(SCRAPPED) This Future Sucks: Chapter 1

(Spinoff of Liquidate)

Two days after the organ trade was officially in place with the Berjaya Times Square Exchange, ultraviolence skyrocketed. Without willing donors in your circle, why not gut some poor bastard in an alley and steal their gooey dumplings? If corpsec like VaS (Verdicts and Sec) Apostles or the police don’t catch you red handed, the exchange gives zero shits who or how you get your hands on your juicy assets. No questions asked. Make sure you bring something like TG’s Freezer shopping bags or some other container that can keep the organs intact. They don’t accept any that are spoilt or destroyed.

This organ stock market thing was first proposed to “curb the illegal organ trade”, “widen the availability of fresh, spare organs” or whatever bullshit they came up with. Legal or not, it makes little difference. If anything, that’d escalate the organ harvesting in the streets. Unless the law is around, so long as you are armed and dangerous, people won’t generally try to intervene. Only dumbshits do that.

For now, I think the heart and spine fetch the best prices. Especially the spine. Spinal prosthetics are very rare and expensive. The few that exist are either reserved for the ultra suits or are used as some sort of mil gear. Spines, however, take time to extract perfectly, and you don’t really wanna stick around a corpse in many places.

Of course, there are body organ prosthetics, but the kicker is that these little shits are vulnerable to EMP attacks. The blast of an EMP grenade covers a very large radius, and thus mainly used in frontal assaults.  If your electricity suddenly goes home for munchpatties and Coca Cola, chances are that a party is nearby. If you have vital chrome like a heart, you can die in a few minutes. Because there isn’t an immediate solution to this, natural organs are still a big preference.

My first organ trading experience was with this childhood buddy of mine who’s a lieutenant in a boso. Cyberbikers. Street racers. Gang on wheels. With creds glistening in my eyes, as I only had 300 in my pockets and two kay in my account, I agreed to take part in good ol’ gang violence. If their rival can hire some civvies for help this time, so can The Velocitards.

Normally a gang fight is rarely one to the death, but not for this one. Buddy told me that this rival gang, Jonestown, kidnapped the leader’s girlfriend and she was almost done with if it weren’t for him and some of his friends, including Buddy. He said that the angry meter was high enough to warrant another Yellowstone eruption, and the leader declared open season. There are a few other thorns pricking the Velocitards, but Jonestown was the sharpest.

“Natural selection dictates that we are setting Jonestown an early appointment with Death!” shouted the leader.

I remember the gang and volunteers brandishing their gizmos of street violence in the air. Fists. Bats. Pipes. Shivs. Poles. A wakizashi. I saw at least two guns. One belonged to some rando and another by the leader himself. His was an XAR Magnum Auto. That black pooshka looked bigger than his hand.

Buddy turned out to be the arm wielding the waki. For myself, I usually carry a XAR Mark II, always hidden within my ANGRY SCUMBAG bomber jacket. It has a big, gnarling pissed off smiley on its back, baring white teeth with red gums visible. I have a few bombers, but this one takes the cake for me. It was love at first sight.

Talking about the Mark II, it’s a common XAR-branded pooshka. It’s a good gun. Fires ten 9mm shots. Light. Easy to conceal and handle. It has an ammo counter and type display above the trigger too. Typical colors are black or silver, but it can be repainted and engraved. Assembly’s a piece of cake. Like other heaters, so long as you remember to clean it, this baby will take good care of you. As a bonus, it supports silencers. Meanwhile, if your 9mm rounds are hollow point or armor piercing, it’s better. I heard that the AP rounds can penetrate as far as Grade II, though usually it is probably more effective at I, and a lot of us folks can afford Grade I.

The Velocitards sped through concrete and purple-soaked neon, every building and advertisement a passing blur. You can’t look at anything for more than a full second before it’s gone. I held onto Buddy’s shirt while keeping my glazzies on the road. Bosos speeding on their bikes are the closest you can get to seeing a calvary charge.

I was close to losing focus when the Velocitards were closing in and the leader was already letting his pooshka shout out verdicts to the guilty. Buddy clashed the headlights of his Locust 400 Hayabusa into the ribs of some schmuck that was one of them civvie volunteers among Jonestown. He had a shitty PopPurse in his hand, the 3D printed plastic gun shattered when it fell on the sidewalk. Per Buddy’s instructions, I hopped off the seat and armed myself, turning around just in time to see a charging Jonestown with a pole fitted with a scrap spearhead. I opened fire at his head twice. He fell off his bike on the spot.

A bullet whizzed by my own gulliver as I took cover behind the Locust, Buddy meanwhile taking one at the shoulder. As both of us ducked, the seemingly endless promotions surrounding us were drowned by screams, thuds and the occasional pop-pop of a heater. Insults and wails of pain blended in a hateful chorus. The orchestra intensified as me and Buddy got away from the Locust. While I stayed close to him, he effortlessly cut down Jonestown and civvie scums with his waki despite his injury, like he leaped out of a samurai anime because scripted actors no longer brought his battle spirit to orgasm. I continued to shoot at least two more Jonestowns, aiming carefully at the legs before double tapping them on the skulls. When I heard the familiar bark of the leader’s XAR Magnum, I heard no further gunshots. Still, I ducked behind the Locust again, letting the fight go on.

By the time I popped out, the Jonestown vecks and their own volunteers dwindled and despite losses among the Velocitards, we emerged victorious, though I was close to certain death when a civvie caught me off guard and hit my cheek with the flat end of a claw hammer. It was a miracle that my cheekbones weren’t fractured, but it still hurt. It ached badly while I quickly duck down to avoid another swing, then pushing my barrel against his solar plexus, I almost emptied my clip and shoved him to the ground. As the last round was spent between the eyes, I watched the Velocitards raining down blows on their surviving foes, bashing and cutting viciously. With open season ongoing, there was no playing fair. No mercy and hesitation shown. Embrace the inner, violent apes that we are. No prisoners. Destroy the body in a pulp. The bruise on my cheek was turning bluish as I gritted my teeth, trying to endure the immense pain I deserved from not remaining on high alert in the middle of a mortal brawl.

Replacing the Mark II’s mag with a fresh and final one, I picked up the former and pocketed it in my black three-quarter shorts. Empty or filled, mags are precious. Just buy verdicts and fill em on your own instead of wasting your creds with new mags.

We spent some time trying to harvest any intact organs from the dead. I holstered my Mark II and watched Buddy dissecting a chest and pulled out most of the abdominal organs but the kidneys and intestines. I approached him.

“You got something sharp for me too?” I asked.

He looked up to me and gave me a multitool, then said his TG Freezer shopping bag should be big enough to store my share too. I looked around and find the same body that I last flatlined, then I learned that watching numerous educational autopsies by TeraHolmes didn’t automatically make you an expert dissector. I still did sloppy work in making an incision and peeling the skin away from the muscle. I took care not to accidentally pierce the blade too deep into the body, lest my new assets will be ruined by my own carelessness. Where I shot this lump of meat, only the heart and lungs were intact. The rest were ruined by full metal jacket.

After carefully cutting them out from below the ribcage, I brought them back to Buddy, who was already finished with his own share, and dumped mine into his Freezer bag. True to its name, the inside is perpetually on ice. A very good preservation bag, sealed with a zipper.

The Berjaya Stock Exchange is both a shopping mall and Malaysia’s national trading exchange. As far as my ape brain can remember from reading in cyberspace, Bursa went down the shitter when the Global Slump bent the economy over the knees. After Berjaya Corp bought it out for 2.2 billion creds, it thought it was convenient to move the national trading floor into its Times Square Mall. Plus, it wanted to expand the space, so the Bursa Exchange hung its terminal and passed on.

The Berjaya exchange is in both Berjaya towers so naturally, for further convenience, they built a bridge between them. Living on the bridge are a giant pair of statue animals. The golden bull and the black bear facing off each other, each sporting a pair of red, bright fluorescent eyes. The bear slightly towers over the bull on its hind legs, ready to smack it in the face while the bull charges on with its curved, golden pairs of horns. Keratins and proteins with a side of bling.

In this age, trading the old-fashioned way in trading floors are safer than digital trading. There are folks who are scared shitless of their transactions interrupted to have their assets stolen or wake up one morning to spit out their cup of MesCap when their trading apps crashed and lost their creds. Although such realities are not a 24/7 occurrence, the Online Broker Crisis drastically decreased people’s trust towards online trading, and Berjaya recognized that. Both it and MayCimb paid the Prime Minister to restrict online trading, and only trust their own apps.

I still vividly remember the scene I was greeted with when we entered the trading floor. Besides a few Berjaya corpsecs, you have this lake of people in suits or some other respectable work attire, and others in street wear. I don’t know much about any other places, but the trading square is one instance where corpos and street scums share and breathe in the same oxygen.

I thought to myself, “Corpsec looks like they are seldom here. What’s stopping somebody to rob a corpo or steal organs?”

I looked around, then tilted my head towards the ceiling. My mouth hung agape as I laid my glazzies upon what are staring down on us. On the entire trading floor.

Big, golden framed paintings of singular eyes covering every corner of the ceiling. Every background is bluish with some whites. Imagery of the blue sky and white clouds is conjured in my gulliver. I have a history of mostly inhaling Dumbo. But lately, for almost a year, I haven’t had any, yet looking up towards the glares gave me the same tics I got when a trip kicks in.

My heart was beating fast when I slowly grit my teeth, trying to control myself from the primal fear of surveillance that the eyes infected into my head. I must have stopped following the Velocitards, because I later felt a gentle slap on my cheek and a hand tilting my head back to my front.

It was Buddy. The familiar, green accented mohawk and chisel jawline. He asked me what was up and looked up the ceiling. Then he tugged my hand as we kept moving.

“First time?” he asked. “Fine to be nervous. Leader said the ceiling is armed with some high energy beam that will scorch you if you try anything funny here.”

“Is that why I don’t see much corpsec as I expected?”

“Probably. The Thrones can see everything here, like God watching down on us in his streaming PlayMol chair. Corpo or punk, you best not drokk around and just do business proper. We are close. Let’s find some booth with the shorter queues.”

As if.

There were some booths exclusively dedicated to business within official MayCimb or Berjaya trading territory. Maybe the organ market will be included in their platforms too, but for now, they don’t deal with those. The other booths were no less crowded, and we just had to stand in line. I didn’t engage much with the Velocitards, but when Buddy left to meet the leader at the front and came back to me, he gave me a credchip. One kay and four hundred.

“Leader extends his congratulations, friend. You did great back there,” says Buddy with a grin, then he spoke in my ear. “Where did you buy the heat?”

“Online in the deep Net,” I spoke back. “Just fracked around until I found this gun shop. Price was decent. It paid off though. I didn’t have the energy to go out and buy one myself. Frack it.”

Buddy nodded.

When his turn was up, he took it from here since I didn’t have any trading account. Not even MayCimb’s MCTrade or Berjaya’s iBull. It didn’t take too long for him to finish, and we soon got out of the line. I noticed that there were huge, white steel rectangular slabs behind the counters and the brokers storing our harvest inside them. There was fluorescent blue light coming out of the inside. Must be freezers.

“Bank?” Buddy asked.

“MayCimb. Just transfer it online. The app will nudge me."