"Ahhh, ! More… agh…"
The moans echoed through a darkened room, lit only by the pulsing glare of an oversized passing lightboard outside. Its shifting neon spilled in through the window, running across peeling wallpaper, broken furniture, and a bed that creaked under the weight of two figures. Another ad blared outside...
The newest line of companion androids, designed to please you endlessly.
The woman on top writhed, long blonde hair sticking to her slick skin, strands falling over her vacant face. Her eyes rolled back into her skull as she shuddered with vigor, her motions relentless.
Beneath her, the man lay pinned, his white hair catching streaks of pink and blue from the passing lights. Sweat rolled down his temple, but his grunt wasn't pleasure, it was irritation. With a sigh, he slapped at the woman's thigh.
"Anita…" Neill muttered, struggling to sit despite her weight pressing down. He could already tell. "…Not again."
Her body kept grinding against him, trapped in its pre-programmed rhythm. Clicking his tongue, he reached between them, fumbling along the artificial skin of her hip until his fingers found the recessed switch. One sharp press...
The woman froze. Her eyes rolled forward, locks of hair snapping back into sleek, factory-perfect black. Her voice stuttered out in a burst of static.
"System reboot complete. There was a failure in executing the 'climax' sequence you inputted, Master Neill."
"Yeah, figures," he muttered. Grimacing, dragged a hand down his face. His lone eye throbbed painfully in its socket, a reminder of last week when he'd sold the other one just to keep the lights on. Not that it mattered.
For months, the building had foregone internal lights to save money. Only its charging pods and flickering name, advertising its presence, remained illuminated.
The old bordello house, what his father once called his empire, had fallen into ruin. But every night the city still bled through its cracks. Neon ads, flickering hovering billboards, the buzzing hum of streets outside. Enough light to remind Neill of everything he'd lost.
The woman finally slid off him, collapsing onto the mattress with a dull thud. Neill exhaled and flexed his shoulder, only to hear the faint clank of his arm slipping loose from its socket again. With a grimace, he snapped it back into place, the joint sparking faintly before settling.
Another thing falling apart.
He glanced over at her. Anita lay sprawled on her side, hair sleek and black again, her expression empty. Her chest still rose and fell in a mechanical rhythm, but the glow in her eyes had dulled. She was malfunctioning too.
"Great," he muttered under his breath. Pulling himself upright, he groped around the floor for his clothes. "Is the sequence still not syncing properly?"
There was a stuttering hum from her throat, followed by the familiar buzz of her voice unit kicking in. It steadied, smoothing out into something almost human.
"Yes, Master..." she answered, head tilting toward him, tone eerily calm. "The sequence fails at the point where I must simultaneously shudder, arch my body, roll my eyes, and maintain maximum internal compression while also---"
"Enough." Neill held up a hand, cutting her off before she could finish the technical recital of the programmed fantasies.
"I don't need the details," He tugged his shirt over his head, his lone eye aching from the strain of neon leaking through the cracked window.
"Just tell me what part needs to be changed, or else the client won't be satisfied." he hissed, jaw tightening.
Anita's glassy eyes stared up at him, unblinking. "The scenario has too many variables to replicate your envisioned sequence of client satisfaction," she explained smoothly, voice caught somewhere between clinical precision and sultry undertone. "Excessive simultaneous commands, the eye rotation, spinal arch, muscular compression, overheated the system. Emergency shutdown was initiated."
Neill dragged a hand through his damp white hair, brushing it from his lone eye. His expression soured.
"That won't do. The client specifically asked for a blonde, someone with the looks of a vixen but the mannerisms of untouched. Stan's already taken the partial payment."
Without hesitation, Anita rose to her feet. Her hair shimmered, strands darkening then flashing into a golden halo. Her eyes softened, lashes lowering with a practiced innocence. The set of her lips shifted into the perfect blend of naivety and invitation, virgin sweetness wrapped around trained seduction.
She came to a sudden halt, her movements stuttering into a series of jerky, twitches. Her voice became strangely flat and devoid of inflection.
"Alert. Battery reserves low."
She glided back to the bed, reclining with a manufactured grace. The mattress beneath her buzzed faintly, charging ports glowing as they fed power back into her frame. She lay waiting, reconfigured and ready for the next command.
Neill didn't look at her. His gaze wandered instead to the window, to the city outside. Neon lights crawled across crumbling walls. Voices rose from the streets below, a chorus of nightlife and desperation. The city never slept, not even in the dark. And neither did its hunger.
After all, it was the year 2099. The world had gone fully AI back in 2047, when androids stopped being a novelty and became the backbone of society. Work, leisure, intimacy, every corner of human life was infused with machines.
Even bodies were no longer entirely human, cybernetic replacements were as common as tattoos once were. Flesh and steel had blurred so thoroughly that most no longer bothered to distinguish the difference.
***
Neill threaded his way through the crowded street market. The air was thick with spice smoke, synthetic perfume, and the static hum of neon signs that never dimmed. Around him moved a sea of figures.
Humans with android companions clinging at their sides, humans so heavily augmented they barely resembled their former selves, and androids perfected to the point where they walked and spoke with more warmth than the flesh and blood buyers browsing the stalls.
He had left Anita behind at the bordello. She was powering up, reconfiguring herself into whatever fantasy his father's next client had paid for. That place, once the pride of Stan Down's business empire, was now a sagging carcass of peeling paint, failing circuits, and debts stacked higher than its windows. Competition had killed them slowly.
Newer androids were flooding the market every week, models built sleeker, smarter, hotter, mass-produced by megacorps with resources far beyond the scraps Neill could scavenge. His father's house was stuck with faulty street models, patched together from sketchy vendors and secondhand scrapyards.
Anita was the only one still functioning, and even she stuttered under the strain of complex instructions. Every time she glitched out mid-performance, Neill knew they were a step closer to ruin.
The Charon street in the district of Pluto was mayhem wrapped in neon. Everyone knew it as the gutter land, where scraps piled high, the dirt-poor clung to survival, and yet somehow the place still thrived.
Android fight rings roared from alley cages, their metallic gladiators tearing each other apart for bloodthirsty crowds. Bordellos advertised pleasure models with glitchy smiles. Illegal trade kept Pluto's heart beating, even when everything else was rotten.
Neill kept his head low as he moved through the press of bodies. He slipped past the gambling dens, where dice and blood credits changed hands faster than breath, and through the vendor row pushing the latest craze, appearance-shifting collars.
A single clasp at the throat and your whole face morphed... celebrity, stranger, ghost. Manufactured illusions, yet they were selling like wildfire.
He tugged his hood tighter, then sealed the filter of his gasmask as the air thickened with toxic haze. Ahead was his real destination. Past the shouts, past the flashing lights, he entered a narrow corridor where shadows swallowed color. Even the hovering droidcops circling above the district avoided these parts.
Neill walked on until the smell changed. The front of the shop was a butcher's, slabs of meat dangling from hooks, flies buzzing lazily around the cuts. But the real merchandise waited in the back. Pushing through a curtain, he stepped into the dim-lit room beyond.
The glow came from rows of jars, each one filled with preservation fluid. Inside floated the goods. Organs, limbs, eyes, spines. Human parts, stripped and tagged, drifting in their glass prisons. The dark room smelled of chemicals, copper, and quiet cruelty.
Neill's gaze found what he'd been coming back to for months. His eye. The one he'd sold not that long ago. A pristine model, glimmering faintly inside its jar like a jewel in brine.
He clenched his jaw. Nobody had bought it yet. At least his liver had sold quickly, and the arm too. His cut from those sales had already gone into paying off bills. But the eye… the eye lingered. Always just out of his reach.
The shop owner didn't bother asking him anymore. No more... Buying today? Selling more? They both knew the answer. Neill always gave the same line, that he was just checking on something. And the owner, half-bored, half-suspicious, just let him linger.
He was planning to buy the eye back, of course. He'd been planning for months to essentially pawn it off and get it right back, but it's already been a week. And he was still short a few cryptos, the kind of shortfall that might as well be the void.
The fee he earned from coding custom scenarios for the girls, rewriting their sequences by actions so they could mimic whatever fever dream the clients demanded, barely kept him fed. And even that wasn't stable work.
The market didn't deal in coins or credits anymore, not down here. Only crypto, encrypted and untraceable, slipped through illegal channels. It was the one currency the black market trusted, and Neill never had enough of it.
He'd already sold off parts of himself. An arm, a liver, bits of his own humanity stripped away and replaced with whatever scrap he could pull from the trash heaps, just to keep his body working.
He was more patchwork than person these days, but still short of the price he needed. Human eyes were never cheap, even in Pluto. Especially not in Pluto.
He thought someone else would have bought it by now. A healthy organ didn't sit on a shelf long. But his eye still floated there in its jar, waiting, taunting him with its glow. Each visit, the hope gnawed at him a little deeper.
Leaving the butcher's stink and its glass prisons behind, Neill pulled his hood tighter and headed out past the black market, the path sloped toward the district's edge.
The scrap heaps loomed there, mountains of discarded parts, android shells, gutted machines, broken cybernetics, rusted organs. This was where he scavenged when desperation forced his hand, where he found replacements for the things he'd sold off.
Beyond that wasteland stretched the border of Orbit's designated zones, the sprawling city districts carved up between humans, androids, and those blurred somewhere in between.
And past the end of Pluto's broken road lay the void, Styx. No-man's land. Toxic deserts, radioactive storms, air that stripped the lungs raw. A reminder that there was nowhere else left to go.
Neill trudged forward anyway.
He wasn't the only one scavenging the heaps. Figures like shadows sifted through the mountains of discarded tech and flesh, their movements jerky and frantic, hands disappearing into piles of rusted plating, broken servos, half-melted skulls.
Neill kept his head down, his bad arm stiff and unreliable since he'd jammed it back into its socket after Anita's latest breakdown. He just needed something, any piece of machinery, to keep it from locking up again.
Then, a glint caught his eye.
Half-buried under twisted metal and splintered plastic, a jar pulsed faintly with its own glow. His breath hitched as he scrambled toward it, brushing aside scraps until his fingers closed around smooth glass. Inside floated an eye. Not a hollow casing.
His pulse quickened. Shoving it into his sack, he glanced around, heart pounding. Nobody had noticed, or so he thought. Still, he couldn't resist checking. Peeling back the mouth of his sack, he let the dim light spill over the jar. The eye inside seemed to shimmer, veins threading faintly beneath its surface.
A laugh almost escaped him, but he bit it down, clutching the sack tight. This was it, his chance. He could sell this one, finally get the credits together, and buy his own eye back. No more waiting. No more scraping by.
He didn't waste another second. Sprinting from the trash heap, boots crunching against the metallic ground, he made for Pluto's black market. His hood slipped, gasmask rattling, but he didn't care.
He didn't see the others pause. Didn't notice the way they turned, eyes narrowing, something flashing across their faces. He never realized they had been watching him, step by step, following the sack in his grip.
And he certainly didn't know the truth.
What he'd taken wasn't human at all.