Author: Outrider-Scribe 12-Kael
Published In: Whispers of the Asphalt Wind
Type: Short Fiction – Worldview Encounter
Story
They called her Teya Jonkers, daughter of the sun-scabbed Wastes and forager of forgotten roads. Born beneath the canvas of a cracked Solshade tent, she’d learned to track the shadow of sandstorms, to read the hum of poisoned winds, to harvest circuits from rust-veined skeletons of long-dead tanks. But today, she stepped into the myth of another kind—the vertical riddle of Neo-Europa.
Teya had always imagined cities as dens of smoke and cold steel, but nothing in her tribe’s old data-shards had prepared her for the truth. The city rose like a crown of glass and chrome from the bones of the old world, its towers slicing sky like verdicts.
She crossed the boundary checkpoint at Gate 14-D, where guards in soft-lit exosuits scanned her Solshade permits and ran spectral checks on her DAD spine-gate—standard procedure, they'd said. They eyed her tribal arm tattoos, readouts of ancestral migration maps, but said nothing. Just a dull beep, then the gate hissed open like a mechanical yawn.
Inside the city proper, Neo-Europa spoke in layers.
Above her, the wealth-towers stretched toward stars she could no longer see. Below, the Smart Slums whispered in neon tongues—chaotic, radiant, alive. She’d expected hostility. What she found was... weight. The kind that clung to the skin and lungs. Filtered air laced with narcotic advertising. City-light that pulsed in rhythms meant to hypnotize.
Teya’s boots, handmade from tarpweave and carbon-tread, made odd sounds on smooth ground. Every street felt like a wound that never healed—repaved, re-coded, re-buried. The city was not one city. It was strata in argument.
Her first destination: the Bleeding Rose. Her contact: an ICEwitch named Roxie LeFleur, Chapel-touched and once a Null.
But before she reached the slums, she detoured—drawn like a moth—to the edge of the Glimmeredge District, where sound became architecture and sensation was currency. Here, a thousand avatars danced in suspended haze, and every billboard was a gate into Cypherspace.
A merchant with skin like mirrored glass offered her a “refined Neural Mirror” at half-market value.
She declined.
“Driftroot,” he said, almost with admiration. “Still use sand-cooled Cradle Jacks?”
Teya smiled. “Still live under stars.”
Later, she passed a Chapel Node disguised as an old telecom shrine—its whisper caught in her implant, a phrase encoded in hex: You have roots in no soil but the signal. She didn’t understand it then, but it echoed in her.
When she finally stood before the Bleeding Rose, the steel petals hissed open, scanning her like a curious predator. Wires slithered and paused, as if tasting her presence.
She took a breath. Not filtered, not tribal-distilled—just air. City air.
Then stepped inside.
Notes
- The Driftroot tribes rarely enter Neo-Europa proper, preferring bartered border exchanges and encrypted drop-sites. Teya’s journey was among the first sanctioned direct entries following the Accord of 2083.
- Driftroot oral historians later called this event “the First Interlacing.”