Ribofunk   ::   Филиппо Пол Ди

I tell you, it made me proud as the ten-year-old who knocked up the neighborhood widow to be stridin' through the city with my fellow gips, confident in our solidarity and fully aware of our so-ci-et-al importance.

Deep Ellum was thronged with folks of every stripe and pedigree enjoyin' the false halogen day. There were splices runnin' errands for their owners. There were preteeny peptide-poppers four or five cohorts down the genetic line from my own, streamin' free 'n' wild with the members of their sets and posses, sportin' their fancy Action Potential clothes. There were gerrys and gullas. There were NU cops carryin' flashlights and shockers to keep the peace amongst the various factions, not to mention the local dirty-harrys. All in all, it was a highly stochastic and organic scene.

Well, we began hittin' the bars around eight, exposin' our receptors to various bands rangin' across the noise spectrum, from multipolar music to old-fashioned country-western picked out on a lone synthesizer, and meanwhile not neglectin' to ingest all manner of delightful deliriants and insidious intoxicants.

Around midnight I seemed to come back to myself as if my consciousness was a balloon on a tether light-years-long, which I had to oh-so-slowly reel in.

"Where are we?" I said to Tino.

"In Parts Unknown."

I gathered that was the name of the bar where we sat. It was a smoky, noisy, jam-packed troglo kind of place. On its raw stone walls hung neo-neon signs that said stuff like REDRAW YOUR MAP2 and WHAT'S YOUR AMPERAGE? The bartender was a simian splice which hung by its tail from an aerial rail and mixed drinks with four human hands.

All of a sudden, like storm waters through an arroyo, or the opening of petcocks on the feedline of a breeder-tank, I remembered my urges of a few days ago, to bury my face in some down-home Texas target. In an instant I was hornier'n a kid's pet unicorn. I scoped out the dance floor, spottin' Geraldine shakin' her skinny little butt with some local dude. Then my eyes passed over her to alight on my dream girl.

She stood a good six feet tall, thanks to her hi-heels. Five-inch ivory spikes that grew out of the calcaneum of her tarsus bones, they were tipped with gold caps. The rest of her feet were bare, with special hi-impact soles that I could see when she kicked toward the ceiling. She wore some Wind Skin neoprene tights, but nothin' above the waist. Her tits were enormous, and thanks to the implanted cantilever lifts, projected out as firm and confident as a CEO's handshake. She had had the refractive index of her aureoles altered so that they were mirrors. On her cheeks were little patches of iridescent fish-scales. I was willin' to bet a week's eft that her tongue was cat-raspy. In short, she was just what the cellscrubber ordered.