Roy King Story
artwork: Lief Parker
The Roy
King Story
The episode takes place in a retro-futuristic setting. Vast
sprawling cities are divided into virtual kingdoms ruled by different
Elites. In the city we are interested in there has been an ongoing corporate
battle between two philosophical and practical approaches towards the
achievement of eternal life—Klone Kultur as opposed to Cyborg Renovation.
Klone Kultur, under the leadership of the Egyptian Club has been in the
ascendancy for some time now & Cyborg Renovation has gradually become
more & more disreputable. Cyborgs take a lot of maintenance & even
worse the drugs administered during renovation are addictive. To cap it off,
the inferior quality of spare parts & software bugs have meant that a
long-term cyborg, if not maintained, tends to exist in a more & more
nightmarish world of memory bleed & perceptual disharmony. Clone Kultur
for its part is gradually breeding out difference, becoming more and more
conservative & ingrown.
Roy King, our central character is a long time Renovation Cyborg. In order
to keep up with his maintenance schedule some years back he had gone to work
for the Cy-Tronics corporation as a salesman. For the last few years he’s
been a field agent, a sideshow barker with Maximum Circus. The Circus used
to be the Cy-Tronics showplace but now that they’re on the skids,
splitting into smaller shows & becoming more & more disreputable.
The Circus remains one of the last havens for Cyborg Culture.
When our story opens the Egyptian Klone Machine is making a full-scale bid
to take over the city and is intent on closing down all Renovation units.
Klone Police are everywhere. They call themselves the Wrathful Angels. They
have a large PR campaign designed to further denigrate Cyborg Culture and
get new customers for their eternal life Klone program. The fact is that
long-term cyborg renovations do have a nasty habit of turning into
nightmares.
The story develops via various episodes in which we see Roy King trying to
stay afloat as he wanders the back street of the Necropolis, how Roy’s
girl friend Ariel tries to save him, the various tactics of the Klone
Police. What Roy needs is a death certificate so he can really disappear.
His animal senses remain very sharp. Roy is dilapidated but he has residual
animal senses from past personality implants & memory sequences. He
needs a software update now. He can hardly tell the difference between being
awake & asleep, reality & dream.
Another central figure is Frank the underground Renovation expert. Frank is
a freelance guy. There is a big underground trade in trademark personality.
You can get a complete trademarked personality package but it is expensive.
You can also get a trademark personality module software package & get
it implanted in a Klone. Frank doesn’t care if you’re a Klone or a
Cyborg, if you’ve got the plastic, he’ll work. Oh yeah, one other thing,
Frank is human, one of the last of the breed. He’s been keeping himself
going on hormones & anti-aging injections but time is running out.
Roy is hooked up in Frank’s hardware shop & the software renovation
begins. We can see various parts of the process on the viewing screen.
Flashbacks to the circus arena…smoky violet lights, the guy wires
stretching across the tent, backroom of the Klone Police...pain searing
across mental barriers crumble in the Necropolis dawn…Ariel shimmering in
eternal sunshine, lying back on the disheveled bed, covers pulled down
exposing her perfect breasts, animal mutterings outside the window…