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Sunday, May 01, 2022

Cetacean cyborg

Jones
28mm scale

Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, swarming across the frame and then fading to black. We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war
in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he'd swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the SQUID he'd used to pick Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.
- "Johnny Mnemonic"


Jones is a cybernetically enhanced dolphin, used by the navy to sweep and hack sea mines during the last war, and addicted to amphetamines to ensure his obedience.  He somehow left the service with his implants intact, but to feed his addiction he now lives in a tank at a grubby fun park, as a low-rent attraction for the children of Nighttown... "Talk to the War Whale!".  One day, razorgirl Molly Millions comes to him with a challenge: a data courier with an encrypted program in his head that only Jones' implanted superconducting quantum interference device can unlock...


 

He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed
like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped
over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun,
his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on
either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on
exposed sections of his gray-white hide.

I first read "Johnny Mnemonic" in high school in the 80s and poor Jones stood out to me as one of the great characters in a story crammed with delicious cyberpunk detail.  I clearly wasn't the only one; Jones made a memorable appearance in the cheesy Keanu Reeves movie (loosely) based on the story.  I opted for a sleeker look here than in the film when I converted a WizKids dolphin.


"Why are we here?"  "Because Allison doesn't really have any
cyberpunk minis.  Also the dolphin was lonely."

9 comments:

  1. Haha, I definitely didn't see this coming! I have to say it's quite an inspired work and an outstanding result :)

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  2. It's a great short story. I really like your take on the character. I've only seen bits and pieces of the movie but I must say it delivers reliably...... *gag*

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    1. The movie is... its own thing 🤷‍♂️😏

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  3. That's very funny, and brilliantly executed.
    I read Johnny Mnemonic around the same time that you did Al, but to my shame, when I first saw the image above, my brain said "Seaquest DSV"...

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    1. I can see why; it's a fair cop 😄. I specifically didn't want to copy the movie version, which I thought was too clunky anyway. Jones is supposed to have government hardware, not something that the Lo-Teks built in their garage.

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  4. Hehe, great idea with the dolphin!
    Even though I would never find any use for it 😉

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  5. Love what you have done here :) Fun fact ... if I'm not mistaken I think dolphin brains have more folds than human ones. Hmmmm .... doesn't that make them smarter.

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  6. This is my favorite of all your pieces, well done!

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    1. Well, thank you very much. That's high praise indeed! It's definitely a piece that, in hindsight, there are many ways to improve, but I'm very happy with it myself. It's kind of offbeat and it has personality.

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Thanks for commenting!