Blood Money

In the bleed den on Wharf Seven, the refrigerators breathed and the donors didn’t.

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My flashlight bounced off stainless steel tables, extraction chairs bolted to concrete, and the vinyl straps chewed grey where teeth had desperately gnawed. Hundreds of tubes sang a chorus of pain as they fed crimson into shot sized bottles, tagged and differentiated. J1:Joy, S4:Serenity, A6:Adrenaline.

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Conveyor belts now paused their journey from carrying plasma trays like sluggish polluted rivers. Bodies hung on steel frames, heads lolled, arms punctured by that gang of deep burrowing tubes with serial numbers tattooed along forearms like scripture.

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“Detail the chillers,” I said, stepping over a boy whose mouth was sewn shut with fishing line to kill any distracting cries. “We’ve got a busy Mint.”

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The others worked in silence. You learn not to talk when the air tastes of copper and despair. Although resilience comes built in for me. The result of a textbook wrong childhood. Some would call it an empathy void. I just call it a managed experience.

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It wasn’t hard to find the ledger of buyers. Half the city’s elite coded by initials and orders. Emotions had become the luxury purchase the rich depended on. The way to spend cash for real reward when the world had gone to shit and real souls had long since been sold and sacrificed at the level of the ‘haves’ in life.

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While the ‘have nots’ were naturally the ones occupying the steel frames in the Wharf.

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Of course this was as illegal as it comes, even if some of those souls would have sold themselves willingly to save families from threat or poverty reality. And that’s what mattered to me. The logic of illegality. Not the impact of it. What the rich buy, the rich buy. I can’t change that.

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By dawn, all the pumps had stopped and the donors hung like emptied skins. I wrote Operation successful and signed off the live report. Investigator Nell Byrne, Central District

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***

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Back at headquarters the evidence room showed rows of glass vials glowing every hue of sanguine red, labels neatly defining the core of how too much cash can now access drugs of precision, choice and privilege. ‘Fear’ for the bored. ‘Lust’ for the lonely. ‘Grief’ for the artists. ‘Hope’ for the naïve.

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I had been summoned to the 75th floor. Executive level. The elevator rose sleekly through shimmers of white noise and omnipresent state slogans. Order Is Peace. Peace Is Progress.

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All good theories. Equally poor realities though.

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The briefing chamber on my arrival was too bright. Too pure and controlled. Three officials waited behind a pane of glass so thick and protective their words almost arrived late.

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“Investigator Byrne,” the woman in the centre said. “Congratulations. Wharf Seven was a success.”

I nodded once.

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She glanced at a tablet. “We like to check in on all our teams when they are exposed to extremes. Or the unexpected. And the scale of Wharf Seven was the biggest shock yet. But for you, there are no trauma indicators from your stats. No sleep disruption from your personal monitors. No elevated stress levels seen from your biorhythms on site. You’re somewhat of an outlier.”

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I wasn’t sure if it was praise. There was too much curiosity for that.

“I would say that I’m pretty consistent on that front.”

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A pause as three pairs of eyes watched me.

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‘And yet as this black market of red thrives,’ she continued,  “doesn’t it -  anger you  - that one cash rich class level should feed on another? Spiritually. Morally. Viscerally?”

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“They do it because they can. So anger isn’t a factor. Nor pity. It’s a situation that exists, that the law says shouldn’t. So I shut down the Mint. That’s the job. Emotional involvement helps no one and gets in the way of what is mandated to happen.”

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This time I detected something clearer from the panel. Satisfaction. Smiles almost.

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The man on the left in a pale suit that matched his skin tone shared a folder across the table with his colleagues.

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“You are the model of consistency Agent Byrne. Chemical readings, blood scans, attitude. Nothing riles you.”

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I showed no reaction. Their records didn’t go back far enough to my childhood to offer any dispute to that. From before the global crash after the arch pandemic. People can mistake calm for peace. They never see what it’s built on.

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“We see a future for you that can be extremely helpful to our goals” the third panellist shared. “For Order is Peace”. Your ‘detachment’ is something unique, something to reward.”

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***

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I watched as the Wharf Seven operation sparked into life. As the conveyor belts chattered into action. The vials filled with their crimson gold prizes. Workers harvested fresh bodies again ranging from volunteer to victim. To martyr.

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As my mouth was roughly sewn up with tight silver thread I could not comment.

 

As my arms were bound to an extraction chair I could take no action.

 

And as my veins pulsed as my lifeblood was distilled into multiple receptacles tagged D9: detachment (prototype) I could think of little.

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Except the claims thrown at me of how "I would be doing my country a service in producing dopamine for the masses. A product to calm the angry, the rebellious, the enemies of the state.”

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With something so pure unseen before in the mix of ‘emotional buys’ on the black market.

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Wharf Seven had its State benefits it seems.

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Although, as my body slowly collapsed inward, every vein started singing its own confession. They’d wanted my ‘detachment’, but that was wrong.

 

What they were siphoning was the rot that I had compartmentalised - the reality of the most feral, bloody and violent of reactions to the abuse, burns and mental deconstruction I suffered in childhood. The revenge I took limb by limb. Sinew by sinew.

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And then compartmentalised from the world.

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My real D9 was distilled depravity. Every product has a source, and there’d be no more containing this one.