Current mood:	happy
Entry tags:	contest, fiction, sci-fi

Huzzah!
Well, I'm not as excited as the title would indicate, but still :) I just passed into the second phase of the short story contest I mentioned previously. While I would have preferred for my steampunk fantasy to make the cut, my cyberpunk caper was the one who got the votes (or maybe the judges eliminated the steampunk one because they didn't want to repeat authors :) ).

Now, it's on to write the second phase story, slightly more than twice as long as the first. I'll keep with the same setting of a Mexico City megalopolis with a superimposed virtual reality that is unwittingly infringing upon the old spirit world, and more space will allow me to explain why.

I'm taking cues from Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex in the way that its cases stem from the use of the technology; they are crimes that cannot be committed by any means other than with the new science in the setting.

If anyone's curious, I translated the winning story, below the cut :)


Contra/Broad-Band

Mexico City has always been a superlative town

By the middle of the 21st century, pulling the data from the census institute’s cloud reveals the statistics that characterize the city, the Moon’s Navel, as the “most” of any modifier in the dictionary: most polluted, most populated, most superstitious, most corrupt, etc. Even the city’s infosphere is a hazard for users unprepared for the iconic chaos of the interface landscape, with avatars bearing fractal tattoos that give you a headache if you watch too close, or the variety of agents that float to and fro as helpful restless souls fulfilling their masters’ wishes.

I prefer to keep the infosphere’s second reality confined to a small frame in my field of vision. There is something comforting in the grey monotony of true reality, stable and immune to the changes in their infospheric representations by fickle admins or graffiti artists clever enough to bypass the locks in order to impose their whims in the visual designs of everything.

The pilot informs that we are about to land in Atenco Spaceport. Those who see the infosphere are focused on the beautiful flight attendant giving instructions for the landing procedure. I only see an empty hallway and rows of passengers attentive to a presence that is not really there, a ghost that exists only in the WiFi waves broadcasted from the shuttle’s computer into their interfaces. I gently tap my computer's strap, where I hid an archaic memory card containing the software I'm smuggling, an immeasurable wealth inside a solid and very tangible presentation.

I’m a forensic data analyst, so I know certain tricks that open the doors to information unavailable to normal users. Also, according to my grandparents from both sides of the border and family tree, I have the gift. My Yaqui father and Dakota mother are somewhat disconnected from their native roots, but for some reason entrusted my upbringing to their respective parents, who told me all the folktales and customs of their ancestors, and both couples never stopped teaching me about the world beyond our everyday experience, unreachable but always present. When the birth of the infosphere was announced, I thought that at last humanity had conquered the spirit world, but to my great disappointment, I found that it was just another veil with which to blind ourselves to the true beauty of the world.

The immigration and customs line is slow but calm. Out of the corner of my eye I spot a slight visual anomaly in the security booth, which my personal decoding software quickly reveals as a small altar to the Santa Muerte, the Sacred Death, installed exclusively in the infosphere. I don’t blame the soldiers; against the regular assaults from criminal gangs that now make Mexico City akin to a fortress under siege, even supernatural protection is welcomed.

I see all my flight mates browsing the news in floating screens existing only for them. Anyone entering Mexico City must go through a permission assignment process for their personal interfaces while their luggage, physical and virtual, is inspected for anything harmful to both the city’s material and informational space. Most people don’t store anything particularly dangerous in their clouds, but even so they are screened just in case they carry a virus by virtue of their carelessness or negligence before they are granted transfer rights for the Mexican nodes and servers.

I smile to the female officer in charge of processing my entry. Being a government employee does not make me exempt to the procedure, even more so as I come from visiting my Dakota family in the United States. I trust they will not find my little treasure, hidden in an obsolete medium inaccessible through any interface that is not the hardly ever used physical port. Green light, and I pass with no trouble at all. My interface systems update their links for the local clouds and servers once I am in the streets.

“Can I come out now?” The memory card’s passenger says with a weak voice that reaches my ears by means that have nothing to do with the real or visual senses of the average person. I smile and plug the card to my computer. The information downloads and Coyote appears in the infosphere, smiling, the same Coyote that by accident taught civilization to mankind and accepted to be my nahual, my spirit guide, in the Arizona desert, and whom I reduced into data to grant him access to this new computer-ruled world. We laugh together at the great exploit we just accomplished.

I smuggled a god into the city.