Satisfied Detachment: A Character Sketch

It was the kind of evening that Shiv liked, which meant that everyone else was miserable.

"Jesus, it's like walkin' through curtains." LiquidMax wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. "Curtains of soup."

Shiv was pegging his jeans, and didn't look up. "Well it's gotta feel like somethin'." He finished work on his left ankle, and switched feet on the little wall in front of the parking lot between The Den and Pizzapocalypse. He was sweating, too: beads of the stuff prickled at his forehead, ran down into his eyes, dripped onto his mirrorshades. But he didn't say anything about it, out of -- what, pride? Obstinacy? Rebellion? He didn't know.

He didn't want to know.

LiquidMax stood next to him, tapping a sneaker on the pavement, hands in his pockets. "Pícale, cabrón. It's gonna get late and she's gonna leave." Down at the corner, the arcade's hologram projectors flared to life and threw a pair of dogfighting starfighters over the street; the laserblasts they traded had a fuzzy blue halo, their edges softened by the humidity in the air. LiquidMax jabbed a finger at them. "See? Getting dark."

Shiv rolled and tucked the hem of his jeans, then set down his foot with a stomp. "Okay, okay! Jeez! Damn, man." He pushed his fingers through his mohawk and shook himself out. Under his breath, he grumbled: "...just a girl."

'Max nailed him with a glare -- even with his robot glasses on, you could tell he was glaring. He didn't say anything; he didn't have to. Shiv waved forward impatiently, "Well, c'mon, hurrypants! Go!" He snarled and glowered and started walking, and he shut his damn mouth before he said what he was really thinking, or expressed anything else.

Well, at least the evening was nice...he concentrated on that, and on the fact that no one seemed to like it but him. He focused on that feeling of satisfied detachment.

He imagined, for a moment, that someone told him that he was actually hiding in it. Someone in particular.

He started humming a song so he wouldn't have to think about her anymore, and led LiquidMax off into whatever dumb adventure he'd be a part of tonight.

---

Shiv and LiquidMax are old characters of mine. They're cyberspace cowboys in the Gibsonian tradition, young and impetuous and full of the virtues and flaws that make you human. Shiv, in particular, is kind of my avatar; he feels the things that I don't want to anymore. They inhabit a retrofuturistic cyberpunk neverwhen, an amalgam of the 1980s and some pre-dystopian future that only the 80s themselves could've -or would've- imagined.

I've written more about the characters and the setting, and they have tons more to say for me, but for right now, this is enough. 

SUGGESTED MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT: "A Million Miles Away" by The Plimsouls