fling after the divorces. She doesn’t know about me and Meadow being together yet but she will the moment she arrives because she is super intelligent.

“Sand said she will try to make it down for this weekend. Matthew wants you to pick him up from the station when he calls.”

Matthew is split personality. Either he is placid and dopey, a friendly travel salesman who until now has been living at home with his christian parents for his whole life, or he is a reckless pirate who has never been caught for regarding the world as his own personal playground, life as a game and all property as public even if it is locked. I have never seen him actually shift between these states. We call him the werewolf behind his back. He also invested a lot of money into acquiring this place.

“And the others?”

“Haven’t heard.”

"Ok night man."

"G'nite."


continued at: Chapter Three

UnicornHuntersE1

Preface 
Chapter One  Chapter Two  Chapter Three  Chapter Four  Chapter Five  Chapter Six  Chapter Seven   

The Unicorn Hunters

Chapter One

I truly cannot say whether this should best be described as a story or as a tale. It has strands, a horse-hair weave by which to play a celtic violin. These are not sad tales, although they are at times dark, as fairy-tales should be; and at other times mirthful, as befits the new wave of the avant-garde. They entangle and between them tell a story which requires patience and dedication to appreciate, skills sadly lacking in today's mainstream culture of digital immediacy.

The story of the unicorn hunters really begins long before I had learned the popular use of that title to mean a couple who seek a single male to share their bed.

Nevertheless it invokes a steampunk universe breaking forth into sunpunk. The former, a contrived and mechanical Victorian era penny dreadful, substance of swashbuckling romance and dastardly foes. Clockwork and powder powered pioneers of progressive autocratic reformulation. The latter a twenty-first century visionary movement fusing art nouveau aestheticism with ecology harmonious technologies; solar panelled insects. Give me genuine 80s cyberpunk, graffiti concrete ghettoblaster pounding hip-hop and industrial decay, anyday. And for the 90s Jeff Noon’s Vurt.

These are the roots and the subcultures as is, representing the twist. As the spiral progresses to its point. This phrase is a cliche and works on many planes. Phrases become codex to those in the know. It is a secret scene.

It begins in a dingy basement. We had yesterday tech and drugs safe for kids. We had imagination. We gamed, rolling dice and developing our sight. In later years this developed in myself to a perception from which I can remote view, not only into our own dimension but others also. Evidently I was useful to somebody and they took me on and used me. Psy-op training starts young. By my late twenties I had assimilated enough of what I had been through, into a training process and insight into what is going on in the world we live in at this time. Most of the people in this society dare not believe the truth of it; electronic mind control, a society constructed of agents. As I write, HAARP (High Altitude Aerial Research Program) is still in operation. The public story; weather control. This decade disclosure of military files has revealed that those weather balloons seen all over the world during the late twentieth century were ufo’s after all, and that aliens do really exist.

We are living at a time where people are so caught up in their own bubble that they find it difficult to cope with this level of information, and so they ignore it; the ostracise those of us who are aware. We think differently, about the world, about what humans are, about physics and spirituality. And so that is the background within which I write. The leap in paradigms from watching movies unrelated to your immediate experience, about a topic; and then to experience it first hand, requires suspension of disbelief beyond many peoples capability. People do not want to appear gullible, and cannot identify the difference between gullibility with the skill of suspension of disbelief. For, as this teaching continues; it is the ability to unplug your belief system at will from the particles of the environment around it into which it radiates; and to step instantaneously into an entirely different dimension.

The Unicorn Hunters come from all over space and time, from other dimensions and other worlds. They fell in love with the magick and knew deep to their core that they had it too. In them, it did not dry up enough to make them forget it entirely. For them, its dwindling came as a challenge to overcome, not as an inevitability to accept. Which is the core of what it is all about.

By observation alone, one may assume that a horse shakes its head not to loosen its mind but to loosen its mane. To the Horse, well, who knows what a Horse thinks?

And the Horse thinks; it should be free, and wild. The compromise of being looked after by humans, fed and manicured, at the cost of its liberty to roam; does this truly compensate for running with the herd through a landscape un-fenced?

We dream of such a landscape. Floating under the awning of our hover-sofa’s with a videogame joypad, travelling over landscapes cultivated but in so many places left to grow wild. We dream of a freedom beyond us and we figure out ways to get to that state as a lived reality. These are the dreams of a unicorn.

The unicorn is representative of the universe. It makes multiple versions, other dimensions, conform to its stream, to its journey, to its passage through. It teaches us this succinctly. When you have heard a unicorns song, sometime in childhood in the semi-starlit drift before sleep, from the quiet core of the - forest you can trust - then your soul is tainted forever by its dreaming. And when it dreams and you dream with it, that is when you learn; that is when you joy, when your spirit fires freely through the confusion of manifest night. Your soaring!

We had to catch one for ourselves. We banded together and set out on the path of bringing together knowledge and skills, insights and fragments of memories of times outside of the laughterless beyond. Each of us unique and yet each of us the same, for the necessary persona to achieve our goal was cultivated by the training methods we formed between us. Shamanic and astral, we soared.

Our trap was hardwired to our signal, a signal which only a unicorn could follow. We had assembled it from the produce of our quests and it worked. We had the beast in the cage, a cage designed that even a unicorn for all its power could never escape.

The unicorn needed healing. We intended fully to break it to our will, just such as a horse is broken to serve man and is at this time in history deemed a socially acceptable behaviour of the wealthy who can afford to own a horse. In the few short years of our dreaming, this will all change as humanitarian rights are positioned at the centre of global law and equality rights are extended to include all wildlife, flora and fauna, indigenous to this world.

A unicorn is not exactly indigenous to this world, is it?

We healed it with beak of phoenix and all the usual alchemagickal rites. It could reach into our minds, naturally, and in doing so for the extended periods with which it fought to get us to sympathise with it and let it go; we formed a powerful strong bond, a mental link. It took over Meadow first before any of us. A unicorn cannot stay linked to a human mind for very long before it must leave, for neither can fully sustain the other. For those brief outside-of-time moments while the connection lasts, a deep soul connection, a feeling of satori washes through, colourful information and knowledge compressed from multiple dimensions into the limited number a human imagination is able to sustain even when stretched to the fullest.

It is terrifying when somebody you know well abruptly has a complete personality change, becomes somebody else entirely, someone psychotic and wild, focussed on a particular sequence of actions and stopping at nothing to achieve some particular task. When sleepers awaken it tests the survivors and sends them for ever outside of a normal state of being. To know from experiencing it for yourself that humans do not function from the routines you feel safe enough with, that in some people a vampiric primal cortex urge is so close to the edge; overrides their mind and takes control of them wholesale.

What you learn from going through it both ways; seeing your mates freak out and from experiencing it from the inside, when it happens to you; trapped inside yourself while some spiritually toxic force seizes you; the only safe direction to go is to do what the programming is stimulating you to do, making you sick with a feel of wrongness, an adrenaline surge, fight-or-flight response masterfully controlled by its pre-patterend escape route being to perform whatever duty to which you have been assigned. People are not who they used to be.

We had all been through it and we all wanted to get out, to get out of the control grid sufficiently enough that it could no longer affect us; to set ourselves free and the others around us. It was this which brought us to the conclusion that our only safety was to acquire a unicorn, with which to fight back against the seering fear of somebody else’s intention.

For me, it was better than to return to the life I had escaped, a sleeping agent corporate military psychic assassin, programmed by remote and through too many experiences, had become aware of it enough to establish my own escape plan from their game. And yet even so, I could never be sure. I wanted security. Using my training I dared hope there to be something in the legend; and I had found my way through dreamtime, acceptance and exploitation, to belong with the group.

Meadow was easy to subdue, her message had been integration, compassion, understanding, love, and she had done it feral and nurturing, womanly and girlish, taking control and yielding utterly all at the same moment. It was several weeks before we found out that she is pregnant. The first moment of the story when it switches into present tense.

Our child had been speaking through us for some time, through our actions, bringing us closer together into this moment. What blessings are bestowed upon our child of that moment we will discover joyfully through time. She thinks it’s twins.


continues at: Chapter Two

Scrawl/PrefaceTheUnicornHunters

Preface
Chapter One  Chapter Two  Chapter Three  Chapter Four  Chapter Five  Chapter Six  Chapter Seven   
Preface of The Unicorn Hunters

Scrawl

She asked me, what is the worst thing i have ever done. I asked, the worst action i did, the worst experience i lived through, the least moral choice i made, what do you mean by that? She told me that i know what she means. I asked her if the war hero, the veteran with medals from the queen for honor in battle, for service to his country, is he a good man? She agreed, he is. I asked her if the blood of innocent children on his hands is a good deed, for he confessed to me that the enemy he fought are the child soldiers who are avenging the murder of their peasant families by western dictatorship. She agreed that is a crime. I question her morality system and on this basis i refuse to tell her the things i have done by which she will judge me. I asked her if judging someone from a position that is known to be twisted and hypocritical is a valid way of understanding a person. She could not answer, her mouth was so hard. Eventually she wiped away a tear and explained to me that she had been willing to forgive me anything because of her love for me. I told her that she may love me now but how could i, a survivor, know she would not twist it and use it against me some later time. She asked me why am i being too hard on her? And i told her, because if you dont harden up you cant cope with the experiences which i have been both punished and forgiven by myself and by the gods, for having been caught up in. She asked me again, what did i do?

This, really, is where the story begins.

What it takes to touch a unicorn is purity, and only once grounded to the world of substance can a unicorn be harmed. Their magick is their purity and their purity is fragile. The same is true of angels. I am neither a unicorn nor an angel though compared with many i am both. But i have something, something i won long ago, believing it would help me to become more pure than i was. And perhaps it has. I was one of the unicorn hunters, trained by them. Though i left and went my own way. What i have is a feather plucked from the wing of an angel. A real one; not one of these people who live such a way that others call them angels without really believing such a mighty thing could exist. Let me explain this to you and heed it well; angels are a pain in the arse. They are not good for humans, for the simple reason that their control the fabric of the world around them, much like a unicorn does with its heart hardwired to its mind. Angels hearts are wired to their wings.

You would think it to be white but it is not, it is golden in colour and glows only when the sunlight flows through it, just so. The angel did not drop the feather as they are reputed to, by way of a blessing. I plucked this one from it and it caused the creature pain. Angels claim to serve their god but they don't, or if they do, its not a god working for the best interests of humans. They think they do but they are incapable of offering us free choice and for humans, free choice is what gives us our power. Its not black vs white choices either, good vs evil. Its not even one vs the other. Simply to have choice in life rather than to be controlled by fates. The angels hardwire grid lines, make destinies which conform to their own selfish needs. And we humans fall into them, believing on the angels ego that to do so is better than to not do so.

On this basis angels are enemies of human evolution, and this is the justification by which i attracted one toward me, and took only one of its feathers before releasing it. The paradigm believed by the angel cannot accept my stance, my perception, i fall outside of the grid it projects onto the world to understand it by. It being a compassionate creature does not see me as an enemy. I could have killed it and still may yet do so, for with this feather i have a link directly back to the heart of the angel itself. 

I use it for several purposes. I have inserted a nib so that i can use dip ink and write with it in the ancient way, empowering the words. The feather heals itself after every time i pluck the nib from it, the feather cannot be muddied. 


continues at: Chapter One