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My name is Hector Castro. I am a fixer, not a writer, and the time given me to write this is short, so please excuse my lack of exposition. I see my penmanship is rather bad, but not as bad as one would expect, considering I have not used pen and paper in over forty years. I am not sure why I am being made to write my story, but I have nothing better to do with my remaining time, so here it is, unlikely reader.
As I said, I am a fixer, or if you are of my dwindling generation you might use the term 'fence'. As far as extralegal careers go, it is fairly safe, especially if you trust your hunches. But I have become obsessively greedy in my old age, and have been know to ignore the hunches sometimes. This is why I am stuck here writing this.
I knew something smelled bad when Ellis came to me with his unusual request. I deal with Ellis a lot. He's the grandson of a wealthy meat farmer up in OKC. Sometimes he provided me with black market beef he stole from one of the many barns his family had hidden under the nose of the Empire, usually he came to me as a customer, looking for gray-market recreationals and banned sex mods. He wasn't bright enough to have much use for stolen softs.
He wanted the heart of a puppetute. Not just any puppetute - he was able to afford even the premium models without going through me. One in particular, that belonged to a programmer down in the North Republic Metroplex. I would have told him to go home if he hadn't made his offer. There aren't many things I can't get, for a kilo of silver. He probably could have gotten the heart of a live prostitute for that price, though certainly not through me. I got the number of the guy who owned the puppet and told him I would get back with him.
I could have made the call immediately, but I wanted to think about this a bit first. I had some ideas why he might want it. Sometimes people get attached to their puppets, especially the 'tutes. I settled on the hypothesis that Ellis had some reason, real or imagined, for wanting the attention of the programmer. I had heard of the guy, a few years back his recs were very popular and I sold quite a few pirated copies. I couldn't get much info on what he had been doing lately. Deciding that I didn't really need to know and probably didn't want to (Ellis is what we would have called a 'sick puppy' in my youth) I called a ripper I have done business with.
No, I am not that kind of fixer. My dealings with the ripper (whose name I have never learned) have been strictly as a supplier. Yeah, I helped him do some really bad things indirectly, but you can't get far in my line of work unless you deal with bad people. I know this guy was good because he always had plenty of silver and obviously hadn't been caught yet, and figured this would be an easy job for him. I offered him enough to be extra discrete, not that rippers like to advertise their business.
"Should be less messy than usual" I joked when he called me back.
"Not really. They are nearly all organics these days, 'cept for the heart and the optics. Their insides are different, but not enough that anyone who wasn't medically trained like myself would notice." He paused a moment and laughed. "Actually, they usually take longer to stop bleeding."
I winced when he referred to himself as medically trained. I don't like to think of people like him being in the same line of work as those friendly folks who I see for my monthly treatments, although he probably did have more first hand experience of human anatomy. The Cloning Moratorium brought him plenty of business from those who are synthetic intolerant. I gave him the code for a drop-point and when to meet me there.
A couple of days later I'm standing by a bench in a public preserve. Some guy who looked about 11 (no way of telling how old he really was) slid up to it on a frictionless, sat down for a moment, then hopped on his board and kicked away. He left an opaque baggy. I walked away, casually picking it up and sticking it in my shirt as I passed.
***TO BE CONTINUED***
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