Life hadn’t always been like this for me. I remember my childhood as this precious thing where my biggest worry was making sure mold didn’t grow on my sheets.

  All that changed with The Protest.

  Protests of any kind were a rare species on a world like Kadar, let alone in Zanos city. It wasn’t because there weren’t things to protest about. Quite the contrary, in fact. It mostly came down to the fact that people couldn’t bring themselves to give enough of a shit to work towards some nebulous ‘better future.’

  Oh, and the shooters. Lots and lots of shooters that the local police can bring to bear against any disgruntled mob.

  In recent history, at least in the last several hundred years, you could only find a single example of a large-scale protest that had swept through the slums. It had happened four years ago, and had been named as just “The Protest.”

  After all, it wasn’t every day that the general populace found out a food production corp was purposefully poisoning their products shipped to poorer areas. Well, poisoning is a bit of a harsh word. Bad for PR, and definitely liable to get a person either sued into poverty or quickly shanked.

  The official and shank-free name for what they were doing was ‘application of experimental drugs meant to bolster the general health and resiliency of poorer city residents.’ Read: blatant human testing. I have no idea how they were planning to collect data on the subject, or how long they had been feeding people weird shit, but when some poor soul leaked the info, the city erupted into violence.

  The wave of emotions rolled through the entire outskirts and caught everyone up in it. Me, my friends, my family. I never saw most of them again after that day.

  That wasn’t the only reason I’d never forget the day, though.

  The Protest was also the last day my eyes worked properly.

  I wasn’t even being stupid, or reckless, or righteously angry. I was just going home and dodging the shadier alleys, like I would every other day, when I got swept into an angry mob of disgruntled idiots who decided to charge the entry checkpoint into the outer city districts.

  And, of course, the police guarding the checkpoint decided the best way to deal with the issue was to release highly toxic and harmful crowd control gas. I was right in the thick of things when the green cloud descended and choked every living thing in its grasp. Technically, the gas did the job. It chased off the disgusting poor schmucks who threatened the public order. It also ruined my health forever.

  Just like the food, the gas had to be some kind of new experimental stuff. After a couple months wheezing for breath, I realized that the gas had done something to my eyes. It started off with my eyesight getting all slightly blurry at a distance, and things slowly deteriorated from there. My perfect vision got to a point where I could only see okay at about five to six feet of distance.

  Normally, that’d be fixable by a pair of glasses. The problem was that my eyesight kept getting worse. By the time I had gone through three pairs of glasses, I realized that I was headed for total blindness. I found tiny scratches in my irises whenever I pressed my face against a mirror. And about two months ago, the headaches started. I would become nauseous and unsteady at random times during the day.

  For just about any normal household in the city, this was a horrible tragedy, but one that could be fixed as simply as grabbing a pair of cybernetic eyes from a shop and replacing the organs. Sadly, that was just not something I could afford.

  Even the simplest standard set of eyes cost four hundred credits, and it took at least an extra hundred to hire a ripper to put them in you. By the virtue of the ever graceful Catill, long may he run his shop, I earned a nice round forty creds a week.

  I know what you’re going to say. Oh, Adrian, you can have those eyes in ten weeks! Less drama, more work, hop to it. If only I didn’t need to eat. Or if I didn’t need a place to sleep. Or clothes to wear. Or… well, you get the picture.

  No eyes for me.

  So, there I was, stumbling over the corpses and happily liberating two gym bags from their previous owners. As soon as I could, I forced my shaky legs to carry me away from the scene as fast as they could.

  I didn’t get far, winded and disoriented as I was, but I did take as circuitous a route as I could just in case someone tried to follow. I didn’t think anyone would go towards the sound of shots getting fired, but people had done dumber things than try to benefit from random gunfights.

  It seemed that my luck was finally turning, because about an hour later, I dove into a familiar alley untouched. After that, it was just a matter of gritting my teeth to shove a couple grimy dumpsters aside, revealing a hole hidden behind one of them. The hidey hole was one that a friend had shown me ages ago and was significantly smaller than I remembered. But it was still big enough for me to squirm through with the bags and pull the dumpster back in place.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Technically, I was now trapped in what was a partially collapsed apartment room with no other way out, but at least anyone who wanted to get at me would have to chat with my shooter while they struggled through the hole themselves.

  I fumbled in the pitch dark until I finally managed to close my fingers around a backpack, and then hurriedly extracted my scroll from the pack. The sheet of steel, plastic, and glass was old and had a crack running through it, but it still worked when I turned it on, and the flashlight mode lit up the grimy space with enough intensity to blind me briefly.

  It was then, finally, that I allowed myself the luxury of unraveling the first gym bag.

  I tore open the zipper and was greeted by carefully wrapped packages. They came with no official logo or recognizable tags, but that did little to hide the gleam of the cyberware within and the obvious quality of the pieces.

  It also did little to reassure me, because everything I saw as I rummaged through the damn bag were limbs, plates and mesh of subdermal, and several injectors of… something.

  They were worth something to someone, but with what I had just done, it was going to be a lot of heat to try and get rid of these. I pushed the first bag aside and pulled the second one to me, and my stomach only dropped further when I opened it. Wetware. Extremely high-quality wetware, if my limited knowledge on the subject was to be trusted. Enough of it that I could completely overhaul the old and out-of-date set I had installed as a kid.

  In spite of that, I carelessly shoved it all aside in my frantic search. It was only when hope was starting to die in my chest and sweat was beading down my face that I found my savior at the very bottom of the bag.

  The pair of eyes came in a tube-like sealed container with what must have been near unbreakable glass for them to trust it with the precious cargo. Floating innocently in the preservation liquid, the eyes almost looked like they were a natural set.

  Where most of the manufacturers seemed obsessed with putting their logo somewhere on the sclera, these eyes were clear of any such adornment. If it weren’t for the unnatural gunmetal gray of the iris, or the clearly mechanical bits poking from the back of the eyeballs, I’d be convinced they’d just extracted some poor guy’s organs.

  Not that I would have been likely to care if they did. A replacement was a replacement.

  I sobbed, then, as loudly as I dared to. Tears streamed down my face and poured out all the frustration and fear I’d been bottling up for so long. Whatever came of the events I’d just caused, I knew I couldn’t bring myself to feel regret anymore.

  I would shoot Jason in the face another thousand times if this was what the act got me.

  It took a while before I managed to calm down, and even then my limbs felt like lead. I was on the verge of passing out then and there, and I felt like letting it happen. It was only caution that stopped me from doing something so stupid.

  The Reapers as a gang were neither very influential nor very well regarded, but they weren’t stupid. If someone robbed them, they’d be all over the place looking for the thief. Even if I were innocent, I wouldn’t want to get caught up in that mess.

  On top of that, I had to worry about Jason’s family, plus whoever had sold the items to the Reapers in the first place. No, it was better for me to be far away from the area by the time they came to sniff around.

  To that effect, I started stripping. My clothes were stained with blood and grime, and I had them off in record time. My scroll also let me check my face and hair for any traces of blood, but I failed to find any and moved on.

  From out of my backpack I fetched a fresh set of clothes, my finest, in fact. I wished I had another set of shoes, but the beat up military-style boots on my feet were the only pair I owned. I made up for that by wiping them down the best I could and even spraying them with a cleaning solution I’d prepped for just this occasion. It was time to go.

  I shoved the eyes into my backpack and covered them up as well as I could, then hesitated and grabbed a set of the wetware. A bit of digging turned up another set of chips, which I packed into my backpack as well.

  I had no clue whether the eyes demanded any custom pieces of tech to work, and there’d be no harm in installing whatever I could from the collection anyway. If the eyes turned out to be faulty or infected, then some wetware and chips would be the least of my problems.

  Wiggling my way out of my hidey-hole was just as unpleasant as entry had been, but I still reset the dumpster with extreme care. I was, presumably, the only person still alive who knew about the spot. If all went well, then the wealth of cyberware I had left in there would be waiting for me to reclaim it one day.

  I also chose to leave Jason’s shooter behind, no matter how much the decision pained me. Gaudy as the weapon was, it had proven its effectiveness, and I already felt worse without its weight on me.

  As I hurried away from the spot, I reflected on the second reason I’d chosen it: it was extremely close to the entry checkpoint to the outer districts. When I reached it, the checkpoint was about as deserted as it always was.

  The wall that separated the districts whined away with its electrical charge, and the narrow walkway of a kill box was unnervingly bright. Scanners constantly ran over it from every angle possible, even on the vigilant lookout for slum dwellers audacious enough to try and cross the divide between dirt poor and relatively well-to-do.

  Because of course Zanos had gleefully implemented a citizenship tier system the second the wider republic suggested it.

  Slum dwellers were E class citizens, poor and generally distrusted but still allowed within the city proper. Above them, in a divide almost impossible to breach, were the D class citizens of the outer districts, followed by the C class middle district citizens, B class inner city stretch, and A class core city dwellers.

  Technically, I had C class access. The final gift of the man I was meant to call father before he dumped us. I genuinely had no clue how my mother had managed to convince him to register me as even that much, but I had never dared to cross into the middle district.

  I didn’t want to suddenly remind him I was a thing and end up stripped of the one lifeline I had. Without access to the outer districts, I never would have been able to reach Catill and beg for work.

  His shop wasn’t my destination of the day, however. That dubious honor went to ripper Glim and his little shop of horrors. I genuinely wished I could say my trip would be less risky than the shootout and subsequent slaughter I’d just fled, but I wasn’t sure that would be true.

  Once more, I could only trust that things would work out.