The room’s owner skipped in, pleased with himself and Marine moved when he had. I figured it was safe enough to follow so I moved into the room myself. It was nothing less than a showroom of immaculate pieces of robotics equipment. None of them were familiar to me, though pieces of some bore markings I had seen before in commercial bots. Everything custom. Legs, arms, full robotic torsos. The stranger things were vacuum-sealed against the wall in clear plastic. Organs, from the looks of them, but with odd patterns across them and connectors and ports laid into the meat.
“A hand, is it? A hand. How’s the wrist? Still good? Hm?”
He skulked around Marine brushing a hand across her back and lowered his head by my shoulder when he came to me. The only thing I could imagine would make a human’s breath smell like his was the ready consumption of copious amounts of cat shit. He grabbed my wrist and walked his fingers up the length of the stabilizer.
“Oh, nice, nice. Keeps it juicy. Shame.” He looked at Marine and laughed. “Won’t get to do the prep myself.” He looked back at me grinning wildly. “It’s a big favor I owe her, friend. So you get a big hand.”
He walked away, hunched, mumbling. He had crossed about half of the room when I felt like talking to Marine wasn’t likely to get us both killed.
“A big favor? Have you seen his dick?”
Marine shot me a “shut up” glance and so I did. She looked back forward, her eyes locked on Darvish. “I’m sorry for this.”
I’d started to tell her it’s fine, but Darvish shouted for us.
“Coming to see your toys or not?” His voice trended away from psychotic whimsy back toward irrational anger, nearly growling by the end. “I’ve got things to do, Marine. No time for this.”
If it were up to me, we would have run to the table to look at his freaky hand collection, but it wasn’t and Marine walked calmly and patiently.
“You owe what you owe, Darvish.”
He coughed, his eyes bugging as he did. “That I do, girl. That I do.”
The table was covered with hands. Some of them metallic, some polymer covered. None of them with skin. Auggies weren’t so weird anymore, but they were the rough equivalent of wearing a giant gang symbol where your missing limb was supposed to be. The poor couldn’t afford the limbs and the better-off got ones covered with at least reasonable looking sim skin. It was a one-way ticket to getting harassed by cops and Virsec idiots pretty much every time you went out. Facial recognition would pretty much flag you for a shakedown even if they couldn’t prove gang membership. Or so the stories went.
The weirdest stories came from the semi law-abiding side of things. There was a strong black market for official brand-name prostheses among the lower earning groups who just couldn’t afford to have the operations done. Adding to that, there were enough doctors left who still gave enough of a shit to do the operation with no questions asked. Doctors weren’t liable for anything past the procedure. Still, there was a patent and copyright issue in place surrounding the limbs. Three of the four companies who made them had filed suit against the black market purchasers and gotten a permanent injunction against unauthorized use, very specifically, of the software inside the prosthetics that universally interpreted brain signals to the false limb. Essentially, it was considered to be piracy and the limbs could be sieged because, on appeal, the WorldGov general appellate court had found that disabling the limb still kept the owner in possession of software they did not have a viable license for. You can probably sort of see where this is headed. Police and Virsec, a duly appointed private community enforcement subsidiary of Vircore, were allowed to seize the offending limbs.
The result of this sort of thing meant that the smallest, and most esoteric, of those companies was in such high demand among criminal and low-income sorts that they were perpetually out of stock. They used an open-source option for limb control and, since the upswing in popularity, had switched to much lower quality construction. Essentially, for two-thirds the price of a name-brand limb, you were buying an open-source limb controller module and the software on it. Most gangs went this route as people like Darvish were insane freelancers, but useful ones. Publicly wearable augmentations, unrestricted access to the core functions, and built to a more fight-ready specification.
All of the hands on the table were that sort of thing. Titanium alloys and matter polymers. All of them black and dark grey. Utilitarian. Honestly, they were works of art, especially considering the shit eating madman who’d made them. He had a yard full of Hawaiian shirt robot helpers. How did he make these?
I reached out toward one and he made a weird, chirping noise. “Listen, friend.” His voice grumbled up from angry to his normal nasal timbre as his eyes shot between my hand and the table. “The one you touch is the one you take.”
I pulled my hand back, looking over them. I narrowed my eyes on one that had what was very clearly a hole in the tip of the index finger. They all had strange things about them. One with slits at the finger tips. Weapons? They had to be, with this crazy fuck making them. My eyes stayed glued to the one with the hole in it. I leaned my head over and saw a focusing lens just inside the tip of the finger hole.
I pointed to it. “That one. Wha—”
He took that to be my pick and plucked the hand up from the table, turning it over as though it were the first time he’d ever
