The Slowboat
The Slowboat rose from the shell of an old pleasure palace, one that had ridden out storms, hard times, and finally the apocalypse itself. For a long time it was a run-down casino hotel near the Steal Pier, managed by the 609 Crew and toxic to anyone's reputation, its faded name long since replaced by the nickname everyone actually used. It hid a secret even then: a disused passage into the old sewers that runs, through a huge rusted pipe, straight into the Gator's flooded sub-basements. That older Slowboat is gone. What replaced it is worse.
During the war the Slowboat shed its almost-pleasant facade and became a processing plant, and today it is the Blare Phagous necrological market at the heart of the Stack's harvesting economy. Its public floor is a market of the dead, necrological materials sorted into trays, cabinets, and sealed jars, each one tagged and priced with the cold care of a jeweler handling gems, while Corpus Delicti handlers manage the higher-grade stock and Artisans move refined compounds like crystal candy through quieter channels. Off the floor sit injection rooms, and above them the quiet VIP rooms where Infection itself is the product, sold as a direct transfer or in stabilized smokable form to clients rich enough to pretend refinement has taken the horror out of it.
Below all of that, the building stops pretending. The prison tiers are enormous, permanent containment levels where anyone the Board of Representatives labels a threat to a healthy society can be held and turned into a source of Infection, and captured members of the 609 Crew are folded back into the very farms they rose up to condemn. The processing queues dress the horror up as routine: the desperate line up to sell their Infection for a couple hundred Chips, and those who volunteer are handed cooked pizza and a small send-off before walking back out into the nearby casinos with Chips in hand. Farther in, behind restricted doors, people are brought in three at a time and run through extraction and conversion under the hands of the Riot Doctors Network and disciplined Blare Phagous specialists. The deepest levels hold the Morgue and the Mortis Amaranthine stations, where the customers and their victims finally disappear. The Slowboat's genius is that it makes the sale feel voluntary even when poverty, debt, and exhaustion have already closed around a person like a fist.
During the war the Slowboat shed its almost-pleasant facade and became a processing plant, and today it is the Blare Phagous necrological market at the heart of the Stack's harvesting economy. Its public floor is a market of the dead, necrological materials sorted into trays, cabinets, and sealed jars, each one tagged and priced with the cold care of a jeweler handling gems, while Corpus Delicti handlers manage the higher-grade stock and Artisans move refined compounds like crystal candy through quieter channels. Off the floor sit injection rooms, and above them the quiet VIP rooms where Infection itself is the product, sold as a direct transfer or in stabilized smokable form to clients rich enough to pretend refinement has taken the horror out of it.
Below all of that, the building stops pretending. The prison tiers are enormous, permanent containment levels where anyone the Board of Representatives labels a threat to a healthy society can be held and turned into a source of Infection, and captured members of the 609 Crew are folded back into the very farms they rose up to condemn. The processing queues dress the horror up as routine: the desperate line up to sell their Infection for a couple hundred Chips, and those who volunteer are handed cooked pizza and a small send-off before walking back out into the nearby casinos with Chips in hand. Farther in, behind restricted doors, people are brought in three at a time and run through extraction and conversion under the hands of the Riot Doctors Network and disciplined Blare Phagous specialists. The deepest levels hold the Morgue and the Mortis Amaranthine stations, where the customers and their victims finally disappear. The Slowboat's genius is that it makes the sale feel voluntary even when poverty, debt, and exhaustion have already closed around a person like a fist.
