The exploded shell of my burned-out apartment is outer space black and devastated in the night above the little

twinkling stars of the city. With the windows gone, the shredded curtain twisting and swinging at the edge of the eighty-two-story drop, it's all so breathtaking. Go to the edge of the concrete subfloor where there was maple flooring once, eighty-two stories above the cement parking lot where the cars filter out like ants in osmosis, and look at the city lights and stars. Feel the desolate warmth of the breeze in monochrome night, and you're gone. It's all so beyond us. Up here, in the miles of night between the stars and the earth, I feel just like one of those experimental test animals. Dogs. Monkeys. Men. You just do your job. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand anything beyond that. There's nothing left. Step over the edge. White floor-to-ceiling drapes made from wire and environmentally-friendly unbleached cotton paper flutter between me and oblivion. Step over the edge. What else is left? Who else is still here anymore? Everything's gone. Everything's gone. Everything's gone. Jump over the wait. Violet. Oh, shit. Violet. I remember everything.

It's in the newsfeed today how some lady was let off for chloroforming her 2-year old daughter, dismembering her, and burying the remains in the front page of the New York Times. Apparently everyone's real upset over the turnings of the case, but frankly, I don't notice or care for this shit anymore, having come to accept that every year, a cute baby girl will be kidnapped and butchered, and will subsequently make international news (incidentally, I've allso come to notice that if it were an ugly baby, it rarely makes news past local fame). This kind of stuff is beginning to appear a lot in the newspapers. Me? I don't read newspapers anywhere. I just scan catalogues from Walmart. ...7mm gel-ink-based pens, and leather-covered photo albums, pairs of steel bookends and lightweight luggage, electric shoe polishers and heated towel stands and silver-plated insulated carafes and portable palm-sized Internet tablets with retina display support and wireless 3G connection, birdhouses and iron-wrought candleholders, rubber place mats with customised prints, picnic hampers and wooden ice buckets, lace-trimmed oversize linen napkins and charcoal-filter smoke trappers and antique desk lamps and jars of seasoned pickles and handblown glass bottles filled with stone-ground English-pubstyle mustards, wireframe click-open umbrellas and sterling silver monogrammed golf tees and cardboard FedEx crates, office tote bags, souvenir glass paperweights, stacked plastic file holders, paisley ties and crystal water pitchers, collected tumbler sets from Peru and office clocks that measure temperature and humidity and barometric pressure... This is allmost better than real life. ...electric calling card address books and margarita glasses, valet stands and sets of porcelain dessert plates, correspondence cards and flexible mirrors and plastic JetFlex multimodular shower heads and water proof aprons and bottles of chardonnay and china cache pots and bottle openers, classic vinyl players and customised golf balls and pedometres and customised coffee mugs and stainless-steel silverware, dishwater-safe Alle cutlery sets, grandfather clocks made of galvanised steel, Njurunda coffee tables, Johanneshov armchairs in Strinne green stripe pattern, Dakapo halogen torchieres, ivory-backed straight razors, ergonomic keyboards with comfort pads, three-cycle self-loading washing machines... I received the party invitation two weeks ago on a lacy-edged cotton card printed with fine script and sprayed with L'eau d'Isseu Florale by Issey Miyake. It is @1900h at the hostess' home in New Haven, which, according to GPS, is about a hundred or so miles from here, which isn't too bad, I guess. I check my watch - @1h30. The hours all blend together. I lost focus. At this time in the day, the roads only host the occasional back-alley drug deal or subway rape or underpass execution. Nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, just the other day, I found a decomposing arm floating by the port, tangled amongst the driftwood and seaweed and soda cans. Little pieces of like, muscles and tendons and ligaments showed through lesion-like gaps in the skin which were probably opened with a smoothbladed knife of about 3-4, with a slightly blunted tip. I drive around a bit in my imitation 1968 Impala, with its wraparound Cinemascope windshield and cold Bakelite steering wheel that's, like, 36 in diametre. This car cost me $98 USD in some usedcar dealership on the edge of Empire City. I could afford something better, but I chose the Impala for those nights in which I don't return to my place in Uptown, otherwise known as Room 1314 at the Avalon Apartment Complex. I chose it because if I have to sleep in my car on weekend nights and on jobs, this car has the biggest seats, and a large, spacious trunk that can hold more than enough. After a half-hour of random peregrination I find myself in an 24-hour diner slightly off the exit ramp into Uptown called One-Eye Jack's, drinking black coffee. People these days, apparently the new fashion is to drink coffee or tea or soda with a spike of one of those new recreational chems that are floating the market, usually an amphetamine or some laboratory synth of adrenochrome, or chrome plus as it's colloquially reffered to. Some people, but only if you can afford it, kick to off to pure unfiltered heroin or marijuana or one those old-world drugs like that, but those are extremely expensive now due to the climate control and all the wars over there anyways. Anyway, doing this is supposed to

give you an extra energy boost that lasts longer than the few extra steroids Joltbars give you, in addition to the caffein's kick. Frankly, I don't bother much with drugs, so I just drink my coffee black. This is one of those old-fashioned retronolstagic joints that hasn't yet adapted electronic catering services either out of keeping the style or lack of funds (probably a little of both), so besides from me, there's the twentysomething waitress that poured me my coffee, and she's sitting in the booth across from me drinking her Earl Grey tea with a swirl of lactose-based creamer and an analgesic called Opal (derived from South American filter-extracted opiates rendered with liquid morphine into a 83%-pure solution, sells at $20/mL wholesale at base price, but is skyrocketing due to drug wars in Colombia), which is usually taken via eye drops or oral delivery, so her drinking it with tea is a bit unusual, but what can I say, these are pretty strange times. The cracked vinyl seat of the booth is scrawled on with Sharpies, probably high school crushes and first dates. At least that hasn't changed much. The fluorescent strips of light are harshly bright, causing the tabletops to shine mirrors, and my vision blurs around the edges a little, thowugh when you go three nights without sleep, you find yourself wandering all over the place. I sit and watch the second hand on my Tag Heuer go around eleven times. In the 19th century, watches like this were called chronographs. This one cost me $1660 USD from the United Jewelers shop across the street from the AmmoNation in Grid 35vNa. Stainless steel case with brushed bracelet, rotating black ion-plated bezel dial with luminous skeletal hands, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal with screwdown crown, measures to 12mm with double safety clasp and water/pressure resistance to 200m (660 ft). Now, amongst the guys in the Financial District, this is a poor man's watch. This cost me allmost twenty times as much as my car. I'm ready to pay for my coffee, but the waitress is either completely iced, or just tuned out on me. The white buds of iPod earphones trickler out of her ears, tracing allong the dark purple river of her hair; the music is turned too loud, I can hear it from all the way across the room, it's something aggrotech or industrial, something from the late twentieth century. She's nice-looking, I must admit. Her hair is wavy and tangled, though has a pretty shine and flow to it. I can tell it's been spliced, because her eyebrows are a gentle black curve, and root-hair transition is seamless, indicating that while it's not natural, it's not done with the primitive methods of dye injections that a lot of people who can't afford gene splicing resort to, which is mostly kids and drug addicts. She has a pretty face too, like one of those in Japanese animation large glowing-green eyes, black ring around the iris, dark around the edges, small nose curved just slightly upward, and a very kissable mouth. Her ears stick through the folds of her hair, they look like pixie ears from some fantasy MMORPG or something like that. I'm not quite sure if that's splicing or just a natural trait though, don't know too much about genetics to be able to tell. It's a unique-looking face. I find her beautiful, but that might just be first impressions which allmost allways fail me. Her name tag reads VIOLET. Oh, this is gonna be a good life. I consider taking a picture of her to scan into the Internet later for referencing, but then I decide against it. Hey, I say. She doesn't some to hear, so I say her name, Violet, hey Violet...and she stirs, sits up, remembers I'm there, fumbles for words, and after a few brief moments manages to get out, Oh, hi. She's so cute. Hey there, I say back. She looks at me. I look away. This is allmost as intimate as love. I clear my throat. I'm, uh, I'm ready to pay now. Oh, uh, okay. She's having trouble focusing. It's the drugs. What'd you order, again? Hot coffee That's it? The joke passes on her. Whatever. Yeah. Okay, well, whatever, man. Don't bother. It's only, like, what? $3 USD? Fuck that shit. Okay, I say. I put my wallet away and prepare to stand. Wait, she says. I look at her. You want me to get that for you?

Wait, what? Oh, she means the coffee. Yeah, sure, I say. She gets up and takes the empty cup and saucer, stumbling once. She's wearing a brief tennis skirt, slutstockings and fur-lined boots, which are probably factory-synth grade from one of those production lines over in the Midwes, like, Kansas or something. Real fur of any kind costs around a starting price of $7,000 USD, and I've seen jackets in the Nordstrom catalogues that cost +$50,000 USD. It's ridiculous how much people will spend on things they don't need. Violet, she's like the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure that haunts the estrogenpumped junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape. Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply-endowed, given to diffident movements of hair-brushing and liptouching. She's just too petrifyingly pretty, it's like a paralysing horror. She's, like, pro-calibre. She has a beautiful tattoo on her back, I can see it through the stretched with fabric of her tshirt. It's a curving, perfectly-symmetrical red bird, an abstractly-aesthetic design that must've hurt like hell to get it done. I want to touch it. On the way back home, I find myself saying her name over and over again, Violet, Violet, Violet...and that's when I started to want, more than anything else, to be with her. @0537h, not yet true dawn, but the sun's beginning to creep across the polluted city sky where Dawn has spread out her bleeding paint-stained fingers, and the places under jagged shadows still cold, and that strange sort of melancholy is insinuating itself into the city's insomniac lights. The staggered halogen lamps by the paths are not yet off, so there still little pools of yellow-white ambience glowing every three metres or so, little moonshines that illuminate tiny isles, pillars, souls of light in a morning of dark. I decide to go for a walk. The whole area running allong the park's tree line and the thickets of like, shrubbery and twig bushes and floral bioplants is covered with fallen leaves that are dry from the October heat, but have not completely lost their oranges and reds yet. The lovely scent of illegally-burned leaves wafts up from the Super Duper Mart's backlot mixed with the scents of grilling food from the ventilator turbines out of the back of the dining hall. Two crows are hovering over the dumpbins in the rear parking lot, and there are flies there too. An empire waste displacement vehicle lumbers by, shooing them off; I watch as its one long hydraulic arm lifts the bin and empites its content into the incinerator and the gently sets it back down. It rises in the start of its arc, its one red alertlight atwinkle. I walk over, and hear the buzz of flies over the decay of something organic, most likely a dead bird or something, because a lot of them have been found recently around these parts of Empire City; I hear that they're appearing in Metro City too, though you can't ever trust anything that comes out of that hole of degenerates and transients. I expect it to be a dead bird, but then I find myself staring at the splattered mess of an object which I'm guessing is an infant wrapped in a plastic bag and dropped five stories onto its head. For the record, brain of infants looks runny like warm oatmeal or something like that, maybe soft-boiled egg whites. This is because encephalonic content does not assume rigidity till later in life, when a child starts gaining awareness. This looks like a newborn, a term male baby, given by the lanugo on the shoulders and hair. The whitish material on its extremities, I'm not a doctor or anything, but that's called vernix caseosa, and it forms upon conception in order to protect the baby in delivery and usually, you wipe it off within a few hours of birth. The umbilical cord has no visible clamp either, and without a cord clamp, a newborn would bleed out in a matter of minutes. The head wound is consistent with the curvature of medical delivery forceps, meaning the baby was probably delivered via forcep extraction. Live brain matter does not look like soggy Jello either, considering the many times I've seen it before. Note the plastic grocery bag two inches from the right foot filled with identical-looking stuff. This is called liquefactive necrosis of the brain tissue, and this happens about two weeks after the baby dies in utero.The skull plates, similarily, overlap in what's

called the spalding sign, and the bone membrane becomes softer, rendering the baby into pretty much mush.