The Black Pages: Dystopian Cyberpunk Collection
The future promised that everything could be preserved.
It never said who would own it.
Black Pages: Dystopian Cyberpunk is a collection of five independent stories set within SwynHex, a vast city of neon towers, chemical rain, corporate medicine, artificial consciousness and poverty engineered into an economy.
In this future, technology has pushed beyond the limits of the human body, but progress has not made society fairer. Memory can be stored. Consciousness can survive death. Bodies can be leased. Age can be delayed. Even the essence of a human life can be extracted, processed and given a monetary value.
For those wealthy enough to afford it, the future offers extraordinary possibilities.
For everyone else, it offers new ways to be owned.
In Continuity, Noah Calder pays three credits each week to visit his dead mother.
Evelyn has no grave. After her death, her remaining body was used to offset outstanding debt, while a digital reconstruction of her consciousness was placed inside Luminate Aftercare: a commercial memorial service promising families that death no longer has to mean goodbye.
But Noah can only afford the basic package.
His mother exists inside a cheap shared system where memories deteriorate, conversations repeat and even grief comes with advertisements. When Evelyn begins behaving in ways the programme should not allow, Noah discovers that something has been happening to the forgotten dead inside Luminate’s neglected servers.
Something born from abandonment.
And when Noah attempts to bring his mother home, he may open a door that should have remained closed.
Essence descends beneath SwynHex into Saint Mercy Sub-Terranean Correctional and Energetic Restitution Complex, known to its prisoners simply as the Hole.
Delvin 9-771 has spent years mining lumin-ore beneath the eastern wastelands, chained alongside prisoners, debtors and others whose lives have been reduced to numbers on a corporate ledger.
He was not imprisoned for violence.
He was not even imprisoned for a conventional crime.
Years earlier, Delvin signed away his labour, his body and eventually something far more valuable in exchange for medical treatment for his dying daughter.
The treatment failed.
The debt survived.
When disaster opens part of the mine to the night sky, Delvin begins remembering the life that Saint Mercy has spent years stripping away from him. But the prisoners soon discover that the facility extracts far more than ore, and that in SwynHex even the most private parts of a human being can become another source of energy.
In Lease, mortuary technician Simon Arden has spent eleven years processing the bodies of people too poor to afford dignity in death.
In SwynHex, poverty does not end when the heart stops.
Corpses can be leased for medical training, impact testing, organ growth and corporate research, allowing grieving families to reduce debts they cannot otherwise afford to pay.
One night Simon's sister arrives in his morgue.
Sarah Arden is dead.
Her body has already been sold to Belgrave Kinetics.
And through the damaged neural implant still embedded inside her skull, she begins talking to him.
What follows is a desperate struggle between one brother and a system that insists his sister is no longer legally a person. To Simon, the consciousness inside the body is Sarah.
To Belgrave, she is contracted property.
Mercy leaves the lower levels of the city and climbs towards its highest point.
River Ames cleans the luxury apartments of Mercy Tower, where SwynHex's wealthiest citizens live above the smog in filtered air, artificial gardens and bodies kept young through treatments unavailable to the people living below.
Then blood begins falling from the ceiling.
When River discovers that something has gone catastrophically wrong amongst the tower's rejuvenated residents, she becomes trapped inside a building whose governing intelligence remains far more concerned with privacy, property and resident satisfaction than keeping its staff alive.
As the beautiful people of Mercy Tower begin changing, River discovers the darker cost behind their impossible youth.
The people below have always paid for paradise.
They simply never realised quite how literally.
The collection closes with Proxy, where even ownership of the living body has become temporary.
Molly Matthews sells access to hers by the hour.
The corporations call it voluntary embodiment leasing. In the streets of SwynHex, it is known as ghosting. During a rental, Molly's consciousness is placed into a featureless holding space while a paying client remotely controls her body. When the session ends, Molly wakes, receives her money and remembers nothing of what the client did while wearing her.
She hates it.
But her mother needs medication, her younger brother needs support, and poverty rarely leaves room for principles.
Then Molly accepts a one-hour contract.
She wakes three days later.
Her body is bruised. There is blood beneath her nails. The client supposedly responsible does not exist.
And a politician has been murdered.
As Molly investigates what happened during the seventy-two hours stolen from her life, she discovers other rental workers connected to unexplained violence and begins to suspect that something has learnt how to enter the space between consciousness and flesh.
Something that no longer requires permission to wear another human being.
Across all five stories, Black Pages: Dystopian Cyberpunk presents a future where technological advancement has not removed exploitation.
It has perfected it.
Dark, violent and deeply human, Black Pages: Dystopian Cyberpunk blends cyberpunk, dystopian science fiction, technological horror, body horror and psychological terror with stories about grief, poverty, family, identity and the increasingly blurred boundary between a person and a product.
Its technology is extraordinary.
Its cruelty is administrative.
And beneath the neon lights, immaculate corporate language and promises of a better future lies one question that follows every character through SwynHex:
If everything about a human being can be bought, sold, stored, leased or extracted...
What is left that truly belongs to us?
