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Caldwell heard the familiar sound of his screams from deep within his nightmare. Long before it jolted him awake, he saw interlaced between the horrific images, fragments of the decision he had made. The fragments coalesced, fusing into something cold, dark and chillingly absolute. He opened his eyes, allowing his tacts and irises the milliseds they o adjust to the semi-darkness. He grunted and turned over on the memory foam futon. It was quiet in his enclosed capsule, quiet, except for the discordant sounds of men in various states of sleep.Caldwell had long learo block out the obligatory rumbling snores of the other octs, the rasping sounds of heavy breathing underscored by the distant noise of traffic outside. In his mind, the sonic summary of recurring nightmares still echoed back from deep within the plastic walls of his capsule.
Screams were nothi the Angel Capsule Hotel. They came, in all their harrowing variety, in the middle of the night or in broad daylight. The octs had learo read meaning in the discordant sounds and to block them out. Over the course of his uionally proloay, Caldwell had heard them all. The cries of desperation, howls of pai-rending sounds of grown men g in their sleep and the depraved shrieking of deranged men brought to the end of their tether. Sometimes the onslaught was relentless, the decibels seeping through the pores of the plastic walls. He had lain awake listening to the nonsensical mutterings of men talking in their sleep, the grunts and exhalations of alcoholics relieving themselves withiifling cos of their osules. He found it hard to decipher the meaning of his own screams amidst all the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Today, Caldwell felt a strange hypersensitivity. He was acutely aware of the sweat-soaked sheets ging to his naked perspiring torso like a shroud, the minute movements of the thermulating fabric systematically adjusting its weave. Caldwell wondered whether this sensitivity to external stimuli was a side effect of him having made the most cowardly of personal choices. He still hadn’t brought himself to plate the finality of his decision but the clusion was iable. Eventually, in a matter of minutes, he thought, he was going to kill himself.
Soon, the end would be in sight for his heavily punctuated sleep patterns. The nightmares that stretched into infinity, ghostly apparitions of fear reag deep into his psyche. He was trapped in a living hell and there was only one way out. Soon, he would have that which he craved more than anything else, a sleep that stretched undisturbed into infinity. He would have peace.
Caldwell gla the time projected in pale green pixels by the cheap Taiwanese clock built into the ceiling. Through burned out eyes, tormen<cite>九九藏书</cite>ted mind moribund in that fuzzy area between sleep and wakefulness, he watched the pulsating digits of the clock tig over. It was that hour of dawn. Outside, the shadows of the night had started to recede, exposing the gray wet reality of a winter m. He lay i on the memory foam futon and watched the time spin on its invisible axis, sweeping through its three hundred and sixty-degree ar precisely sixty seds. It was 5.30AM.
Time had bee a meaningless cept to Caldwell, reduced to a simple biological ting down, the unstoppable approach of an impending expiry date. He found sleep elusive, his existence reduced to untold hours of wakefulness followed by annoying stretches of insomnia. Sometimes he would go days without sleep, a relatively ret affli that he cluded was subsciously brought on by a desperate attempt to avoid being plunged bato another interminable sequence of horrific dreams. When sleep came eventually, the nightmares would begin all ain, the grotesque storyboards unfurling with even more iy. Then he’d wake up screaming, the time projected from the clock his only bea to reality, ting down to his impendih.
The more he thought about it, the more the decision to take his own life seemed to make sense. And today, which happeo be his tweh birthday, was as good a time as any. There was nothing to celebrate, only the encroag shadow of death. It wasn’t a decision that had e easily. Caldwell suspected that the deaking process had been in <big></big>motion for quite some time, firing away deep within his synapses. He’d been sidering it at a subscious level, surreptitiously weighing the s and pros.
All things being equal, suicide seemed to be the most sensible path to take. It ath well trodden. He could not go on any longer. His ret trip to the black zone of Oval, which he’d taken while enveloped in a reality distortion field of his own making, was firmation enough that he’d been plating it for a while. His impending suicide remeditated and not a spur-of-the-moment thing as he’d tried to have himself believe.
Caldwell thought about the endless nights lying oon staring into space, the burning pixels of prams etg glyphs on his eyeballs. As the memories drifted away and the images faded, and his impending suicide came bato focus, Caldwell found himself staring into the swirling black hole that was his depression. A depression that was the cumulative sum of a whole litany of misfortunes, some of which he cluded he would never uand. He wondered how his life had degeed into this clawing miasma of raw unfulfilled need.
Caldwell lay i oon watg the green pseudo quartz of the capsule timer usher in his demise. His eyes shifted to the LCD panel set into the pla<s>?９９liｂ?</s>stic ceiling. The sight of the backlit digits of the last units of his credit disappearing into the ether filled him with a strange sense of euphoria. This would be his last capsule hotel. Just a few minutes now and it would all be over he reassured himself. Instinctively, his eyes moved to the transparent black vial sitting on the cigarette-scalded plastic shelf. The poison he’d acquired from the white-haired Geian in the syringe-scattered back alleys of Oval.
Caldwell wondered whether the hackers on the Hacker Underground Board, The HUB, would miss him. The HUB was a job board and unity in cyberspace, a hag workhouse, gridiron and credit source for tless Union hackers and byteboys from Vienna to Vladivostok. Scleaned from the HUB had kept Caldwell in obyl Chi and pizza fhteen months. The vast majority of the deals had e from a mysterious procurer hidden behind a work of firewalls and low level intruder dete AIs so intricate that they had to belong to a major glomerate with something to hide.
The word on The HUB, itself a dynamic piece of unity code drifting through cyberspace, was that the buyer was someone on top of the food of a major Yakuza trolled Zaibatsu. In this business, you didn’t ask questions. It was hard enough getti<cite>.99lib.</cite>ng into The HUB’s inner circle and once you were there, you did your damo stay there. That meant receiving your eleic briefing and delivering the service, end of story. You kept your mouth shut and it stayed shut even after the credit transa took plao questions.
Caldwell had made a living riding the soles of the Union’s capsule ho<code></code>tels. Until retly, he had ayed in one place lohan a couple of weeks at a time. His current capsule was the only exception, ten weeks in the same claustrophobic sarcophagus, the lack of workflow and credit going hand in hand with his current state of stasis. The purpose of his nomadic lifestyle had been both to stay tinually shrouded beh a cloak of anonymity and to avoid f emotional attats to places or people.
He had this internal alarm clock that told him when it was time to move on. He listened for it daily, that fraying of the hat sighat a ge of enviro was immi. Otherwise, he would deteriorate rapidly into a nervous wreck, incapable of doing anything other than claw at the plastic walls of his capsule and drive himself apoplectic with self-loathing. Sometimes it was just the other capsule jockeys being friendly, on the rare occasions that he actually ventured outside on a toilet run, which set the alarm bells ringing.
His work on The HUB had bought him a certain level of notoriety and a modest amount of credit that allowed him to eke out aen the digital floating world of ercial hag, while stantly maneuvering to stay below the radar of the ever-shrinking legal domains of the Union. The black markets were growing fast, spreading like some new-fangled disease, f the authorities to resort to desperate measures tn in the escalating crime and put a stop to the shady rackets of subversive types.
Over the last two months an inexplicable stasis had taken hold of the market, at least as far as Caldwell was ed. He had gone more tha weeks without landing a job, a fact that he attributed to the highly publicized failure of his attempt to retrieve the private banking t list from a Sumitomo Bank database. Someo there had a vea against him and they had used the free-flowing data of cyberspace to stack the cards against him. Why? Caldwell had no idea.
He had been part of the inner circle of a tight ring of anonymous hackers around the world that geed most of The HUB’s business. He’d proven himself over the months with increasingly eous breaches of the databanks of major corporations. The owner of The HUB who went by the niame of Glyph took a small cut of each score. Suddenly Caldwell had been disected from the deal flow and from the inner cycle, reduced to a livewire of depression staring blankly at ay and line. Hackers were born to hack, yet Caldwell was hardwired to haly on demand. As the deals dried up, Caldwell’s enthusiasm for the game withered. He was no lourned on by the aplishment of promising a secure system.
Failures were on in the digital floating world. You won some, you lost some. Since his chosen profession only allowed for a hand-to-mouth existence, Caldwell’s exile had taken its toll on his credit chip and his will to live. He had tried desperately to reverse the situation but to no avail. His hag winter had set in and all he could do was stare at the capsule terminal as his software agents retury-handed. Some did not return at all, having died mysterious deaths while iating the intricacies of superior intrusioion code.
It had taken a while to reach the catharti but he now knew with absolute certainty that death was the only way out. He had no knowives, nobody to grieve for him. His online associates would not miss him for long, distracted as they were by the emerging opportunities of a rapidly shape-shifting cyberspace. His memories held nothing that would give him cause tret his owh. They said that when you were about to die your whole life flashed before your eyes. Caldwell knew his flashbacks would be very brief. In fact, he suspected that he might not have any at all.
There was cold fort to be gleaned from the knowledge that he was soon to disappear into the ether, permaly jerked into the matrix of the great beyond. For a while, his memory defiotwithstanding, Caldwell had believed fervently that there was some unfulfilled purpose to his existence, yet undiscovered facets of his potential. And it was that belief that had kept him going, kept him ected to the glowing lattices of cyberspace for days at a time. That belief had slowly and surely been shattered. He was going to die oblivious of his past, too scared to face a dark and desolate future.
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