(Licensed Wu-Tang Clan music starts)

Ian Tuason:

“Five Deadly Rebels, a Kung Fu Sci-Fi Scripted Podcast. Hosted by Ian Tuason. Music by Wu-Tang Clan producer, Cilvaringz. This is Bonus Episode 2: The Prologue, featuring Alex Richter from the Kung Fu Genius Podcast.

(Music fades)

Alex Richter:

“This is the five boroughs.

This is the last microcosm of reality, flowing down a singular path to a predetermined destination—a path defined by fear, greed, and selfishness—a product of man’s most primal code in its rawest form.

Here, in the gray dawn, the city yawns, stretching its concrete arms in a bleary-eyed mockery of wakefulness. This is where steel towers touch the sky like skeletal fingers, serving as the home of the hard-coded, pouring into the bowels of subway stations, faces as blank as their starched shirts, waiting on train decks, waiting in trains, waiting in elevators, waiting in offices for the day to end, and waiting in beds to repeat the loop. They are cogs in a ceaseless machine, marching towards the daily slaughterhouse of choice.

This is the five boroughs.

This is where the programmed succumb themselves to fate. Their survival instincts birthing capitalism. Their tribal instincts birthing racism. Their dominance instincts birthing misogyny. Their predatory instincts birthing poverty. This is where the disillusioned claw their way upwards—stepping on the faces of others to gain higher ground, driven by instincts beyond their command.

This is the five boroughs.

Some seek refuge from its relentless loop through digital screens—seeking alternate realities on phones, desktops, tablets, even screens mounted onto their faces. But there are some who do not attempt to escape. They create their own rules in the reality that binds them. They are the rebels. They are the night. They are the secret world hidden in plain sight underneath the bustling of the unconscious.

These are the streets of the five boroughs.

As night descends here, the grid of glass and metal transforms into a labyrinth of shadows, alleyways, underpasses and abandoned buildings. This is where the rebels emerge, shedding their mundane masks to reveal their true faces.

This is where heartless streetlights and graffiti-splattered walls show the indifference of life and death to the ignorant enough to wander here at night, uninvited. This is not their world, not the world of rhythm and routine. Some who dare to trudge here do not return. Those who do escape to the safety of their homes, return changed. Their eyes have seen a reality defying its own rules.

This is where dimly-lit lanes and cracked sidewalks meander through discarded neighbourhoods like veins connecting safe houses, trap houses, whore houses and gambling houses. What lies in these streets of rebellion, what secrets await the defiant, what horrors await the weak minded, only the rebels can reveal—until the strong waters of time carry them away, back onto the predetermined course of all things.

These are the streets of the five boroughs.

This is where the Five Families once ruled, now overthrown by the law turned corrupt, enslaved by the same code of their predecessors, replacing their seat on the throne.

This is where rebels from another time, centuries ago, sailed west in their ships and began a new world here at its ports. A new world, that in time, discarded the rest of the world for its own selfish preservation.

This is where two towers once stood, a symbol of this selfishness that others less fortunate felt compelled to attack, and so they did. An attack that I do not condone, but always knew, from the math, was ultimately inevitable. Yet, the hard waters of the river time washed away this act of rebellion as well, and once again, the world that is, surrendered itself to reality.

And so the math remains sound—the river time cannot alter its course in the world of the coded, but only in the underworld of the recoded—only in the streets can the revolution of reality begin. In the streets of the five boroughs. The five boroughs and the five rebels.

The Master.”

(Wu-Tang Clan music fades in)

Ian Tuason:

The story continues next Wednesday in Five Deadly Rebels, Episode 9: I Choose Violence, anywhere you get your podcasts. To learn more about the podcast, visit our website at five deadly rebels dot com. This has been a DimensionGate production.

(Music fades out to wind sound effects)