The Open Market
Thanks to the fresh wave of newbies pouring in, Seoul Southern Prison was noisy again.
Not long ago the mood had gone deathly quiet — too many people shoved into the Darkzone against their will, too many of them coming back dead or half-ruined. Now something had shown up to fill those empty seats, and the place had a pulse again.
The newly admitted inmates kicked up a serious riot once they realized their sentences had been forcibly converted to death row. It didn't last. The prison had no intention of ever letting them walk back into the outside world, so it did what it always did: crushed the uprising under a tide of security robots and heavily armed guards.
Once that little WWE match between the prison and its inmates wrapped up, the old-timers each collected the newbies assigned to their cell blocks and melted away. Some of them planned to bleed the rookies dry. Others meant to raise them properly and slot them into a team. And then there were the ones who had something else in mind entirely…
"You put the newbies out front and throw a massive open market."
I headed for Cell Block H-088, the lowest floor's premier commercial district, to take part in Seoul Southern Prison's version of a country market day. Lucy had come all the way from the women's block to walk with me.
"It's been a long time since they held an open market this size. Before, the guards' inspections and surveillance were so tight that even licensed merchants had to tiptoe around."
"Back then nobody was getting mandatory Darkzone deployments, and the population wasn't exploding and collapsing like this either."
"Still, it's a little strange. The occasional open market used to make sense, but we have a flea market now, don't we? Anyone can use it just by logging into PrisonNet. So why bother opening another one?"
"That's obvious. The newbies who just got here have no money, no idea how to use the flea market, and zero clue what anything actually costs. This is basically a crash course in teaching them how to shop."
Lucy nodded as if that clicked immediately.
"So the veterans parade the new arrivals around, tell them what to buy, bankroll the ones who are broke, and bind them to whatever group they belong to."
"Exactly. One way or another, everybody wants these inmates to live longer. The prison likes it because more veteran convicts means a better Darkzone yield. The veterans like it because it locks in their comfortable lives and their status."
And if that was the goal, you had to raise the newbies no matter how much of your precious time and money it cost. That was why the prison tacitly allowed an open market where inmates could gather in droves, and why the veterans showed up with their pocket change and personally walked the rookies through a shopping trip.
"Leaving clueless new inmates to rot — or just fleecing them — only piles more risk onto your own shoulders. So they decided to grow them instead, and offload some of that risk back onto the people they raised."
"Right. The veterans who figured out how dangerous the Darkzone really is are the ones who throw themselves into this the hardest. There's a reason the old mafias and gangs got shoved aside and the clans — groups built specifically to explore the Darkzone — took over."
Mafia and gang types were idiots who treated crime like the entire point of being alive. The inmates who formed clans had already stopped ranking crime as priority number one. Survival was the new top slot, and they would cooperate and share information with anyone if that was what it took. Fail to clear the Darkzone and you were the one who died horribly, so strutting around the prison committing petty crimes had lost its appeal.
"It's pretty ironic. The thing that rewired the heads of vicious criminals everyone swore could never be reformed turned out to be the Darkzone."
"There are still plenty of inmates committing crimes, though."
"That'll sort itself out soon enough. You can't stop the ones who actually have the power and skill to dominate a Darkzone — but the two-bit offenses from the nobodies will dry up on their own."
Even putting the best face on it, this place was a cesspit. Drop a glittering jewel or a gourmet meal into a cesspit and give it enough time — it ends up looking like it belongs there. As long as the contents didn't suddenly overflow, the prison wouldn't much care what happened inside.
That was when a familiar voice rang out not far away.
"Come one, come all! Brand-new products from our Cute & Lovely Tool Shop, brought to you special for this open market! Everybody take a look as you go by!"
Lee Sena's Cute & Lovely Tool Shop, which usually sat buried in the deep commercial warren of Cell Block H-088, had apparently taken its show on the road into the wide common area. Hundreds — thousands — of inmates streamed past her stall, every last one of them twisting their heads away with grim determination, as if making eye contact would get them strong-armed into buying some misshapen piece of junk with an even more misshapen name.
Naturally, I turned my head too.
"Ah! Super Rookie!"
Shit.
How the hell had she picked me out of a crowd this size?
"She's calling you."
"Don't look over there. Pretend you didn't hear."
"…"
If Lee Sena kept acting like she knew me, I was fully prepared to sue her for whatever charge I could invent. My resolve didn't matter. She burst out of her open-market stall and came sprinting straight at us.
"Super Rookie! Why are you pretending you didn't hear me?!"
"…So the time has finally come for you to return to your maker, Pretty."
If the creation smashed the skull of the one who made it, that would also prove the creation was superior to the creator. I grabbed Pretty, ready to bring the claw hammer down on Lee Sena's head — then had to let it go. Too many witnesses for a perfect crime.
"Super Rookie?"
"That's the famous one…?"
"The guy who swallowed Cell Block H-050 all by himself?"
"He really is built different. Didn't think he'd show up here in person."
At this point I had to wonder if Lee Sena had planned it. Every eye in the vicinity locked onto me. Even the veterans who'd been shopping-and-educating their newbies started paying attention, which meant the newbies trailing after them like baby chicks craned their necks to get a look at me too.
I felt like I'd been drafted as the circus clown.
"Wow, there are so many people! I don't think we've had an open market this big in ages! Super Rookie, you came because you were interested in my traveling stall too, right?!"
I had, in fact, just become interested in her open-market stall. Specifically, I was curious whether she would sit down in the street and bawl, or just stare into space in mute despair, if I flipped the whole thing over.
But I had come to Cell Block H-088 today with an actual purpose, and for the sake of that purpose I needed to carve the word patience into myself about thirty more times.
"…I just got back from a rough expedition not long ago, and I figured it was time for a proper gear upgrade. As luck would have it, they threw an open market on the same day a huge batch of new inmates arrived, so I was planning to browse quietly and do a little shopping. Quiet shopping is off the table now, thanks to a certain someone."
"That's perfect! Since we're already here, start by looking at our shop's products! You made a lot of money, didn't you?"
She clapped her hands and beamed at me with a smile so bright it bordered on mania. Leave it to a natural-born weirdo and mad scientist: she had gone past mere social blindness and into the rare talent of actively draining the life out of people.
Fortunately, Lucy picked up on my suffering and stepped in.
"I'm sorry, but what our leader needs is standard equipment. Low variance, proven performance, and a stable supply and maintenance pipeline."
"Oh? Then that's even better, isn't it? Every Cutie I make has low variance if you use it properly, I've personally tested all of them so the performance is proven, and if you just come find me, the supply and maintenance are both perfectly stable standard equipment!"
"A handmade one-off from a eccentric engineer in a dust-choked workshop is not the same thing as a factory-stamped, spec-standard mass-produced item."
"Of course they're not the same. Mine are vastly superior."
Lee Sena fired back as if Lucy had asked the most obvious question in the world. She was so brazen about it that even good-natured Lucy turned to me with a look of pure disbelief.
See? This is how I live.
"We're making a scene here. Let's talk over there."
Too many eyes, too many ears. I reluctantly shoved Lee Sena along by the back and moved us over to her open-market stall. Once she committed this hard to the hard sell, she would never let go unless I bought something.
"So what did you put together for today. Fast and short, the way Koreans like it — three lines if you can manage it."
"You picked up the most basic issue gear from Mr. Vladimir last time, right? I figured that wouldn't be nearly enough for either of you, so I specially prepared Darkzone-spec equipment. Firepower-focused, survival-focused, and disruption-focused."
I couldn't stop her from chattering like a parrot, but she had at least hit the three-line summary, so I gave her display the courtesy of a look.
First up was the temporary stand labeled for firepower.
It was packed with things that looked dangerous at a glance. A large-caliber hand cannon that seemed ready to spin your wrist a hundred and eighty degrees the instant you pulled the trigger. A katana that could manifest an ultra-high-heat plasma cutter for a few seconds by dumping its internal battery in a single overclocked burst. A bomb the size of a basketball that looked poised, the moment it went off, to spray an unholy volume of shrapnel and blast pressure across the entire known world. And so on.
The whole collection was so grotesque I had to wonder whether a functioning human brain had produced any of it. Maybe what she actually wanted was for someone to hang a big REJECTED tag around her neck. She had clearly decided that if failure was the mother of success, the first step toward succeeding was to fail as hard as possible.
Next, my eyes landed on the survival stand.
Instead of a traditional painkiller, a deeply questionable syringe that forced the brain to dump extreme volumes of pleasure chemicals so you'd forget you were in pain. A piece of candy that massively boosted cardiopulmonary endurance so you could keep moving for hours without tiring — and inflicted severe brain damage as a side effect. A pill that would keep you alive without food or water by burning through every calorie and every drop of moisture stored in your body.
This is actually making me dizzy.
Even fearless Lucy flinched when she read the last pill's description and took a couple of steps back from the stand. Lee Sena, sparkling-eyed and undeterred, tried to wring a reaction out of us anyway.
"Well? Aren't these products truly revolutionary?"
"In a certain sense, they really are. The problem is it's painfully obvious why nobody has ever tried this before."
"You don't need to worry about those backward dropouts. Technological progress always starts with a flash of inspiration and a willingness to try something different!"
Prisoner must immediately push her down a flight of stairs. For the good of humanity.
No. Hold it together. That's the Crazy Clock talking, and it lives in my head.
Anyway, just one more stand to look at. The disruption spec.
Won't be anything special. Noisy gadgets, weird lights, that kind of— wait.
I found something that had absolutely no business sitting in Lee Sena's Cute & Lovely Tool Shop — and that was, for some reason, unnervingly familiar.
Why is this here?
It was a must-have item for any EFD veteran. A Hologram Decoy Generator.