IMAGE:The Setting Sun by artificialdesign









“Against a backdrop of architectural extremes stands Celeste Charming, bisecting the sunlight in a massive east-facing office nearly a mile above the ground. Platinum-coloured pixie cut. Ivory skin. Shoulders rolled back, setting her chest at odds with the tight crème bodice dress that falls at two different lengths, longer in the front than in the back. She sways as she chews through her delivery, spitting ex cathedra into the face of another woman, shorter with a defeated posture—an underling of some kind; likely an assistant given her devotional nodding and agenda-sequencing finger twists.

The jingle of spurs alerts Oni to a beak-hooded figure behind her. He heels past her sporting a Cro-Magnon gait, cracking his knuckles, and wheezing into a respirator. Beneath his camo-patterned scarves, he is otherwise draped in orange and black fabric with spidersilk interwoven. Armour bulges through the gaps. His hips are significantly sloped; either arthritis from a lifetime of boot dentistry or augmentation. For a violent artifact like this—ostensibly yanked from another era—to be permitted to walk freely in Celeste’s office, he must be exceptional at his craft, and judging from his attire and age, he has been exceptional for quite some time.

“You killed Jin Koybashi. You murdered him—a good man,” Oni yells, white-hot with anger.

The beaked hood pinches Oni’s shoulder. His scarves unravel into the assault, revealing a bulbous nose and a cratered face. His eyes aren’t his own. They are implants: red lenses encircled black, set in a rotary plate pulling information that would normally get lost in the vitreous. They fix on Oni, and spin. He growls and turns back to face Celeste.

Oni struggles in her bindings, but even her robotic strength is insufficient to break the magnetic clasps around her wrists. With her eyesight almost fully returned, she scans the room for objects and exits that might provide an alternative to whatever it is Celeste has in store for her.

Shushing her unconfident confidant with a limp finger, Celeste turns and curls the same finger, summoning the beaked hood closer. He nods, steps back to grab Oni, and drags his captive across cold white marble towards a chair at the centre of the room, positioned beside a small holo-tabletop projecting weightless cherry blossoms. Kicking, Oni overturns the tabletop, vaporizing the homage to natural Himalayan beauty.

The beaked hood smacks Oni across the face with a gloved hand, and throws her into the chair. Sensing more resistance, he forces her to fit the chair’s form with a shove, all the while ignoring her grunts and quiet gasps.

“Skyr, Dr. Matsui, I’ll be with you both in a moment,” Outland’s godlike CEO assures Oni and the beaked hood.

Neither the wait nor the appointment hinge on Oni’s wants, needs, or desires. If Gibson’s annotation was correct, and Celeste was in fact “the mark,” Oni resents him now for having missed it.



Something besides Oni is out of place in this surgically clean office: a bloody metal apparatus on Celeste’s desk. Oni winces to train her vision and to determine what it is. Recognizing the design, she immediately regrets sating her curiosity. Dripping blood on this Outland altar: an implant and a second-generation augmentation tree fused to a spinal column and brain.

“Let me go,” demands Oni.

The beak-hooded mercenary Celeste identified as Skyr overhears her, and grips her shoulder again. This time, he thumbs her clavicle, making her entire frame slacken under a regime of remarkable pain. Unfastening his respirator, he issues a gravelly command: “Best shut the fuck up, fugee.” Again, he forces her into the chair—so hard that Oni’s legs splay and jut further out making her look like she has melted.

“Let me go or kill me,” says Oni. Blood and spittle fork from her bottom lip. She gulps blood to squeeze out her loathing: “I want nothing to do with Outland. Fools and brutes.”

Skyr cracks a devious grin and looks to Celeste for direction. Celeste gives none.

Oni looks past Skyr’s gnarled fabrics to the city framed behind him, stretching to as far as the PIT’s mountain ramparts. The city looks like black mold caked onto an old motherboard. C-Blocks rise above the toxic crowding like stripped capacitors charged by angry dissidents. They’re impressive, the C-Blocks; especially the few trapped in the PIT by and behind the Partition Wall.

Among the C-Blocks stacked PIT-side, one in particular stands out. Unlike its ilk, sinking in a necrotic sea of interlaced skyscrapers and defunct highways, the Chrysalis, so-called, resists the rot. It is no Citadel to be sure, but it’s as good as the PIT will come to a relative. Hex Akbari, an ally from the old days, lords over the Chrysalis, or he did around the time of Oni’s first spat with the Outland Corporation.



Does Akbari return her desperate stare? What does he see? An empire on the brink of collapse? Or a tower extending higher and higher into space, casting a lasting shadow over a conquered humanity?

Midlevel around the Chrysalis stretch the old refugee housing complexes: windowed boxes clinging like barnacles to structures whose original shape none alive can recall. The erosive tide sweeping in carries with it a froth of drones and disease. It chases the cabins higher and carves bays into the surrounding slum towers.

While the solar-paneled rooftops are bright, beaming second-hand sunrays into Oni’s bruised and tired face, the streets anchored hundreds of storeys below are not. What kind of darkness exists beneath the uneven surface? Doubtful Celeste has any idea. The Outland magnate does, however, know quite well the cost of keeping such hellish congestion and decay out of Los Angeles proper, as well as the need to minimize the amount of grazers on this greener side.”

[ARCHETYPAL - 2nd DRAFT EXCERPT - GUY FAUX BOOKS 2016]