Weekend Freewrite - Standing at the window

Because I've been hooked on Cyberpunk2077 since my birthday on Dec 31st, I've been jumping on that bandwagon in my writing as well and have been doing random free-writes in my notebook whenever I have time.

So, when I saw @mariannewest's latest free-write prompt, Standing at the window I felt like it'd make the perfect next scene for my little effort at cyberpunk dystopian fiction.

As such, this was done in my notebook.

For sake of ease as I'm sure some of you will find it hard to read my terrible writing, it says:

Standing at the window of his new short-term tenant housing, Travis sighed and idly flipped a beer cap into the trash-can across the apartment.

It had been a long week, making sure he had scrubbed as much of his last identity from the Relay as possible before spinning up a new one which he'd used to get the small apartment he was in now.

His clients of course knew how to get him jobs - that had always been largely anonymous so the identity scrubbing was mostly a way to ensure that nobody could find him if he'd botched a job or missed anything. It was a precaution that had served him well over the years.

I've been switching scenes back and forth so far between this character - Travis - who is a 'Scrubber' - someone who makes shit on what counts as the internet of the future disappear. Video, text, whatever. If it can't be removed, he's the guy who burries it under a deluge of other data, and makes it as hard as possible to find. The inspiration from this comes from the real-life companies that deal with reputation management online.

The second character is Andrij - a drug dealer specializing in the physical drugs of our times. In the future, if you want to get high or have a crazy trip, there are specialized one-time-use programs designed and customized for exactly the style of trip you want to take. They're safer for anyone using cybernetic implants - which most people have. So physical drugs that can be of varying quality and can provide a random trip... those are relics of the past. But Andrij has managed to make it a collector's and enthusiast's product... and jacked the price to fit such a niche market.

Maybe if I spot a good prompt again in the near future I'll toss up a scene from his perspective. We'll see.

Either way, this was a fun free-write.