The distant future in the wake of the Third World War was bleak and dull, full of corruption and greed. Devastated nations that once stood so proud crumbled and fell to exist merely as land-masses upon which people lived as other nations prospered. Russia fell prey to a contained nuclear attack from China, resulting in the cold country’s absolute destruction. The United Nations ceased to exist as those who governed its workings met untimely ends at the hands of assassins or walked away to wash their hands of the dying world order. Germany and Japan emerged from the War as superpowers while the United States’ government lost all power as a product of a well-planned attack on the Federal Government, sending the nation spiraling into anarchy and chaos without a government to hold it together.

            In Japan, technology advanced rapidly. Nanotechnology worked wonder, undoing damages caused by disasters in mere days while it might take human beings months and years to work such wonders. Scientists found cures to most diseases by using a form of Nano Machines—NanoBots—engineered specifically to be injected directly into a person and programmed to attack and destroy unhealthy and harmful cells. They went even further to perfect the cloning of humans with minimal complications as well as to create the methods of growing offspring in artificial wombs—Test-Tube Babies—and the means of replacing severed limbs and damaged parts of the body with mechanical parts that worked just as well or better than the original parts with sensors and receptors to feel heat, cold, pressure, pleasure, and pain.

            As technology advanced, a new world began to develop called the Cyberworld, a vast networking of thousands of computers via an intricate web of codes and wires that spanned across the entire island country, its origins in an urban neighborhood in Osaka. For most, it remained an unknown and terrifying world of digital corridors and forbidding territory. Those able to navigate such a complex system were both feared and revered for their elite skills in doing the impossible task of making logical sense out of a mess of numbers and symbols, though they were really so few, a group made up of Cyborgs and Hackers.

            Ruling over both Japan and the Cyberworld was the Kurari-yaku, the Mafia-like organization that had gained control over Japan near the end of the War. Lead by an obscure figurehead by the name of Yukio, its membership was comprised of wealthy men who knew the Underworld as if it were their own backyards and rough-and-tough street rats as well as the occasional every-day person seeking more to their ordinarily-dull lives. They used all means available to maintain such a tight control over the Japanese government—fear, violence, blackmail, terrorism—and most who resisted met an unfortunate end.

            ‘Kurari Kurabbu Kyuubu’, also known as ‘K-Third’, was an establishment known not for any services that it may have rendered but as a bar frequented by young men and women as a way to appear ‘cool’ as well as being the birthplace of the Kurari-yaku. A club of music, sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence, quite often the Kuraris could be found relaxing within the Plexiglas walls of their special room that watched the rest of the club, lounging across the various couches and cushions among the tables, laughing, drinking, smoking, or engaging in various acts of sexual fun, with the two named Toshiya and Kyo regularly found in their midst.

            Of the many Kurari-yaku members that frequented K-Third and its enticing activities, only two of them would ever really be recognized alongside Yukio. Considered the Lords of Yokohama, their names brought about a mixture of fear and awe in all worlds—Real, Cyber, and Underworld. One was a monster of mind games and politics, a stoic telepath able to make even the infallible Yukio shiver with his dead stare and flat voice that whispered silent prophesies; the other was his androgynous Cyborg companion who was really more of his caretaker, a man who meant little to Japanese society except as a Kurari and an elite Hacker.

 

 

He awoke with a sharp gasp and sat up, a dark outline in the blackness of his silent bedroom.

Why did he always have these dreams…?