Incorporated with DeepSeek
The Orks. The Big Boy Orks.
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| unrelated sample picture. With regards, The Goblin |
The connection crackles to life, a brief burst of static snow that resolves into two faces carved from granite and old grudge-work. The encryption icon in the corner of the screen pulses a sickly green—Triple-Prime ICE, nothing less for business chat.
On the left, **BRICK**, real name *Dieter*, but that name died in the Hamburg floods of '62. His tusks are uneven—one capped with cheap steel after a Renraku guard's rifle butt, the other chipped from gnawing on an industrial ration bar during a three-day lockdown in the Ruhrplex. Outside his window, the *Rhein-Ruhr Sprawl* is a smear of neon orange smog being washed sideways by a sheet of acidic, wind-driven rain that sounds like gravel hitting corrugated tin.
On the right, **HEX**, real name *Klaus*, but that name got buried under the rubble of the Essen arcology tremor. He’s got the lean look of a rigger who hot-sims more than he eats. A fresh chrome datajack port glints near his temple, the skin around it still red and angry from the back-alley chop-doc in Cologne. Behind him, an ancient heat-exchange unit wheezes, struggling against the 42-degree Celsius humidity that followed the latest Atlantic storm surge.
**BRICK:** (Wiping condensation off his lens with a grimy thumb) Scheiße. You look like drek warmed over, Hex. And that’s saying something coming from me in this sauna. Did the Marseille run fry your last nerve or just your optical wiring?
**HEX:** (His voice is flat, filtered through a cheap voice modulator that makes him sound like a ghost in the machine) The humidity down there, Brick. It ain't the dry heat of the barrens. It's like breathing hot synth-lube. The storm rolled in just as we were packing up. Hail the size of my fist bouncing off the armored tarp over Belsunce Square. Felt like the sky was trying to jack our score before we even left.
**BRICK:** But the market itself... *Mann*, tell me it was worth the swim through the Calanques run-off. The pictures you sent of that Bioware tent near the Old Port—I’m still drooling like a Hellhound over a ghoul’s leg.
**HEX:** The *Marché aux Puces de la Chair*? That was the high point. This old troll woman, face like a melted road map, had a cooler humming on a salvaged solar battery—the only thing working when the grid browns out from the heat index. She had a **Suprathyroid Gland**, third-gen, still in the sterile fluid. Not that black clinic synth-brew crap, actual cloned tissue. They say it cuts your reaction time down to the bone.
**BRICK:** (Leans forward, tusks scraping the edge of his own monitor) Don't play with me, *Bruder*. The stuff that makes you see the matrix before the sprite even compiles? My street sam reflexes are getting sloppy. Two seconds behind the curve in the F-G zone is a closed casket.
**HEX:** That’s the one. But I’m not paying twelve grand Eurodollars for a gland when I can get the same edge with a needle. Speaking of which, I’m putting in the order with that Corsican boat contact tonight. He's got a new shipment of **Jazz**—the "French Riviera" cut. Supposedly less nosebleed, same timeline dilation. And a crate of **Nitro-9** that'll make your muscles scream but keep you standing when the next corp-raid shock-troops come knocking.
**BRICK:** (Grunts approval, reaching for a warm bottle of *SoyKaf*) Jazz is for decker jitters. For me? I'm looking at the hardware we saw. You saw the booth run by that silent guy with the synth-leather apron? **Muscle Replacement 4**. The kind that doesn't whine like a servo motor in a monsoon. He had a demo arm there—punched through a cinderblock like it was wet cardboard. I'm thinking of getting my left arm done. Fits my cover, right? *Brick*? Get it?
**HEX:** (A rare, dry smirk) Very subtle. You want to be a walking armored personnel carrier in a city where the *Bundesgrenzschutz* scans for military-grade chrome at every checkpoint. You know what I liked more than the muscle grafts, though? The **Datajack Plus** on aisle six. The one with the integral cooling sheath. With this rain and this heat, my current jack is corroding from the inside out. One more blackout from a lightning surge during a thunderstorm, and I'm a vegetable drooling on the deck. That's the upgrade. That, and maybe a shot of **Focus** before the next deep dive.
**BRICK:** It’s a world of rust and sweat, Hex. Germany is a steam bath with a bad attitude. Marseille is a gutter filled with gold teeth. At least down there, by the Vieux-Port, the smell of the sea covers up the smell of the dead a little better. Here? It's just ozone and regret.
**HEX:** The storm's picking up again. I'm seeing lightning over the Frankfurt skyline towers. Might lose the relay.
**BRICK:** Get the order in for the Jazz and the Nitro. And keep an ear to the ground for a used Suprathyroid that doesn't come with a twelve-kilo price tag. Next time we go south, we're taking the land route through the flooded tunnels, I'm not flying over the Med in a storm with a cargo of illegal chrome.
**HEX:** Agreed. Stay dry, *Brick*.
**BRICK:** You too, *Hex*. And by dry, I mean don't get fried by the damn sky.
The feed cuts. Outside Brick's window, the acid rain intensifies, washing another layer of dystopian grime off the glass, revealing nothing but more of the same endless, neon-flecked dark.
