I woke to find an even half-dozen human predators pawing over my goods. My telekinesis knocked the first one back into several others. Before I could blink a gun-toting chrome-crusted man? at the back of the crowd dove over them in a flat leap, and came down beside me in an eerily graceful landing. I could not connect to my psi powers again in time. He cut my throat, ear to ear.



Luckily, I have an O2 pump installed at the base of my brain. It kept me alive while I prayed silently inside my head for healing. Health was granted, but not in time to save most of my gear, or my clothing.



Color me red and pink for anger and embarrassment.

Still, I am a verser, a multi-dimensional traveller, a worldwalker, a gatesman or whatever you wish to call my kind, and we know our own. I felt my gear inside my gut, and I followed that sense.



It took me past burning barrels around which huddled the refuse of the Earth, and past clubs where the terminally uncertain posed as the Next Great Cool Person, and down alleys where shifty-eyed individuals pointed guns and lasers toward my head. But I was so obviously unthreatening in my skivvies that they let me go.



A few, of course, liked my weakness, and chose to relieve some of their frustrations on my helplessness. I have learned skills on a dozen worlds from masters as far-ranging as Musashi and D’Artagnan and Joe Lewis. Also, most of my cybernetics might not have been their kind, and so they thought I was harmless, but the Lekostian Star Empire does very good work. Nobody lived to tell the others how dangerous I was. My mood was not good.



I increased in my dislike of this world. Very few old people were present, and the children played in the street next to biohazard signs.



The street signs were bullet-riddled and bent-over from car crashes, I assumed. They spoke of a corporate world. Enterprise Way, and Digital Blvd. crossed under the broken and fallen down sign of IBM.



Following my gear out toward the outskirts of the great city led me into an industrial park apocalypse. There were the wide lawns, and the strangely built buildings with the uniformative and techy sounding names, but it was all shattered. Small trees grew randomly from lawns and parking lots. The few signs still readable had gaping holes shot into them.

Makeshift barricades of sandbags had rotted to long lines of sand that blew in dust devils across acre wide parking lots.



I discovered my first skeletons here in an upside down burnt-out wreck. The front looked like an rpg had punched a hole in it.



War and desolation followed by a complete lack of social structure was what this said to me.



Continuing to follow my stuff, I came to a vast meeting in a slightly patched Microsoft office. No bouncers sat at the door. But still my sense for danger hit me hard. I narrowed my eyes, and saw with a hawk’s vision.



At least twenty separate ambushers lay around me in hiding. Adding paranoia run rampant to my diagnoses of this world’s ills, I walked into the meeting.

The room had some of the most vicious and depraved individuals I have ever seen. They were equipped with a great deal of the finest firepower their world had to offer. Every man and woman was cyborged, and chromed, and loaded for war elephant.



At the front of the crowd of desperados, a man began speaking.



“Cyberpunks, legends, you have assailed the MegaCorps, broken the teeth of their illegal deadly computer countermeasures, evaded kill teams, robbed from the rich to give to the poor, and you have paid in blood for your heroism. Ten times ten thousand of us have fallen. We are all that remains.

The MegaCorps with their tame governments ruled the world. But they were slow and fat. We were fast and hungry.

It was like dunking a tyranosaurus into a pool of pirahna. As long as we were willing to pay the price, they were doomed. As long as we kept the faith, they had no chance.

Let us keep the faith, one more time. There remains one last dinosaur still keeping us from a world of peace and plenty.

Your children will revere you, whether you live or die, if only you join in the fight tonight.”



Then he pointed at me as I stood in my skivvies surrounded by chrome and black leather and lots of guns.



“See, even the lowly ones want to join the fight.”



I breathed in and out, and then I raised a hand. The crowd quieted; it was a trick Napoleon had taught me.



“You are an idiot. All of you are idiots. Go home, and do something useful like plant a garden.”



They did not shoot at me. They laughed. I had made a wonderful joke.



Bitterly, I walked down through the crowd to get my stuff. Taking it out of the hands of the wide-eyed predators I had earlier met; (who were sincerely surprised to see me alive) I slipped my clothes back on.



I looked around, and even with my weapons I was no match for this crowd. Oh, they thought they were the toughest things in the Universe. A good two platoons of High Rangers would have cleaned their clock, or a patrol of elven paladins under Lady Winterblest would have done as well, but they outmatched me alone.



Frustrated and bitter, I walked out of there past the ambushers, and then an idea occurred to me. A small suggestion in the mind of one of the hidden reserves that he saw an opponent reaching for a knife is all it took. A boiling furball of flying bodies erupted outside the meeting, and it sparked cries of “Betrayal” from inside the meet. You could hear the crump of the KE weapons and the thunderclap of lasers for miles around as the room disintegrated into insane violence.



I ran as fast as I could with bullets and lasers yelling encouragement from all around me.



I spent the next year helping Intergraph Europe, the last megacorp, put together a ring of facilties in which they saved the best of the old age. Meanwhile, outside, the “almost freed” continued their descent into a new Dark Age lit only by the flames of wood, and the infrequent electrical lights of the new monasteries, the Intergraphs.

Maybe, in five hundred years this world would be willing to try progress again rather than blindly striking out at what they do not understand.



Tadeusz