compensated, cooling his body without preamble.
The people who had put the muties here wanted them to sweat.
Little wonder, since it was that sweat that created the glist, a potent hallucinogen that could trigger powerful visions in anyone who imbibed it. Anyone human, that was. The drug naturally had no effect on the muties themselves, although it had inspired one of their crueller nicknames in the outlander communities—Sweaties. They were known by a few names, some more respectful than others. Sweaty Betties, or more simply Betties, was most popular, especially among the drug-using community. Kane was an ex-magistrate, so he didn’t dabble in things like that, but he had had experiences with the kind of lowlifes who did, knew the way they spoke, the slang they used. You couldn’t be an effective mag without knowing your enemy—a truism of all law-enforcement was that the law’s enforcers and the people who broke laws were always trying to stay one step ahead of each other.
The room stank of the sweat, that thick, viscous sweat that poured from their bodies in great rivers to be collected by drain channels that ran across the bottom of each cage, gathering the liquid and sending it to a collection tank that stood poised by the wall closest to the door through which Kane had entered. There were two collection tanks there, in fact, wide as barrels, taller than a man and covered over without being properly sealed. Each had a gauge on its side, a little needle residing on a white crescent behind a tiny pane of clear glass or plastic, indicating the volume contained in the tank.
Kane strode over to the two barrels, stood on tiptoe and lifted the cover of the nearest to peek inside. A pungent stink assaulted his nostrils, so strong it made him flutter-blink for a couple of seconds. It smelled of candy or rotting fruit, the sweetness almost too much to process in one hit, the way gasoline can smell fruit-sweet. It was glist. Kane recognized it, wasn’t surprised in the slightest. This room was a glist farm; that much was obvious. Dealers would take the muties, incarcerate them and then subject them to high temperatures, not enough to really hurt them but just enough to make them continually sweat.
The room was a collection center for the operation next door, the building that Kane had viewed with the cloud symbol on its door. That place was a dream factory, outlawed by all baronies, but the sort of thing that was hard to keep tabs on. Dream factories created and sold dreams, either as group experiences or, as with the more high-scale ones, on a case-by-case basis. The dreams were tailor-made to generate a mental thrill in the dreamer, who would plug him- or herself into some kind of virtual-reality tech that had been spliced by a tech genius so it could be pumped directly into the brain. The trouble with the setup was that the human brain doesn’t fool easily and can usually tell when something isn’t real. Which was where glist came in.
Glist was the by-product of a particular sweat reaction in a subspecies of muties who had, for reasons of survival, developed the ability to produce toxin-filled sweat when scared, presumably either to scare away or, in extreme circumstances, poison any predator who came near. The effect of these toxins on the human bloodstream in carefully administered dosages, however, was to fuel elaborate hallucinations.
Coupling glist with the VR tech in a dream factory helped solidify the illusion of the dream being real. In fact, the effect was so absolute that it was not unheard-of for a user to become lost in his or her dream and never reawaken.
Long-term glist abusers had other problems, too. Frequently, their desire centers would get unraveled and they’d begin to show strange sexual tendencies, or to hunger for poisonous foodstuffs. In short, for the users, sometimes the dreams became real.
It burned Kane, seeing people—even muties like these—imprisoned this way. In his role as a
The people who had put the muties here wanted them to sweat.
Little wonder, since it was that sweat that created the glist, a potent hallucinogen that could trigger powerful visions in anyone who imbibed it. Anyone human, that was. The drug naturally had no effect on the muties themselves, although it had inspired one of their crueller nicknames in the outlander communities—Sweaties. They were known by a few names, some more respectful than others. Sweaty Betties, or more simply Betties, was most popular, especially among the drug-using community. Kane was an ex-magistrate, so he didn’t dabble in things like that, but he had had experiences with the kind of lowlifes who did, knew the way they spoke, the slang they used. You couldn’t be an effective mag without knowing your enemy—a truism of all law-enforcement was that the law’s enforcers and the people who broke laws were always trying to stay one step ahead of each other.
The room stank of the sweat, that thick, viscous sweat that poured from their bodies in great rivers to be collected by drain channels that ran across the bottom of each cage, gathering the liquid and sending it to a collection tank that stood poised by the wall closest to the door through which Kane had entered. There were two collection tanks there, in fact, wide as barrels, taller than a man and covered over without being properly sealed. Each had a gauge on its side, a little needle residing on a white crescent behind a tiny pane of clear glass or plastic, indicating the volume contained in the tank.
Kane strode over to the two barrels, stood on tiptoe and lifted the cover of the nearest to peek inside. A pungent stink assaulted his nostrils, so strong it made him flutter-blink for a couple of seconds. It smelled of candy or rotting fruit, the sweetness almost too much to process in one hit, the way gasoline can smell fruit-sweet. It was glist. Kane recognized it, wasn’t surprised in the slightest. This room was a glist farm; that much was obvious. Dealers would take the muties, incarcerate them and then subject them to high temperatures, not enough to really hurt them but just enough to make them continually sweat.
The room was a collection center for the operation next door, the building that Kane had viewed with the cloud symbol on its door. That place was a dream factory, outlawed by all baronies, but the sort of thing that was hard to keep tabs on. Dream factories created and sold dreams, either as group experiences or, as with the more high-scale ones, on a case-by-case basis. The dreams were tailor-made to generate a mental thrill in the dreamer, who would plug him- or herself into some kind of virtual-reality tech that had been spliced by a tech genius so it could be pumped directly into the brain. The trouble with the setup was that the human brain doesn’t fool easily and can usually tell when something isn’t real. Which was where glist came in.
Glist was the by-product of a particular sweat reaction in a subspecies of muties who had, for reasons of survival, developed the ability to produce toxin-filled sweat when scared, presumably either to scare away or, in extreme circumstances, poison any predator who came near. The effect of these toxins on the human bloodstream in carefully administered dosages, however, was to fuel elaborate hallucinations.
Coupling glist with the VR tech in a dream factory helped solidify the illusion of the dream being real. In fact, the effect was so absolute that it was not unheard-of for a user to become lost in his or her dream and never reawaken.
Long-term glist abusers had other problems, too. Frequently, their desire centers would get unraveled and they’d begin to show strange sexual tendencies, or to hunger for poisonous foodstuffs. In short, for the users, sometimes the dreams became real.
It burned Kane, seeing people—even muties like these—imprisoned this way. In his role as a
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