From The Desk

  Sorrow is a stealthy thing.  It will rear its head at strange times, at random occasions in the middle of the day. Something unrelated will occur and it will set into motion a chain of thoughts that will peel open scabs on the soul and the next thing you know your soul is leaking like a sieve.  The pain that you compartmentalized and filed away in that "Raiders of the Lost Ark" style warehouse in the back of your mind is suddenly brought back up to the forefront of your thoughts and you are missing everything and everyone you've ever lost.  You realize how empty the world is getting regardless of how crowded it is becoming.  You almost hate yourself for ever caring about anyone enough to ever miss them when they are gone.  But you remind yourself that regardless of how epically painful it is,  losing those who anchor themselves to our souls, it is an honor and an absolute joy to have had a noble and true blue handful of good people who saw past your ...

  A excerpt from "The Reactor City Stories", a collection of cyberpunk tales I've been working on. ____________ ... In the corner booth a couple of scrappers were looking at Deep Web footage of the combat along the Mississippi, on a half broken holo-tablet. A young woman, no older than 25, was nervously trying to flirt with an old timer, her awkward attempts told me she was new to the prostitution game. This was a scene repeated time and again in countless bars and taverns in the dirtiest corners of New Baltimore, more "lovingly " known as Reactor City. J.W. swished his drink around, looking down into it, staring through it into his own past.  The screen above the bar was streaming the recycled news feed from the last 6 hours, reports on the riots, the fires, the food shortages, and the acts of desperate men. J.W. never even looked up at it   He had certainly had enough propaganda and government approved sensory input. "We're all desperate men. Every on...