Monologue for a Cyberpunk

Below is an introductory monologue I wrote for a Cyberpunk burlesque show that my wife produced. I've been thinking about doing something with it, but I don't yet know what.

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Brilliant, venous shivs jut from the hive-like surface of a grim and exhausted Earth. Pulsing with polychromatic streams of neon sun blood, these monuments pop turgid with the hubris of an utterly depraved and fallen human race that trucks on into its final night; defiantly marching with fists in the air despite the descending, gargantuan weight of inescapable doom.

At the tops of these spires of steel and wire, glass and light, are solipsistic cliques of plutocratic sociopaths, corporate monarchs, indulging in samples of sweet innocence which curl away in fear and revulsion from their sterile and frigid touch. Their bodies are checkerboards of silicon and gold, freakishly augmented monuments to their self-love and adoration. The most inhuman of humanity, perched to lord indifferently over the dregs which inhabit their nadir.

Follow the light and the relentless, oppressive pull of gravity downward and you see the chrome-lined sedimentary layers of corpo underlings and mindless sycophants, zombified in their pleasure capsules with technologically stylized visages pressed joyously into portals which open to opiate worlds of anesthetizing spectacle. 

Propping up those distant and soulless folk are utterly vacant, eternally doomed workers and desperate families squealing for air beneath so many indifferent boots. Various chemicals and the hum and glow of media vidscreens numb the agony of a life disastrously spent carrying the weight of the worst of the world.

Finally, at the sticky, flavorful bottom of the stack are the netrunners, the cyber gangs, the tech criminals, the wire wizards, the juicers, the street samurai, the punkers, the anarchs, the dispossessed, the disinterested, the free, and the damned. They travel up and down the levels, working their angles, fighting the corporations, and losing themselves in the ever darkening shadows of the shattered society which looms ominously over them.

These things constitute the corpus Cyberpunk. The ravaged body of future despair and devastation, of cybernetic dreams and nightmares, of smoking wires and seared flesh in a time both far distant and yet seemingly near at hand.

This genre was birthed on the typewriters and keyboards of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and many others. It's wound its way into movies, music, television, and video games.

Here, tonight, you'll see a celebration of the genre. Performances of light and dark, paying tribute to the chrome and neon world of what if?

So, pop your stims; set your dials to, "Bliss;" toss these performers a Satoshi or three; and be prepared for one hell of a ride.