Current mood:	cyber
Current music:	punk

Sex On Wheels
Sex On Wheels

by drsmax

The following story is based on the pseudo-randomly generated digit string (2613253114) output from drsmax's CyberPunk FlashFiction Generator. Details behind the cut that follows the story.

every night some pissed-off robot kills one of your babies.

you wake to a start, some asshole pounding on your windshield. the flailing of a figure obscured by heavy downpour.

you sleep in your car. or someone else’s. every night, parking meters doubling as rent meters. so many do, nowadays, that no one pities you. their pity reserved for those who sleep on their biodegradeable motorcycles or reclining bicycles. no one sleeps without at least a pair of wheels under their ass, homelessness/vehicularlessness having been outlawed around the same time hiroshima seceded from japan.

when you’re in your own car, your hands never leave the steering wheel. constant transdermal drug delivery through your palms regulates your diurnal arousal cycle. no matter were you go, you’re always at work. continuously chord-typing the keys inlaid in the hand grips. you’ve got eyes to spare for the multifarious inputs concerning road, work, and social relations. everyone’s a spider nowadays, you included.  though you all have the standard issue human number of limbs, it's the four pairs of eyes that earn the arachnoid moniker.

your outputs are catheterized and even your ejaculate is siphoned off to one of the car’s multiple reservoirs. erotic electric shocks constantly jerk you off as the car feeds computer generated porn into one of your eyes.  its constant caress elicits raw material for your constant gene-gineering. other materials, the bulk of the biomass, are obtained from the road kill the car scoops up.

your car pups a litter of useful monsters daily. its only exhaust the products of your genometric hacking. your babies clean the streets, repair the infrastructure, violently enforce the ban on homelessness/vehicularlessness. your fortune depends on the usefulness of your babies. the constant utility you secrete into society’s mainframe brings favor from the city elders. but no favor from the disgruntled robots.

you’re working, it seems, like 24/7. dream/work/sleep/play. dreamwork. workfuck. its all the same, nowadays. and no one pities you, their pity reserved for the robots. unemployed ever since the city elders tired of their constant metallic whining about robot rights. humans are cheaper and more pliable and much more willing to put up with the degradation/privilege of the 24/7, the constant go go go of the life on the wheel.

the robots are angry. the robots kill your babies.

the downpour eases up enough for you to see that it’s a robot pounding on your windshield. pounding on your windshield with the corpse of an octopus. one of yours. the sight of it makes your eyes do that thing where they all twitch in a separate direction at once. all eight of them. it’s a facial expression, but not a human one, the emotion conveyed utterly alien. even you don’t know what you’re feeling anymore. but your car knows. better than any lover. the onboard computer detects the change in your body chemistry. the engine races in response, the car lurching forward. the robot crunches underneath, trailing sparks for kilometers before finally releasing its grip from your bumper.

every night some pissed off robot kills one of your babies. but you don’t mind. you’ll make more.

Copyright 2004 Pete Mandik


Dr. Smax’s Cyberpunk flash fiction generator. Get a 6 sided die (or a JavaScript dice roller) and start rolling. If you end up using it, I'd be curious to see what you whip up.


A. The “Cyber” part (roll twice)
1 =  robot
2 =  cyborg/bionics
3 =  disembodied artificial intelligence
4 =  the global information network
5 =  genetic engineering
6 = surgical mods other than cyborg/bionics

B. The “Punk” part (aka the sleaze factor) (roll twice)
1 = sex
2 = murder
3 = drugs
4 = black market
5 = “hacking”
6 = terrorism/sabotage

C. Prefixes to toss around (roll twice)
1 = cyber- (duh!)
2 = geno-
3 = neuro-
4 = nano-
5 = pico- (like nano, but smaller!)
6 = bio-

D. POV
1 = first person singular
2 = first person plural (good for group-minds!)
3 = second person
4 = thirdperson
5 = roll again
6 = roll again

E. Typographical tomfoolery
1 = no caps
2 = neither caps nor punctuation (crazy!)
3 = pseudo-meaningful alphanumerics
4 = Old school. Strictly vanilla.
5 = roll again
6 = roll again

F. Setting
1 = Japanese urban
2 = Other urban (aka not Japanese)
3 = Space (but no leaving the solar system!)
4 = Virtual reality ( but remember: just cuz anything goes, try to stay in genre. It ain’t cyberpunk if everyone is suddenly a fucking hobbit.)
5 = roll again
6 = roll again

G. Word Length
1 = 50 (crazy!) or roll again
2 = 100 (macho)
3 = 250
4 = 500 (comfy)
5 = 1000 (attention taxing) or roll again
6 = roll again