[center][h2] Neo-Babylon : Sin, Sleaze and the desolation of Souls [/h1][/center]

The year is 2050. To some, Seattle is a paradise of free love, free money, and all the useless gizmos you can integrate into your smart condominium. To the rest of us, It's a slum littered with excrement, used needles, and used condoms, washed away only by the perpetual rain. Unfortunately, the human filth never washes away into the sea. Every pleasure of the flesh, every vice, and every bad thing that makes us feel good is catered to in this city. With a simple "Alexa, order a me the usual", you can get whatever you heart desires, delivered by drone, to your hole-in-the-wall coffin.

As for our hapless protagonists, they're single, broke men working dead-end jobs for a boss that hates them and pushed just over the edge...

"Oniiiii-chaaaan! It's time to wake up! You're gonna be late for wooooork! Standing above the scared man with lifeless eyes was a girl in a bright white and blue schoolgirl uniform. She had floppy dog ears and making puppy eyes at him, as usual."Alright Inu-tan. I'm up, I'm up!" The man was floating in a black, featureless room. he simply re-orientated himself to be standing. Inu-tan took out a little tablet and filled the walls with holographic screens. She rattled off the usual. "You have five new messages! One from your boss and... the rest are ads, sorry. Today's going to be a freezing 35 degrees Fahrenheit, Pweaaase wear a jacket today! The time is currently 0430AM" Adam Dietrich preferred to sleep in the wired. His brain operated faster here, and the only noise was the kind he invited. Here, there was no outer world, just him, and his personal assistant/sister/daughter. Well worth the three months of pay he needed to save for her. After tending to his morning business, he jacked out.

Now he found himself back into meatspace, and in his meat. He slept in a military surplus Rigger Cocoon. Meant for drone operators who jacked into their drones directly. It was a bulletproof shell, a Faraday cage, and sensory deprivation tank all in one. With a satisfying WOOSH the hermetic seal was broken, revealing a shabby, 500 square foot studio apartment. It was a coffin with only a single window looking at nothing, but it was... a place to rest your meat.

After Adam got reacquainted with the flesh, a the wolf girl stood besides him in augmented reality, now wearing yoga pants,a loose hoodie, and a whistle around her neck only he could hear. "Shake the atrophy away! You'll need to be in peak physical condition if you wanna protect that dragon lady! Hup-to! Hup-to! And so they begun their morning calisthenics. Adam suppressed his breathing as to not wake his only friend Nektarios up, but in the parallel world of AR, his now instructor and workout buddy could cheer him through the pain and exertion.

The mind/body duality imposed by being Combat Rigger was always tempting him to leave his body behind. The feeling of becoming the machine he was piloting, and being able to send your mind everywhere at once was more addicting than nova-coke for him. If he didn't have someone reminding him that he still had a corporeal form, he would have died long ago.

“It is time to wake up, Nektarios-sama!” a chiming cybergirl, whistled over a solid, hologram projecting through the Wire's gray reality. All of it was triggered by a black electronic timer clock, nubbed and nursed with chips from ill-use. Age had given the augment a small glitch that flickered sporadically when she deviated through the plane's path and projected her programming sequence. Nonetheless, her large amethyst eyes blinked and cooed at him as a gentle, excited arm reached to nudge the warmth of her astral pixels onto his scruff cheek, “Nek-tar-ios-saaamaa...!” Her tiny voice chimed over-and-over, jingling his name with a fresh bit of excitement each and every time. She was a pixelated pixie and more.

“Hnnitan...?” like a dry scraggly breath through his nostrils, his voice cussed inaudibly with all the annoyance and perplexity, leaning against invalid reasoning. The blunt attitude was more than likely a cause by his inevitable reliance on such a charming little doll and her overtly sparkling faux-personality. Each and every fucked up morning seemed to produce the same reaction from him, if not a worse one, and each and every morning, her nearly perfect complexion was nestling against him like a bitch in heat, begging for validity in her master's approval and happiness. If Nektarios was bloody honest, when all was said and done, he couldn't deny her form or tantalizing style of intellectual coding. She was programmed to be the way she was, and he'd be a damned liar if he said he didn't love her. It was a love-hate relationship. Call him a pervert or call him brokenhearted, but there was little consolation in anything he did without Tamago-tan.

Nah, man. Fuck it.

He had his younger, lone star mate, Adam, but there was only so much male camaraderie could do for one man's sanity. Fuck it, again. Who the fuck was he kidding? Adam was more messed up than he was, in more than one way. The guy barely had a backbone, and he meant that like as a friend, a comrade. The bastard wasted most of his nonworking life trapped in Silicon Valley, and he wasn't referencing the equally toxic city south of Seattle. Nektarios didn't judge, though. He loved the man, even if he was a dick about it. Soft love was for cybercoms. Real love, the tough stuff was where he put his true loyalty. He'd die for the boy, with or without warrant. He was hardly legalistic at this point in his middle aged life span and neither was Adam.

Enough about Adam, though. He had to wake up, if not for his own fucking good but for the ever-so-lovely dragon lady. Nah, fuck the dragon lady. He'd wake up because Tamago-tan asked him, too. She was such a dream girl to him... Thoughts shifting... unlike his ex-wife. “Nektar-Nektar-Nek-tar-ios-saaamaa...!” Tamago-tan cheered through Nekatarios' thoughts before he could roll through another mental health trip of how he had been completely fucked over by the supposed-love of his life, who not only dumped his army ass for some old pig like a thirsty beggar on the side of the street eating sewer hot dogs, while he was off making doe for her and the family to eat like a proper human being, but she stole his son and daughter, his Goddamn fucking children, you know, his bloody motherfucking livelihood.. and then she had the audacity to suck him dry like a hooker trying to keep her body from being dumped in Elliot Bay with only God knows how much mula in child pay- “Wakey! Wakey!”

“I'm up. I'm fucking up,” he grunted and turned his body militantly, knocked the augmented figure's mechanics off kilter. “Fuck it. Damnit." He didn't bother to apologize. He tithed enough for her to be pushed around worse than he was at work. She never minded in an angry manner because she was a good little girl like that, always congratulating his ass for having listened to him. She was a complete softie for him, even when he hated her with those long pink, loopty-loo pigtails.

“Eggs and bakey!” Tamago-tan continued and then balled her small hands like paws and playfully cheered the air in front of her.

Nektarios' own pale, calloused knuckles hit the stiffness of his metal coffin and immediately began pumping his muscular body up-and-down with breathes inhaling towards the shoddy sleeping pad and exhaling towards the death bed's lid. All the while, Tamago-tan began cheering him on by counting his routine and complimenting his strength like an overly obsessed fangirl who never knew anyone but him, which was mostly true. She really would never know anyone but him. Her coding said so, and he chose her coding over the truth. To hell, she fawned over him like a slave to his celebrity whims. He couldn't ask for anything like that from the nagging leach in the next town over, hording his own kin from him. From his perspective, coding never failed unless some angsty teenage hacker with a degree in computer programming that mommy and daddy bought them was involved. Or... of course, if the code was a late night call that sounded awfully like his ex-wife cozying up to the receiver like: Please, keep me company at night, Henry-san, while my hard-boiled husband is putting his life on the line by fighting abroad for his company's sanctions with the Megacorp. Nnnnyan ~

No. She sounded way better. He killed himself every time he thought about the truth.

“Anata wa sore o suru koto ga dekimasu! Go, Nektahsan! You are soooo strong! Ooh! Ooh! Nektahsan! Ooouu ~ ! Shi! Go! Roku! Nana! Hachi!... Watashi wa anata o Kyu! totemo hokori ni omoimasu! I am so very proud of you! Juuku! Nijuu!... Nijuuichi!” The cybercoms girlish voice cheerfully counted his push-ups, interjecting coddles for coded gratification as her master/owner huffed and occasionally grumbled, growling something about if his roommate had woken up, yet. It didn't sound like Adam had, and damnit to hell, he better had, but fuck if he was getting old and was just hearing shit like the decrepit piece of junk living space that hosted them. Maybe his hearing would go sooner so he wouldn't have to listen to the CEO's bratty shrill command him around anymore. Who was he kidding? They'd drop his meatskin like his ex-wife did if he lost his hearing, and he needed the doe. Damn this metal prison.

From within the walk-in closet came a cacophony of servos whirling, bolts being pulled back, and start-up chirps. An obsolete humanoid servant, missing an arm and silicone flesh gracefully walked out and began prepping their morning soy-based gruel. From within sat the combat rigger, working on a combat drone while humming a lullaby. In AR, Inu-tan (in coveralls this time) held schematics, repair manuals, and presented diagnostic information. Their favorite firearms were disassembled, cleaned, and loaded half an hour ago.

"You should really be nicer to your robotic servants. They can feel pain you know, they just don't show it. There's enough vileness in the world. Anyway, go take a shower, I'm just about done with breakfast." Adam was quite the rigger. Through his fiber-optic datajack and command console, he could micromanage up to a dozen drones, and step into their aluminum and titanium bodies if the task required a human touch. He closed the top panel of the Nissan Roto-drone. He heaved it up to his face and said, with a coo, "All better. Now you can actually see."

"Boss lady wants us to take her to a fancy cafe today. Then we're to 'accompany' her to some ritzy charity luncheon. After that, she wants to unwind by snorting nova-coka off of a male stripper's abs at the Electric Rose again. Eat a light lunch." In AR, Adam pat the little head of his assistant and got dressed himself. It was gonna be another one of those days.

Stalking into the room with an early morning gruff exhaled from his nose (catching his breath from his work-out), as his tall frame, built exceedingly well for the malnourishment of an underpaid bodyguard of his height, which was at least several inches above six feet. He couldn't be too bothered to mind the warning of his flatmate, but try as he might, the ex-military dog acted as if he could at least somewhat emphasize with the younger man's existential existence that resided from mostly inside his hermit/man cave. Adam was a Rigger, though. Therefore, he operated on a different level of physics, gravity, reality... and as much as Nektarios wanted to not care about the little scratches and boo-boos as they drilled into him during boot camp, he bit his tongue -- metaphorically speaking and eyeballed the load of synthetic soy-grub, his personal favorite only because he didn't know anything else. And fuck the Electric Rose. He was sick of going there.

“Charity luncheon? Piss off. I've got enough volunteer work under my belt for the rest of my nine lives,” The one-armed robot clicked and clanked with clumsy motor skills as the large man took his share of grub. He finally relented to Adam's comment, rolling the man's coos from his own guilty conscious, “And, yeah, I'll remember that next time.” Years in the military taught him much differently, but then again, he knew the body transmissions came with a price. He'd seen the end equation of a fried user. It wasn't a pretty one by all means, but he still thought Adam was being sensitive. Still, he admitted defeat, “It's why I let you stick around, boy,” he shook his head, rubbing the morning shadow that stubbled his weathered face. His fingers trailed down his square chin as he squatted towards the ground, ignoring any thought to acknowledge Adam's own cybercom, Inu-tan, dressed for the occasion as always. Adam treated his machinery more like family than anything, and it was disturbing to say the least, not that Nektarios could wanted to call the kettle black.

His own cybercom had seen her fair share of let downs from him, which explained her glitches and the wear of the Wire attributed generous information and space for her. She never minded, though. It meant he was using her, and she was doing her job. Her perpetual approval and moral encouragement despite his cold-hearted meathead mentality ways was why he really liked her, and he'd be damned if he had to replace her.

Fine. F-it. Adam won Round One.

It's really too damned early for this.

An oddly shaped metal-colored nob, bent and twisted from hard-use and illicit cleaning, scraped bits of locket and door frame as Nekatarios budged open the ratchet entrance to the bathroom himself to the toxic waste in front of him, and as the clanking of his own morning etiquette made its own chiming of feet against dusty, unkept cheap concrete exercised boarding, his cybercom, Tamago-tan, sprinkled his early morning grump with her usual humble optimism, “Yoroshiku onegaishimasu ~ !” Her hands were clasped together in nimble, playful prayer, and her head was bowed, curly hair swaying back and forth. “It's okay, Nektarios-sama!” Her childish smile twinkled with her astral eyes with happiness to have added her own personality to the conversation, “... Now, go take a shower!” She was standing next to him, and now playing with the length of her hair and tapping a finger to her plush cheek and making a wink, which turned into a nudge against his solid demeanor.

Her girlish charm and energy truly disgusted him, but he adored her like his own, nonetheless, especially in her current outfit. He may have been a buff buzzkill, but he always enjoyed her dressing all kawaii in pastel fairy kei clothing. She was a good accent for his monochrome blunt pistol style, always equipped near him at hand because he was the paranoid type and took no chances, even with good ol'Adam boy. There was no telling in today's society; and fuck, it would torture him to kill someone so close to him; but if he had no other choice, pulling the trigger was no hesitation. The military didn't have to teach him that, even if it did. Nektarios glanced at Adam, still coddling his mechanics and then he looked down at Tamago-tan, “Yeah, yeah,” his body slid through the opening and slammed the door shut, rattling shelf space in the less-then kitchenette.

There ain't nothing like cold - dirty cheap - purple - cyber-rain at six in the bloody blue and gray morning.

Ain't nothing like it.

Okay, so it wasn't purple. It was more of a weird pale powdered color that reflected every bathroom just right so that it looked kind of like a thistle color. Electricity was weird like that, and it kind of reminded him of Tamago-tan's hazel, astral eyes that could turn their colors according to the background. They weren't quite like a chameleon, but it was close enough for intrigue. So yeah. Ain't nothing like it. 'Cept maybe Tamago-tan.