Stormblood, стр. 26
The club was packed, people crowding around stained tables cluttered with drinks and nasty-looking stains. This floor was known for its body augmentations, with plenty of its participants gathered up here. I saw chrome and alloy hands gripping glasses and tumblers. Arms and legs that were whirling meshes of gears, tubes and artificial nerve joints. Bionic eyes twitching in metallic faces and torsos crawling with internal machinery. Subsurface lighting scattered reflections across flesh injected with skingrafts, turned scaly and leathery, growing horns and antlers and wings or sprouting silicone feathers. In the smoky glow, it looked like I’d stumbled into a nightmare, like a demented child had stitched together random parts of animals and machines and people. Most of these people were unable to afford to have fingers or limbs reprinted in a medclinic, so they had volunteered to be experiments. They’d let scientists and cyberneticists test unorthodox and bleeding-edge procedures on them, either for their own personal fascination or so they could be perfected for those who could afford it.
Like that was ever going to go well.
Several rotated to look at me. The only defence I had was a metal projectile I could shoot out of my armour’s sleeve, but I’d hoped not to use it.
The bartender was a skinnie, the blue thrumming up and down his chest as he mixed expensive drinks from cheap ingredients. The bright-red pockmarks along his arms were tell-tale signs of a synthsilver user. The liquid was meant to be squeezed into the eye, but hardcore addicts always went for the veins. Hunched on a battered couch next to me, a man rubbed a smear of dark-grey grimwire along his stained gums. His body shuddered, eyes rolling back as the hit spread through his system. He’d have hallucinations for hours.
Doesn’t matter where you go in the universe, places like this are going to exist.
I could feel people watching me as I exited the club and climbed a rusty stairwell through the guts of tenements plastered with neon. Beyond grimy and smashed windows, the floor stretched into a rabbit warren of makeshift housing and prefab metal cubes, crisscrossing staircases and ladders snaking through the fissures between the building. The clanging of metal and revving of engines echoed through the network. I felt like a rat trapped in an endless metal maze.
I passed by at least a dozen more stormdealers selling their wares from dimly lit storage units, before I found Sam’s door. I swiped her card and stepped in.
The smell slapped me like a soggy towel in the face. A sweet, syrupy smell like wet hot glucose crusted on skin, triggering my stormtech. I snapped off my helmet filters and flicked my rebreather on, chopping the smell off. Cool, clean oxygen flooded my lungs. I swallowed and reached a hand to the wall to steady myself.
Wong might have been doing Harmony’s rehab, but she hadn’t been quitting by a long shot.
The room was practically dripping with stormtech. Constellations of chemical attributions popped up on my HUD. Her furniture was overturned and smashed apart, mostly stained with grimwire and synthsilver. Empty phials and hypodermic needles crunched under my heavy boots. Almost everyone who Shreds turns to some other vice to achieve the same high. I knew first-hand it never works. Because nothing’s ever, ever good enough.
I still remember surrendering myself to rehab. The wet, skintight fabric of the sensory-deprivation suit sealing around me. The tendrils and inner abrasives stirring to life against my flesh. The multitude of buckles and full-body restraints biting into my skin as they strapped me down, secured blinders and mufflers over my eyes and ears. The algae stink as they lowered me into the soundproof tank and pumped me with anti-stimulant chemicals to combat the stormtech and ease the withdrawal symptoms. No matter how I begged or thrashed, they wouldn’t untie me, wouldn’t free me from the tank. If they had, I’d probably have killed myself.
That was Stage One. Stage Two had been a series of training and rehabilitation exercises, working my muscles, psychotherapy, counselling. Reconditioning my mind and de-programming my body, freeing me from seeking physical exertion. Prying free all the instincts the stormtech had hammered into me until I had a grip on my urges again.
If I opened my suit one crack, breathed the air in this stormtech-drenched room, years of agonizing work could be undone. My skin itched and demanded it with pheromone-induced hunger. But this mattered more. The Reapers mattered more.
I quickly sifted through the gutted room. Harmony couldn’t have realised it was this bad or they’d never have sent me here. Too great a risk of losing me down the gravity well.
Sam’s sanity levels were scrawled across the room. The scratches and fist-sized dents in the walls. The dry blood in the bathroom. The sweat-stained bed sheets. I could almost see her in here, screaming and weeping and slowly driving herself mad, knowing she’d kill anyone who walked through her door and probably then herself. There are a million symptoms that come with Shredding, none of them pretty. Rehab had been her last resort. Someone had noticed she’d relapsed into taking stormtech and used her weakness to murder her.
If that person had been standing in front of me now, I’d have my own murder to explain to Kowalski.
Unless I found the source, Wong wouldn’t be the last Reaper or skinnie to die like this. At least I now knew why Wong had machinery jammed inside her hands. She’d volunteered for human-modification experiments just like the people outside. Some cyberneticist in a backalley clinic had used her as a human lab rat in exchange for some meagre drug money.
The only source of luxury