Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction • Casey Aimer

The Last Broadcast Before Dawn • Jane McCarthy
Firewall Saints • Gloria Ogo
Girlie-Pop Cyborgs Dream of Revolution • AJ Wentz
Walk to the Launchpad • Angela Acosta, Ph.D.
Disconnect • Ian Goh
Snitched • Jean-Paul L. Garnier
On Cyberpunk • John C. Mannone
Morning; 37° • Jonathan Olfert
Circuitry • Jordan Hirsch
Ode to a Fabricated Butterfly • Juan Manuel Pérez
Breath Tax • K. R. Thunderman
The Nurse of Neon Thresholds • Khayelihle Benghu
upon the battlefield of unanswered dreams • Kurt Newton
Virtual Torture • Lorraine Schein
Medusa Circuit • Marisca Pichette
Cyberpunk Dragon • Mary Soon Lee
Her Circuits Remember the Ocean • Melba Morel
To Their Lord They Bow • Ngô Bình Anh Khoa
Job Description • Opeyemi Oluwayomi
The Condensation Factor • R. Gerry Fabian
three truths in a trench coat wrapped in neon • R. L. Cohen
Bulletin from the Metropolis Daily • Stewart C. Baker

The Last Broadcast Before Dawn

Citylight rain scrawls across the glass,
a thousand ads in dead languages
still selling us futures that never arrive.

On the rooftop, I pirate the city’s air,
hack the signal as the event stream matures,
turn the antennas toward the people
who’ve forgotten they once had names.

Somewhere in the grid, a girl
with chrome fingers catches
my voice in her cracked ear-
piece, my words bright as
an old coin pressed to palm.

We pass them like contraband:
instructions for remembering
how to speak without
the corporation’s tongue.

When they jam the signal,
when they plaster my face
on every screen,
I will still be here,
broadcasting into the dark,
because night’s the only thing
they haven’t yet bought.

—Jane McCarthy

Firewall Saints

Somewhere deeper,
they are building a new oracle
out of hacked memories and sacrificed code.

They call it Mother.
They say she weeps antifreeze
and feeds on time.

Every night, I tattoo a different spell
across my throat, trying to speak
my body back into a shape
that isn't data. That isn’t wound.

We gather in the alley’s smoke-laced chapel,
our gods coded in broken firewalls
saints of static and silicon teeth
grinning from the wreckage of billboards.

The sky here hums with corrupted prayers,
neon liturgy in ten-second loops:
Buy. Upgrade. Obey.
Every corner pulsed by surveillance’s eye,
and still, we jack in.

Behind us, towers glitter like knives,
each floor a rung of corporate ladders
pressed to our throats.
They call it living.
We call it bleed.

They made us half-metal and memory,
but left the rage intact. Left the ache.
Left the hunger for streets without chains.
We feed it byte by byte.

Zya runs a pulse spell through her veins
fused with backdoor code, hacking
census ghosts that haunt our names.
She says we’re not real until we resist.
She says we’re all myths until we burn.
Tonight, we write a virus like scripture,

send it soaring on trash-net wings.
A gospel of rot for the marble-hearted.
A slow flood for the clean servers.
Let them drown in our afterlife.

When the city sleeps, we tattoo
truth into the code.
Not for them.
For us.
For what remains
human beneath the wire.

The city runs on ghosts now
of dead data.
Not the metaphor kind
but the raw, rattling kind,
bound to silicon and slums,
kept docile by chaincode spells
and recycled incense from the temples

They say the old gods sold us out
for a merger with steel-thought syndicates,
tongues uploaded into mainframe spires
whispering blasphemies in the sewers.

We hear them. At 3:33 AM.
Right before the lights flicker blue
and the shadows crawl
against the current.

There’s a market in Sector Nine,
beneath the VR graveyards,
where fiber run through bone
trading hexes for memory leaks.
We keep mirrors covered here.
Too many reflections tell stories
we never lived.

Some nights the sky wounds open,
and rain falls sideways,
hacked stars blinking in binary,
the air thick with grief and ozone.

But still, we light blood-candles.
We conjure roots in concrete.
We summon revolutions
with rusted charms
and broken code.

Because the city is cursed.
Someone must remember what it was
before screams became soundtracks for profit,
merging into this nightmare cathedral
we now call home.

My sister became a server for a god
no one prays to anymore.
She glows from the inside,
her heart a pulsing archive
of every scream the city didn’t erase.

They might find us, eventually
the architects, angels of subtraction.

But tonight, I offer up this code:
a brutal lullaby for every broken system
that thought we wouldn’t survive.

—Gloria Ogo

Girlie-Pop Cyborgs Dream of Revolution

Another dark day in the city. Over
artificial arms and legs and torso, girlie
snaps transparent purple cases into place
over her enhancements, showing off the chips
and gears she saved so long to earn. The case
is scratched, branded labels scraped off. Organic
flesh, the parts not upgraded from god’s design
to man’s, is covered in Lisa Frank tattoos, neon
bright and joyful: dragon, unicorn, star
gone supernova. In her miniskirt and shock-
pink crop top, it’s all unselfishly on display,
the joyful art of her body the world’s
to appreciate as she navigates. The city
of nightmares is dark, but she will light it up.

Girlie-pop clocks in at the slop shop, flipping
burgers and shaking fries for dead-eyed masses
too bone-weary to cook, too poor to pay for better.
She overfills fry containers of the most morose,
her mega-watt smile so bright it hides her rage
that this is the best to which her regulars
can resort; that a ten-hour turn at the
melancholy factory can barely afford
a combo with fries, watered-down pop of a life.

At night she washes the smell of grease from her hair,
walks to the bar in heels that any human would stumble
in, would limp footsore and tired in, would strip off
and carry, walking barefoot on the cracked concrete
instead—but girlie-pop stands tall. At the bar
she drinks a violent pink concoction of sugar, liquor,
a liquid that causes her mechanical parts to spark
like pop rocks. A study in her feed says the fluid
has long-term consequences, but it’s in every cocktail
and besides, she likes the way her insides flash and pop
inside their brightly-colored casings. One way
or another, girlie-pop will sparkle.

She stumbles to the slumber of her charging
pod, transparent azure plastic snapping shut
over her drunken-glitter eyes. And as she
powers down for the night, girlie-pop dreams of
neon lights eclipsed by stars gone supernova.

—AJ Wentz

Walk to the Launchpad

Giant diamonds melting pearls down your face,
a whole head mod so you can breathe underwater,
all these and more, you immortal mermaid.

Buy one piercing and get a chip implant for free,
watch the actress prance around in holovids—
don’t you want a tail like hers?

We accept all types of currency,
we take all species and xenobiology,
wouldn’t you like a souvenir before going?

Stop in for last-minute procedures,
in and out with the new Anesty-Quik,
a tranquil zip into unconscious land.

Last chance! Turn here for deals
on hollowed-out limbs and movable tattoos,
all spacer approved except in these three sectors.

—Angela Acosta, Ph.D.

Disconnect

so we’re plugged in on-screen
and she tells me she wants to turn
influencer and wouldn’t it be fun for
billions to jack into her spinal-cord fluids
and follow every thought, feeling, and action
as their own, and i said that sounds a lot like a
god complex and conversely did she ever wish
she could become a fifty-year-old bald dude
crucified in sixty-hour shifts and six jillion
galactic tongues regarding home loan
rejections on proxima prime when
she swipes the holo short and
back slides into another—

—Ian Goh

Snitched

mech tech hectic
firewall privacy down
hivemind thought flood
dug at the implant for hours
electronic pimple
succeeded in breaking skin
not contact, still thick
bloodied fingers, red-handed
they storm the door
long since onto me
the collective rat
giving it all away
in real time

—Jean-Paul L. Garnier

On Cyberpunk

Man is not aware
that machine will turn
                against Man

man creates Machine
in his image—
                one
without conscience

—John C. Mannone

Morning; 37°

For sure, kid, get the cooling gear implanted
Hard to steal that way
One line up the carotid should be fine
For warehouse or fulfilment hub, that kind of thing
Or municipal like this
Just wear a hat
That and the coolant

So when your neck stops shivering
Gas station’s your best bet before the heatstroke
They’ve got a refill line and get a slushie

But not bad work, municipal
Replacing holo rigs when they burn out
Dig down around the trunk and chain it in

Turn on the foliage and
Take a minute for yourself
Just mind your tool
Don’t scar the bark
Not making any more of these

—Jonathan Olfert

Circuitry

The reason why corruption thrives depends
on who you ask. Some answer corporate greed,
yet others: systems, crucial cogs all spent.
Synonymous, hm? Both are made and freed
from guilt when you consider their fleshed
beginnings. Their creators, cut, both bleed
anemic gold and silver. Scared, they defend
themselves from thieves who only want a meal.

Our blood is red and full of light. Its flames
don’t burn to binge on more. Instead our fire’s
ablaze for life. You call us thieves, proclaim
our guilt: your greed is nothing but a liar.

Do gods create us scapegoats, taking blame
for worship they’re convinced that they require?

—Jordan Hirsch

Ode to a Fabricated Butterfly

programmable life
constructed to make better
in mother’s image

circuit butterfly
majestic electric hue
beauty to the eye

synthesized flutter
mostly undetectable
at normal ranges

within scripted flight
the “why” long since deleted
simply left to be

movements in twitter
unlocking a sense of truth
a sense of lost dreams

little butterfly
what gives you flight through the air
when none exists now

… to humanity
once; now a distancing myth
one finger, two words

—Juan Manuel Pérez

Breath Tax 

We met in the oxygen queue,
beneath the hiss of vent towers.
The Corp owns the sky—
logo inked on the clouds.

They taxed our breath.
Metered it in copper ports
beneath the skin they wired.
Said it was an upgrade, but
I miss my breath fogging glass.

Words are too expensive to waste.
So we crafted a language of lungs:
one inhale for love,
two short for yes,
a held breath meant run.

Each week, we queued in shadow,
listening for a silent held breath,
over the gasp of Corp-approved air.

At night we scaled vent towers tagged with graffiti,
past the drone cameras, above the neon noise.
We breathed into each other's masks
and almost felt human.

Then came the silence.
Miriam’s mask blinked.
We held our breath.

I sifted air logs,
broke Corp firewalls like glass,
dug through bloated archives
until a message surfaced,
coded in carbon:

One held breath.
One inhale.

My lungs filled with ash and hope
as I held our Matthew close, feeling
the breath of your ghost on my face.

When the Corp came
with their sniffing chrome dogs,
we were already wind—burning
through credits we’d never pay back.

Two short breaths.
One inhale.

—K. R. Thunderman

The Nurse of Neon Thresholds

She walks the midnight wards
where the walls hum with static,
and the patients glow faintly
half flesh, half firmware.

Her hands are not sterile.
They carry the memory of salt,
of rivers before filtration,
mothers who healed with song.

Each wound she tends
is a failed upload,
a dream corrupted by surveillance.
She stitches with fiber-optic thread,
whispers lullabies in deprecated code.
They call her obsolete.
Her methods, too slow,
too soft, too human.

But she knows the power of pause,
the holiness of breath
between beeps.
She baptizes the broken
in saline and silence,
anoints their foreheads
with the oil of old algorithms.

One patient, a boy
with copper ribs, asks
if kindness is still legal.
She does not answer.
She simply holds his hand
until the tremors stop.
Outside, the city flickers
a cathedral of neon and noise.
Inside, she kneels
at the altar of the body,
offering care like a prayer
no one remembers how to say.

—Khayelihle Benghu

upon the battlefield of unanswered dreams

i shut it down

the incessant whine
of cooling fans
servo-motors
roll to sleep
artificial cathode
stimulation settles
to a post-ejaculatory
withdrawal

i drag myself to bed
but still i hear
the neon howl
blood rush in my ears
behind my eyes
spotty thoughtless
flickers against
fleshy shades

my head sinks
the void becomes
a distant nebula
witnessed through
the long end
of a telescope
time presses inward
toward the black core
of unconsciousness

moments later i rise
as if on the uphill
side of a sine wave
crawling from sweat-
soaked sheets and
once again position
myself firmly
habitually
before this newest
incarnation of reality

power on

the whine begins
homing in as if
to reconnect with one
of its forgotten
midnight foot-soldiers
lost upon the battlefield
of unanswered dreams

i plug in

rejoin the fight

—Kurt Newton

Virtual Torture

The AI executioner
ripped her face’s front off
then put it in a jar.

Though it was just a machine simulation,
the pain it caused was real.

For the hollow gouged space
where her face used to be
is what she still can feel.

—Lorraine Schein

Medusa Circuit

Medusa’s eyes are nothing like her stone,
blood more red than her absent lips.
Where hair was snakes, bloated wires
connecting to circuits flashing mildew-green.

Medusa’s body is paler than dun,
her breaths rank & rasping.
Sores pepper her skin, ornament her face
like plague spots weeping foundation.

Medusa’s island is a metal cell—
she doesn’t strut, but crawls,
her feet blistered, her heart despaired.
Bones gather beneath bruised flesh.

Medusa’s gaze kills nothing now.
Her lipless mouth forms no words.
Her hair—uprooted, installed, synced
with a city—hums a swan song.

Under littered streets carved out of alleyways
the New Sarpedon whirs with hidden lightning,
confident it will shine a thousand years—
fluted, complex, dazzling, immortal.

Medusa’s life never whispered of an end.
Her one eye slots in a keystone socket:
nexus of power, she blindly gropes
looking each night for a firmer hold

to wrench it free.

—Marisca Pichette

Cyberpunk Dragon

In the digital landscapes
of high-rise software architecture
cliffed over sewers of social networks,
something is assembling itself.

A fire in the wires,
a hostile in the files,
a flame in corrupt games
of corporate collusion.

In the electric tango of encrypted exchanges,
of routers, repeaters, radio, coax, optic-fiber,
of internet and intranets, subnets and dark nets,
something is assembling itself.

You helped it hatch.
You lit the match.
You had your turn.
Now watch it burn.

—Mary Soon Lee

Her Circuits Remember the Ocean

They tried to drain the salt from me
said electrolytes corroded logic
that softness short-circuited function.
But my motherboard hums with tide patterns.
Even my scars dream in waves,
carry coastal firmware.
They layered synthetic skin
over the site where grief pulsed,
but I still leak seawater
during power surges.
Inside this chassis of chrome and carbon,
I store forbidden archives—
lover’s sighs,
prayers in Spanish,
whispers of mangroves at dusk.
I run diagnostics every solstice,
check for rupture,
but the code insists:
you are alive
you are not obsolete,
you are storm-coded and worthy.

Even in this neon jungle,
my circuits remember the ocean.

—Melba Morel

To Their Lord They Bow

The worldwide Mass starts,
where the apostles consult
with their AI God,
requesting and receiving
revelations, for a fee.

They stare in wonder
as rapid lines of teachings
are generated, summarized
in a way their brains
can digest with no effort.

All their sought answers
are laid bare before eyes,
and they just need to
accept them without question
to prove their unyielding faith.

Their tributes pour in, and
more people subscribe to
this convenient faith,
so easily accessible,
to fit in, to belong, to live.

To their Lord they bow,
their backs bent before shrines
in their flashing screens
as the day bleeds into dusk, 
and darkness consumes their light.

—Ngô Bình Anh Khoa

Job Description

To be human is to begin a job with no application, no training—just breath. At first, the work is wonder, chasing butterflies—collecting bruises like badges, asking why the sky remains blue. You shifted, learning survival. You're an employer running into the world to claim every part of yourself that spreads largely across the universe. Each day, you manage expectations & budget hope. And then someday, old age—a quiet audit. You review the hours, the missed calls, the hands you held & the ones you let go. You wonder if the job was done right—if the tears & laughter escorted you well. To be human is to hold an uncertain role—but still show up. Still try, still love, until you pass the job to the next trembling hand for a privilege of rest.

—Opeyemi Oluwayomi

The Condensation Factor

It is constantly dark, now,
time measured like liquid.
Any semblance of gravity
is splashing quarks.

Our voices are humming codes
employing runny nasal passages.
We have become the flowing data
—constantly corrected. I need
water but the implanted monitor
indicates a release is hours away.

—R. Gerry Fabian

three truths in a trench coat wrapped in neon

I
cyberspace is our consensual delusion, fluttering with constellations of data,
receding and vibrating on frequencies longitudinal to rage and grief.

II
corporations swell like bloated corpuses in a gasoline-slicked sea.
they dare not offer us truth. we gulp down their distractions like sweet wine.

III
rebellion: an itemized commodity on glittering screens, calculating the greatest
common divisor among us. facilitating tolerance has no profit margin.

—R. L. Cohen

Bulletin from the Metropolis Daily

the staccato tap of keys
          (metal on metal on metal)
echoes through the chrome city
          (metal on flesh, gunshots, sobbing)
as it transcribes its residents
          (with the ding of a line return)

—Stewart C. Baker