Chapter 2: Contracts
The clinic didn’t have a name. Just a number. 4-19. Etched into frosted glass, wedged between a hydroponic refinery and a drone repair depot in Sector 9. The number felt like a bad omen. Inside, it didn’t smell like a hospital. Hospitals smelled of sickness and bleach. This place smelled of burning ceramic and hot copper. It smelled like a mechanic’s bay.
I sat. Molded plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Chrome bolts. Shiny. New. Everything in this place got built to be replaced before it wore out.
To my left, a dock worker holding his severed arm in a bio-bag filled with pink preservation gel. The gel cast his fingers in an eerie glow. Inside the bag, something shifted. A soft squelch. The sound of preserved flesh settling. He didn’t flinch. Bored. His gaze fixed on the preservation fluid, not moving. His other hand scrolled through something on a cracked datapad. He didn’t notice that I sat down.
To my right, a girl. Sixteen, maybe younger. Scrolling through dermal plating options on her datapad. Bronze. Titanium. Carbon-weave. She shopped for skin as if it were upholstery, her finger swiping past each option like a paint swatch. Then she paused. Pearl finish. The light caught it. Her lips moved. No sound, but I read it anyway.
Gorgeous.
“Vane, Silas, Bay 3,” the speaker droned.
Above the door, a scrolling marquee promised: FINANCING AVAILABLE FOR ALL ESSENTIAL UPGRADES. WHY RENT YOUR POTENTIAL WHEN YOU CAN OWN IT?
I stood, feeling and hearing my knees pop. The sound echoed in the sterile silence.
Bay 3 wasn’t a room. It was a stall. Surgical servos and hydraulic arms lined the walls. Limbs too large to be handling human flesh. The surrounding air smelled of surgical coolant and ozone, a sharp chemical tang that made my sinuses burn. Each servo bore a faded yellow tag: PRECISION LASER. BONE INTEGRATION. VASCULAR SEAL. CRANIAL CAVITY RETRACTION.
I’d seen these in academy videos. Never used on Baselines. Not until now.
The Chair sat in the center. Black leather. Chrome frame. Restraints that appeared sturdy enough to hold a convulsing man. The leather was worn at the wrists and ankles. Pale streaks marked where other people’s skin had rubbed away the dye. Ghost marks.
How many bodies had sat here before me?
A man in a white coat waited by a monitor, back to me, data streaming across the screen in rapid blue pulses. His shoulders hunched. His jaw worked. Tension hummed through him like a current running through electrical wire.
“Sit,” he said.
I sat. The leather was cold. It sucked the heat right out of me.
“Doctor, if you’re reading the waiver, don’t bother. I signed it. Just tell me I’ll wake up.”
He suddenly went still. His shoulders tensed under the white coat. A posture I hadn’t seen in years, but one I would know in the dark. He turned slowly. Mid-thirties, but his face was a map of exhaustion no cosmetic splicing could hide. Brown eyes. Sharp. Filled with disbelief and devastation.
“Aris,” I breathed. The name tasted like ash.
“Silas,” he said. Not a question. It was the sound of a parent finding their child in a morgue before they’re even dead.
The datapad clattered onto the metal tray. He didn’t look at the nurses or the machines. He crossed straight to me, seized my chin with a grip that was clinical but shaking with suppressed rage. His hands smelled of surgical soap and something else. Something I recognized from many years ago. The same hands that had pulled me out of the white building as a child. The same hands that had given me my name. Now they were trembling.
“What are you doing here?” he hissed, his voice low enough that the cameras wouldn’t pick it up. “Of all the clinics in the Sprawl... why are you here?”
“It’s where the insurance sent me,” I said, pulling my face away. I couldn’t meet his eyes. I felt like a kid again. “I didn’t know you were working for Helios. I thought you were still in the Zone.”
“I go where the funding is,” he said, his eyes flicking to the door, checking for observers. “But that doesn’t matter. You have to leave. Now.”
“I can’t. It’s a mandate, Aris. Upgrade or eviction. I’m not losing my badge.”
“You’re going to lose a lot more than a badge if you let them cut into you,” he snapped. He grabbed the chart, scanning the procedure notes. “Class 3 Ocular Suite? Are you insane? You know what you are. You know what your blood does to foreign matter.”
“I’m tired of being a Baseline, Aris,” I shot back, my defensive anger rising to cover the fear. “I’m tired of being slower. Of being the only thing in this city that rots. I need this.”
“You are alive. That is what you are. Everyone else out there? They’re just shipwrecks held together with rust and silicone. You are the only thing that is real,” he said. His voice took on a furious tone.
“Real doesn’t pay the rent. And real doesn’t stop a bullet.”
He just stared at me. The anger bled out of his face, leaving something worse. He turned to the surgical tray. Scalpel. Bone saw. Chrome eyes resting in their sterile bath like offerings on an altar. His hand moved toward them, then stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper.
“If I send you away, Greyson will just send you to another clinic. Some chop-shop in the Gut. A butcher who doesn’t know your history.”
He looked at me, his eyes hard and glassy.
“Last week, I turned a kid away. A rookie, just like you. I told him it was dangerous. I took the moral high ground.” His voice cracked. “So he went to a street doc in Sector 4. They used industrial sealant on his optic nerve. He didn’t die, Silas. He wishes he had. He’s in a care ward screaming at invisible fires.”
He gestured to the shiny, sterile tools on the tray.
“But the week before that? I successfully installed a neural lace in a girl. Perfect integration. She’s faster, smarter, better. And she doesn’t laugh anymore. She doesn’t dream. I saved her life and killed her nature.”
He leaned in, the mask of the professional slipping completely.
“That is the math, Silas. That is the choice. I can ruin you with precision, or I can let the city butcher you with indifference. Which tragedy do you prefer?”
We sat like that for a long time. His hand was still on the surgical tray. My were eyes still on the chrome.
“The one where I keep my badge. Do it, Aris. Please. If it has to be someone... I want it to be you,” I said softly.
He closed his eyes. He took a breath that rattled in his chest. When he opened them again, the mentor was gone. The surgeon was back. But the warmth was gone, too.
“I can’t use the standard protocol,” he said, his voice flat. “Your immune system... it’s going to fight. I have to put you under deep. Deeper than the law allows.”
“Do what you have to do.”
Aris reached up and pulled the gas mask down from the overhead boom. He didn’t look at me as he adjusted the valves. He couldn’t.
“I gave you that name. Silas. It means ‘of the forest.’ Organic. Wild. And now I’m the one who has to pave it over,” Aris said as he placed the mask over my face.
“Just make me see, Aris.”
The mask smelled of stale rubber and localized anesthetic. I tried to push it away with my mind, tried to find a better smell. I thought of the basil Elara was chopping this morning. The green, sharp scent of something that grew from the dirt.
“Oh, you’ll see. You’ll see everything,” Aris said, and his voice cracked. The gas hit me. The basil vanished. The dirt vanished. Only the chemical void remained. “Count back from ten,” Aris said. His voice came from miles away.
“Ten.” The restraints tightened. Clack. Clack. Clack.
“Nine.” The ceiling dissolved. Hydraulic arms above me looked like spiders made of knives.
“Eight.” I thought of Elara. The promise. It’ll still be you.
“Seven.” Aris leaned over me. He wasn’t looking at the monitor. He was looking at my eyes. My natural, brown, failing eyes as if saying goodbye to an old friend. His mouth moved.
“Forgive me,” I may have imagined it.
“Six.” The darkness rose up from within me. Deep water. Cold. Heavy.
Then the sound. Whirrrrr-zzzt. The bone saw. Not medical. Industrial. Factory floor. Construction. I tried to scream, to tell them to stop, that I’d changed my mind, that I wanted my failing eyes, that I wanted home. But the paralysis had locked me in the meat. Pressure. Crushing pressure on my face. A popping sound, wet and sickening, like a grape under a boot.
Then nothing.
My soul didn’t leave my body. It was evicted. The sensation of being less. A room after the furniture has been removed. Still a room, still structured, but empty of the things that made it home. Somewhere, voices cut through the static. They sounded like they came from underwater. Muffled. Desperate.
“BP spiking. 180 over 110.” Aris.
“Stabilize the graft. Cauterize the nerve endings.”
“He’s rejecting the interface fluid. Tissue swelling.”
“Push the immunosuppressants. Maximum dose.”
“Doctor, that’s lethal—”
“He’s not a Baseline. Do it.”
Cold liquid flooded my veins. Fire followed. I tasted copper and burnt plastic, the flavor of my own cells rejecting what didn’t belong. My body convulsed, but I had no body to convulse. I was consciousness divorced from flesh. I was a scream with no throat to make it. I wasn’t a person anymore. Meat and math colliding in the dark. And in that darkness, I understood what I’d done.
I hadn’t bought new eyes. I’d sold the only ones that had ever looked at Elara and seen her, truly comprehended her, without a data overlay calculating her market value. Her pulse. Her fear level. Her threat assessment. All the things that made her less in the eyes of the city.
I had traded the truth for high definition. A loading bar appeared in the static.
SYSTEM BOOT... 14% OPTICAL SYNC INITIATING. WELCOME TO HELIOS.
The text burned. Not light hitting a retina. Data writing itself onto my brain. Characters burning their way into the soft tissue of consciousness. I tried to blink. No eyelids. Only shutters.
SYNC COMPLETE.
The world slammed back. Light. Too much. White. Blinding. Scorching. Burnt circuit boards underneath. The smell of me being rewired. Dust motes floated in the air like tiny planets. Microscopic scratches on the metal arm above me, each one a miniature canyon. I counted the pores on Aris’s face. Mapped them. Saw the moisture glistening in each.
My vision was perfect. Terrible, but perfect.
“Silas?”
I tried to answer, but my throat was as dry as sand. The words tore at my vocal cords.
“Can you see me?” Arias asked.
I focused and saw a red box snapped around his face. Text scrolled.
SUBJECT: MALE. 34 YEARS. HEART RATE: 112 BPM. DIAGNOSIS: EXTREME DISTRESS.
Heat radiated from his skin in light infrared waves. His body was a furnace. Adrenaline. Fear. His pulse stuttered in his neck. Started. Stuttered again. Every tell visible. Every lie detector response catalogued. I could diagnose him the way a mechanic reads an engine.
I was a Shiny. Upgraded. Powerful. Alone.
“I see you,” I said, the words tasting like blood.
His gaze moved from the bio-monitor to me to the restraint buckle. Back to me. Like he was trying to solve an equation that didn’t have an answer. His hand trembled when he reached for the restraint.
“Don’t blink.”
“Why?”
“Your immune system just woke up.” He reached for the restraint buckle. “And it’s angry.”
Then the burn started.