316 Far Future Ch. 26 – Where Women go and Men Blunder... (1/2)
My escort was watching me as we walked past the cleaning tanks, the dissection tables, bone removal, blood filtering and storage, organ packaging, the flensing stations, the chop-and slurry vats, and the final destination of the boilers and processors that reclaimed the water and reduced the rest down to either blocks or strips of soylent for use by the food corps.
I burst out laughing early on, pointing. ”I recognize that one! He's a ganger borg I offed yesterday. Don't feel bad that I cost you a cardio, his heart was mechanical anyways.”
The Stiff looked down where I was pointing, his neck-plug Trodes pulsed. ”Yes, the cadaver had clear signs of implant replacements and organ stress from suppression treatments. Low value return.” He shook his head, as if not dying with all his parts was a cardinal sin, and every person alive was just walking returnables made from someone else... or going to be made into someone else.
”I'm surprised you keep such close track of processing.”
”We have to replace workers in events of emergencies,” was the slow, plodding reply. ”Knowledge of systems is required.”
”Ah,” I nodded sagely. ”If it's not private knowledge, what's the average processing time for a single corpse, and how many a day do you process?”
His plugs crackled as he cleared that. ”The full processing of a cadaver from reception to shipping as soylent takes approximately 2.3 hours, varying dependent on sanitation and salvage possible. We process approximately seventeen thousand cadavers a day at this station.”
I eyed the tubes around me, where new corpses were being dumped in, and old ones removed dripping for processing. Random limbs and body parts arriving untidily that had been screened were being sent directly into a fast-processing tank over there, skipping salvage and going directly to slurry.
Seventeen thousand a day, just at this station. All these corpses I was seeing would be gone and replaced by new ones within three hours.
Y'know, it took a LOT of people to generate that kind of death rate... even if the life expectancy rate was shit down here. I wondered how the birth rate kept up, and just shook my head.
There were ten Soylent stations in the city...
Health problems mostly came from abusive habits and environments. Genetic afflictions had largely been purged from the genome, and people were vaccinated against a slew of diseases, whether they wanted to be or not. If it saved them money, the government did it. Cut down on the number of medicae needed. Medicae and treating sicknesses was expensive.
”In the event of an inundation, what's the maximum processing capability of this station?”
He didn't have to think about it long. ”If cadaver salvage is relegated only to the most optimal subjects, this station can process two hundred and fifty thousand subjects completely per day.”
Talk about your battlefield clean-up! Of course, this was a mega-city, population in the billions...
”Do you sell gold, or better yet, platinum?”
He did glance at me then, weighing what to say. Naturally, the reason they sold them is because they recovered them from cybernetic implants, jewelry, or dental work. Waste nothing, after all.
”Most is traded under contract.”
”At sub-market rates, no doubt. If I was willing to pay market?”
His Trodes fizzled and sparked as he went searching for an answer. ”There are allotments for personal use available. How much do you require?”
”How much platinum do you have?”
The negotiation was quick and clean, used up a lot of my creds, but the not-so-precious-here metal was soon being shipped to me in Habberblok.
The people here had no experience with magic, so they were unaware of Investing objects by burning precious metals. Normally, this wasn't even possible, as the mechanical, multi-step process of smelting ore without human interaction would remove all spirituality from the metal, and it would be useless for such things.
However, metal that was right there when a person died would regain its spirituality, and given the saturation of the environment, retain it even if simply smelted down and recast into bars or coins.
I hummed thoughtfully to myself. This was likely one of the very few sources of magically viable metal in the whole city. I was going to have to take over their contract for it, once I got enough money flowing through.
”Do you use our product?” he asked in a stiff voice.
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It seemed like an innocuous question, but it wasn't.
”Bladebelle.” He blinked. ”The answer to your question is-?”
”No.”
There were... implications for a psi-user using soylent. Scrub it all they liked, it was still cannibalism, and there were psychic ramifications for eating the stuff. I could pick out something with soylent in it at a glance. Spiritless processing just didn't have the transformative power of nature. Ki sensitivity basically squared that.
Psis either didn't eat any soylent... or they preferred it. Those kinds that did generally got a bullet in their heads sooner rather than later. It was one of the danger signs to watch out for.
The Steiners, like most of the Undermobs, vat-grew most of their people. It skipped the whole time and money thing of raising kids and educating them. Program in the basic knowledge, assign them a name from a list, send them out to die or eventually earn a Designation and become a Frank.
It was also rumored that Steiners were only grown from nutrients distilled from soylent... and so were their own biggest customers. Naturally they brooked no threats to their soylent supply whatsoever.