Riot Doctors
Most of Stack City never sees a Riot Doctor, and that is precisely the point. Their work happens behind the last locked doors of the Slowboat, past the market floor and past the processing queue, in rooms the paying public is not meant to picture. What goes on there is not medicine, though it borrows medicine's tools and its unhurried calm. These are the specialists who take the harvesting of Infection and make it more efficient, running procedures that few bodies could survive without a steady hand managing every stage.
Where the larger powers of the Stack keep the extraction economy turning, the Riot Doctors are the ones who make it turn faster. They experiment. They refine. They widen what can be drawn out of a person and stabilized for sale, and every gain they manage is weighed against the count of subjects who did not live through the attempt. Captives arrive in threes, are restrained, and are carried through extraction and conversion until whatever their Infection is worth has been sealed into containers for later trade.
They keep a lower profile than the Merican Financial Institute or the Blare Phagous, and they seem to prefer it. The system depends on them anyway. The other powers maintain the machine; the Riot Doctors improve it, and in the Slowboat, improvement always arrives with a body count attached.
Where the larger powers of the Stack keep the extraction economy turning, the Riot Doctors are the ones who make it turn faster. They experiment. They refine. They widen what can be drawn out of a person and stabilized for sale, and every gain they manage is weighed against the count of subjects who did not live through the attempt. Captives arrive in threes, are restrained, and are carried through extraction and conversion until whatever their Infection is worth has been sealed into containers for later trade.
They keep a lower profile than the Merican Financial Institute or the Blare Phagous, and they seem to prefer it. The system depends on them anyway. The other powers maintain the machine; the Riot Doctors improve it, and in the Slowboat, improvement always arrives with a body count attached.
Structure
Very little is known about how the Riot Doctors are organized, and the group does nothing to correct the gap. They surface as the Riot Doctors Network in the deepest rooms of the Slowboat, working alongside the more disciplined Blare Phagous specialists, but who leads them, how many they number, and how they recruit are all questions the Stack has learned not to ask aloud.
What is clear is their standing. They sit among the black-market powers whose systems hold up the Board of Representatives, valued not for any territory they hold but for the expertise no one else can supply. That expertise is the whole of their leverage. In a city where every other power controls a place, a currency, or a crowd, the Riot Doctors control a method, and the method is worth more to the extraction economy than any single stretch of the Slowboat.
What is clear is their standing. They sit among the black-market powers whose systems hold up the Board of Representatives, valued not for any territory they hold but for the expertise no one else can supply. That expertise is the whole of their leverage. In a city where every other power controls a place, a currency, or a crowd, the Riot Doctors control a method, and the method is worth more to the extraction economy than any single stretch of the Slowboat.
History
The Riot Doctors are a product of the Infection-harvesting industry that reshaped the Stack, and their origins are as undocumented as their membership. As harvesting shifted from a crime into a trade, someone had to push its methods past what butchery and desperation could manage on their own. That role fell to the Riot Doctors.
They did not build the extraction economy. They are the reason it keeps drawing more from the same raw material, and in a city that puts a price on everything, that distinction has made them both indispensable and nearly untouchable. Whatever came before the Slowboat's hidden tiers, the Riot Doctors have left no story of it that anyone in the Stack can tell.
They did not build the extraction economy. They are the reason it keeps drawing more from the same raw material, and in a city that puts a price on everything, that distinction has made them both indispensable and nearly untouchable. Whatever came before the Slowboat's hidden tiers, the Riot Doctors have left no story of it that anyone in the Stack can tell.
The Slowboat's experimental necrologists, who push Infection harvesting past its safe limits in pursuit of higher yield.
Type
Necrological Specialists
Also Known As
Riot Doctors Network
Base of Operations
The Slowboat, Stack City
Role
Experimental Infection extraction
Affiliation
Black-market power behind the Board of Representatives
