[A WRENCH JOCKEY’S GUIDE: CLASSIFIED] SUBJECT:
The Slow Rot (A Guide to Integrity, Maintenance, and Failure)
So, you’ve got your first piece of chrome humming in your meat. You feel the power, the edge. You think you’ve won. Here’s the part the ripperdoc doesn’t mention when you’re paying your Cal: the rot has already started.
Chrome isn’t a part of you. It’s a parasite, and it’s constantly at war with your body. Your flesh is trying to reject it, the Blight’s radiation is eating at its circuits, and the city’s grime is seeping into its seams. It’s a slow, steady decay, a tax you pay for defying your own biology. Every piece of chrome you own is on a 200-day journey from godhood to garbage, and it’s your job to keep it from getting there.
The Stages of Failure
The rot has a rhythm. Learn to recognize it.
- Stage 1: The Honeymoon (100%-51% Integrity) This is the lie you bought into. The chrome works perfectly. Your new eyes see in the dark, your new arm punches through concrete. You feel invincible. This is the chrome at its full, beautiful, deadly potential. Enjoy it. It doesn’t last.
- Stage 2: The Glitch (50%-1% Integrity) This is the first sign the parasite is winning. Your chrome enters a “Malfunctioning” state. That 5% Blight reduction you paid for is now a measly 2.5%. Your HUD will flash a warning, but you’ll feel it first. Your cyber-optic will fill with static at the worst moment. Your reflex booster will stutter, making you feel like you’re moving through mud. It’s a constant, nagging reminder that your power is borrowed, and the interest is coming due.
- Stage 3: The Flatline (0% Integrity) This is it. The chrome goes silent. It becomes dead weight, a useless lump of metal and wire bolted to your flesh, providing NO benefits whatsoever. Your HUD screams a CRITICAL failure warning, but you’ll know because that extra speed, that extra armor, that ability to see in the dark — it’s just… gone. There’s nothing more terrifying than the silence where a god used to be.
Feeding the Beast: Maintenance & Repair
Your chrome is a hungry ghost, and if you don’t feed it Cal, it will die.
- The Ritual: You crawl back to the ripperdoc’s chair. You let them plug you in, run their diagnostics, and tell you the damage. You pay the fee, and they restore the chrome to 100% integrity, resetting the clock on the rot.
- The Price of Neglect: The cost of maintenance is based on how much you let it decay. A quick tune-up for a minor glitch is cheap. But if you wait until your chrome is a “Broken,” flatlined piece of junk, the ripperdoc is going to charge you a fortune to bring it back from the dead. It costs more to repair a corpse than to treat a sickness.
A Fixer’s advice? Maintain preventively. Check your integrity every month. If it’s below 75%, get it fixed. A smart runner budgets for the rot. A dead runner is the one whose Mantis Blades glitched in the middle of a firefight because they were trying to save a few Cal.
[TRANSMISSION END]