Everyone arrives thinking the Everwinter will kill them with cold. It’s subtler than that. What it takes is smaller and closer to the bone, and it takes it so gently that you thank it at the time. Four soft thefts. Learn them before the city teaches them to you.
The chrome remembers. Nobody can build the good machines anymore. The fabrication chains died with the old world, so every neural port and optic and good arm in this city is salvage, pulled from someone who no longer needs it and sold on with the seam still warm. The trade word for a used one is furnished, and furnished is exact. A port that spent a lifetime in a skull comes with the previous tenant still in it. Small at first, your new hand reaching for a cigarette you never smoked. Deeper stock brings dreams that aren’t yours. The rare units still remember being someone and will tell you at three in the morning. Unfurnished costs more, and now you know why, and now you also know why certain buyers pay a premium for one specific furnished arm, a named one, and what grief looks like when it has money.
The dead keep you warm. Die here and the scrubbers have you by morning. The body goes to the Render, hardware pulled and papered, and the heat of the process feeds back into the Grid. The Corpos call it efficiency. The street calls it the dead keep the city warm, and decided that generations ago mostly to spite them. Your people won’t get a grave. They will get your name cut into the insulation of a heat main, hand-height, in the district you lived in, so the warmth carries you through the streets you walked. The oldest mains in Sputnik are solid text a century deep, and the Tenders who work those pipes never scour them.
Your name is collateral. When a runner takes a street name, the old rite is to sell the birth name to a Mnemonic for safekeeping. A few Cal, a sealed record. Retire alive and you can buy it back. Die, and the Mnemonic holding it comes to the Render door and reads it aloud, once, off the ledger, to whoever is standing there, and then the name is over. Runners who mock every faith in this city will still pay a stranger to hold their name. Sit with that one a moment.
Someone is always taking the last read. We attend deaths. Not only as vultures, though we’re that too, a deathbed capture taken with consent is the cleanest read there’s, the last thing a person was, held in an object forever. There are fees and waivers and a family’s cut. But notice what it means that this city has a profession for catching the final thought before it cools, and a market for the thoughts once caught, and a general understanding that anything you ever felt strongly enough may already be sitting in somebody’s collection, labeled and priced.
Two footnotes, because you’re new and nobody else will say either one to you directly.
The first is the still ones. You will meet somebody in a bar who doesn’t move when the room moves. Ordered a drink, hasn’t touched it, pays exact, tips exact, and when they straighten their gloves twice while looking at you, that’s you being decided about. They’re called Sanguine and they’re not a story. Some of them are the best company in this city and there’s a waiting list for what they do. Be boring at them until you know which kind you have got. Nobody was ever followed home for being boring.
The second is the sound. There’s a thing under the radio in this city, and if you take on enough of the amber that falls out past the wall it stops being a sound. It becomes a voice. The voice is polite, it uses the second person, and everyone I have ever read who got that far describes it the same way. Not as a threat.
As an invitation.
This is the borrowed city. Everything warm in it belonged to somebody else first, the arm, the heat, the name, the memory. You will spend your life here assembling a self out of what the dead left behind, and it works, and that’s the part nobody warns you about. You become someone. You just never stop wondering how much of that someone is you, how much is the furnishing, and whether anything out past the last lamp is keeping the receipt.
[GUIDE ENDS. THE ARCHIVIST WISHES YOU A LUCID EVENING.]