COURAGE, TRUTH & BOOTY:

  Samizdat Spirit A story about fascism, it's fall, and redemption. By A. Piratemonk The sky over the Detroit Special Administrative Zone was the color of a dead circuit board, a uniform, leaden gray that promised only acid drizzle and the slow, managed decay of the old world. Rain slicked the streets, making the surviving chrome gleam with a kind of tired nostalgia. Ryo wasn’t a cowboy, not in the classic sense. He was a narrative pathologist. When the AI constructs that ran the city’s infrastructure got sick, he was the one they called. He’d jack in and scrape the memetic plaque from their logic gates, debriding the code of whatever digital psychosis it had contracted from the polluted data streams of the Net. It was a dirty job, but the cred was clean. The gig came through a cutout, a shell company nested inside a trust that was probably owned by a holding firm registered in a Próspera freedom city. The pay was heavy enough to feel like a threat. The target was a high-level mun...