Brooklyn '97
🏠 BROOKLYN '97 TRANSMISSION
READY
Ayyyy, Brooklyn!
Summer '97.
A few months back, we lost Biggie Smalls, and the whole city still feels like it's walking with a limp.
Wu-Tang Forever just dropped though, feels like it's putting back a little pep in our step.
Half the block is rattling windows, Triumph blastin' from every battered boombox. Yeah, it's a real battle for the Soul out here.
Up Manhattan way, Giuliani and his goons are out there "cleaning up" the streets, kicking out the squeegee men, bulldozing the peep shows, putting a fresh coat of beige on Times Square.
Their friggin' grandmotha's should suck eggs.
So nu. This is friggin' Brooklyn, babe.
Everybody I know is lining up to see that new Men in Black movie. Maybe I call up Charlene, see if she wants to catch it. Nah. Who am I kiddin'? Charlene don't wanna see me no more.
I mean, fuhchrisesakes, look at my so-called "life," eh? Fuhgeddaboudit! No matter how much Febreze I spray, the whole apartment still reeks of off-brand soy sauce, kitty litter, and existential dread.
What gives? I don't even eat Chinese on account of the MSG, and I ain't owned a cat since Dinkins was mayor.
Too bad too, I love the little furballs, but with my allergies? I'd end up in the friggin' hospital.
Oy vey. Maybe existential dread is the last, honest aroma left around here.
Yeah, my cousin Gina breezes in reekin' of Newports, ranting about how the city's turning into a giant mall and how the guys down at Nathan's are swapping out the mustard for some California bullshit. She's got a fresh blowout and, as always, a mouth that don't quit.
"Mark my words," she's kvetching, "You give it five years? Nobody'll even remember what the fuck a bodega is. They're gonna turn the city into one big-ass Banana Republic."
I nod along, only half listening, flipping through a crumpled Village Voice I found on the Q train. Something about Dolly the Sheep, something about Clinton and some intern, something about how they're turning Coney Island into a "family-friendly destination?"
Like hell they are.
Eh, that's just great too; so much for the hustle. I mean, sure, there's always gonna be some market for fake IDs, but its sounding like this Fiorello-wannabe jabroni is makin' a serious dent in my roll, and I doubts Gina keeps risking her exalted position down there at the DMV if all's I'm racking up on my end 's a few Friday night delinquents and the occasional paranoid schizophrenic.
Gina's still going.
"Betcha they're puttin' LSD in the tap water," she says, pouring herself a cranberry Arbor Mist, the only thing she'll drink. "That's how come everyone's so… so docile. You ever notice that? Huh?"
She takes a long drag, eyes darting to the pigeons on the fire escape.
They coo in unison. Low. Guttural. A sound that's just a little too synchronized. A little too Red Army Chorus for my liking. It's been happening a lot lately.
"You think it's the pigeons that's crazy? How about them Mets?"
Jesus.
I rub my temples.
I gotta get outta here.
I slip an MTA token in my pocket (still ain't used to them MetroCard bullshits), take one last look at the stale pizza on my counter (could probably build low-income housing outta that crust), and I start makin' my way to Coney Island.
Coney Island
🎢 CONEY ISLAND TRANSMISSION
READY
Coney Island in the Summer:
The sand is hot enough to fry a knish, the boardwalk's creaky as hell, and some guy in a tank top that says "BOSS OF ALL BOSSES" is screaming at a claw machine like it owes him money.
There's a kid crying.
There's always a kid crying.
I weave through the boardwalk chaos, past the fortune tellers and the knockoff Oakley vendors, past a guy who's either selling hot dogs or running a numbers game, or both, maybe. My brain says I should go hit the Cyclone first, ya know, let my bones realign themselves through some high-velocity chiropractic adjustment, but my gut says otherwise.
My gut says something's off.
The arcades are mostly the same as they've always been. Sticky floors, busted air conditionin', cigarette burns on the cabinets. A small congregation of teenagers hovers around Tekken 3, throwing around some insults that'd make their grandmothers faint silly, but there's something different here.
Something... weird.
The Machine
It's in the back corner, where the light don't hardly reach.
Literally, there's a whole string of half-dead bulbs above it, flickering just enough to make it look like this thing exists in some slightly different dimension.
No marquee. No branding.
Just a plain black cabinet with a glowing start button.
I don't even see nowhere for the quarters to go.
Shit, I think this baby is free play!
I steps a little closer.
The screen flickers and what not…
NepoCorp
🏢 NEPOCORP TRANSMISSION
READY
Normally, I wouldn't be caught dead in a place like this. Hell, I barely leave Brooklyn, fuchristsakes. But here I am, standing in the belly of some finance dooshbags's wet dream, a grotesque monument to complete and utter bullshit.
It's all sleek suits and terrible art, a shrine to excess and small dick compensation, where wannabe executives bark into Nokias like they're negotiating the fate of the free world, when really they're just trying to expense another steakhouse lunch.
These people live off stress, cocaine, and quarterly projections.
I do not belong here.
I know it. They know it.
But wouldn't you know it,
I got a cousin who works security.
It's funny how easy it is to get into places like this when the right people are doing the wrong things.
For my cousin, its a pretty good gig. Not that the rent-a-cop gig itself makes from peanuts; but his real dough comes from slinging yayo to the junior Gekkos what can't cope wit' the stress of working the 80-hour weeks just so's to inflate some Harvard dickhead's bottom line.
So I tells cousin Neil I got some "business" to take care of downstairs, and he barely looks up from his Playboy. He just swipes his badge, mutterin' "Don't get me fired, ya mook", and lets me right into the executive elevator.
---
Ding!
The doors open onto Sub-Level 50, and everything changes.
No more corporate "art." No more networking weasels in cufflinks.
Down here, it's all cinderblock walls and flickering fluorescents.
A server room is purrin' static down the hall, racks on racks filled with outdated beige towers.
NepoCorp ain't a tech company, but I bet they got enough offshore shell companies and SEC-dodging schemes to justify keeping a black hole like this running.
The Terminal
It sits in the corner of some kinda data containment room.
Good old DOS. No branding, no logo. Just a single 'C' prompt in the corner of the screen.
This thing belongs here as much as I do: bupkis.
Everything else in the room is standard corporate junk—locked filing cabinets, dot-matrix printouts, a whiteboard with a cartoon doodle of a schlong.
Somehow, somebody got into NepoCorp's infrastructure and carved out a little space for themselves. A little backdoor or what have you. Kudos.
Okay, here it is, let's see if I can remember that password...
Brighton Beach
🌊 BRIGHTON BEACH TRANSMISSION
READY
Brighton Beach, Baby!
Soon as I get to Little Odessa, I find a pay phone and ring Charlene.
No answer. No matter.
Somehow I know exactly where she is, like I'd been there before. I mean, of course I been there, lotsa times, but this feels more like one a them psycho-spiritual, instinctual sorta situations.
When I get there, the boardwalk is almost empty. It's night now, and it should feel peaceful, but nah. It feels like somethin's waiting to happen...or like something already happened, and I just missed it.
Sure as shit, there's Charlene, standin' at the railing, starin' at the ocean. She don't turn around for nothin' when I walk up. Just pulls out a cig, taps the pack, and lights up.
"Took you long enough."
I step up beside her, hands in my pockets.
"Ay, Charlene. Listen, if you don't wanna tell me what's going on it's whatever, okay? I just wanna make sure ya gonna be alright, ya know?"
She exhales, waiting for the smoke to disappear into the wind.
"What do you know?"
"Shit, not from much, just some weird crap about some dead commies or whatever, something about 'Red Echo' or somethin'? I mean, I don't usually pay no mind to that conspiracy crap, you know I got Gina with her bullshit, so I'm pretty desensitized or what have you, but I do know some weird shit's tracing back to you and it seems kinda heavy. I'm out here thinkin' like, who is this broad? Foxy Trotsky? You know I'm no judge, right? You can tell me anything. And shit, if you're thinking about getting into some trouble, hey, I'm down for that too, babe, it's just it's easier for me to helps out if I know..."
She looks at me with the saddest smile, the most beautiful, most saddest eyes I have ever seen.
"I'm so sorry you got mixed up in this, Chaimi."
"Eh? I don't know, I mean I pulled some shit, but I don't think nobody knows from nothin'."
"We're all mixed up in it," she corrects herself.
"Oh okay, you mean like in a philosophical sorta way…"
"No, Chaimi, it's all very real, very tangible danger--I want to tell you, I want to tell the world, but--"
"Tell me what, Charlene?"
She sighs, looks around, and then, outta nowhere, laughs.
"Come on, let's go down to the beach. I'll tell you everything."
---
The Ocean.
We leave the boardwalk and head down to the sand.
The ocean stretches out in front of us, a black sheet swallowing the glow of the city. The neon signs, the streetlights, they all get eaten by it, like the water just absorbed all history.
Charlene kicks off her shoes, lets her toes sink into the wet sand. She lights another cigarette, the flame flickering against the wind.
That's when she tells me.
She tells me everything.
Red Echo ain't just some online ghost story.
It ain't just old Cold War paranoia rattling around in the heads of guys who still think Russia gives a shit about them. The Soviet Union never collapsed. It just changed shape.
They figured out that wars don't need battlefields. That control is easier when people don't even realize they're being controlled. No flags, no standing army. Just banks, corporations, governments. The world never stopped being theirs. They just made sure nobody noticed.
And we, me, her, everybody:
we all been a part of it since the day we were born.
She tells me about the chips, the ones they put in us before we could even walk. Not some sci-fi metal implant bullshit, but something built into us at the genetic level, mapped out in a way nobody questions.
You ever wonder why they track births so carefully?
Why a person ain't real till the right paperwork's filed? It ain't for record-keeping. It's for indexing.
And then she tells me about the Bay of Pigs virus.
That's the part that makes my stomach drop.
The virus ain't meant to kill.
It ain't meant to destroy.
It's worse than that. It resets you.
Anytime someone gets too close, anytime the wrong people start asking the right questions, Red Echo don't gotta send hit squads or cover things up. They just roll you back.
Push your consciousness back anywhere within the last 24 hours. A complete overwrite. No memory, no trace. You wake up, go about your day, and never realize you've been here before.
She don't know how much time we got. Could be an hour. Could be a minute. Could be happening right now.
And Charlene, she's already past it. She tried to fight it. Screamed the truth into every corner of the internet, sent files to journalists, tried to wake people up.
Nobody cared.
Nobody wanted to.
The system don't just erase people:
it erases the need for them to be erased in the first place.
---
At this point I feel like I should say somethin'. Some kinda rebuttal, some kinda fight-back instinct should be kickin' in right about now.
But it ain't.
I just stare at her.
"So that's it?" My voice comes out rough, like I swallowed gravel.
"You're just givin' up?"
She don't flinch, don't get mad. She don't snap back at me the way she used to when we was kids arguing over dumb shit, back before all this.
"I tried, Chaimi. I really did."
She don't look at me. She just stares out at the water, arms folded like she's cold, even though I know it ain't just the wind.
"I tried screamin' it from every rooftop I could. The press. The forums. I hacked into databases, I pulled files, I did everything I could to shake people awake. And you know what happened?"
She laughs, but it ain't a happy laugh.
"Nothin'."
She turns to me then, and I see it in her face,
the kind of tired that don't go away with sleep.
"Nobody cared. Nobody wanted to. The world don't need assassins anymore, Chaimi. It don't need hit squads or black-bag kidnappings. It just needs you to be too distracted, too comfortable, too stuck in your own routine to ever notice somethin's wrong."
I swallow, my mouth dry as hell.
"So what do we do?"
She exhales, slowly.
"Nothin'."
"Wait."
"What?"
"That's it. I got it. That's how we take them down. That's how we prove it. Charlene, baby, it...ah babe, I swear I must be a friggin' genius!"
"Chaimi! Tell me! What do we do?"
"Alright check it out. Alls we gotta do is--"
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