[Arashi] [Cyberpunk!AU] Open Your Eyes (1)
[Title] Open Your Eyes (1)
[Author] honooko
[Rating] PG13 here, probably R later on.
[Notes] Cyberpunk!AU. Blame kitsch_brigade, who has sworn she will draw me a picture for every single chapter. Title stolen from a Snow Patrol song.
Nino crouched with his ear pressed to the cold steel, turning the knob smoothly until he felt a tiny twitch, a minute click, under his fingers. Grinning, he pulled out the inner panel as soon as the safe door popped open. 47 keys, 5 keys per key-code, 235 possible combinations. The task would be impossible to finish in under three minutes for anyone else; but Nino wasn’t the best at this for nothing.
The target was a middle-aged man with a daughter he doted on. Her name was Karen. Assigning numbers to the letters in Roman characters, you’d get…
11, 1, 18, 5, 14.
The panel hissed softly in his hands, and he removed the lump of paper inside gingerly, tucking it into the hidden pocket of his vest, zipping it up to his throat. Just a short beat later and the safe was back in the state it had been in before he’d gotten there. He didn’t bother wiping anything down; he hadn’t had fingerprints since he was 13 anyway.
Nobody in the Underground did anymore. The few babies born had their prints burned off by their parents now to protect them. It’s hard to identify someone with no physical identity.
Nino made it to the window without incident, Aiba’s skates working better than he would have expected of one of his friend’s gadgets. They rolled silently and Aiba had sworn up and down that they would, with enough momentum, let him skate up a vertical surface. Nino had yet to test this hypothesis for fear he’d end up with his head smashed in; Aiba had not provided a helmet.
Then, at the corner of his awareness, Nino heard a tiny, almost imperceptible ‘twang’, followed by a soft buzz. He froze, focusing entirely on the sound.
“Fuck,” he muttered. The detection System had caught him and was transmitting. He had two options; he could shut the System down, or he could run for it. Shutting it down would only draw more attention to his presence here; Systems didn’t just stop, and the Force was paying attention now.
Running it was. He longed for the days when it could all be blamed on a stray cat, but the Ment had banned animals in the city seven years ago.
Nino flipped his hand over, exposing his wrist. A small display lit up, tiny dots blinking across a grid. Red, he determined. Maybe that wasn’t the real name for the color, but that was the one he’d decided must be red. He stood by his belief that this display was the best invention Aiba had ever come up with; the Ment tracked the Force with their own signals and with this tracker, he could see them coming by tapping into the Ment’s own network.
The idiots never kept track of how many people were watching.
The Force didn’t use flashing lights and sirens. They didn’t need to; people got out of their way, or they were arrested too. No resistance, no excuses. They would be upon you before you’d had a chance to breathe.
Time to test the skates, Nino thought as he pulled down his goggles, planted his feet on the outside wall and pushed.
Dropping down seventeen stories on wheels was no mean feat, and for a moment Nino wondered how, exactly, he would transition from vertical to horizontal without shattering his femurs. But then his wrist display flashed ‘VERY DANGER!!!’ at him at the same time as the rear of the skates let out a short jet burst, taking him off the wall and forward to the flat ground.
“Well,” Nino said after a pause. “That’s... unexpectedly convenient.”
Continuing to skate was the key. If he stopped for any amount of time, the chances of being caught would skyrocket. The Force was good at what they did; three dots tattooed above his right eyebrow were testament to that. Each one stood for a time he hadn’t managed to get away in time.
Nino really didn’t want a fourth; it would upset the attractive balance on his face, he felt. But as he rounded a corner into the City Limits proper, he drew up short in front of a huge black wall. Or at least, it had been black.
Now, it was covered in color. Nearly a full two stories, the graffiti crawled up the surface of the wall, images pressed together tightly like the artist had too much to say in too little space. Every color was laid on bright and thick and transitioned as smoothly as a blink. It was breathtaking.
He wanted to stay here and try to name every color he saw. At least half of them he’d never seen before in his life, and considering how quickly the Ment crushed any signs like these of rebellion, he probably never would get a chance again.
Some twenty-odd years ago, right around the same time the Ment stopped being a good thing for the city and started being “an irrepressible fucking dictatorship” (as Jun had put it), they’d banned color. Not many people could see it anyway; some medical cure back in the early 2020s had color-blindness as a side effect, one that carried on somehow. Nino wasn’t sure of the details; all he knew was that people who could see it were arrested. The Ment didn’t stop using color though; the Force uniforms for example were a bright color Nino had decided was orange. The very rich and very powerful were allowed to wear color within reason; the Ment rewarded their loyalty with fashion freedoms, apparently.
But the mural could only have been done by someone who could see it. And Nino realized with a start that he had no idea who that could be.
His wrist flashed at him again, reminding him that dawdling was a very bad idea, and he took off again into the darkness, around the crumbling hunks of concrete that made up the City Limits. All the less-than-loyal lived here, hiding in the pockets that the Force couldn’t find.
Nino had been born here; his mother had died here. The Limits were more home than anywhere else.
~
“Damnit,” the squad leader swore. “Little rat was right here, there’s scorch marks on the wall.”
“Following that trajectory, he’d have gone right around here, Sir!” a helpful newbie chirped. Newbies were like that; trying to overlook the part where they’d signed their lives away for a moderate promise of exemption.
The squad rounded the corner, and it was all Ohno could do not to wince. He’d been here hours ago, before he was called on duty.
“…Get rid of it,” the leader said, his voice soft and dangerous. “Now.”
Ohno remembered smearing the paint across the wall, feeling the paint with his fingers and drowning in the colors. He never wore his eyeglass lens when he was painting; it tinted not just his right eye (blue and gifted with color sight) into a safe, colorblind brown, but also made everything he looked at a sad shade of amber. Even the Force’s obnoxious orange jumpsuits were dulled into a boring dirt tone.
Looking at his mural as the squad rubbed it down with acid, Ohno felt the tiniest bit of relief that at least someone had seen it before it was gone.
~
Nino presented his prize to Jun back in the bar with a grin, panting hard and bracing himself on his knees from the run. Jun ran his hands over the cover, carefully opening it to confirm the contents were as expected.
“The first volume of Dragon Ball,” Jun said reverently. “I’ve never seen one before.”
“That’s it, right? That’s what we were supposed to get?” Nino said, with just a hint of hesitancy. Jun looked up, nodding and closing the book, tucking it into his apron pocket. Nino never had figured out what happened to things after Jun got them; they eventually went to the people who’d asked for them, but the journey was something of a mystery.
Jun ran the local bar in the City Limits. Here, a group of resistance fighters held out, calling themselves the Underground in reference to their tendency to live in places without windows. Jun’s bar was a meeting place for anyone and everyone, but nothing he did was noticeably illegal, and so the Force had no good reason to venture into the Limits and shut him down.
It was called simple ‘The Place’, something Jun had picked specifically because no one could directly mention it without being vague. It’s location was known almost purely by word of mouth, and that suited all the patrons perfectly.
“Everything went okay?” Jun asked, grabbing a glass and pouring Nino some iced tea.
“Well… I may have set off the System.”
“You what?!”
“But I got away!” Nino added quickly, instinctively ducking Jun’s swat. “Nobody saw me!”
“As relieved as I am to hear that,” Jun drawled. “You’re getting sloppy.”
“I’m getting to old for this, that’s all,” Nino shrugged with a grin. Jun twitched; he was two months younger than Nino, both a youthful twenty-two. Aiba had them beat by a year at twenty-three, although mentally he gave the air of someone quite a bit younger.
As if summoned by the barb, Aiba appeared out of the back. One side of his hair was sticking straight up, and he held a sack in one hand that was smoking… and wiggling.
“Jun!” Aiba declared brightly as soon as his eyes settled on his target. “I’ve got a present for you!”
“Oh. Um,” Jun said, looking at the bag and recoiling at the thought of having to touch it. Nino snickered gleefully into one hand.
“You seemed kind of stressed lately so I thought maybe if you had a pet or something? Did you know petting a cat or dog for twenty minutes a day lowers your blood pressure? I read it in one those old magazines you’ve got filed away!” Aiba informed them, putting one finger in the air in an ‘educator’ pose.
“Aiba-chan,” Nino reminded gently. “Animals aren’t allowed.”
“Right!” Aiba agreed. “That’s why I made you this!”
Reaching into the sack (and tossing it to the floor as Jun let out a strangled noise) Aiba pulled out what looked like a very ugly, very dirty throw pillow from the late 1970s. Beaming, Aiba tucked it in his elbow and stroked it deliberately, and the pillow gave a low, gargley sort of rumble.
“It purrs! See? Like a cat!” Aiba explained, holding it out to Jun with the pride of someone presenting the queen with a new gown. Jun twitched.
“Awww, that’s so sweet of you Aiba-chan!” Nino chirped, enjoying Jun’s expressions of conflict. “Go ahead, Jun, you try petting it too!”
“Er. Thanks,” Jun said, attempting a smile and only managing a grimace with teeth. He took the pillow gingerly, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, and stroking it with the tip of his other index. The pillow gargled happily, and Aiba shouted his victory.
“It’ll look lovely in your bed, Jun,” Nino said brightly, and Jun shot him a look of pure loathing.
~
Sho finished his conference call with the same genial smile he’d started it with; entirely charming and entirely fake. As the Ment’s pet Scholar, it was his job to remind them of everything they had ruined and destroyed, and tell them how to keep it from coming back. They’d been calling him more and more frequently of late, borrowing his extended Generational Memory to try and keep the citizens in line.
Honestly, it pissed him off.
Sho didn’t directly remember things before the Ment came into power. But his father had grown up pre-Ment, and raised him to appreciate, and most importantly, remember. Sho knew what the old countries were called, what languages they spoke and cultural mindsets they held. As a child, Sho had been fascinated by all these things, as they were practically fantasy worlds to a boy who had never, and would never, see them. But as he aged, Sho was struck by the anger that he was never given a chance to experience these cultures, locked out by the Ment on the pretense of protection.
When Sho was six, they banned all books except the ones written, published, and approved by the Ment itself. That was when he first started to understand why it was so important that he never forget.
But as a boy with knowledge, he held value to the Ment. Instead of imprisoning a rich and educated citizen, the Ment drew him up a contract as the exclusive benefiter from Sho’s genius. He’d signed knowing what it meant, just as well as he knew that if he was careful, he could continue as he always had without the Ment’s interference. And sure enough, he continued to learn and read and absorb, straight from the private, secret library his father had hidden away for him.
In the past year, Sho had started hearing rumors of an underground rebel movement, made of the last generation of pre-Ment citizens and their children, raised on native cultures and ideals. These people were living time capsules, determined to keep their story alive even under the hand of the oppressive government.
It was Sho’s greatest desire in life to meet these mysterious renegades and learn from them what it meant to keep fighting.
Chapter 2
[Author] honooko
[Rating] PG13 here, probably R later on.
[Notes] Cyberpunk!AU. Blame kitsch_brigade, who has sworn she will draw me a picture for every single chapter. Title stolen from a Snow Patrol song.
Nino crouched with his ear pressed to the cold steel, turning the knob smoothly until he felt a tiny twitch, a minute click, under his fingers. Grinning, he pulled out the inner panel as soon as the safe door popped open. 47 keys, 5 keys per key-code, 235 possible combinations. The task would be impossible to finish in under three minutes for anyone else; but Nino wasn’t the best at this for nothing.
The target was a middle-aged man with a daughter he doted on. Her name was Karen. Assigning numbers to the letters in Roman characters, you’d get…
11, 1, 18, 5, 14.
The panel hissed softly in his hands, and he removed the lump of paper inside gingerly, tucking it into the hidden pocket of his vest, zipping it up to his throat. Just a short beat later and the safe was back in the state it had been in before he’d gotten there. He didn’t bother wiping anything down; he hadn’t had fingerprints since he was 13 anyway.
Nobody in the Underground did anymore. The few babies born had their prints burned off by their parents now to protect them. It’s hard to identify someone with no physical identity.
Nino made it to the window without incident, Aiba’s skates working better than he would have expected of one of his friend’s gadgets. They rolled silently and Aiba had sworn up and down that they would, with enough momentum, let him skate up a vertical surface. Nino had yet to test this hypothesis for fear he’d end up with his head smashed in; Aiba had not provided a helmet.
Then, at the corner of his awareness, Nino heard a tiny, almost imperceptible ‘twang’, followed by a soft buzz. He froze, focusing entirely on the sound.
“Fuck,” he muttered. The detection System had caught him and was transmitting. He had two options; he could shut the System down, or he could run for it. Shutting it down would only draw more attention to his presence here; Systems didn’t just stop, and the Force was paying attention now.
Running it was. He longed for the days when it could all be blamed on a stray cat, but the Ment had banned animals in the city seven years ago.
Nino flipped his hand over, exposing his wrist. A small display lit up, tiny dots blinking across a grid. Red, he determined. Maybe that wasn’t the real name for the color, but that was the one he’d decided must be red. He stood by his belief that this display was the best invention Aiba had ever come up with; the Ment tracked the Force with their own signals and with this tracker, he could see them coming by tapping into the Ment’s own network.
The idiots never kept track of how many people were watching.
The Force didn’t use flashing lights and sirens. They didn’t need to; people got out of their way, or they were arrested too. No resistance, no excuses. They would be upon you before you’d had a chance to breathe.
Time to test the skates, Nino thought as he pulled down his goggles, planted his feet on the outside wall and pushed.
Dropping down seventeen stories on wheels was no mean feat, and for a moment Nino wondered how, exactly, he would transition from vertical to horizontal without shattering his femurs. But then his wrist display flashed ‘VERY DANGER!!!’ at him at the same time as the rear of the skates let out a short jet burst, taking him off the wall and forward to the flat ground.
“Well,” Nino said after a pause. “That’s... unexpectedly convenient.”
Continuing to skate was the key. If he stopped for any amount of time, the chances of being caught would skyrocket. The Force was good at what they did; three dots tattooed above his right eyebrow were testament to that. Each one stood for a time he hadn’t managed to get away in time.
Nino really didn’t want a fourth; it would upset the attractive balance on his face, he felt. But as he rounded a corner into the City Limits proper, he drew up short in front of a huge black wall. Or at least, it had been black.
Now, it was covered in color. Nearly a full two stories, the graffiti crawled up the surface of the wall, images pressed together tightly like the artist had too much to say in too little space. Every color was laid on bright and thick and transitioned as smoothly as a blink. It was breathtaking.
He wanted to stay here and try to name every color he saw. At least half of them he’d never seen before in his life, and considering how quickly the Ment crushed any signs like these of rebellion, he probably never would get a chance again.
Some twenty-odd years ago, right around the same time the Ment stopped being a good thing for the city and started being “an irrepressible fucking dictatorship” (as Jun had put it), they’d banned color. Not many people could see it anyway; some medical cure back in the early 2020s had color-blindness as a side effect, one that carried on somehow. Nino wasn’t sure of the details; all he knew was that people who could see it were arrested. The Ment didn’t stop using color though; the Force uniforms for example were a bright color Nino had decided was orange. The very rich and very powerful were allowed to wear color within reason; the Ment rewarded their loyalty with fashion freedoms, apparently.
But the mural could only have been done by someone who could see it. And Nino realized with a start that he had no idea who that could be.
His wrist flashed at him again, reminding him that dawdling was a very bad idea, and he took off again into the darkness, around the crumbling hunks of concrete that made up the City Limits. All the less-than-loyal lived here, hiding in the pockets that the Force couldn’t find.
Nino had been born here; his mother had died here. The Limits were more home than anywhere else.
~
“Damnit,” the squad leader swore. “Little rat was right here, there’s scorch marks on the wall.”
“Following that trajectory, he’d have gone right around here, Sir!” a helpful newbie chirped. Newbies were like that; trying to overlook the part where they’d signed their lives away for a moderate promise of exemption.
The squad rounded the corner, and it was all Ohno could do not to wince. He’d been here hours ago, before he was called on duty.
“…Get rid of it,” the leader said, his voice soft and dangerous. “Now.”
Ohno remembered smearing the paint across the wall, feeling the paint with his fingers and drowning in the colors. He never wore his eyeglass lens when he was painting; it tinted not just his right eye (blue and gifted with color sight) into a safe, colorblind brown, but also made everything he looked at a sad shade of amber. Even the Force’s obnoxious orange jumpsuits were dulled into a boring dirt tone.
Looking at his mural as the squad rubbed it down with acid, Ohno felt the tiniest bit of relief that at least someone had seen it before it was gone.
~
Nino presented his prize to Jun back in the bar with a grin, panting hard and bracing himself on his knees from the run. Jun ran his hands over the cover, carefully opening it to confirm the contents were as expected.
“The first volume of Dragon Ball,” Jun said reverently. “I’ve never seen one before.”
“That’s it, right? That’s what we were supposed to get?” Nino said, with just a hint of hesitancy. Jun looked up, nodding and closing the book, tucking it into his apron pocket. Nino never had figured out what happened to things after Jun got them; they eventually went to the people who’d asked for them, but the journey was something of a mystery.
Jun ran the local bar in the City Limits. Here, a group of resistance fighters held out, calling themselves the Underground in reference to their tendency to live in places without windows. Jun’s bar was a meeting place for anyone and everyone, but nothing he did was noticeably illegal, and so the Force had no good reason to venture into the Limits and shut him down.
It was called simple ‘The Place’, something Jun had picked specifically because no one could directly mention it without being vague. It’s location was known almost purely by word of mouth, and that suited all the patrons perfectly.
“Everything went okay?” Jun asked, grabbing a glass and pouring Nino some iced tea.
“Well… I may have set off the System.”
“You what?!”
“But I got away!” Nino added quickly, instinctively ducking Jun’s swat. “Nobody saw me!”
“As relieved as I am to hear that,” Jun drawled. “You’re getting sloppy.”
“I’m getting to old for this, that’s all,” Nino shrugged with a grin. Jun twitched; he was two months younger than Nino, both a youthful twenty-two. Aiba had them beat by a year at twenty-three, although mentally he gave the air of someone quite a bit younger.
As if summoned by the barb, Aiba appeared out of the back. One side of his hair was sticking straight up, and he held a sack in one hand that was smoking… and wiggling.
“Jun!” Aiba declared brightly as soon as his eyes settled on his target. “I’ve got a present for you!”
“Oh. Um,” Jun said, looking at the bag and recoiling at the thought of having to touch it. Nino snickered gleefully into one hand.
“You seemed kind of stressed lately so I thought maybe if you had a pet or something? Did you know petting a cat or dog for twenty minutes a day lowers your blood pressure? I read it in one those old magazines you’ve got filed away!” Aiba informed them, putting one finger in the air in an ‘educator’ pose.
“Aiba-chan,” Nino reminded gently. “Animals aren’t allowed.”
“Right!” Aiba agreed. “That’s why I made you this!”
Reaching into the sack (and tossing it to the floor as Jun let out a strangled noise) Aiba pulled out what looked like a very ugly, very dirty throw pillow from the late 1970s. Beaming, Aiba tucked it in his elbow and stroked it deliberately, and the pillow gave a low, gargley sort of rumble.
“It purrs! See? Like a cat!” Aiba explained, holding it out to Jun with the pride of someone presenting the queen with a new gown. Jun twitched.
“Awww, that’s so sweet of you Aiba-chan!” Nino chirped, enjoying Jun’s expressions of conflict. “Go ahead, Jun, you try petting it too!”
“Er. Thanks,” Jun said, attempting a smile and only managing a grimace with teeth. He took the pillow gingerly, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, and stroking it with the tip of his other index. The pillow gargled happily, and Aiba shouted his victory.
“It’ll look lovely in your bed, Jun,” Nino said brightly, and Jun shot him a look of pure loathing.
~
Sho finished his conference call with the same genial smile he’d started it with; entirely charming and entirely fake. As the Ment’s pet Scholar, it was his job to remind them of everything they had ruined and destroyed, and tell them how to keep it from coming back. They’d been calling him more and more frequently of late, borrowing his extended Generational Memory to try and keep the citizens in line.
Honestly, it pissed him off.
Sho didn’t directly remember things before the Ment came into power. But his father had grown up pre-Ment, and raised him to appreciate, and most importantly, remember. Sho knew what the old countries were called, what languages they spoke and cultural mindsets they held. As a child, Sho had been fascinated by all these things, as they were practically fantasy worlds to a boy who had never, and would never, see them. But as he aged, Sho was struck by the anger that he was never given a chance to experience these cultures, locked out by the Ment on the pretense of protection.
When Sho was six, they banned all books except the ones written, published, and approved by the Ment itself. That was when he first started to understand why it was so important that he never forget.
But as a boy with knowledge, he held value to the Ment. Instead of imprisoning a rich and educated citizen, the Ment drew him up a contract as the exclusive benefiter from Sho’s genius. He’d signed knowing what it meant, just as well as he knew that if he was careful, he could continue as he always had without the Ment’s interference. And sure enough, he continued to learn and read and absorb, straight from the private, secret library his father had hidden away for him.
In the past year, Sho had started hearing rumors of an underground rebel movement, made of the last generation of pre-Ment citizens and their children, raised on native cultures and ideals. These people were living time capsules, determined to keep their story alive even under the hand of the oppressive government.
It was Sho’s greatest desire in life to meet these mysterious renegades and learn from them what it meant to keep fighting.
Chapter 2