The Night Air
Not fucking again. Literally fucking, which was the problem -- Kimmie's upstairs neighbors were at it again, for what, the fourth time tonight, and the management could claim however much it wanted that the walls were supposed to be sound-proofed, the truth was that this was a shitty apartment, it clearly wasn't up to code, and when two grown-ass adults decided to hurl their bodies together on a battered wooden bed, you could hear it. Not to mention that the big blonde girl was a screamer. You would think after getting the news that the war was finally on, they would have gone decently to sleep, but no. They were probably celebrating life or some such bullshit. Kimmie couldn't take it anymore. She shoved back the chair from her desk, grabbed a fur to wrap around herself, and headed out into the night.
She just wanted to walk, far and fast and until her brain stopped buzzing. Sometimes walking helped. The streets were more empty than usual -- everyone who had someone was probably at home, cuddling them up, waiting for the bombs to fall or the shooting to start or the diseases to spread or just for the chips in their heads to catch viruses, melt, and drip out of their brains. And yeah, the truth was that if she had someone, Kimmie would probably do the same thing. But she didn't, and that alone was enough to make it easy to glare at the people who were glaring at her, as they always did when they saw her walking around wrapped in a fur. Fucking holier-than-thou types. How did they know that it wasn't synthetic? It could totally be synthetic.
-- excerpted from my Kickstarter book, Demimonde: $5444 raised, 12 hours left to finish funding...
(DRAFT)
Here, Under the Twin Moons
Jitender propped himself up on one bony elbow, letting the thin sheet fall down, baring his hairy brown chest. The AI kept the temperature at a comfortable level throughout the battered old student housing building, but he still found a sheet comforting. Something to hide beneath. Not that a piece of cloth would protect anyone from what was coming."Come back to bed," he said. "What do you think you're going to see up there? It's not as if they're going to start shooting at each other tonight." The shooting had already started, intermittently. Attacks on the alien-settled parts of town, mostly, though there had been a bit of random rioting here and there. The university grounds had stayed quiet so far, maybe because most of the students were reasonably pro-human. But he'd studied enough history to know that their fragile peace wasn't likely to last.
-- excerpted from my Kickstarter book, Demimonde: $4884 raised, 13 hours left to finish funding...