Secondhand Parts
As the street tough hyped his score, Dr. Carter paid more attention to the garish, animated tattoos that crawled beneath his skin and the crude augs that marred it more than the words he blurted out. He seemed lowbottom, even for this part of the sprawl. Really, if he hadn’t come into her clinic with thirty kilograms of other people’s limbs looking to do some business, she wouldn’t have taken him or his crew seriously.
That much violence elevated him a notch or two in her eyes. Still, almost all of that credit was wiped out by the poorly bandaged wounds his crew sported. While all of them had made equally questionable aesthetic choices in garish neon greens, which she assumed were their crew’s colors, some of them were hurt pretty bad, and the fact that they weren’t looking to get stitched up meant that they were every bit as stupid as she thought they were. It didn’t matter, and clearly neither did they, since their gang clearly wasn’t on her radar.
Seventh Street Slayers? South Side Scythes? He’d mentioned their name as well as his own, but she’d been too busy staring at the bloody garbage bags they’d brought with them to pay much attention to all that.
Her reverie ended when the seller finally named his price. After that, she knew how this would play out, and while she didn’t even bother to keep a straight face, she did pretend to try. While she wanted to start the bidding process for the grisly items on display as low as possible, she didn’t want to outright disrespect the street tough in front of his crew. That could make things messy.
“Two hundred? For all of this?” she said finally when she got tired of listening to him talk. “You sure you didn’t get high before you came down my stairs nǚshì?”
The doctor didn’t quite laugh at him, but with that tone, she might as well have. While she didn’t know if he’d gotten blasted for pain relief or celebration, she would have known that he was flying even if her own well-calibrated cybereyes did feed her updates on his heartbeat, respiration, and pupil dilation three times a second.
Those showed that he was on Zazz or Jacked almost as clearly as they saw his anger rising with his pulse. She didn’t let that bother her too much, not with the auto turret mounted on display behind her. It hung there, from the ceiling, for everyone to see. If anyone pulled a weapon, the whole group of them would get shredded by high-velocity rounds before they had the chance to do much about it.
While that would protect her and give her the excuse she needed to replace the stained linoleum flooring that made the whole room look like shit, it would make a real mess. Between cleaning up the damage and the security service that’d pay her a visit afterward, she’d be lucky they only shut her down for a couple of weeks. So, burdensome though it might be, she maintained civility instead of trying to push the price even lower.
Besides, they didn’t want to kill her; they needed her, or at least her credits. Their dealer wasn’t about to take body parts in trade and give them what they needed to party. As the junkie in front of her struggled to work through that idea, she finally said, “I’ll give you twenty-five thousand for the lot of it.”
At barely more than a thousand credits a limb, her offer sounded insultingly low even in her ears. Two hundred thousand would have been close to fair, but then she didn’t make much of a profit on fair, and since there weren’t a lot of other buyers around, fair wasn’t in the cards. Unless these guys wanted to leave the city proper and take the risk of traveling into the outlands, they were out of luck. As dangerous as the sprawl could be sometimes, the outlands made it look like a block party.
“Twenty-five?!” the ganger erupted as his flunkies looked at him in alarm. “The pieces in this bag list for almost a mil! I want twenty percent of that, minimum!”
Doctor Carter nodded as she pretended to listen, but she didn’t need to. The lies came to her lips effortlessly as she waited for her turn to speak. “Ah, I see,” she said, pretending to find the flaw in his reasoning. “For cars or guns, twenty percent would be more than fair, I agree, but a lot of this stuff you’ve brought me isn’t going to survive removal, and even if it does, I’ll never be able to charge half price for a part with the serial numbers scrambled.”
“I’m not saying these are worthless,” she hastily added as she saw the man’s expression darken. “I’m just saying damaged goods aren’t worth as much as you think. That’s all.”
The doctor picked up a few of the arms then, and two of the heads, showing the various defects that detracted from their value. Someone had cut this one off too close to the joint, and that one had filament damage. “This skull has a bullet hole in it!” she declared at one point, showing it off as she talked over everyone’s head about the effects of shock trauma on circuitry.
Although she technically told them the truth, those truths were wildly exaggerated. As they went back and forth on a fair price, it even became a lesson on how to harvest parts from corpses more cleanly in the future, not that Doctor Carter would ever encourage people to murder for profit, of course. However, if two gangs were beefing anyway, then burying quality hardware along with the losers would have been a waste.
In the end, they agreed on sixty-five thousand credits, which would be enough to see the gang high all weekend and ensure that she made six hundred percent on the deal when she was done reinstalling the gear in those who could afford it. Well, 300% if you consider labor, but whatever, she thought as she looked at her gruesome score. A deal was a deal, and while she’d use some of these limbs to do some good in the community, the rest would keep her rent paid for months.
She’d seen the list that the tough had proffered at the start of their conversation. Still, as they took their leave and slowly tromped up the stairs, she took a look at a couple of the limbs she’d set aside during the negotiation process. There was a Kazuna, and one of the new Mastricht-8s, too, with its new millisecond-scale auto-react function. Either one of those would come close to paying for the whole lot once she’d cleaned them up and sterilized them.
She smiled to herself then as she ran the numbers; despite what she’d said a few minutes before, very few people in this neighborhood cared where something came from, as long as it worked and she sold it cheaply. That was doubly true if someone had been crippled by industrial accidents or gang violence and desperate to get back on her feet.
“It’s a bloody gold mine,” she whispered to herself as she started to add it all up. There would be a few failed components that weren’t worth harvesting, but even for those, the flesh would be worth a little something.
A reputable bug farm wouldn’t touch human protein. Fortunately, she knew plenty of less-than-reputable protein farmers who were good for making a body disappear, and even bug chow was getting expensive these days in the sprawl. She’d be the one doing them a favor, and by the time it was done, there wouldn’t be a shred of evidence that any of this had ever happened.
She felt the excitement flow through her then as she studied her bloody grab bag, eager to see what she’d just shelled out the credits for. It felt like Christmas in a deranged way, and all Doctor Carter wanted to do then was start slicing and dicing; unfortunately, that was the exact moment when the chime of her front door went off as it opened again.
Damn, she swore silently, annoyed that someone had the gall to open the door before she’d toggled on the closed sign to deal with this treasure-trove.
Out of habit, she flipped her visual feed briefly to make sure that one of the guys she’d just finished doing business with wasn’t about to come down the stairs blazing. What she saw, though, was worse. It wasn’t a ganger or a cop. It was Diego, her mystery man; he was back, and unsurprisingly, he was in rough shape.
A sigh of resignation escaped her lips at the sight. He was one of the people that she least wanted to see, no matter how well he paid. Unfortunately, she expected his vendetta would keep him coming back for a long time to come. She still regretted asking him what his deal was during his first visit.
Still, she couldn’t very well turn him away, not when something had blown off his left hand to the wrist, and the only thing that was keeping him from bleeding out was the belt that had been wrapped so tightly around his forearm that it had turned his mangled flesh white.
As he came down to her shop, she dragged the pieces and parts she’d just gathered into her walk-in refer, so that she could work on them later. Then she grabbed some synth blood and started washing up.
“Back already?” Doctor Carter asked, not bothering to turn around as her mystery man entered the room. “I was hoping that after your last visit, you’d stay bullet-free a little longer.”
“No one shot me,” he answered dazedly. “This is from a grenade.”
“I see…” Doctor Carter answered in as serious a tone as she could manage. “Maybe you should just stick to bullets then.”
Her mystery patient started going into detail on exactly how he’d ended up holding a live grenade as it went off, along with the gun battle that had let up to that moment, but she tuned him out as she washed up and gloved up. After his last two visits, she no longer needed to hear the details. He was a man on a mission, and sometimes that mission seemed to be violence for violence’s sake.
He should almost certainly be dead. That was the only part of his story that mattered to her at this point, as he talked about turning the tables on professional killers or taking on whole gangs at once. No matter how many men he killed, though, it wouldn’t bring back the people he’d lost.
“Don’t you think enough people have died?” she asked as she approached him and examined his mangled arm. Even that was probably asking too much, but the dark thoughts swirling around her mind demanded some kind of release.
“When everyone on the list is dead, it will be over,” he repeated, just as she knew he would. “When that happens, and there’s no one left to fight, well, I’ll have something to remember all of them by, won’t I?”
Doctor Carter was rarely at a loss, but something about this guy put her on the wrong foot. It wasn’t just what he was saying; it was how he was saying it. He wasn’t drunk or high, according to the stats her virtual assistant was picking up as she studied him. He wasn’t even afraid he might die. He wasn’t even sweating; instead, his heart beat like a metronome.
You’d have to be fucked in the head to survive being left for dead the way he was, she thought to herself. Still, he had quite a vendetta, and though patching up losers after gang beefs was pretty much how she made a living, she’d never had a customer quite like him before.
“I cut it off at the elbow, just like you told me,” he said, derailing her train of thought as he set the half-arm aug down on the examination chair like it was no big deal. “Left you plenty of room to do the detailed work.”
She looked at the proffered limb. It was a Green Anasawa model three. It was almost five years old, but it seemed to be in decent shape, even if it was nothing to write home about. She had better in stock, and with a bit of work, she could probably slap that Mastricht-8 on in its place.
He could afford it, too. His credit chip seemed as bottomless as his vendetta. She didn’t suggest it, though, because it would have been a waste of both of their time. Instead, she said, “You know this is a half arm conversion, right. Your wrist is fine. We don’t have to replace the rest.”
“It has to be this arm,” he insisted. “Cut what you need to cut.”
She resisted the urge to call him an idiot and instead pushed him back onto the exam chair, and started an IV of saline with some broad-spectrum antibiotics and painkillers, then hung up another bag of synthblood to keep her customer topped off and awake while she started on the teardown of her donor part. That would take more time than the surgery to install it, really.
While she’d planned to spend her evening doing exactly this, for some reason, knowing that he’d taken this trophy just to reuse it disturbed her more than two bags of anonymous limbs she’d just purchased. He’d ask me to cut off his hand even if he hadn’t just blown it off, she realized as she worked. That was certainly part of her horror. Only maniacs replaced good flesh with metal.
She tried to push that realization out of her mind as she focused on removing all of the dead flesh and neural shunts. That was no big deal, but putting it back into the man who’d killed the previous owner? That was some bad juju, and she crossed herself as she put the thing in the autoclave to sterilize it.
“It will never be enough, you know,” she said softly, suddenly feeling bad for him. “No matter how many you kill, no matter how many you…”
Doctor Carter’s words trailed off as she turned around and found her patient snoring softly to himself. She felt annoyed then that her professional distance had slipped, even a little, and reminded herself, Not your business. As long as he pays his bills, the only thing you’re in danger of losing is a customer.
She let him sleep a few minutes as her machine got up to temperature and only woke him up again when the part had been sterilized and cooled to explain the procedure, get his signed consent, and bill him. Even on surgeries like this, where survival was practically guaranteed, she always got paid up front. As soon as all of that was done, she put him under and got to work.
The surgery itself was messy but routine. For someone else, that might have been a gorefest, but after all the work she’d done over the years, it wasn’t so different from slicing deli ham as far as she was concerned.
Parts are parts, she told herself, whether they’re people or plastic.
She just picked the right spot to saw into to make sure that both of his hands would be of equal length, then brought her surgical saw to life with a high-pitched whine and started cutting. The vacuum attachment kept the blood from going everywhere. Still, even as it noisily slurped up blood and pureed flesh and sucked up the shards of bone, it did nothing about the smell of pulverized bone dust that wafted briefly through her clinic, momentarily overriding the copper of blood and the lingering ammonia smells of disinfectant.
That was the easy part. Once it was done, she had to reconnect the major arteries and veins with donor tissue from the stump so that they’d still circulate up to the mid-forearm. Then she slapped the new prosthetic on and let the nerve links do their job while she installed the mounting bolts to the ulna and radius.
Once the fit was solid, she injected a little wake-up juice into her client’s IV and then made herself some kaf while she waited for him to come around; the next step wasn’t hard, but she couldn’t do it without his cooperation. Really, it took more time to calibrate than it had taken to do everything else. It required a lot more talking, too.
On his previous visits, she hadn’t needed to do fine-tuning for the heart or the eye she’d replaced. The heart just worked, or it didn’t; she just had to check for leaks, and the eye, well, all modern cybereyes came with autofocus functions these days. They didn’t live in the Dark Ages; it wasn’t the 2050s anymore.
Cyberarms and legs, though, were as different as their owners and had to be calibrated to ensure they moved as expected. She accomplished this by giving him a command, observing the output, and then making adjustments. It was tedious, but not difficult, and as it ate up another hour of her life, it gave the two of them the chance to chat, even if it was against her better judgment.
This time, they didn’t discuss bodycounts or vendettas, though. They didn’t even discuss the reason why he was doing all of this, not directly. Instead, he told her stories of his life before all of this had happened, when he used to live in penthouses so far above the sprawl that her whole world was hidden under a layer of polluted fog. She wasn’t surprised; it certainly explained his bottomless credit chip.
By the end of it, Diego seemed almost human. Each time his new hand did something he didn’t expect, he paused the story he was telling to laugh about it.
“It wasn’t me, I swear!” he insisted when he flipped her off at one point when she asked him to make a fist. “It must be the previous owner, letting us know he’s not happy about this.”
She tried to smile at that, to defuse the mood, but the expression wouldn’t come. Instead, the corner of her mouth merely twitched as she digested the idea that some small piece of its previous owner’s ghost still clung to the part. These limbs were so carefully modified and calibrated that each one might be considered custom, but a ghost? Hardly.
Still, his smile only lasted until they’d finished and tamed the misbehaving limb. By the time she prescribed him a bottle of generic antibiotics and another of steroids, he was on his feet again, and he’d become the same haunted soul that he usually was. The man was here for one reason, and that was to use pieces of those who’d wronged him to make himself stronger. He had someone else’s heart, eye, and now he had a new hand, too. At the rate he was going, he’d be all gone before this was over.
She tried to imagine that as he left, not how horrible that life would be, because that was too depressing. Instead, she tried to imagine what his body would look like if everyone who had ever wronged him became a part of him in some twisted way.
Will there even be any of him left by the time he finishes his list? She wondered as she tried to think of what he’d become as he turned from an angry man into a broken borg made from the parts of his enemies.
While that image was disturbing, her thought from earlier made it much worse. As he left, she didn’t just imagine him fully converted into a collection of parts. She imagined the souls of his enemies following him like a fog, as each one clung to the part he’d stolen from them. That thought stuck with her, even after she shook her head to clear it, and she frowned as she moved to retrieve her recently purchased parts and get them back in working order.
As she laid the first arm on the steel table, she noted that her expression was tired and tense in the distorted chrome reflection of the thing. Her scalpel hovered, but she didn’t make the first cut. She couldn’t; instead, she was distracted by tiny, unimportant details.
There were scrapes on some fingers but not others, indicating usage patterns, and a faded tattoo just above the wrist. It was just three interlocking circles, and meaningless to her. But not its former owner, she added silently. Someone had chosen it.
That thought haunted her as she forced herself to get to work, making what should have been fun, tedious, and bloody. The doctor kept telling herself that after the first one was done, she’d get in her groove and move past this. That never happened, though, and with each tick of the clock her frustration mounted. When it was done, she set the Adanii 209B aside and reached for a leg that had been severed at the knee. She hoped this one would have less personality, but immediately noticed a faint impression of a sock line on the synthetic calf, and the brand of the blood-spattered sneaker it still wore.
Another ghost, she sighed mentally. Another story.
Doctor Carter kept waiting to be swept away by the detailed, repetitious nature of the work, but much to her annoyance, that never happened. Even when she started blasting something loud and angry, or later tried a calming live stream to drown out the chatter in her mind, she still found herself wondering about the people behind the parts. Every one of them belonged to a ganger, sure. She wasn’t about to value their lives any more than they did, but if she hooked this one up to her patient instead of the battered green Anasawa he’d brought in with him, what gesture would it have made?
She only got through half a dozen before she tossed her scalpel down onto the tray in disgust. “I’ll get back to this tomorrow,” she sighed to herself as she put the rest of the unfinished sack in the refer. As much as she normally loved to slice and dice, right now she wondered why she still did this job at all.
How many ghosts have I sold, she wondered as she changed into her street clothes. No, better question, how many more am I going to sell?
Too many. The answer came to her instantly. No matter how guilty she felt in the moment, she knew it would pass. Even if it didn’t, there was no way she was going to throw out six figures in inventory, or make sure that all the body parts she’d spent 65k on were given a proper burial.
As Dr. Carter went up the stairs, the lights turned off, leaving a starscape of indicator lights on her instruments and monitors as they powered themselves down one at a time. Almost as soon as she left the door and sent the lock command, the heavy steel shutters rolled down to cover the entrance to her clinic, too, transforming the place into an armored bunker. It was automatic; she just wished the shutters around her soul would do the same.
David is an author living in Bavaria with his wife. He has a few other short stories in print, along with more than a dozen books and audiobooks available for sale online. He even has an ongoing web novel. For more about him or his works, check out his website, Caffeineforge.com