These days this stretch of Richmond’s all vape lounges, cryo-clinics, and cheap aug stores. A little Houston strip where everything hums faintly - machines, refrigeration, neon. Not much of its history left.
The Cellar Bar’s still there, though. Next to the vape lounge.
The man at the bar was three drinks past good judgement. Shirt half-untucked, a cracked plastic badge still clipped to his belt. Faded centaur silhouette logo. Chiron Strategic Solutions.
“They fired me,” he tells the woman next to him. “I just worked on the environmental systems. Air purity. Did waste filtration for the med-center site. But you sometimes heard things. Stuff going on down in the sub-levels.”
He stares into his glass, like he hopes it might answer him. “Heard it was something like tissue integration. Circuits that - yeah - grow in you…can you believe that shit? Don’t need power, they pulse with you, like they’re talking to flesh.”
She gives a polite “get me out of here” nod. The kind reserved for broken or boring. He keeps going anyway. Her eyes flick to the bartender.
“Heard some of the guys at lunch call it Meatweb.” His laugh is too loud for the half-empty bar. “Like your nerves didn’t know where your body ended. Might spill out. Said it could mask your bio-ID, disappear from the scanners like you weren’t there.”
She signals for the check.
He leans in. “News gets out, they’d have to shut it down. Have to…right?”
The bar door opens gently. Two men in gray linen jackets. Corporate neutral, but still dressed for the bayou heat. Corporate goons. They see him, stroll over.
The drunk sighs, like he’s relieved. “Told you they were keeping tabs.” He raises a shot glass toward her, trembling in salute.
They take him quietly, each with a hand on an elbow. The woman watches them leave, as the door swings shut.
Outside, the rain starts. Sheets of it, obscuring everything about the neon except its pulse. The men take the drunk to a waiting car, dark, blacked-out windows. He gets in without a fuss.
A story from the Static Drift universe.