Free Ribofunk by Paul di Filippo

speech and thought patterns.
    Naturally there were lawsuits and, eventually, damages awarded. Each victim got ten thousand NU-dollars.
    I gave half to my mom. I’m sorry to say that she nulled the whole balance on a single trip to the tribal casinos at Second Mesa, without even enough left for the side excursion to the Grand Canyon by LED-zep that she had always wanted to take. I gave a thousand to my sister, Charmaine, and we all know how she spent hers. As for me, I was determined not to waste my share.
    Although before the incident I hadn’t really devoted much thought to getting out of the projex, afterwards I was really determined to make a life for myself, having seen the trouble that could come from lying around all day on the prole-dole just inhabiting virtuality. So I daleyed a minor city official and got my name illegally posted to the list of lottery-chosen prospects for CivServ jobs. With the remainder of the eft, I latched the black meds that allowed me to pass the aptitude test with a low grade. (I would have scored higher, but under the stress my essay came out rhymed, and they took off points.) Combined with my official disability status, the score got me my first-ever and still current job: humble Eater Feeder under the boss of our corps, Cengiz Ozturk.
    Who was going to be mighty pissed this morning if I was late again.
    So I poured Pioneer plantmilk over a bowl of Stressgen Supercereal and slurped it down. I slipped into my blue and gold CivServ Windskin uniform and was almost out the door of my fission-cee when a personal message with a high-priority code got past my filters and loudly interrupted the barely audible CNN feed.
    “Corby,” squawked the parrot, “this is your mother! I’m calling from home! Get over here right away, it’s your sister!”
    Before I could argue back that I’d be late for work if I did what she wanted and couldn’t she handle things herself, Mom had cut the connection, leaving me with no choice except to jump my rump to her bawl-call.
    I kicked a chair and started to swear, then I bolted down the stairs.
    On the intrametro train I cudgled my brain. What could have gone amiss with Sis?
    Before you could count from two to six, there I was at the gecekondu projex.
    The projex had been old when I was a tad; now they looked ancienter than Adam’s NAD. Unsmart buildings lined dingy streets; hustling nonfranches littered the plazas of grocrete. Each had a scam or a story to tell; a tale of woe or something to sell. Mutawins and hojats were on stroll-patrol, encountering vexy derision from babydolls with sexy sincisions. The scene was total jhuggi jopri, and all my troubled past flooded back on me. But I held my head high and walked on by. In blue and gold, now adult-old, I strode past the various hawkers proud and tall, showing them I didn’t belong here at all.
    Hoping I could control my rhymes if only I thought about neutral times, I remembered the history of the projex.
    Way back in the teens, during the Last Jihad, just after the Fall of Istanbul, the IMF began allotting refugees to various countries, cities, and bioregions. Chicago had gotten mostly Turks and a smattering of Crobanians, who had all been forcibly funnelled into the hastily constructed projex.
    One of these flee-gees had been my dad.
    Dad had fallen in love with a local girl named Chita Garvey—my mom, of course—who happened then to be a very xinggan Cubaitian some sixteen years old. Dad’s relatives weren’t too uptaking about the eventual multicult marriage, which was soon followed by the birth of a son, then a daughter.
    One day when I was eight and Sis was just born, Dad and a hardline cousin named Zeki got into a serious argument about how Dad had betrayed his heritage. Zeki claimed Dad had been verraten und verkauft. Words escalated into blows, and that’s when cruel cuz put the boot in.
    Out of his pocket, Zeki whipped a military model neural shunt (Snowy surplus from Operation Rock the