Getting worried

There was this guy, Dav Remner, I knew. Typical low-level muscle/hustler, would do anything short of murder for a few yen. Not feared or anything, but well-liked as far as that goes. He was getting up there, a little creaky in the bones--must have been thirty if he was a day--around the age you start feeling sorry for people. Wouldn't have surprised me if he died, if he was too slow on some job and got popped, or if he burst a vessel in his sleep and never woke up. Wouldn't have surprised me at all. A lot of times you wake up in the morning and someone you used to hang around with is just gone.

I never would have thought he'd go and fucking join the Electric Church. But I wake up today, and Dav is now Brother Remner. He made the rounds, creepy plastic face and reflective glasses and all. Called me Nad, told me he was so happy, invited me to look into it.

Dav Remner couldn't shut up about how he hated the Monks. Dav would go on and on, after a few cups of Pick's corrosive gin, about how The Electric Church were evil motherfuckers. We had to shut him up about it all the time. There is no WAY he'd join the goddamn Tin Men voluntarily. Or so I thought. But here he is, prancing around in his new robot body, preaching Mulquer Codex. This shit is getting crazy.

Access ain't easy

It's never easy to find open nodes to get online with. Even when you find one, you gotta scope it for fucking weeks to make sure it isn't just a goddamn SSF honeypot. It's amazing--thousands of us wandering around without a pot to piss in, desperate, and the SSF has nothing but time to spend trying to trap us in class-C misdemeanors.

So I've been scraping by. More Monks on my ass, it's like I'm in their system now, my face, my photo, just on their net and whenever one of the bastards scans me an alarm goes off--there's Nad Muller, let's go fuck with him. I can't go anywhere without one of them noticing me and coming over. Hello Nad. How are you, Nad. You're looking a little worried, Nad, maybe you need forever to contemplate your sins, what do you say? Just look at their creep-ass web site: the-electric-church.com. If that doesn't make you want to run the other way, nothing will.

I've known a few people who've joined the Electric Church. They're not people any more, of course--they're cyborgs. But they still *seem* like themselves, in some ways. Of course, they all look alike, so I can't fucking tell them apart myself. But once in a while this one Monk, Brother Hassam, who used to be a guy I'd get drunk with in Pick's, he sees me and strolls over--and it's weird, because he's this thing, this Tin Man, with a modulated voice and a plastic face, but he comes over and says "Hey, Nad, how are you? Still picking pockets over on the Bowery?" and we'll have a goddamn conversation. And he always ends it by telling me how happy he is now that he'll never die, and how I should let him convert me. So we can have that damned conversation over and over again, for-fucking-ever, I guess.

Anyway, gotta run. This node's hot, I can feel it, and the last thing I need is a System Pig's boot on my neck this morning.

The Monks Scare Me

Fucking Monks. Tin Men. Cyborgs. Everywhere, every-fucking-where I go, there they are.