Cyberpunk

Imprint is cyberpunk flash fiction about Axel and Max taking their relationship to the next level via a bio connection. This dark, disruptive, sci-fi micro-story is part of Anomaly: Year One from Shacklebound Books.

The idea for the story came to me while I was writing Neon Edge, a cyberpunk novel, during the pandemic. Genre always draws me in, from watching Blade Runner many times to the dusty ethos of Mad Max and reading authors like Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, and William S. Burroughs. Drive-in films also had their effect, with features like Johnny Mnemonic, Cyborg, and Crime Zone.

Neon Edge came about after finishing an early draft of my teenage memoir, where I focused on my relationship with my best friend and life in a punk underworld. The sense of youthful adventure transported over to my cyberpunk novel. I thought about what it would be like if the characters of my adolescence never truly grew up and were in their thirties in an apocalyptic world still doing crazy stuff. What if they stumbled upon something that could change their lives? How would that play out in a world of deviant technology and the depravity of those left behind? Neon Edge became a fast-paced journey where they have no one to trust except each other.

Early influences date back to July 1990. When I had my car wreck, the surgeons put a titanium plate and screws into my upper right arm, reconstructing it. The surgery scar is over my bicep, turning to the side at the bend of my elbow. Twenty-one staples sealed it like a railroad track, one for each year of the legal birthday I hadn’t met. I was nineteen, and the impact changed my life. It took better than a year to use my arm again. First, I had to straighten it out. The radial and ulnar nerves were severed, and I was told that they would slowly grow back about an inch a month. I would take off the sling and let my arm hang as I swung on the tall swings at the park in the dead of night. One thought kept returning: cyberpunk.

Around mid-September of that year, I became obsessed with the film Hardware, seeing it multiple times in the theater. The dystopian escapism haunted me. I related to the character Mo for having a cybernetic arm and Shades for his spaciness and need to escape. Even in its R-rated version, the film fascinated me.

Time went by, and I wrote in different genres. I had finished a draft of my memoir when the pandemic struck. We were living in Washington, DC, probably the craziest place to be at that time. With the curfews, riots, and military checkpoints with armed guards, the city felt like how I imagined Eastern Europe in the 1980s as a teenager. Trapped indoors, in a terrible apartment with only a view of an industrial-style courtyard, I felt the urge to create. Dystopian influences filled my mind, and I went full throttle into writing a cyberpunk manuscript.

Both of my cyberpunk stories were influenced by all of those things. Imprint is about boyfriends leveling up their relationship, while Neon Edge is about best friends, one gay and one straight, and how that doesn’t matter in dystopia.

Below is the synopsis for the unreleased novel.

Neon Edge

Edgerunners Cade and Frost, cool aces with no future, are just looking for a thrill. Caught stealing a shuttlecraft, they discover a set of encrypted data dice, offering them a chance to escape a dying world.

2070: Growing up in the aftermath of a meteor striking the moon, Cade Streif and Frost Tybor live on an Earth ruled under a fractured police state where resources are mined for the off-world colonies. Separated in a crash in the flooded, dead city of New York, they must find a way to reunite and unlock the secrets of the dice hidden in the shuttlecraft.

On the run, Frost returns to the streets of Terra City, where they grew up, to enlist the help of a badge, aware he is under surveillance. Cade is captured by wraiths and locked up in Zed 10, an ocean prison, and has to trust his cellmate to break him out. Both aces are determined to find each other and the dice. The owner of the shuttlecraft, Möbius, is also searching for the dice and contracts a bioroid bounty hunter to track them.

An antigravity disc chase and a maglev train ride to a fight club lead to a convergence at the Mark 13 junkyard, where they are unsure of whom to trust or which promises to keep except to each other. The data hints at a way to reset their SINs (system identification numbers) and cybernetic upgrades for Frost’s atomic heart and Cade’s synthetic arm—a way to be free. The danger lies in the encryption of the dice and the power it gives to whoever wields it.

Encountering rogues of all sorts, Cade and Frost flee across the Wasteland to New Hades, an underground city with an off-world launchpad, in hopes of unlocking the nu-tech secrets, escaping into the big dark, and finding something more than a thrill.

Dean Cade