Short fiction from the pen of Bob Lock. A touch of cyberpunk with the dormant pixie of pixels.

The Pixelated Pixie.

by Bob Lock

'Trodes slapped on. Enclosed within faux-leather womb, his eyes flutter and close. Just jacked in, with Sony booted up, running hot and ready. A flesh artefact in a sepulchre of electronics. Cooling fan whirls into life as micro-bearings whine in protest. Down the pipe-line he falls into a black data-highway. Feedback hits him.

Jake, no longer imprisoned by an enfeebled body, gifted to him by a pathogenic quirk in his genes, flexes a cyberspace hand. Turns down the gain whilst digitised eyes watch nodes fly past. He is ever aware she might dwell within. Jake glances at their signature and then glides on. An epinephrine high, born from excitement not fear, flares a warning. He selects a mild sedative. Registers an electronic mosquito's kiss as his 'rack' obliges him with a transcutaneous hit.

Junctions now. He chooses one he knows well. Crashes through weak firewalls that crumble effortlessly, then reaches Byzantine database and his desire. She waits as if sleeping. Brina, his dormant pixie of pixels.

Like a ciphered kiss, Jake feeds her a squirt of code. She awakens. A pixie princess to greet her prince. She rises, a kaleidoscope of swirling pixels, coalescing into an image of chromatic purity. Subcutaneous 'trodes tingle his groin as the pixie pouts her lips. Brina's skin is the colour of coffee. Jake smiles when her binary fragrance catches his sensory-enhanced awareness. Brina's body flows to his side as they hot-dog a streamer to their favourite construct. A honeymoon haven of delight, conjured by his imagination and dreams. A place he knows all too well that his ruined corporeal self could never visit.

Then watching the sunset on a planet not yet fully formed, they count the stars he sprinkles across the darkening sky, a tapestry woven by his volition. Teasing him, Brina and Jake run naked through lakes of cool mercury.

She allows him to capture her and as they make love on shores of powdered diamond, two become one, in mind, body and electronic soul.

Adorations drip from his mouth. They cascade like tinkling bells around her feet. His whispered words of love are a statement unheard before. Although perturbed by his worship, she accepts it with a sigh.

Later, quietly lying on grass grown from his will, Jake traces the shape of her perfect hip with his virtual hand. She turns and smiles, but now with teeth of glass.

Her eyes bore through to his mind, grasping the thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus and pituitary gland, gradually attempting to suppress his emotions.

With panic, he kicks out. He strives to push her back. She transforms. His love no more but a security program that has found him at last.

His autonomic reflexes over-ridden, he tries in vain to jack-out.

Jake's physical eyes open in wonder. The state of pleasure, of overwhelming love, transforms to harrowing pain and desperate fear. Whilst Brina, the database defence system, increases his heartbeat to a rate he can never survive. She fulfils her objective and the meaning of her Celtic name, Protector. A precious gem of liquid diamond. A tear, a conjunction of virtual jewel and a tangible, salt-laden liquid, runs down his cheek.

Pain receptors overloaded, he dies in both worlds.

She, his love, the centre of his universe, smiles a smile of digital satisfaction.

Then, in a timeframe only discernible by a machine-mind, she returns to her pixel palace. Strange notions, far exceeding her program parameters, assail her as she drops into digital somnolence. Why do all her princes die? Was this one really in love or just in lust?

A picosecond passes and across the world, one more hot-dogger jacks in.

Another hacker with an appointment to keep, a pixie to meet, but once again through the clandestine use of corporate machinery.

Yet one more possibility for the pixelated pixie to break another heart.

end

(c) Bob Lock 2006 all rights reserved

Bob Lock was born in Gower, Wales in 1949. He is married to Anna and has two grown children and two grandchildren. He has been fascinated with SF/fantasy/horror stories since the late 1960s when he first read Bester's 'The Stars My Destination'. It inspired him to put pen to paper and write himself. Lock has been published in a couple of horror anthologies which contain stories by writers such as Steve Lockley, Andy Cox, Brian Stableford, Ramsey Campbell and Guy N Smith.

He also has a number of poems published in a couple of anthologies and a non-fiction historical piece in Medieval History Magazine. At present, he is writing two novels and compiling a collection of his short-stories.