STREET SPIRIT (FADE OUT)
Somewhere, buried beneath concrete and exposed wire a stage fills with shifting silhouettes
// Kino 88 — Ruins of a BD Theater, Pacific North, Watson
// 21:30 — Local Signal Active
// 21:30 — Local Signal Active
[video]
The crowd didn't arrive so much as bleed in, shuffling like ghosts from alleys, ducts, underpasses—every part of Night City that still pulsed without permission. Nobody asked questions at Kino 88. They came when the signal whispered. They followed the coordinates spray-painted on the side of a wrecked BD kiosk three days ago. Or maybe it came in a glitch-loop, audio only, woven through a pirate dream on the black feeds. Kino 88 was largely without its ceiling, the old asphalt roofing slowly crumbled in on itself like an old effigy collapsing into ash. Some bygone fire left the dulled whites and sepia oranges an ashy white. The screen was cracked, a spiderweb of impact points and old chemical warping, but it still flickered dimly, like a wounded optic refusing to shut down. Beneath it: rows of what used to be seats, now plastic skeletons. A tangled mess of speaker wire and melted metal. The smell of wet dust and burned mylar hung like a ghost through the air.
And in the center of it all, shuffling through slowly accumulating bodies, was Cormac. He didn't walk onstage. He climbed up, combat boots crunching glass and synthetic polymer as he scaled the rusted scaffolding behind the projector rig. His silhouette hit the cracked screen first—biker jacket fluttering with each jagged movement and the outline of his guitar slung low. The veins in his arms glowed faintly beneath the artificial neons that were loosely scaffolded around the stage, pulsing to a beat only he seemed to hear.
He paused, surveying the crowd—like some preacher regarding his gathered mass. He began to shift slowly across the stage, hands planted now over his guitar. It was a vintage telecaster heavily modified, running with dual wires that streamed cold electric code through his wrists. It's body was dented and chipped, paintwork largely dulled, with a kill-switch, feeltrack interface, and various other adornments haphazardly intwined with the wooden body. The headstock, uniquely, was untouched. That same, all-American, anachronistic silhouette. Some vestige of a musical amenity long gone and largely abandoned in the dopaminergic noise.
The Capsules were already there, and had largely setup the makeshift venue. In a place like Kino, something hollowed out, abandoned and then suddenly claimed, they were felt more than seen—loitering in the shadows, sitting atop broken speaker towers, sprawled across busted rows. There home was wherever they imprinted themselves, claimed wordlessly, and bastardized with an intangible pride. Moss was tapping a beat into the armrest with the side of a shiv. Hex had a transmitter running from his collar to a BD spike. Someone—probably Sawtooth—had tagged the Capsule pill sigil in blood-red neon across the side of the burned concession booth. It pulsed like it was breathing, almost in pain.
Then Cormac stepped into the beam of the flickering screenlight. No pyrotechnics. No announcement.
He stood there for a breath too long. Then his fingers wrapped over the fretboard in some over-practiced precision, and his pick violently glided down the bridge's string. Rigid, almost atonal, piercing strikes sent a chord through the air. Through the boosted chrome speakers it rendered something otherworldly, and the sound seemed like it could split the metal of the rafters. He sent this going for some time, singular, one after another, the tempo speeding but almost imperceptibly.
Silence. Then the hum. A low feedback loop spiraling from the stack of scavenged amps behind him. Not mechanical. Not clean. It shivered, like it had been buried in the dirt too long. Cormac knelt and ran his palm across the neck of his guitar. The contact made the air warble. The aggression may have lunged those string out of time, but the rig was jacked directly into his wrist, the beating of his pulse regulating his rhythm. Syncopated to his imagined perfection. He looked out at them—not just the Capsules, but the strays, the burned-out BD junkies, the dopesick solos, every feeble, insignificant punk willing to follow some spare signal into a destitute shell. Each would soon be a prodigal son to those six strings.
A few nods. A few murmurs. Someone in the third row dropped to their knees, unclear for what.
Visions of heroes, of idols he knew only in posters and dreams swept through his mind. It was his pulse and his breath, shaped into the calloused fingers that shifted across the frets as though unearthing some commandment hidden beneath the aged rosewood.
And then his singular, rhythmic strums became melodic, chords shifting in diatonic precision before giving way to melodies that dripped like liquid from a river of sound. It was delicate at first—like he was coaxing something broken back to life. His fingers danced across the strings not with speed, but with an intensity of vulnerable, wrapping tones. The tonic was ambiguous, but so were the lot of all those gathered there. Resolution didn't exist in that small encampment of nomadic souls. His guitar slowly convulsed into an exhale, a nervous system prolapsed into space. The chords rose, layered with subtle feedback and ghosted harmony, carrying the weight of things never said, wordless grief like a substance in the air.
The Capsules watched in stillness. Some with eyes closed. Some mouthing words to songs that hadn't been written yet. The BD feed hummed on illegal wavelengths, slicing across rooftops and signal towers, and in that moment, for anyone listening, it didn't feel like a show. It felt like memory. Like a place you forgot you lived in. The climax didn't explode. It unfolded in a raw, ascending motif full of dissonance and grace, as if the sound itself was struggling to hold together, like it might collapse under the weight of its own self-inflicted burden. And Cormac played through it, eyes unfocused, face half-shadowed in the flickering light of the ruined screen behind him.
The sound tore out of the speakers like an open wound. Layered across it: archival riot loops, screams from old BDs, heart monitor spikes, the voice of a child saying "please" on repeat. The Capsules leaned into it, for them more a ritual than a show.
The Coil had come aboveground tonight. Night city may well have forgotten the sound, but the voiceless heads swaying beneath the sensory excess of the disemboweled theater wouldn't.
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