Chapter Twenty-Five - Sneaky Ghillie Lemon Squeezy

“The pornography industry is nearly always at the forefront of technological changes. Video playback, online streaming, VR, augmented reality [...] it’s not surprising that when new tech became available, alien technology at that, it was immediately put to carnal uses.

Also, alien porn was an interesting development for the industry.”

--Excerpt from an article on TheHub.com, 2023

***

I knew I didn’t need to move stealthily in order to not make any noise. My armour’s boots were silent, and it wasn’t like I was wearing some of those cheap nylon clothes that make swishing sounds when they rub together.

Still, it would be wrong to casually walk in while stealthed.

I kept low, eyes and ears peeled for any trouble, and it didn’t take much for me to find some.

There was, as Myalis had warned, a guard in the room. He was sitting behind a desk, head bent back, looking towards the ceiling. I could have imagined that he was taking a nap if it weren’t for Myalis’ telling me what he was watching at that moment. The jerky movement of his forearms didn’t help any.

“Weirdo,” I muttered.

“At least he’s all alone,” Rac said.

“Close your eyes, you,” I said. Didn’t need her seeing any of this. “Myalis, can we just shut off all of his augs?”

Not being able to see anything might calm the idiot down a notch.

Certainly, but shutting down all of them would terminate him. He has respiratory augmentations, and some that assist with blood circulation, likely because of the way his arms and legs were disconnected.

“Can you be selective?” I asked. I navigated through the menus of my cyberwarfare suite, and found a way to connect to his augs. Then I saw a flash of what he was looking at before I shut it off in a hurry. “Wow,” I muttered.

People living in sewers were pretty dirty.

That should be easy enough to do. Shutting down all nonessential augmentations in three... two...

My new pal jerked on his chair, then looked around. It was pretty clear that he couldn’t see anything, though, judging by the way he moved his arm around as if searching for stuff. He bounced to his feet, did up his zipper, then stumbled towards the door at the back. “John! John, my eyes have fucked up again!” he shouted.

I followed him.

According to the map I had, the next area over was a wide passageway that overlooked another corridor one floor down.

I kept close to my blind masturbator buddy as he moved in. There was a catwalk that ran all along the corridor, with some passages leading off of it to the left. A rail kept people safe on the right, and below that I could see down to another corridor with crates and boxes. There were some tables with games, a few TVs on the wall, even a bed tucked in a corner. It was a living space.

“Davie, you stupid fuck, close the fucking door!” someone shouted from below. “You’re letting the good air out.”

Davie stumbled backwards, swearing under his breath the entire time. “My arms are all screwed up,” he said as he tried to find the handle. “My fingers are numb, I can’t feel my joints, and my eyes are off.”

“What were you doing?”

The dude talking walked out of one of the side rooms. He was a tall guy, with a good chunk of his face from cheekbones up missing and replaced with a set of embedded augmentations. His arms and legs were prosthetic as well, the sort I’d seen on plenty of Sewer Dragons, though maybe a notch nicer.

“C’mon, John, you know I was just checking my media feeds,” Davie said.

“Uh huh. What kind of porn were you watching?” John asked.

I stepped to the side so that I was next to the wall and out of the way.

“I wasn’t watching anything like that—don’t be disgusting. Now fix my eyes, I can’t see shit!”

I snuck around John while he grabbed a hold of his pal’s head, then continued on deeper down the corridor. It was strange, being entirely invisible to people. “Myalis, how’s the air in here?”

There continues to be trace elements and small quantities of various chemicals. Long term exposure is more harmful than would be advised, but the air is otherwise close to standard.

“Great,” I said. I tapped on my thigh and opened the holster that held my Trench Maker. It would be in easy reach, if I needed it.

The room that John had been in looked like a combination office and bedroom. So this entire area had to be some sort of living space. Or at least an area where this lot spent a good deal of time. I passed by the entrance to a short corridor with the stairs in it so that I could check out the other rooms on this level, but for the most part, they weren’t much more than storage and what looked like a small barracks with two people sleeping in it.

It was... I glanced at a clock on my HUD. Nearly eight in the morning. “We’ve been down here forever,” I muttered. If I wanted to get to the hotel and take six showers before Lucy woke up, then I’d have to wrap things up in... Lucy and I’d had a busy night, so I probably had until noon before she woke up.

I refocused. The top section didn’t seem to have anything too out of the ordinary. Certainly no room full of kidnapped people.

Making my way downstairs, I resisted the urge to hum; that was, until Rac started to make commentary. “It’s a nice place,” she said.

“This place?” I asked.

The decor was a bit industrial for my liking. Too much rust and flaking paint and signage that dated all the way back to the 30s hanging on the walls.

“Yeah. It’s safe, got some air, probably water. Bet they can sneak out from a bunch of places too. And it’s safe.”

“You said that twice,” Franny said.

“Yeah, cause it’s important,” Rac said. “Really sucks to have your house blown up, or mowed away by some corp. Or just... taken, you know? You arrive home and you find out some gang needed a place for a lab, so now you need to move out. S’not fun.”

“Hey, you’ll be fine from now on, you know,” I said.

Rac was silent for a long while. “Thanks,” she said at last. “But, uh, I don’t need charity. I can look out for myself.”

“Sure,” I said. “But I look out for my friends, so you’ll have to deal.”

She chuckled, and I figured I’d have a hard time convincing her to be anything like one of the kittens.

The bottom floor wasn’t all that weird. Cement walls made more cramped by boxes and crates and stacks of those plastic pallets used to carry stuff around. Some enterprising people had stacked them in such a way as to create little cubby-holes where they could sleep, but otherwise, there really wasn’t much worth poking at.

One guy was sitting at a desk, an IV tube poking out of his jacket and connected to a syringe that he was slowly, ever so slowly, plunging down.

Judging by the way he was twitching every few seconds, whatever he was juicing himself with wasn’t healthy. I left him to it.

There were plenty more Sewer Dragons in the rooms here and there, most of them sleeping, but a few were gesturing in the air as though working through media feeds. They could have been any number of people I’d seen waiting on the sides of stores and streets—background people minding their own business. Except these were in some fucky underground pit, and none of them had much of their original bodies left.

At the end of the corridor was a large door. It had a wheel in its middle, and, strangely enough, a bunch of wires running across it. “Is that a trap?” I asked.

“It’s not live,” Gomorrah said. “Look, bottom left: there’s nothing at the end of the wire.”

“Huh,” I said as I knelt down and stared. The wires were bare in some spots, but still in their plastic sheaths in others. “What is it?”

“I suspect that it’s a rudimentary faraday cage,” Myalis said.

“The things that make it hard to connect to the internet?” I asked. A few stores had them. You needed to use the local wifi or nothing at all. That way they could datamine you while you shopped.

“Makes sense,” Franny said, “if that’s where they’re keeping the people they kidnapped.”

“Well then,” I said. I gripped the wheel and spun. If anyone heard, I had plenty of ammo to tell them to calm down.

***