Neon Dust 1.3 - Medical Care

Happy Saturday, dear readers! Here's the third installment of my new cyberpunk series. I hope some of you are enjoying it. I hope these characters will begin to grow on you. If you read this chapter, you should have an idea of what I plan to do with multiple POVs by now. I intend to keep the "camera" on the action, but I just want you to see inside the heads of more than one person. My intention is to only do that with Tony and Adelaide, but we'll see how it goes as the series progresses.

Anyway, as I'm not too worried about taking this to print, I'm going to take my time with the story and focus on details I might have glossed over if I was trying to follow a snappier plotline. I think I'd like that as a reader, so hopefully, you all will, too.

See you all tomorrow with a new Victor of Tucson chapter :)

-Plum

3 – Medical Care

Tony watched the girl at the counter wave Adelaide through, then leaned back in the hard, plastic seat, closing his eye as he tried to let the latest wave of nausea and throbbing pain roll over him. Was it too soon for another hit of the stim? He almost chuckled at the idea. He’d known plenty of jittery operators who regularly used similar substances. Honestly, it was a little hard to believe that he’d never hit an inhaler quite like the one Bert had given him—it was serious business. He could see how someone could get hooked.

“C’mon, dummy,” he whispered as he began to bounce his leg up and down, using the motion to distract him from the pain. “You’re at the clinic. Just hang tough and see what the doc says.”

“Yo,” a guy to his left said. “You better take a number before someone else comes in.”

Tony opened his eye and blearily looked around the room. Sure enough, a big red LED sign on the far wall read D77, and he could see a check-in kiosk near the door. Had Adelaide said anything about that? Did he space it? “Thanks,” he grunted, nodding to the guy—middle-aged, dark skin, dreads in a loose, knit cap, clothes that looked like he’d slept in ‘em. He stood and walked over to the kiosk and began filling in his information:

Name: Anthony Santoro

DOB: 07-21-2089, Age: 29

Insurance: NA

Payment Method:

Tony frowned, looking at the options: Sol-bits, Boxer-bits, Other Major Corporation Currency, Dust, Other. Shrugging, he selected “other.” The box beeped, the camera flashed, startling him, and a high-pitched, androgynous voice said, “Thank you! Your number is D92.” After a brief pause, the machine hummed and spat out a paper ticket. Tony fumbled his grab as it began to fall toward the floor—depth perception with one eye was no joke. He leaned over, almost fainted, and snatched up the ticket. Then, he woozily made his way back to his seat.

“You ain’t looking too hot, sport,” his neighbor remarked.

“I’m not feeling too hot.” Tony closed his eye and leaned back, resting his head on the plasti-sheet wall. The guy didn’t say anything else, but Tony heard some of the other people in the waiting area talking. A little boy was sniffling, and his mother was worried he had dust poisoning. A young woman was in tears, talking to someone through her PAI—it sounded like it must be her boyfriend because she was mad that he was missing “another wellness check-up.” An old guy was grumbling to his wife, saying they were wasting time, but she was worried about his joints—how would he keep working if he could barely walk?

All in all, the snippets of conversation were a nice reminder that he wasn’t the center of the universe. He wasn’t the only one who was having a shitty day. He smirked, though, wondering if anyone else could boast that they’d been stripped of upwards of two million Sol-bits worth of dust. Tony wrapped the stray thought up, stuffed it into a box, and then tossed it through the door, where he’d locked up his memories of Jen and Eric. He didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with that kind of regret and anger—not yet.

The door behind the receptionist opened, and a wheelchair emerged, carrying a young man who looked half-conscious. His eyes were sunken, and his flesh so wan and yellow that it looked like a cheap synthetic knockoff. A slender, gray-haired guy with a high-end scientific visor and wearing a blood-stained white smock pushed the chair. As soon as the guy was clear of the door, he let go of the handles, waved to a woman sitting nearby, and said, “He’ll be good to walk when the sedatives wear off. Make sure he does! Mobility is the key to getting those new organs working.”

The woman wiped tears from her eyes, and in Tony’s opinion, they looked joyful. She stood to take charge of her husband, brother, or, heck, maybe son. The doctor smiled and nodded at her, then scanned the waiting room and let his opaque lenses settle on Tony. “Tony?”

“Um, yeah.” Absurdly, Tony felt his heart rate speed up and a little anticipatory excitement, like he was a kid waiting to be picked for a streetball team.

“Come on back, I’ve got your…results.” Clearly, the doc was trying to forestall a riot by calling him back ahead of the other folks in the lobby. Still, the grumbling was thick in the air as Tony stood and hurried through the door behind the doctor.

“Thanks,” he said when he was through the door, and it swung shut behind him.

“Not a problem. Addie told me about your situation, and those anti-bac canisters will more than cover a simple install.” The doctor had very precise diction, and as he scanned his weird, black-lensed visor with its little sensor and camera nodules over Tony’s half-empty track-suit sleeve, he tsked and put a friendly hand on Tony’s shoulder, guiding him down the hallway. “Come on, we’re going to have to prep the install site; whoever amputated your arm didn’t do you any favors.”

Tony had to laugh at the comment. “No, doc, I don’t think they were trying to help me out.”

The doctor chuckled, shaking his head grimly, then gestured to a pair of plastic swinging doors. “My operating theater.” When he pushed his way through, Tony had to hold his elbow to his nose; the coppery scent of blood and something like a mix between shit and a dead rat almost made him gag. “Sorry about the smell. My last patient needed a bowel replacement, and the medical waste bin is a touch too full.” He gestured to a big red and white barrel in the corner, and Tony grimaced at the dark smears on the top and sides.

“Jesus, doc.” He looked around the room and saw overfull trash bins and three autodoc tables, all of differing makes and clearly of vastly disparate capabilities. One of them looked to be forty or fifty years old. He caught a glimpse of Adelaide in the corner, dragging one of the anti-bac canisters over to the table there.

“Here, go over and sit down on the autodoc in the corner where she’s loading up the anti-bac.” Peters pointed to the stainless table equipped with half a dozen robotic arms, all sporting different tools—from a circular saw to a wide-gauge needle to a compression cuff.

Adelaide was tugging a rubber hose out from the densely packed innards of the autodoc, trying to pull it toward the nozzle of one of the anti-bac canisters. She looked up with a red-faced grimace as Tony approached. “His assistant called in sick.”

Tony was still holding his sleeve to his mouth and nose, and he nodded emphatically. “I can see why!”

“They mostly volunteer; they’re used to the, uh—” Adelaide turned her face down into her shoulder and coughed, sucking in a deep breath through the fabric of her blouse. “Smell!”

Seeing her like that, red-faced, struggling to help despite being grossed out, Tony remembered she was only there for him and felt a surge of guilt. “Hey, let me do that. You don’t need to be in here.”

She shook her head. “I’m fine. I was supposed to get a mask.” She paused, frowning at the hose she clutched. “Yeah, Tony, you do this. I’ll go grab us a couple of masks.” She jumped up and strode toward a big white cabinet by the sink, and Tony bent to try, one-handed, to do what ought to be a simple task but seemed daunting in his current state. Luckily, the tank was heavy, and it held still while he grasped the hose and pressed it to the nozzle, putting his weight behind it. With a hiss and a click, it popped into place.

“Hey, you got it!” Addie presented a white medical mask, and Tony took it, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible.

He hooked one strap over his left ear, then pulled it over his mouth and nose. It was made of some kind of paper and smart-gel blend and almost immediately made a pretty tight seal against his skin. “You’re a rockstar, thanks.”

“Anyway, I’m not in here for you, Tony, so don’t get your wires twisted. I volunteered to help out for a little while when I saw Peters running around like his eggs were on fire.”

“His, uh, eggs?”

“You know, like when you put too much powder in the oil and the burner flares up?”

Tony used his hand to leverage himself up onto the stainless table. “I think you and I have very different ideas about how you’re supposed to fry an egg.”

Adelaide crossed her arms over her chest, cocking her head as she regarded him. “You really are from ‘Hattan, aren’t you?”

“You thought I made it up?”

She chuckled. “C’mon, have you looked in a mirror? Still, I can see that left eye of yours is pretty special, and you have a casual way of mentioning stuff—fry an egg? Really? Like a whole egg?” She shook her head again, her right eyebrow cocked up at an impressive angle.

“Adelaide!” Peters called her from the other side of the operating “theater,” where he was struggling with the barrel of medical waste. “Let me get this loaded on your sled, then you can drive it out back for me! There should be an empty one by the back door!”

“Oh, brother. Good thing these masks are filtered.”

“You want me to—”

“No! You look like you’re about to faint. Just let the doc do his thing.” She paused, staring at his face, and Tony realized his shades had slipped down while he’d been leaning over the anti-bac canister. “You lost your eye, too?”

“I don’t know if ‘lost’ is the right word.” He shook his head, his lips quirking into a wry grin.

Addie looked at him like his lunacy might be contagious, then turned and hurried over to help the doc. Tony sat there reflecting on his ability to make light of his predicament. Had he gone over the edge? Was he cracked? Considering all he’d been through, it seemed possible he’d finally snapped some noodles. “I mean,” he said to the autodoc, “they pulled my whole data port. Maybe they took some brains out by mistake. Sometimes those synthetic nerves go pretty deep.” His grin turned into a chuckle as he laid back on the stainless table, staring up at the spider-like surgical arms.

“How are we doing, Tony?” The voice startled him, and Tony jerked his face to the right where the doc stood in his significant blind spot.

“I think I’m cracking up.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised at some transient delirium, considering these readings.”

“Huh?” Tony caught a flicker of movement above him and saw that the autodoc was moving a bulb of glass that flickered with multiple LEDs back and forth over his body.

“Yeah, they did a number on you, huh? Looks like you had quite a robust dust matrix pulled out and not delicately. Is the wound on your chest where your old dust reactor was?”

Tony tried to touch the sore spot under his tracksuit but just flapped the empty sleeve over his chest. He tried again with his left hand, gingerly prodding the tender flesh. “Yeah.”

“Was your arm natural?”

“Just my forearm, but only partially; I had a chrome hand and a plasma forge mounted to the bones.” His “chrome” hand had been high-end, too—bones stronger than plasteel but flesh that looked as real as any natural skin. He could punch through bricks with that hand, but why would he when he had a class-A plasma forge?

“Well, the good news is that they left most of your nerves intact, especially in your eye; that significantly cuts down on the expense if you get a prosthetic.”

“I’m broke, doc.”

“Yeah, got that impression. Well, let’s start with what we can; I’m going to clean up these extraction sites and prep your arm and chest for the hardware Bert sent over. I’ll go ahead and sedate you ‘cause this autodoc isn’t gentle, and I’ve got other patients to see to. When it’s done with the prep work, do you want me to go ahead and do the installs? I need you to verbally confirm for legal purposes.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“And what, exactly, am I installing? Again, I need you to say it.”

“The, uh, cybernetic arm and old-ass dust reactor and matrix.”

“And you’re okay with the install site for the reactor being your chest? As you know, the more marrow it has access to, the more effective its transmissions. I’ve done them in femurs, too, but—”

“Just put it in the old hole.”

“Sternum, got it. And you consent to me feeding the dust matrix into your arterial system via the femoral artery?”

Tony sighed. “Whatever’s easiest, doc.”

“Excellent. Now, the arm Bert sent over is a full arm replacement. It can be modified to attach at the elbow where your amputation took place, but I could also go ahead and remove—”

“Nah, let me keep as much of my arm as you can, please.”

“Not a problem. The arm has all the adapters. I’ll be able to tie your muscles and nerves into the provided synthetic grafts.”

Tony sighed and closed his eye. He was a little surprised Peters was being so careful; he’d been to chop docs plenty of times, and they usually cut first and asked questions later. Of course, it was the first time he’d been on the table in a place like that, so he was more than a little grateful for the doc’s concern. He chuckled, images of Chavez’s spa-like clinic flashing through his mind. Oh, man, if Eric could see him on this bloody, stainless table! The humor quickly turned to anger as he reminded himself he was there because of Eric.

“Any questions or concerns?” Peters asked, snapping him out of his dark reverie. Once again, Tony boxed up the emotions and stuffed them into the storage room he’d built in his mind.

“Can you do anything about the throbbing in my eye socket?”

“Yeah. I can help with that. I’ll clean it up and give you something topical, so you don’t have to drug yourself up with Bert’s old inhaler.” When Peters saw Tony’s confused scowl, he added, “Addie mentioned it, but only out of concern.”

“All right, Doc. Push ‘play’ or ‘enter’ or whatever you do on these machines, and let’s get this over with.”

Peters chuckled. “It’s not quite that easy. Take off your tracksuit top, though; there's no sense in letting the machine rip it off. I’ll start the sedation protocol, and when you wake up, you should be feeling a lot better.”

Tony obliged, unzipping the tracksuit and pulling his arm and a half out of the sleeves. He handed it to the doc and then laid back, shivering involuntarily as the cold stainless touched his bare shoulders. Peters hung the jacket over a stainless stool nearby and returned to the autodoc’s control panel. A moment later, two of the arms whirred into action. One hooked a blood pressure cuff around his left biceps, and the other attached to his lower arm at the elbow, where it skillfully and nearly painlessly inserted an intravenous tube.

“Okay, Tony, countdown from twenty, and by the time you get to one, I’ll be waking you up, and you’ll be feeling a lot better.”

“If you say so.” Tony forced a smile, then began counting, “Twenty…nineteen…eighteen…” He felt something cold rush into his arm. “Seventeen…six…six-uh-six…”

***
Addie looked at the clock on her AUI, saw it was 11:32, and said, “JJ, if I’m walking, how long will it take me to get to the Royal Breeze Apartments from here?”

“If all goes well on your route, you will require seventeen minutes to reach the Royal Breeze Apartments.”

Addie smiled ruefully at JJ’s caveat: “If all goes well.” All too often, all did most decidedly not go well in The Blast. She shifted in the marginally more comfortable, slightly padded chair that Doc Peters kept in his recovery room. There were four beds in the room, three of which were occupied, but she was only interested in the one before her. “Should I wait for him?” she asked, keeping her voice very low to avoid waking any of the other unconscious patients.

“According to his chart,” JJ said, naturally assuming the question wasn’t rhetorical, “Tony is a twenty-nine-year-old man. It would not be unreasonable to assume that he can find his way back to your father’s store.”

“True.” Addie nodded and then sighed, slumping down in the chair. Was she really going to take advice on human behavior from JJ? The dummy couldn’t tell sarcasm from rage, let alone how Tony might feel if he woke up alone. What if he didn’t remember something? What if he didn’t remember anything? He’d been drugged before her dad gave him the dodgy inhaler. “I should’ve thrown that thing out! Well, to be fair, I didn’t know he saved it…”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand—”

“Not talking to you, JJ.” After a moment, she said, “Message the apartment manager. See if he’s going to be free to talk today.”

“Message sent.”

“Mmph,” Tony grunted, shifting under the thin, gray blanket Doc Peters had thrown over him. Addie watched as he lifted his cybernetic right arm and rubbed his face. The blanket caught in the exposed actuators near his elbow, and he unwittingly dragged it to the side, where gravity took over and pulled it to the floor. “Oof,” he said, holding his hand before his face, mechanical fingers splayed. They had little rubbery pads on the fingertips, and Addie was pretty sure Tony could feel things with them, but when she stood to look at his face, all she saw was confusion in his left eye. A clean white bandage mercifully obscured his other socket.

“You waking up?” she asked.

“Huh. It works all right,” he said by way of answer, clenching and unclenching the black, plasteel fingers. He reached down and gently probed his chest where Addie’s old dust reactor sat. Only a tiny chrome circle was exposed at the center of his swollen red flesh. She knew, from experience, that it could be programmed to display his dust level in LED digits or, if he installed a mod from the pub-net, he could get it to display a tiny image of whatever he wanted.

She leaned a little closer. “You remember everything?”

He shifted to lift his head a little and peer at her through that uncanny silver iris. His dark brows drew together, and his lips cracked in a smile. “Hey! Adelaide.”

“Oh, good. I feared I’d have to explain to my pops that his new project had lost his mind.”

“Is that what I am? A project?” Tony pushed himself up into a sitting position, his mechanical arm clicking and whirring softly as he gripped the rail on the side of the bed. He winced a little and let go, reaching over with his other arm to massage the area where his flesh met the synthetic, black, rubbery skin at the arm’s cuff. “A little tender.”

“Yeah, the doc said you should take it easy for a few days. He gave you a Tri-Norovan implant that’ll last about a week.”

“For infection?”

Addie nodded. “Infection and rejection. He thinks you’ll accept the synth materials, though.”

“Yeah. I’ve had no problems in the past.” Tony coughed and shifted his legs to the side of the bed. “Can we stop for a soda or something on the way back?”

“We’ve got drinks at home.” Addie stepped closer. “I have an appointment, remember? I’ll drop you off on the way, though.” She grabbed his jacket from the foot of the bed and held it out to him.

“Thanks.” He pushed his arms awkwardly into the sleeves, and Addie resisted the urge to try to help. In fact, she forced herself to look away; something about seeing him shirtless made him more real and less temporary in her mind.

She wanted to ask what kind of work he’d done when he’d been a corpo drone because she didn’t think most corpo-rats had muscle definition quite like that. Maybe he was one of those pretty boy narcissists who spent half their day in the gym and the other half at a salon. Maybe he’d been a high-end escort! Addie’s mind spiraled down strange avenues as ideas bloomed like fireworks. Could he be a source? Could he have an interesting story? If it got people to click on her page, maybe it would boost some of the more important stories from the district. If—

“If you’re late, I can find the way. I’ll bring the cart back.”

Addie, startled out of her fantasies, saw that he’d zipped up the jacket and was stepping into his sneakers. A moment later, he stood before her—loomed over her was a better description. She looked up at him and arched an eyebrow. “How do you seem taller?”

“You didn’t get this close to me before. Do I need to see the doc?”

“No, he’s busy saving someone—gunshot wounds.” She gestured to the door. “Ready?”

“Yep. Where’s the cart?” He started for the door, quietly moving past an unconscious woman who’d just had some tumors removed from her lungs.

“Take a right in the hallway toward the back door. The cart’s in the alley.”

Tony nodded, and then he was gone—out the door—and Addie was hurrying to keep up; was he feeling so much better after a little medical attention and just about ninety minutes of sedation? Shouldn’t he feel even more groggy? When they reached the alley and started toward the street with Tony driving the little electric cart, she said, “Peters told me you had a fancy wirejob.”

Tony looked over his shoulder at her, tilting his head quizzically. “Seems like a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“Hah! I don’t think you’ll find a court to hear your case in this district.”

“Anyway, the wirejob’s useless to me.”

“Yeah, he said it was class-A.” Addie was fishing—something that came naturally to her—but she wasn’t sure what she was fishing for, exactly. He’d already admitted to being an ex-corpo. He’d already told them that he’d been betrayed, stripped, and dumped. If he’d had class-A gear, though, that was certainly an interesting angle. A full-body wirejob like that would cost a fortune.

Tony sighed and shrugged. “Probably not enough dust in this neighborhood to fire my wirejob for more than a couple of seconds.”

Addie frowned. “Is it the quantity or the quality? I know we’re all running some dirty dust in our reactors down here. I mean, unless we buy extra. I bought five units of refined dust once, and it lasted me almost a week, using my drone for a few hours every day.”

“You know the answer; it’s some of both. The dirtier the dust, the more work the reactor goes through to use it, and the less juice it gets out of it. Anyway, this reactor and the matrix you gave me will keep the dust out of my blood, but there’s no way it could output enough to fire up this wirejob.”

“So, forgive my inquisitive mind, but why’d whoever stripped you down let you keep that wirejob? Why’d they leave you with an eye, for that matter?”

Tony reached up to touch his bandaged eye with his new, mechanical fingers, and then he looked sideways at her again. “Now you’re getting to the good stuff. I’ll be honest, though—I’m trying not to think about those things ‘cause I can’t afford to be pissed off in my current situation.”

“What?” His words didn’t compute for Addie; when she had an emotion, she felt it. There was no putting it off for later.

“Yeah. I gotta deal with the present.” He smirked. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I’m not in a good position to be plotting my revenge.” The cart whirred and thumped as he pushed it over a speed hump. They’d taken a different alley to avoid Beef and his cronies, and as Tony pushed the cart onto the sidewalk, Addie saw her dad standing outside the shop, chatting with Mr. Nguyen. “Hey, there’s your dad.”

“Yep.” Addie lifted her arm to wave, and her father, as always, waved back.

Tony did much better with the cart now that he had two arms and even managed to hop it over the curb so they didn’t have to walk to the corner. Her father jostled Mr. Nguyen. “There they are! I was getting worried, Addie!”

“Seriously? We were like a block and a half away. Anyway, here’s your new employee, feeling much better, I’d say.” Addie gestured expansively at Tony like a showgirl at a fancy car show. Tony smirked and fished in his pocket for the black sunglasses her dad had given him.

“Donny, this is the young man I was telling you about. Tony, this is Donald Nguyen; he owns the bodega on the corner.”

Tony stepped forward and held out his new mechanical hand. Mr. Nguyen, always cheerful, smiled hugely as his eyes widened. “Oh! This is it! The arm from your shop, Bert! Haha! You finally got some value out of it!” He took Tony’s hand and pumped it up and down. “Nice to meet you, Tony. Hey, hey! If things get too slow around here, I could use a tall guy like you to help stock shelves now and then!” He let go of Tony’s hand and turned back to Addie’s dad. “Or! Or, Bert, how about he can watch my store a couple of times a week so I can spend a little time with Nancy before she goes back to school?”

“Easy, Donny,” Bert chuckled, “It’s his first day. Let’s let him settle into a routine for a little while.” Addie had heard enough. She started for the door, but her dad wouldn’t let her slip away that easily. “Where you going, Addie?”

“I have to get my drone. I have an interview in half an hour.” Again, she started through the door.

“Hold up a second! Did you hear about the shootout? There’s more than one gang cruising, looking for payback!”

Addie whirled. “Not against me, dad! The Helldogs know me and most of the others nearby, too. Even Domino doesn’t hassle me.”

“Plenty of others would love to stir trouble up by messing with a local girl like you! Where’s your interview?”

“Royal Breeze Apartments, and I need to leave if I’m going to make—”

“Reschedule it, honey. Things are too hot right—”

“Dad! We live in The Blast! It’s always too hot! These stories need to be told; we’re invisible to the rest of the city, and that’s not okay! You know the guy I interviewed the other day? Mr. Felix? He’s paying seven hundred bits a week to keep the gangs from tossing his place, beating him up, or worse! Boxer Corp doesn’t do anything, but I’m getting more and more clicks! I have to keep growing my page, and I can’t do that if I don’t keep posting stories! You know what happens if you let your page stagnate? You lose followers, and they stop sharing. People tune out!”

“I know the metro-net has a harsh algorithm, honey, but your safety—”

“I could go with her,” Tony said, his voice almost too calm and steady to be heard amidst the heated back and forth. Still, Addie’s father froze momentarily and regarded the tall, near-stranger in his borrowed tracksuit.

“Aren’t you a little worn out?”

Tony grinned and tapped the center of his chest. “Nah. This dust reactor is cleaning my blood and sending some juice to my nanites. I’m feeling much better.”

Mr. Nguyen did a comical double-take, his eyes wide. “Na-nanites?”

“Yeah, I have a medical nanite battery in here.” Tony thumped his mechanical fist against his right thigh. “I don’t think the guys who stripped me knew about it. It’s nothing too special; it helps me heal a little faster than usual, cleans toxins, and whatnot. It wasn’t working ‘cause it’s powered by a dust engine.

“Well, no offense, Tony,” Addie’s father said, shaking his head. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, but what are you going to do if there’s trouble?”

“Um…” Tony looked from Bert to Addie and then back again. “I mean, I can probably run twice as fast as she can. If nothing else, I’ll distract the bangers so she can get away.”

“Twice as fast?” Addie felt her neck growing hot. “I don’t think so!”

“Hah!” Mr. Nguyen slapped his hands together. “I like it!”

Addie shook her head and turned to her father. “I’m going. I’m not a little kid—you can’t stop me, Dad.” She paused when her father’s face fell; she hated playing that card with him. They’d gotten into the same argument too many times, and she’d threatened to move into her own place too often for him to really push the matter. Still, she felt guilty, so she decided to throw him a bone. “If you want your new employee to follow me, I won’t stop him. I’m leaving in two minutes.” With that, she pushed her way into the store and stomped upstairs.