Radio Waves

Still, despite everything, they act noting short of immortal, wide grins plastered on their faces in the low lights of Zone clubs and speeding down Route Guano with patrol cars hounding them alike. They're young and loud and disorderly and messy in every aspect they can be, something so quintessentially killjoy that calling them anything else would feel wrong. And killjoys, well, killjoys never die, though they sure as hell can come terrifyingly close to it.

It's easy to pretend you're untouchable- to renounce your fears and bathe in the spotlights that make everything around you go by in a blur- until someone gets hurt. Until you are faced with the consequences of your own reckless abandon, until you're left to pick up the pieces and tell yourself that it was a fluke- that from then on you will truly be immortal like everyone says.

poison: gets help, but only after everyone else is taken care of. if there’s someone else who’s injured, they will not sit down until they know that that person has been tended to. they’re pretty reckless in claps and most of their injuries are blasts to the legs and arms along with gashes from dodging. they know it’s not good to be reckless, but it’s the way they remind themselves that they’re still alive.

kobra: pretty good about getting help, but panics and hides things when he thinks they’re really serious. a gash that needs a little bit of cauterizing? he’ll ask jet. but for maybe a raygun blast that’s just a little too close to his abdomen for comfort? he’ll definitely have a panic attack because he thinks the others will get mad at him for not avoiding it. he has a lot more of close combat wounds like bruises, concussions, or busted lips because of the whole karate thing, and he seriously underestimates a drac’s ability to pack a punch sometimes.

ghoul: will not let anyone touch him. he deals with all of his stuff alone, it’s just a thing from the lab that whenever he gets medical care from anyone else he gets flashbacks to being in the lab again. when he first got to the zones and woke up with doc trying to stitch him up, he nearly punched the poor guy in the throat. another thing: even though he’s better than jet at treating injuries (from all the days in the lab with nothing to do but watch the scientists) he refuses to patch up anyone else. not out of selfishness, but just because there’s still a part of him that believes doctors are evil.

You’re a Class Two pull, meaning that when you’re in year four of the Battery City education system and just about to turn ten you take the mandated city-wide test, a battery of mental and physical tests and forms you have to fill out. You take the SCE3 and a week later you’re informed that you’ve passed it, so you’re transferred to a new school in the Central Sector and you embark on a much more rigorous education that includes everything from history to geography to physics to war strategy to medical biology. Your class consists of some forty other kids in your year but by the time you finish finals there are only twenty-three. You’re approved for the next stage of the SCT Program just before you turn fourteen. You and twenty-two other prepubescent kids are entered into a roster for a series of bio-augmentation procedures that will drastically improve your effectiveness on the battlefield.

Battery City is fighting a war and it’s losing and you’re going to be what turns the fighting around. This is what they tell you before you are stretched out on an operating table, the surgical light nearly blinding. Even with general anesthetic, remember always the cold of the table against your skin. Remember always the skip of your heart an instant before the long, bristling line of needles the length of your forearm drop and pierce your skin and set you on fire. The automated plungers depress and administer the protein compound injections that will increase muscular density and improve your reflexes, strength, and endurance. The unconsciousness preceding and following this procedure does not spare you the sensation of having sulfuric acid siphoned through your veins, swelling your tendons, setting your brain on fire. The anesthetic does not spare you the sensation of shattering bones when your skin is stripped back and the silicon carbide nanocomposite is grafted onto the upper layers of your bones where it will expand into a protective shell and strengthen bone integrity and tensile strength and make your bones nigh unbreakable in most combat situations. When the plate of your skull is cut into so that the high-sensitivity cybernetic neural implant can be inserted into the folds of your brain tissue to increase nervous transduction and elevate reflex response times by over a hundred percent, you feel it in your spine because it feels like your nervous system has been filled with napalm. Remember always the sensation of tiny surgical tools in the fragile, jellied components of your eyes when the electromagnetic retinal enhancements are wired into place to allow for improved visual capabilities and the capacity to see in the dark.

The recovery period post-op varies between six weeks and five months. For you it was nearly four months - four months of injections of a daily mineral and vitamin intake, physical therapy, stretching, and ensuring that your new physiology would not literally kill you in the field. The burn settles into your skin easily and stays. Understand that the effects of the procedures performed on you will remain indefinitely. The nervous tremors, the periods of vertigo, the days when your vision shorts out and you’re rendered partially blind - these are the consequences of the program in which you have been enrolled. The chronic headaches and bouts of fatigue will never leave you entirely.

Trace the long tracks of keloid spiderwebbed over your skin - down the insides of your arms, the sides of your legs, down your spine. Feel the lump of scar tissue on the back of your head where the part of your skull was pried away. Experience periodic spurts of envy for those in your class who were spared this - who washed out prior to finals or who died on the operating table, because in some ways they were the lucky ones.

This is what they do not tell you: that equipment failure is the number one cause of death among scarecrows. Class Two scarecrows in particular have a 59% failure rate, which is defined as any subject that dies due to catastrophic side-effects of the bio-augmentation process, dies due to any short-term or long-term consequences of the bio-augmentation process, or dies due to critical failure of said bio-augmentations in the field. This is still a drastic improvement over the 76% failure rate of the Class Ones.

It is equipment failure that nearly kills you, because like many of the Class Twos, your production was rushed. You were slapped together, cheap and dirty and ugly, for the sole purpose of giving Battery City an advantage in the Analogs. You were not conceived of as something that would endure, and you were not intended to. You were created to be a more elite, effective form of cannon fodder; better at taking orders and better at killing but ultimately as easy to discard as any third-tier draculoid.

They taught you the most efficient, ruthless means of killing and did not teach you how to survive in the Combat Zones outside the city because you were not particularly expected to or even built to survive for long. You were engineered for a very specific purpose and it is that purpose, now, that is killing you.

It is your chemically-enhanced muscular density that is failing you now, locking you in convulsions and bringing you perilously close to blacking out without ever allowing you that blissfulness of unconsciousness. This kind of equipment failure is what kills 59% of the scarecrows in your class and it is nearly what kills you.

At Dead Pegasus gas stations, of course! By all means they are abandoned and if one looks a tad bit too much like one of Tommy’s storefronts then that only ever means some ‘crow got lazy and tried to get some easy kills to meet their quota. Still, they never refill the oil pumps, but they work just fine anyways. 

There’s a lot of rumors going around that it’s because the bombs created a crack in an oil pocket or that it’s ran by ghosts and you’re going to crash if you don’t pay up a fair price at the counter. Regardless of what the truth actually is, motorbabies, tumbleweeds and even beta bugs know better than to question why it still works. Always count your eggs when they’re in the basket or something.

The answer to the second question depends. They have patrol cars, which are semi-electric, and those get stolen a whole bunch, so there’s quite a few going around the Zones and Lobby, but the average Better Living citizens is prohibited from owning personal vehicles due to the ETHER Act (“Environment, Technology and Hazard Exposure Reduction” Act) passing in november 2004, post-Helium War. It’s some bullshit clause that’s using the pretext of individual carbon footprint to keep citizens within the City while also trying not to ring any alarm bells that they’re a company getting weirdly involved into politics.

Angel, let’s say you’re a nobody and you grew up a nobody and that’s all there ever was to you. You were born in a shit-infested corner of the Ritalin District to a couple of strung-out junkies blitzed on BLi pills and when you hit age twelve it was an easy bounce from the Lobby to Juvie Hall. Straightforward as blinking. You hit that pipeline and you always had a snap to you, you always had a violence and napalm threaded in the ropy network of your veins. You hit age sixteen and here’s the thing, Angel: Battery City is fighting a war and it’s losing.

So you turn sixteen and they yank you straight from Juvie and they shove an EX-20 standard-service BLi-issue battle rifle into your hands. They don’t ask if you can shoot and they don’t ask if you’re ready or willing to die for their cause. They put you out on the frontlines and, Angel, as it turns out you’re a pretty rotten shot. All that fire and discharge and no direction and bad depth perception, and disappointing people is a new thing for you, see. This is the first time anyone’s ever had expectations for you because this is the first time you’ve been someone noteworthy enough to have expectations ascribed to you. Literally any expectations at all.

So they reposition you from footsoldier to field medic. And once again, they don’t give you anything in the way of instruction or advice. They don’t tell you shit about who you’ll be treating. You have to learn as you go and pick up all the little things and all the big things as well - how to tourniquet a bleed or spot a TBI and how to stabilize someone who’s just gotten a laser-burn to the chest. You’re no doctor. You have no training. You have no guarantee that you’re doing any of this right or that any of what you’re doing is actually helping. They don’t teach you any of it and they give you no direction.

They don’t tell you that you’ll be experiencing the Analog battlefield the way few others experience it: with you elbows-deep in blown-open rib cages, eye level with the sluice of the eviscerated dead. You get the full scope of the human cost of the Analog Wars while you watch screaming, hemorrhaging sixteen-year-olds like you die because they were flung onto the Analog frontlines without their preparation or consent. You know the Wars by the depths of the trenches and the number of amputees and the bomb-blasted shards of bone that decorate the battlefield. You’re just some fucking kid who can’t shoot straight and you got the luck of the draw for the first time in your life because unlike the hundreds you see shuffled into triage who leave in carbon-plastic bodybags, you get to live.

You get to live with the fifty thousand ton of radioactive nuclear soul-stripping weight that’s watching BL/ind footsoldiers cry for their mothers while they die with their guts steaming in the desert sun - because Battery City needed to shell Zone Two in heat and mortar fire and decided that the squads of exterminators they deployed earlier were acceptable collateral.

You get to live with the knowledge of what “collateral” means, in war.

And then, when a scarecrow goes down screaming because of the things BL/ind put in his skull and beneath his skin and you’re the only one for miles to help him, you get to learn what it means to be collateral.

rule one: dont panic when you realize you’ve been caught. better living uses nets, tranquilizer darts, traps, tasers, and other methods to capture joys. if you’re in a trap or a net, don’t fight, you’ll just tangle yourself up worse. if it’s a dart or a taser, do not take the prongs out of your skin. keep them there until you’re either captured or get help.

rule two: stay silent, or at the very least, don’t give any crucial information. skirt around the point or just keep your mouth shut entirely, no matter what they do.

rule three: be ready to leave at all times, stay as oriented as you can. panic can be overwhelming and easily lead to your death but if you keep a cool head you can usually work out a way to escape or negotiate for your life.

rule four: cooperate when being transported. if you think you can outrun or outshoot an entire drac patrol by yourself, you’re a fool. just wait until you can work something out, it’s better to wait for an opportunity to arise than jump the gun and get yourself killed.

the fab four have been captured more times than they can count on hand.

jet’s missing a couple teeth from when he got beat within an inch of his life after he spat on korse during interrogation. he stills says it was worth it, even if it’s hard to chew on one side of his mouth still after years.

ghoul’s never been captured, he’s always too quick for them, but that isn’t going to say he doesn’t have more than a few odd pinprick scars on his back from tasers.

poison’s got some pretty bad ropeburn scars on their legs and shoulders from getting captured when they were a new joy in the desert and got netted.

04: na na na

Party? Sparring.

Jet? Music.

Kobra? Naps.

Ghoul? Nonsense.