When the glass tubes inside the neon lights that keep MegaCity 1 awash in a polychromatic glow crack, the escaped noble gases drift and gather over the unincorporated zone, the suburban remnant of the old city. Here, where life is short and cheap and where any bionic augmentations are done by one's own hand or via gray-market surgeon, this apocalyptic neon cloud serves as a consolation prize: intermingled with atmospheric metallic particulates, the multihued miasma produces a dazzling aurora surrealis, especially after an acid rainstorm. As a lifelong Zoner, you know that these storms mean more empty houses, so when your flittering holographic emergency alert system says the coast is clear and turns the color of a dead channel, you pick up that weird-looking gun you used to rob a Dollar General next to a cornfield managed by nanobots and get to work. This is life on the
C0PPER_W1RE
Joining us for this collision of "low lives and high strangeness" and "low lives and high technology" is Kelby Losack, author of God Is Wearing Black and the upcoming Texas Tea, co-host of the Agitator podcast, and kingpin of hoodrat noir and hillbilly cyberpunk, which should be your cue to not deliver any stepped-on product when you submit.
Please send submissions to contact@apocalypse-confidential.com as a Word or Google doc for written submissions and .jpgs or .pngs for visual submissions, with how you’d like to be credited, a short bio in third person, and any links for promotion (blog, portfolio, etc.). Include your Twitter handle if you wish to be tagged. Please limit fiction submissions to around 4k words. This special presentation is open in all categories. Simultaneous submissions discouraged. Please include “C0PPER_W1RE” in the subject line of your email.
Deadline: September 5.
Publication date: September 19.
Artwork by Robert Voyvodic.