The slums were a world of uninspired street planning and uninterrupted strings of buildings that all looked the same. You could pick which concrete and brick structure you wanted to live in, but they were all tall, decrepit, and filled with walk-in cabinets trying very hard to pretend to be full living spaces.

  I couldn’t rightly say the outer districts were much better than that.

  The streets were still locked into the same perfect grid patterns, the buildings were still uninspired, and I was willing to bet that most of the apartments were similarly small.

  Where things changed, however, was the maintenance.

  All of the buildings were meticulously maintained. The streetlights worked. You could actually walk without constantly stumbling over garbage. Oh, the alleys were still absolutely filthy, but no one really expected a well-mannered citizen to venture into those.

  The alleys were for chucking garbage into from a distance.

  Likewise, there was the occasional shop that managed to break up the monotony a little, and even a single park! Sure, it was no bigger than an apartment building, but you could still see a bit of greenery.

  Sort of.

  Most of the grass was stomped into the ground, and the singular tree was kind of anemic, but it was a nice place to sit down at the end of a long day. Today, however, I merely eyed the many benches with considerable longing as I cut my way through the park.

  After all, I would either greet the day tomorrow with a new pair of eyes, or I wouldn’t greet it at all.

  For all the dark thoughts that were swirling through my head, the street where ripper Glim was set up wasn’t particularly foreboding, filthy, or even suspicious. Point of fact, his door was right across from an ice-cream parlor.

  Sure, it was a front for one of the gangs and never actually sold enough stuff to justify staying in the business, but they still sold some of the best (and obviously not organic) ice cream I’d ever had.

  I gripped the strap of my backpack and eyed the group of people loitering in front of the establishment with considerable distrust. They were all tall, muscular, and had clearly taken enough steroids and supplements to permanently shut off their brains. They also proudly featured the tattoos that marked them as members of the Goliaths.

  “Oi, kid!” a voice snapped, and I slowly turned with one foot already on the first step to Glim’s clinic.

  One of the gangers was moving towards me, arms crossed across his chest. I wet my dry lips as my heart pounded away. I knew it was a ridiculous thought, but a part of me whispered that they knew exactly what I had in my backpack.

  “Y-Yes? What can I do for you?” I offered with much more confidence than I felt, and even tried to push my chest forward a little. Not in a challenging manner, just trying to come across as an eager youth ready to please the local hegemons.

  The man snorted, which was fair. I could charitably be described as scrawny.

  “No clue what you heard about that place,” the stranger kicked off, inclining his head at the clinic, “but you don’t want to go down there. Trust me. The whole free treatment thing is bull. Chances are, you’re not going to walk out at all.”

  That actually made me blink in surprise and look at the ganger again. He was fairly young. Fresh, some would say. Maybe a year or two older than me, though you wouldn’t be able to tell with how little flesh I had on my bones.

  Regardless, I couldn’t believe he was trying to warn me. That just wasn’t something most gangers went out of their way to do.

  Having said that…

  “Sorry, but I gotta. I… don’t really have the money to go elsewhere,” I admitted with a bitter grimace.

  Not that I would have opted to switch to another ripper even if I could afford them. I had no clue what ties a random ripper had or who paid them for info. There was every chance that news of exactly what I was installing would make their way to ‘interested parties’ the second it was in my head, and then I’d lose my shiny new pair of eyes the next alley over.

  Or they’d sell me out to the manufacturer I technically robbed, and I’d be dead either way.

  The ganger grimaced right back, and actually opened his mouth to argue, but several hollers from his friends made him grumble and turn away from me.

  “Whatever. I tried to warn you, kid. Whatever you do now is your business.” Posture stiff, he went to re-join the other Goliaths, and I watched him before I committed to my trip down the stairs.

  He wasn’t wrong to warn me, of course. I knew all about Glim and his reputation. He was one of those few clinics allowed to continue operating in spite of the fact that they were as shady as a black cat, mostly because he kept his mouth shut, accepted all clientele, and even engaged in a bit of community service from time to time.

  The whole ‘free checkups and treatment’ thing was real. The catch was, you were rolling the dice every time you walked into his clinic. Get lucky, and as per the promotion, you walked away with a nice free checkup and some meds to make you feel better.

  Get unlucky, and people never saw you again.

  They might, however, catch sight of a familiar eyeball, piece of cyberware, or skin transplant package if they happened to frequent the right black market after one of Glim’s ‘acquisition sprees.’

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The thing was, I had something I was banking on.

  When we were still living in the outer district and I still had a mother, I vividly remembered her taking me to his clinic. The man had frozen up at the sight of her, his extra robotic limbs spasming like they’d been shocked, and I was left to sit on his creepy surgery table while Mother and he talked in hushed whispers.

  Whatever was said that day, it worked. My mother told me that I should visit Glim whenever I needed a ripper and she wasn’t around for some reason. He still charged me for everything, but he did good work, his meds weren’t toxic bullshit, and he hadn’t sliced me up for spare parts. Yet.

  I wasn’t sure if whatever deal my mother had struck with him was still on or if I just wasn’t a decent harvesting target, but the scav ripperdoc was still my best bet. Maybe it was kind of sad, but I even felt a little nostalgic whenever I saw him. He, along with my old Cadmus shooter, were the only things left of my mother.

  I knocked on the sturdy metal door as soon as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and it took less than a minute for several cameras in the various corners to focus on me before Glim ripped the door open, giving me the first glimpse of the ripper in a while.

  As always, he was a vision straight out of a kid’s nightmares. Four mechanical limbs bobbed and weaved around him, holding surgery tools and a particularly large syringe. His breathing was an ominous hiss through that breath mask he always wore, and his eyes glowed with a sickly green light. Seeing as they barely peaked through a mass of shaggy brown hair, the creep factor was only enhanced.

  “You. Thought you were dead.” That was his lovely greeting as Glim looked beyond me, then stepped aside barely enough to let me awkwardly squeeze by. As soon as I was past, he slammed the door close and it initiated a lengthy locking procedure that sent echoing clatters through the clinic of metal bars slamming into place.

  “It’s nice to see you too, Glim. Not dead yet. I do, however, need an eye replacement. I also got a bunch of better wetware and chips, so it would be nice if we could handle installing them as well.” I knew he wasn’t a chatty individual, so I just dove straight in.

  “Show me.”

  I did that. The dumbest thing in the world you could possibly do was lie to your ripperdoc. Didn’t matter if it was the most legit of corpo rippers or a back alley butcher, that path only led to pain and a grisly death.

  “Hmm.” Glim had one of his mechanical arms poke through the loot. “Nonstandard. No notable markings. No logo. High quality, however. Where did you get this? No, wait, I don’t care. Do you have my fee?”

  Good old Glim. I stared him in the eyes as I handed over a hundred credits on a chip, then had to fight down a shudder as zeroes and ones started flashing over his sclera, leaving only the green of his irises visible.

  Damn Cypher made extremely good military-grade cybernetics, but each and every one of their products was creepy to the max.

  “Hm. Good. Lie down on the table,” Glim ordered with no preamble, in spite of the fact that I’d only handed him a hundred creds, the first of several separate installations.

  He always made me pay, but I learned a long time ago he was surprisingly flexible about how much I paid him. It was definitely one of the reasons I kept showing up when I had to.

  Knowing what would be happening to me shortly, I stripped everything that went on the upper half of my body. Glim might do good work, but he wasn’t shy about cutting apart whatever got in his way, and my best clothes would be liberally coated in blood if I didn’t take them off.

  Funnily enough, he always did make sure to wipe down his patient’s bodies after surgery. It was just the clothing he didn’t care about.

  “Would you like me to put you under for this operation, or will you stay conscious throughout?” Glim asked.

  I hesitated. “What’s the price difference? I’m guessing there are painkillers involved for the second option?”

  “Correct. The anesthesia that can dull the pain but keep you conscious is more expensive. You’d need to pay me another hundred credits. General anesthesia that would put you under is considered part of the standard payment.”

  I’d never done any wetware installations before, so this was news for me. Still, it wasn’t exactly a difficult choice. “Put me under.” Paying more for the grand privilege of watching him take me apart? Hard pass. If he wanted to kill me, he could do it whether I was under or not. Literally watching someone rip my eyes out of my skull wasn’t on my bucket list.

  “Very well.”

  Before I could say or do anything else, his syringe-wielding cyber limb shot forward and sank into my neck. Surprisingly enough, it was entirely painless. I was out like a light before I could even question that.

  —

  I groaned, somehow feeling both numb and like I’d just been run over by a truck. My eyes were aching and kind of scratchy. This wasn’t really a difference from before, even if it was somewhat exaggerated at the minute.

  When I went to raise my hand to brush sleep out of my eyes, the limb refused to cooperate. It felt like I was dragging it through water, which finally prompted me to blink my eyes open.

  For a second, I couldn’t process what I was seeing. Then I froze because I could see everything around me in startling clarity. My natural eyes had been failing me for years, but even before then, what I defined as ‘perfect’ vision fell far short of what I was experiencing now.

  Every mote of dust that crossed through the light, every shadow, every scuff, I could see them perfectly. Having lived in a fuzzy sphere of colors melting into each other for so long, this was beyond exciting. It was like being born again.

  “You’re awake. Finally. It’s a good thing you brought the wetware and those chips with you. The eyes are nonstandard. They would have fried your interface chip. I don’t think they’ll work with any other setup, either. The wetware might be able to support normal brands. Maybe. Should have charged you extra. Had to change everything.”

  I’d never heard Glim talk so much all at once before, and I had to admit that what he was saying was a bit concerning. In spite of that, I did bring the wetware with me, so… crisis averted? Besides, I honestly could not bring myself to care at the minute.

  I could see. I COULD SEE!

  Tears sprang to my eyes, and even though the water felt weird against the cybernetic replacements I’d just had installed, I didn’t care. The days of my vision failing on me were over.

  The ripper continued to speak. “The eyes will feel off for a day or two. They’re an advance model, though, so they should start to feel natural quickly. Won’t notice the difference after the adaptation period. They don’t have anything fancy, but they’re high-quality optics. I think. Couldn’t find any fancy options, at least. They can record, take calls, do the HUD display, etc. No malware. Maybe. The coding’s weird.”

  “They can really do all that?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. My scroll was great, but decent eyes were supposed to do everything it could and more.

  “Yes. That’s why the chips were needed. Had to pull your entire old setup, as I said. Including the wetware. All upgraded now.” Glim motioned towards the baggies I’d brought him the stuff in, now full of the slightly bloody ports and chips I’d carted around in my head for years.

  It felt odd to see those old parts there, blood stained and discarded, but Glim clearly hadn’t found them worth better treatment. Which… fair. They were as standard fare as standard got, just barely better than the stuff you’d throw into the dumpster.

  And that no longer mattered, because I was beyond them now.

  A smile slowly stretched across my lips. With these eyes, I could hope for more, work towards more, maybe even dare to dream things would get better.

  I was just about to let the enthusiasm carry me away when a flash of pain shot through my head, and I hissed in a harsh breath. At the same time, my eyesight briefly glitched. I wasn’t sure, but for just a second, I thought I caught sight of a shadow, and a toothy grin.