Android: Undercity by Richard Lee Byers

Author:Richard Lee Byers [Byers, Richard Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Amazon: B07NJD1VFL
Goodreads: 43895383
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Published: 2019-02-06T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Besides tempting me to keep pursuing things a prudent person wouldn’t, my visit to the plaza level was bad for me in another way. Over the years, I’d gotten used to the gloom, grime, and decay of the undercity, but my little field trip reversed that, at least briefly. The night felt darker; the neon signs, holodisplays, and fluorescent graffiti more garish; the litter and overflowing garbage more ubiquitous and malodorous; the stim dealers, wylders, streetwalkers, and panhandlers more unpredictable.

Sneering at my own jumpiness, my own foolishness, I did my best to shake the anxiety off. By the time I arrived at Sugar’s Clinic, I felt more like a streetwise resident of the lower levels again, not that it was much of a happy way to feel.

The entrance to Sugar’s is in a filthy, narrow alleyway. The only sign is a red neon cross in the window, the symbol harder to decipher now that a couple of the tubes that make it up have stopped glowing. Once you go inside, though, things look more promising. The interior is brightly lit and spotlessly clean, with the smell of antiseptics tingeing the air. Sugar’s several medical certificates, all legitimate, hang prominently on the walls. The only thing that might put you off is that the whole place is a single room without so much as curtains to screen off one area from another. On a previous visit, I’d seen Sugar and her bioroid nurse performing gory thoracic surgery while half a dozen onlookers blanched, cringed, and tried not to puke in the waiting area just a few steps away.

That wasn’t the case this time. No one was awaiting or receiving treatment, although I must not have missed the last patient by much. The bioroid, a Florence identifiable by the old-fashioned nurse’s-cap shape incorporated into the contours of her head, was pulling a bloody sheet off the operating table. Pacing, Sugar Blanc was dictating notes that some mic somewhere presumably was picking up.

Sugar’s a small, thin woman with a restless, get-to-the-damn-point manner that rarely goes away except when she’s tending a patient. Though I didn’t know the details, I could imagine why she hadn’t lasted at the several hospitals that had let her go. Scowling at the interruption, or just on general principles, she said, “Pause notes. You look all right, Zamora. What is it, STI? There’s no treatment for a couple of the new strains. The genitals rot right off.”

“Thanks for putting that image in my head,” I replied. “I don’t need medical attention. I need medical info in the form of your professional opinion. If I show you some images, will you tell me what you think?”

“Are you planning to pay like for any other office visit?”

“What if I told you that you might be helping to save lives? Wouldn’t the Hippocratic Oath kick in?”

“When Hippocrates starts covering my bar tab, he can talk to me about waiving my fees.”

I grinned. “That’s the Sugar your patients know and love. Yeah, I’ll pay.

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