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.

UnicornHuntersE4

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

Chapter Four

Meadow tames me with spring softness into an autumn comfort. Directs my skills to positivity. I need her. I cannot tell you who or how many who's i have been used against my will to kill by remote. I cannot tell you what other depravity I was involved in. When i began healing instead of harming, as my will and awareness grew stronger, when i began riding higher and with more positive light, the back of my heart erupted with light and i began to become invisible to the ones who were stealing me from my sleep and forcing dreamings upon me. These dreamings are not fantasy, they are really real in the really real real. It is far outside the bounds of Mental Health textbooks, what officially is known about it is classified military secrets. Meadow taught me a white light meditation, filling myself with white light as i breathe until my body glows with it. Inner tranquility.

Meadow is not on mental health henefits as she has avoided the system entirely throughout her whole life. For most of it she has lived in forests, on traveler sites, squats and her friends council houses, all across the country. What she needs comes to her and she goes where she is needed. She embodies freedom. Her journey has brought her to this place.

The garden centre has a converted barn extended by a corrugated metal shelter which we all hate despite it being useful, providing an outdoor place to sit in the dry and stare through the few plants left by its previous owners at the trees behind it from the road. After a few days here we had re-oriented our center away from coming in, into looking out. We discussed sky-places from where we project down our understanding of the place from the air, and decided to meet there tonight during dream.

My skill at astral travel, remote viewing and an ability to connect with others, riding hosts, to have persuasive powers as a voice in their head which many mistake for their own mind to be doing the talking because they cannot see; all this is why my role as facilitator. My focus. Its inner systems. Meadows gentleness takes us through into the dimensions we want to go. Her emotion. Its inner symbolism. Jake boosts my scope, we work together, with his ability to connect with frequencies which he hears as sounds. His harmony. Its rhythms. The music of our souls.

"When the others arrive shall we have a pentacle." Expresses Meadow. Her voice speaks the words not as a question, she talks backwards like that "from cider and origin." It sounds or feels like she says, festival rather than pentacle. She speaks on many levels and challenges us to accept. This is our riddle game. We all play it endlessly. What makes us the shamen is that we do so knowingly. Meadow most of all.

That night we dreamed intensely.

It took us a while to orientate; i was stuck in the forest until i remembered, upward! Meadow down by the river tho to her it appeared as a stream. Jake swooped in and two others, spirit guides or other travelers, perhaps but we don't like to think about that the shadow ones, lost guides turned nasty. We could all feel them and in the minds eye perhaps see them. United we function as one eye, usually we need time to orientate. We have done this a few times before but only once so powerfully, when we brought along the unicorn and vision-made this place into being. We do not all see each others spirit guides, though they are not always presenting themselves visibly anyway.

The presence of others took its effect as we mingled and accepted our relationship with the others at deeper soul level of understanding than is easy to write about in words. We settled into each other by making peace, sharing understanding, feeling their chakras insert into our own and adapting to the balance. In the balance often barter. Their powers became ours for the journey.

We flew over our landscape, seeing the ruins, a column of white so bright we could not look toward it, the stone circle, the spring. Fields and forests. Dreamers more conscious than human sleepers, animals in their burrows and nests, involved in their own Dreamings.

We saw deadlands beyond where industry, concrete and gaseous metal had closed areas off of the dream. We felt starlight like water upon us. We waited until the density above our heads had lifted, so we may rise. Waiting at the Gate until accepted, a natural sign will alert you to the opening of the second gate. To go through the first is to bring dust of your journeys with you. To go through the second is to enter cleansed that you may see the next crossing more purely as it truly is. A lighter frequency. And then to the next gate. A gate is a moment expanded through time. It can be depicted through symbol. We share common symbols, between us have a repertoire sufficient to deal with most crossings.

An awareness flows through us; it is because we said hello to the stones. The word for stones is also light. Crystal, but the emanation for which crystal is a conduit. It affects the light grid through which particles filter with such high refinement that sleepers cannot see it, only dreamers and the dead, and those of other realms who share this space for their passage or their home.

From the higher perception we did our work. When we awoke on a different wave of consciousness the next mid-late morning, we remembered as much as we can of it. Jake made voice recording, I wrote in my dream diary and Meadow told us what she had seen. We shared our information and extrapolated what we must do now. We had our mission for the time of us being here, tasks we must perform. It all works for the balance so that the paths of our lives and those around us can continue toward the highest frequencies possible. Gradually through centuries we are working toward a state of attaining higher and higher frequencies. This is the Ascent and it affects our consciousness. We awaken.

Except that night, for that dreaming, it did not go like that. The strangers were together, one like us a unicorn hunter and its spirit ally, although one could as easily call it the other way around, a spirit and the human with whom it travels. Often, so often it is human sleepers who are bound by spirits of the Otherworlds, we see this regularly.

The unicorn hunter was not from our time although in the astral and especially so close to a shrine, matters of time ceased to matter. We learn an alternate system of physics. Spirit sciences. Time is mass and mass is time. In the realm of conscious dreaming it is the self who creates an ephemeral version of mass, it is our lucidity and focus by which we create time. Our group enhances this, our balance unique and its own flow. The unicorn hunter and his ally were harmonic to our own flow, by desire.

He was excited to meet us. I visualized him as a short fat man dressed in steampunk attire, leather straps and breeches. His ally was deflecting the shrine light from behind him so that he did not cast a shadow, by this he was difficult to read, to know, to see. His presence was strong and assertive, we did not shift or scatter, we held with him. It felt important to do so.

Around the shrine, countless other dimensions shifted, a spine of kaliedescopic spokes rotating, through which energy rises. As other energy threads flow around the core, gates open through which other dreamers find their levels.

"How did you find us?"

"Unicorn."

We knew this meant it wants rescuing, obviously another unicorn hunter would have some sort of ability to hear its call for help, he would after all have been listening for such things.

His gesture, interpret that however you will, the symbol image of a ghostly smokey unicorn head in the space between us momentarily at chest height, his desire to capture one revealing his quest and beyond that his true nature, murderous black of his eyes, sureness of such volume and gravity it made dense of the particles around us, held up only by the hope of his aspiration.

We were at once accused, revered, and requested that he may invite himself upon us, through us to meet our unicorn, a wild power which we had enslaved for our mastery. The dreaming unicorn swept up through us.

"Who is this guy?"

His power was immense. He released the unicorn from our bond, using our guilt reaction and pride as a lever. Had he intended to do so was irrelevant; the will of the unicorn was far beyond ours. We were swept up with it. I felt Meadow beside me gripping it by its mane. Jake gripping its tail. Something dark flew up past us, travelling faster than the unicorn only by a degree and within its flow. The elation of that freedom and the fierce drive of the unicorns desire to escape its tether and run fast and far, we felt that too in its entirety. As the unicorn shed its attachments to that place, it shed us, as a snake sheds its skin. It shed us so powerfully that we also shed ourselves. And yet we fripped, sending one another bursts of energy to strengthen our bond. If one of us had fallen, we all would. It was a challenge we did not intend to face.

The unicorn slowed.

The spirit ally of our encounter was now projecting a shield to shadow all three of us from the awareness of the unicorn. It did not know we were there! It was relaxing, we all were. Shaking its mane and trodding its new ground. Its heart hardwired to its brain and beyond, it had gone home to a safe place. Around us... green haven.

We had to be quiet incase the unicorn heard us thinking. We knew that we had to capture the unicorn again: in case we got stuck here, even if not for our original purpose. And then the scene changed.

We were in a large luxury stable. The colours of the stable are the same as those on the ring which the cunning spirit ally had placed over the unicorns horn; a tether! Brown, tan and silver. The steampunk guy was waiting for us.

We were exhilarated, we met him with laughter despite we acknowledged him as thief.

"There are those who would not go to the liberty of preserving the animal; taking simply the tusk. Cutting it off. Killing the beast."

We climbed off the unicorn. It was standing still, listening, observing. Its heart flared out in reach to analyze the surroundings. Its tusk flared out for same purpose and to project its will into the particles from which the realm was constructed, to re-shape them. The projection failed, they remained as they were.

"It is a strong chain. Specially made."

He would have attacked us if he were hostile. He was confident. A thief bothering to open up conversation with the people from whom he had stolen, directly following the theft.

"Yet truly, the unicorn is not yours to keep. It having become property is now appropriated. Thus sealing the bond upon it. It escaped from you, its first gate. There are three with your binding and this is the second. It binds you also into its service. In course, I shall no longer be its master. What I do is a necessity, and a consequence of the path which yourselves started."

"Who are you?"

"You still seek to possess it. You have done your bit and may do so again in the full circle of time. This is the bind I have worked into my... it's tether. Already you have learned much, already you are experts at this chase. Welcome. There are some of us who have been doing this for some time."

"Are you Victorian?"

"We should find the third. The unicorn knows already what must befall it and what path it will shape."

The unicorn was looking pissed off.

"Worry not, we are a step closer toward capturing a unicorn."

"We had already caught it." Sarcastically.

"No, indeed you have not. There are planes and depths you do not know of, places where unicorns go, we can barely imagine."

"Where are we?"

"Within the ring, of course."

"What will you do with it?"

He smiled.

Back in the normal world:

"I can't believe we lost a fucking unicorn."


continues at: Chapter Five