“Your skin looks really rough now but it’s a lot better than it was when we were first brought down, I’m glad they took care of that. I was told over and over that they were tending to you and to wait here.” She huffed as she picked at my arms and fingers and clothes trying to get a look at me in detail.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore and the parts where the stuff caused bleeding have been sorted out. Not even itchy now. I’m glad it didn’t get in my eyes though.” I said, trying to paint a good picture for her. She was awake and outside for the first time in a while, I didn’t know how she was coping but seemed alright.
“Well, you’ve been cleared for recovery now so I want you to stay near me for a little while so I can keep an eye on you. The skinny corp man who is running around the tent talking to people said our house should be fixed in two days so we’ll be sleeping here until then.” She responded with a smile. Likely, she was happy to get the situation back to normal quickly, nothing wrong with that.
She always tried to keep herself in check when she was awake around me, I hadn’t noticed it when I was younger but these days her eyes were a bit tighter, the smiles a bit more forced. She really didn’t want to be in the real world anymore but she had to wake up to talk to me and check in so she put up with it.
I couldn’t do anything about it though so I just learned to accept it and try to keep mom ticking over as best I could while carving out my own life from what was around while trying not to get carved myself.
“That’s good then, you remember Ears? He said he might be able to get a place over in the triple Rs streets for us but it’s better that we’ll be back in our home so soon.” I said, honestly I’d expected the corpo types to strip the whole street apart to clean up all traces of whatever they had messed up with. Maybe even zeroing every person to so much as get a glimpse that gas stuff.
“Have you eaten since you woke up? Did they give you anything yet?” Mom asked, fussing with my hair.
“No, I just woke up and they told me the legal stuff and that I wasn’t dying. I shook off the meds eventually and here I am.” I told my mom. I was actually hungry now I wasn’t dealing with new going on around me.
“I collected some of the ration packs they have been giving out and grabbed some snacks and stuff from other people giving food out. Turns out a lot of people on our street had their fridges and stuff damaged in the blasts so people are just giving the food out before it goes bad.” She said reaching under her little folding bed next to the one we were sitting on, my bed for now I guess.
“You think it was a blast?” I asked her as she rummaged through a plastic bag full of packaged food.
“Well, the corp people said it was an attack on something of theirs and people have said they had dangerous gas in their homes and stuff, you got burnt by it. And the fercrete got all broken as well. Makes sense the highway above got bombed a whole lot and whatever was on it fell into the housing complex below.” She said finally digging out some beef flavored protein mash stuff and mixing it up in a big bag of crunch sticks, basically just carbs pressed into blocks and then baked in a bubbler machine until you ended up with something edible, if dry.
“Right, I suppose that could be it. Moving something dangerous and then it got blown up and fell into the complex, spreading it around. Nice news bites for them to clean it up after as well.” I said rolling the idea through my head, it didn’t seem to totally fit though. The gas and structure damage was definitely lining up with that but what about that melted thing in the living room that ate the power cell I’d scavenged? What about the electrical effects that had fried my implants? What about it making more of the gas?
There was something more going on with the whole thing but I didn’t have the means to find any information on it. Not with the corp cleaning up the evidence as we spoke.
I reached out and took a bag of now beef flavored, salt covered crunch sticks. The packet called them “Wonder Carbs” but there were so many brands for the same stuff so whatever.
We ate the food quietly next to each other and watched the people bustle about through the tent. The flow gradually slowed down as time went on and after we finished the second big bag of the stuff, this time barbecue flavored; whatever animal a barbecue was, the tent was mostly calmed down as people started settling in for the night and filling up the little beds in the fabric lined rooms.
I lay on the rough fabric as my mom fell asleep among the chaos on the bed next to me. On the opposite side was an old man hugging a bulky external respiration unit to himself as he slept, probably couldn’t afford actual cyberlungs or whatever the model would be called. The grotty thing was just buzzing away and clicking once it filled and again when it emptied with the constant sound of some sort of air pump noise in between.
Calming down to sleep was a little surreal to me though, the last time I’d done this the entire room had melted and my skin with it. I’d put the thoughts of what the gas stuff had done to my body to the side but now I was thinking about it I’d probably need to chip some synth-skin in at some point if it didn’t heal well, especially with my head. You can get away with a scar riddled body but you’d straight up get turned away from some places if you looked like a melted candle.
I checked my face render on my biomonitor and it looked raw and my eyes still looked red around the sockets. My hair was a little scuffed but didn’t seem to have mixed much with the acid at least. Maybe I’d get away with my appearance in the end of the recovery.
[User has processed the requisite caloric surplus required to initiate pending treatments.]
[User is advised to prepare themselves for a small amount of pain and to arrange a suitable environment for post-treatment recovery.]
Wait. What? This thing again. What does that second part mean?
[User is advised to be able to attend to themselves in regards to vomiting and emptying bowels on completion of the treatment to expel toxic compounds and other waste products tainted with dangerous elements.]
So the bathroom? I highly doubt this is even going to work anyway. Gonk interface thinks I have a medical suite of some sort. It’ll throw an error as soon as it tries to do anything. I just stayed laying back on the bed listening to the sounds of snoring strangers and the ventilator of my old neighbor.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
[Treatment will begin in ten seconds…]
Yeah, sure it will. I wondered if mom had scrounged anything fizzy to drink.
[Queued treatment: Grade zero medical rehabilitation and purge treatment will now begin.]
And now the error message.
Then a rush of pain ran through my body, it felt like someone had poured not quite boiling but still painfully hot water through my body all at once. I couldn’t even scream as my lungs just clamped closed and my throat dried out almost instantly.
I rolled out of bed in a panic as I tried to breathe and it was then I realized this was that gonk treatment thing! Was it failing somehow? Was it broken in some dangerous way!?
Suddenly the pain was gone and my lungs opened up as I staggered to my feet, a little shaky but otherwise fine as I pulled in gulp after gulp of air as I tried to shake the stars from my eyes. My stomach was gurgling loudly and I felt a tightening pain. This… The interface said I needed to find a toilet.
I near enough ran to the public toilets at the side of the street, not even set up by the corps as they’d always been here. Well, it would have been better if it was a run, it was more of a pain-filled waddle as I tried to not shake myself too much while trying to keep quiet to not wake people up.
I made it to the stalls in time and relieved myself without issue although the smell, while typically bad, smelled mostly like molten tarmac which was concerning. Then I flushed and tried to leave only to then quickly need to throw up, returning to the stall and vomiting what I could only describe as an orange jelly material and a load of heavy bile that burned worse than I’d noticed before.
I kept vomiting for quite a while. I was losing focus and had gone from standing over the toilet to basically wrapped around the thing. I finally finished, flushed and walked out of the toilet stall to clean my hands in the sinks. The mirror was heavily damaged and graffiti and had no use as a way to look at yourself so I just washed up and headed out.
Was that what was meant to happen? Have I just vomited up a kidney or something? I don’t have any medical implants or anything that can perform filtration, so if the debug interface actually pulled off that treatment properly then it did it with only the hardware in my cerebral implant, and that thing was old and a lowest bidder piece even what it was new.
[Treatment complete successfully. User has been cured of five minor ailments. For detailed information on the functions and outcomes of the treatment please see the treatment result documentation.]
Five ailments? Is an ailment like an illness? Can I see my details again? My profile I think.
Name: Malcolm Beckett
Age: 10
Health:
Widespread minor dermal damage
Minor respiration tissue damage
Cyberload: Trace
Endurance: -1
Reflexes: -1
Perception: -1
Insight: 0
Presence: -1
Skills: None
Abilities: None
Huh. So a lot of that must have been what made my sick and… Yeah, well that must have been why it was so chemically. Is that a word?
Hey, sanctum. How were you able to purge me or whatever? I don’t have the augmentations for that.
[Your biomonitor contained enough data collection hardware to re-purpose into a construction in your torso that was formed from extraneous heavy metals and organic elements in your body. That construction resolved itself into a rudimentary organic medical filter about the size of a clenched fist. The filter has been exhausted from your treatment and has been recycled into your tissues.]
You took bits of me and made a new organ to clean me out? How does a cerebral implant do that?
[The Sanctum program has full control over the hundreds of types dozens of millions of nanomachines that make up its physical form. These can be tasked to carry out a great number of premade procedures and the Sanctum program can create new procedures as the User requires based on information, hardware, software and materials provided and the requirements of the user.]
Nanomachines! They have been banned for… Well, like forever! More than a hundred years! Well the adaptive types are… Maybe you aren’t adaptive?
[All Sanctum controlled nanomachines are created for specific processes and are only able to perform a small number of functions. These functions do not violate the 2091 Mercury intrasolar ban on adaptive nanomachinery.]
Oh, well then that’s fine then. Still a bit spooky but at least I’m not going to be chased by cops for tiny illegal machines.
[Sanctum controlled nanomachines do however violate the 2103 Mercury intrasolar ban on nanomachine creating nanomachinery.]
So you are banned!
[Technically, user is correct.]
I needed to keep calm. I was sweating and worn out. I needed sleep.
Filling my hands with water I washed my face as best I could and then my hair. I thought to bring up my appearance on my optical display given the lack of mirror. I looked a little better.
Eyes feeling heavy I walked back to the tent filled with snoring and quietly found my bed to lay down. It squeaked a bit as I settled down on it and I just stared at my mother’s back on the other bed, she would likely go ballistic if she found out I had nanites in me.
I’d heard before that nanites used to be in the water supply back in the day designed to keep people healthy, but that was before the whole plan to make a dyson swarm around the sun by using nanites to grind up Mercury. Now they basically weren’t allowed to be used outside of single use, single function situations like nanoscale surgery and augmentation installation.
Ah, whatever. I’m not dead despite everything today. I’m down a power cell and living on the street but at least the second thing will fix itself with a few days. I’ll need to find some cash soon though with that battery gone.
Time to sleep for tonight though.
Maybe the gonk sanctum can help me make some cash tomorrow.
-
Waking up was rough, my stomach was hurting from throwing up and the unfamiliar bed had me sleeping weird; leaving my body quite stiff and painful. Getting to my feet and stretching I noticed my mom had left at some point. I hoped she wasn’t trying to get back into the house to get her incarnation player.
I grabbed a pack of starries and a bag of fish strings and got moving out of the tent. The place was quite busy but not much conversation and shouting yet, people weren’t into the mood for talking yet it seemed.
Pushing out through the packed exit onto the street I looked around for my mom but she wasn’t out there. I wondered how I was going to make some cash today with the corp swarming about and everyone displaced likely thinking the same.
I could either go wide and look around the streets for trash or something to klep worth credits at the scrapper. I could also go deep and head down to the maintenance layers to look for malfunctioning units to pull apart or even deeper to the piping layers and hope to find some broken down bots or maybe a powered down regulator unit to strip for scrap.
Usually I tried to work alone these days, I’d worked with others a lot growing up and it always led to issues or blood. Better to keep to myself. But in some of the deeper piping layers it was better to have a team with you for protection, there were a lot of weird and violent living people down there or sometimes just other scavengers looking at your haul.
There might be some odd jobs people around here will need doing I could look for but I didn’t fancy dodging corp door kickers just to collect peoples items from their melted homes. It wouldn’t go well to get in trouble with the people who own the tent I’m currently living in.