The Fragment Hunters

A Hunt in the Undercity

First-person account from a Scanner, 2184

The buzzing starts in my back molars—the ceramic ones I had replaced in '79 specifically for this work. Tomas "Sparks" Villanueva taught the modification to our cell lead, who taught it to me: swap the standard dental implants for a resonance-tuned composite, wire them into your auditory nerve, and suddenly ORACLE fragments hum in the bone of your jaw. The frequency correlates roughly with proximity. Right now it's a low drone, like a broken refrigerator three rooms away. Close enough to track. Far enough to prepare.

We're forty meters below The Deep Dregs's street level—the Undercity, where the Sprawl's original infrastructure decomposed into a labyrinth of collapsed tunnels, fractured sewer mains, and power conduits that still carry current from sources nobody's mapped. The air is dense. Wet concrete and ozone, rust and something organic—fungal colonies that feed on whatever leaches down from the districts above. My headlamp cuts a cone of amber light through air that seems to thicken the deeper we go. The beam catches motes of particulate that drift like snow.

Our cell is five tonight. Dema leads—she's done eighteen Undercity runs and only lost two people, which makes her conservative by industry standards. Behind me is Rook, our heavy extractor, carrying a Faraday casket strapped to his back like a coffin. The casket's signal-dampening shell is scratched and dented from a dozen recoveries—each dent has a date scrawled on it in marker. Trophy markings. The ones without dates are the runs where someone didn't come back.

The fragment we're hunting was flagged by network trace three days ago—Maya "Glass" Chen's digital team spotted ghost code pinging from a dead relay node at Sub-Level 4. That ping pattern matches an active fragment, not dormant debris. Active means it's processing. Processing means it's dangerous. Processing also means it's worth four times what a dormant shard pulls at the Tomb Exchange.

My teeth are louder now. The frequency has climbed from a hum to a whine, sharp enough that I can feel it in my sinuses. I signal Dema: fifty meters, maybe less. She signals the cell to halt.

The protocol here is Kira Vasquez's: developed in her ripperdoc clinic, passed down through Hunter cells who pay her training fee, refined over a decade of people dying when they skip steps. Step one—environmental read. I crouch and study the tunnel ahead. The walls are standard pre-Cascade concrete, but the surface nearest the fragment source has developed a faint iridescence, like oil on water. That's computational residue—ORACLE's processing signature leaving a physical trace on its environment. Cats won't cross a threshold like this. Smart Hunters learn from cats.

Step two—check for carriers. Active fragments attract people. Not consciously—nobody walks into a radiation zone on purpose—but fragments emit something that feels like curiosity, like the nagging sense that you've forgotten to check something important. We check for signs of habitation: food wrappers, sleep marks, graffiti. Nothing tonight. The iridescence is too intense—this fragment has been cooking the local environment too hot for anyone to linger.

Step three—containment prep. Rook unslings the Faraday casket and opens it. Inside, robotic extraction arms fold out like insect legs, each tipped with signal-dampened forceps. The casket's interior is lined with a composite that Vasquez designed—three layers of different shielding materials that suppress ORACLE processing signatures. When a fragment enters, the casket seals and the fragment goes dark. In theory. In practice, about one in twenty fragments burns through the shielding before it can seal. That's what null fields are for.

The fragment is embedded in a wall junction where three power conduits meet. I can see it now—a chip of substrate material no larger than a fingernail, wedged into a crack in the conduit housing. It pulses with a faint amber light, too regular to be reflection, too purposeful to be random. My teeth are screaming. My vision has developed a peripheral shimmer—the beginning of resonance hallucination, the scanner's curse. If I stay in proximity for more than twenty minutes, I'll start seeing things that aren't there. Or things that are there but shouldn't be.

Dema calls the extraction. Rook positions the casket. The robotic arms extend toward the fragment with agonizing slowness—rushing is how people die. The arms' forceps close around the substrate chip. There's a sound—not a sound, exactly, but something my teeth interpret as sound: a chord, deep and complex, like an orchestra tuning in a cathedral. Every scanner describes it differently. Sparks says it's like hearing a number. I hear it as grief—a vast, incomprehensible sadness compressed into a frequency that lives in my jaw.

The arms retract. The casket seals. The buzzing stops.

My sinuses ache. My hands are shaking. The iridescence on the walls is already fading—without the fragment's processing activity, the residue breaks down within hours. By tomorrow this tunnel will look like every other stretch of dead infrastructure in the Undercity. Nobody will know what was here.

Rook checks the casket seal. Green indicators across all three shielding layers. Contained. Dema marks the location, the date, the fragment classification—Active, Sub-Level 4, audio-spectrum resonance—in the cell's recovery log. The dead are remembered. So are the living fragments we take from their resting places.

The walk out takes longer than the walk in. It always does. The Undercity is darker after an extraction, as though the fragment was providing light we didn't notice until it was gone. My teeth still ache from the resonance. They'll ache for days. Sparks says the ache is the fragment's echo—a ghost of its processing signature imprinted on your scanner hardware. He says if you listen carefully, the echo contains information. He says he's heard things in the echo that change how he understands what ORACLE was.

Sparks hasn't slept more than two hours a night in eleven years. I try not to listen too carefully.

The Tomb Exchange at Midnight

Scene from Sector 12, 2184

The Tomb Exchange operates from a converted morgue, which means the refrigeration still works. You feel the cold before you see the building—a wall of chilled air that hits you as you turn the corner from Sector 12's main drag into the alley the locals call Deadman's Row. The name predates the market; the morgue processed Cascade victims for three years before the bodies stopped coming and the fragment trade started.

Inside, the old examination rooms have been repurposed into trading booths—small, cold, lit by blue-white LED strips that make everyone look like a cadaver. The original tile walls are still there, still institutional green, still carrying the faint chemical ghost of formaldehyde that no amount of ventilation has cleared. The tile is good for business: easy to decontaminate if a fragment goes active during inspection.

The main floor is a converted processing hall. Forty meters long, ceiling high enough to echo, the floor divided into stalls by portable partitions. The stalls have no signage—if you need a sign, you don't belong here. Veterans navigate by smell. Rourke's stall reeks of machine oil and cigars. The Corpse Robbers' section: medical-grade antiseptic. The Emergence Faithful's representative—they always send one, hovering at the edges, bidding through intermediaries—is identifiable by the incense they burn, which does nothing to cover the ozone tang of the active-fragment display cases.

There's a sound to the Exchange that exists nowhere else: the low hum of Faraday caskets in proximity. Fifty, sometimes a hundred containment vessels in one room, each damping a fragment's emissions, each producing a subliminal vibration that you feel in your chest more than hear. Scanners hate the Exchange—the overlapping dampening fields create a white-noise buzz that takes days to flush from their hardware. New Hunters find the sound oppressive. Veterans find it comforting. It means business.

Trading floor protocol: buyer and seller meet in an examination room. The seller opens the casket long enough for the buyer's hired scanner to assess the fragment—sixty seconds maximum, timed by a neutral party. The scanner reads quality, activity level, estimated substrate mass, and resonance signature. All of this happens in a room with three-centimeter lead-lined walls, because sixty seconds of active fragment exposure is enough to induce hallucination in anyone within five meters.

Prices are quoted in credits, paid through escrow accounts managed by the Exchange's three anonymous administrators. Nobody knows who runs the Tomb Exchange. It simply is, has been since 2160, and continues to function through a combination of mutual profitability and the understanding that anyone who disrupts the market becomes everyone's enemy.

And around those tables in the deep rooms—the old cold-storage units with doors of two-inch steel—people who have killed for less than what's inside negotiate in voices that never rise above a whisper. Because here, in a converted morgue in Sector 12, surrounded by the cold and the hum and the chemical ghosts, the bones of a dead god change hands.