Fallacy of Dawn

Fallacy of Dawn

Benji's Arcade is an anachronistic and wholly out-of-place vermin lair that has affixed itself to the body of the city like an itchy, raw lesion. It's also one of the only local businesses that I've been able to find that doesn't demand any sort of drug testing whatsoever. While Benji himself is a wildly animate, prancing glop of splorg, he doesn't care a shig that I have a bit of a substance problem, and a bit of a memory problem (thanks to the aforementioned drug problem -- ... oh, right, ha ha) so long as I am able to make it on-time to my shift every two days out of three. And it's not like he's in danger of drowning beneath a paper phalanx of recent graduate employment applications, all eagerly expressing their desire to dispense quarters within a filthy video game parlor. I hate working here; I hate having to work here, but I do have some affinity for some of the older games.

It wasn't always like this for me. See, I used to be able to write and disassemble computer code. I was pretty good at it, too. I worked with one of the best software engineers ever -- Nevelle Raemarie O'Reilly -- my childhood friend and sometimes-girlfriend. (I know that's sickeningly saccharine, but once in a very long while that's how life ends up.) Together, we'd scratched together a living breaking the copy protection placed on digital video discs, game CDs and audio POGs

But the good times and illicit warezing all ended eighteen months ago. The two guys with the slicked, jet-black hair, crisp gold watches and classic thug builds who descended on us that day told us that they finally found us after months of searching, that we were stupid to operate in the city so close to the action and so on. One of the goons slammed Neve's head against her monitor and as I got up like Prince Fawking Valiant, the other one turned his vapourizer on my Techtronics Logic Analyzer. The guy then turned his fists onto my head. It wasn't a very good showing for either my face or my TLA.

After beating the crap out of me, the guy then ground out his cigarette in what remained of my once-whole nose. He left in palpable disgust, pausing only momentarily to induce himself to vomit upon me. (Getting covered in strawberry yoghurt and stomach acid was a tad excessive, I thought at the time.)

I woke up the next day to find myself shivering in a completely different and completely bare studio apartment. I was thrown into the city of New Haz with a criminal record, which means I am unable to leave without paying an absolutely unreasonable tariff. I found out, later, that those guys (or whomever they worked for) operated on my brain while I was out cold. I can no longer perceive the electromagnetic spectrum correctly -- specifically, anything from TV or radio waves looks and sounds completely garbled to me. While I now live in a city that is completely dependent on the commercial software industry I can't even, effectively, type my own name.

Source:

http://www.joltcountry.com/chix/ - Official Site