"Okay, back up off me, Cubby, and keep that OPTIKAL locked on me, I detest repeating myself. Don't like the name 'Cubby', huh? Earn a better one, ya halfscan.

"I know what you're thinking, scanning, whatever. I've seen that befuddled, blownbit, bunny-eyed look you and your subscribers always have. Here you sit trying desperately to process the eternal question: How the hell did we come to THIS? No 'retrospective' can really work without answering that question, now can it? How did we get into the position where your corporate suits and our guys alike can kick in your doors without warrant or warning? How did we come to have HOTDROPS with a response time measured in heartbeats? How did we get 'Trespass Laws' which, with the right mouthpiece, allow you to blow apart your own people if they're on the competition's turf after shopping hours? Why do I enforce them? And why did we let the 'how' of all this happen?

"For that answer, Skibby, we're going to have to do a little bit of connect-the-dots. Connect-the- ... never mind. You're damn near larval prescript, ain'tcha? How about chase-the-porn-feed-through-the-data-flags? That buzz phrase 'spark a glitch?' Spectacular.

"Well, back in the '80s, or maybe it was the early '90s (who can really remember these days), urban legends started popping up along a common theme. Some guy a friend of a friend knows (usually) gets picked up in a bar by a beautiful boy or girl and goes back to his or her coffin for a little after-school fun. They have fantastic sex (usually), or he just gets juiced unconscious (depending on how sadistic the storyteller is), and he blinks out. The next morning, he wakes up freezing in a bathtub fulla ice, with some new abdominal scars and one kidney short of a matched set.

"Well, like most Netfeed legends, it may have had a grain of truth. At that point, transplant surgery was just getting to the point where rejections were getting rarer and organ viability was getting wider acceptance. Yeah, I know, Tiger, it's hard to think of a time when you couldn't just go get your blown-ta-pieces arm replaced with a hunka surgical steel, but it existed. I lived in it. So did your daddy, unless daddy was Pyrex. Anyway, someone at that time may have actually had the skill to do a chopjob and leave the patient alive. You never know. If they did, they'd get away with about seven digits worth of black-market kidney. Seven digits, by the way, isn't money anymore when you're dealing with the Market. Seven digits is opportunity, motive, method, legal fees, alibi, bail, and acquittal in one single, easy-to-serve, single-dosage wrapper. Get the point?

"Fast-forward a couple of years. A prime human body could be worth millions to the right hands....

"Why the hell would organs be worth so much? Simple math, really.

"It all begins like a dirty joke. 'There once was a sheep named DOLLY', and Dolly became a worldwide celebrity in 1996 when she became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult ewe's DNA. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, lemme explain. In 2002, Dolly developed arthritis. In the following years, she developed glaucoma and later congenital heart failure. So? That little predicament brought the idea of cloning human parts for replacement organs to a grinding halt. Suddenly, it dawned on people that cloned parts could be imperfect. Worse, they could be imperfect and not detected as such for years, maybe even decades after replacement. That, coupled with speeches from key government officials evoking images of embryo farms, custom-made children, and desperate women pressured into selling their eggs, made it easy for conservatives to get their bill passed making it illegal to clone anything that ever had a face. That included somatic cell nucleus transfer as well. Hell, it eventually included everything.

"That was their answer to everything at the time. If it's dangerous, make it illegal.

"Oh yeah, Spanky, it was still being done, it just went back to being a back-alley-and-coat-hanger operation. Read something with pages sometime, you'll be amazed at what you'll find out. Anyway, they said it was ethics that drove their decisions. I say they were making money, taking bribes from those who traded in illegal transplants. They stood to lose considerably if their clients were able to get the same product cheaper elsewhere. We all know something illegal is more expensive than something legal is. It's economics. So, they eliminated the legal alternative. You either cloned your own parts, which was illegal, new, difficult to perform, risky, and expensive, or you pulled 'em off someone else, which was also illegal, but was a cheap and established black-market trade.

"Well, it soon became pretty obvious to the Einsteins (I'm not telling you who Einstein was, just keep rolling) working the chopshops that the younger the bodies were, the more growth and cloning potential the organs had. Female bodies were better. The ovaries alone were worth their weight in plat. Pretty and athletic were nice, but those were just bonuses. And, of course, corp kids were a favorite flavor, because on average they had a better diet and were exposed to fewer hard pollutants and less hard labor.

"Welcome to virgin sacrifice, 21st-century style. And people wonder why I drink.

"Of course, the corps and my distinguished predecessor denied that it was a widespread problem until it hit home. They didn't want to admit how deep the rot went, and believe me, it went all the way to the bone. The cops were everywhere and doing their best, of course, but nobody was trying to snatch them, and a third of the 'bangers were carrying nonlethal rounds and tasers now. No murders ever hit rap sheets, and insurance companies 'covered' the relatively small losses, so public outcry was kept to a minimum. If you were a victim, you'd just wake up, in a puddle of your own blood, and wonder absently where your left arm or right eye had wandered off too. Kinda scary now that I think about it. But at least things were pretty peaceful.

"Then, like the train wreck at the end of the tunnel, came the girl named ANGEL HARDAWAY.

"Angel Hardaway? They didn't d-load you anything for this interview, did they? Man, you guys really are an outline looking for a scene to happen. No wonder they pay me to do what I do. Damn.

"Anyway, Angel Hardaway was the darling little girl of then-Head of Internal Security Affairs Rachel Hardaway, and wow, whattabitch. Being a rich kid and a politician's daughter, she got to act out as much as she wanted, secure in the knowledge that the Not-So-Secret Service would clean up any mess she left behind. But, obviously, they're not around ALL the time. It was going to happen, it was only a matter of when.

"When little Angel didn't check in for a couple of days, Mommy dearest wasn't really worried. It's not like it was the first time, or the twentieth. No one knew that Angel's ride had been detoured through a hot zone by a Squad sealing in some clockwork chromejob. They had originally intended to take a safe route, but that day there was a tinman popping off rounds into anything that wandered by, so there was no through traffic on Main. I remember the guy, I think. His name was Chandler. Man, that guy was bad news legend. He had guns so powerful the recoil alone was shattering windows. 'Rogue military prototype', I'm pretty sure is what the reports said. In the end, we lost 31 men that day, including firemen and EMTs. But none of them made the papers like Angel later would.

"In all the disarray at such a huge loss, the local police were less than cooperative when Hardaway actually started to worry about her daughter over a month later. To this day, I still think Hardaway blames them for her loss. That would explain much of her later policy. Anyone or anything to blame but herself, I guess. Just remember to thank God in your prayers tonight that she lost last year's election. Never mind, you probably think God lights up when you flush His handle and has a face that turns green under water. Anyway, imagine the look on Rachel's face when she found out from one of her aides that her little girl's plasticized skin was up in the display grid of MONDO'S Inflatable and Ceramic Mammals (anything with fur, for any type of fun!) with 'real teeth and eyes!'

"It didn't take the Service goons more than a couple of hours to find out that parts of our dear Angel were on sale in a half-dozen different black body shops up and down the strips. It took 'em even less time to buy all of it for authentication. Some shops had her on sale at 20% off if you bought the major organs in matched sets. Well anyway ... using the teeth and eyes they so flagrantly advertised, it didn't take long to find out it wasn't a fake. 'Woman scorned' got nothin' on 'grieving parent.' And when the said parent happens to be the Head of Internal Security Affairs, well, things start to happen real fast.

"The widely known about-but strangely unpublicized-witch hunt of bodyleggers in the Metro area was just the beginning. Hardaway had a lot of pull with the President and about everyone else of reasonable power in the Senate and the Media, and she used every ounce of it. Thank God state-sponsored executions for these crimes never got any further than her home state. But panic spread like wildfire. You think the scare of '02 was something? This was a new kinda fear. It didn't happen to 'somebody else.' It happened to people just like you. For several months, there was extreme paranoia. Vigilantism was rampant, and it was common for simple muggers to be executed on the street as suspected body thieves. Legislation easily passed for looser gun laws across the board. Organleggers weren't using guns because it turned a community service crime into hard time for life, so things tended to get pretty lopsided. All in all, it pretty much backfired, and more stray cats were probably shot than true criminals, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. So the guns stayed.

"We lost more than a few downtowns the following years due to the riots. People felt, maybe justly, that their elected government couldn't protect them, so they decided to give in to the gangs. Lexington, not too far from here, was the first to be declared a 'Hostile District' or HOT ZONE. You could still be a cop or a teacher or a postal worker in Lexington, you'd just no longer get a paycheck for it from any government. Some stayed anyway. We attempted everything to suppress the areas. Everything. From artillery bombardment to harassment to gassing. The citizens refused to let us operate. For the past six years, in fact, the National Guard has attempted to force the people of these cities, under penalty of death, to submit fully to having them establish a presence within the cities. Only two have given in since the start of it all. The others just responded with fury and bullets and bloodshed. I say let 'em be. The whole thing's a media nightmare anyway.

"Anyway, at the time most people believed that it was worth your life to try and help a drunken friend home from the bar. Some respectable bars even went so far as to start a sign-in process, so you could tell the staff who was going to be driving you home. A lot of people avoided using it, though, because they didn't know (or want anyone else to know) who they were going home with at last call. So the program never carried. And, as the Bard said, 'The wounds time doesn't heal, the mind quickly forgets.' The organlegger scare lasted about a year and a half and had about as much effect on daily life as AIDS did in the '90s or Black Molly has today. A few months of fear and then a forgotten notation in a history dialog.

"History will teach us nothing.

"Finally, tired and almost defeated, Hardaway was approached by Lt. Col. Hardin Sevin of GEARSMITH INDUSTRIES, who suggested a different approach. It was one that had been used during the War and was proven effective. What he suggested would attack the chopdocs in their collective pocket books by offering people an alternative to cloning and organmugging. He would offer them surgical steel. It would be clean, quick, and legal. All he needed was the financial backing to buy off his opponents and the political support to ease lawmaker scrutiny. Hardaway could offer that support and endorsement, and soon, everywhere there was a person decked out in someone else's skin, there would now be a metal-skinned cyborg who needed routine maintenance and replacement parts and expensive retooling for years to come. And no one had to die to get them that metal. So ... Hardaway knocked back her drink and picked up her checkbook, and pulled the trigger on our old way of life.

"Welcome to the New World."

Item pulled by Caryl "Cubby" Lyzette