#ACD did a lottttt of scene setting in the beginning of study in scarlet

[theseventeensteps]

so here's the first 1,000 words of my little experiment, rewriting A Study In Scarlet to take place in cyberpunk future-Chicago:

New Chicago is the kind of city that gets into your guts. Like hookworm. The silt of the sea, the lights perilously perched at the water’s edge as the waves lap at the mildewing apartments of the Scaffs and floods the temporary shelters of the Undertow. It’s a tough place to live, but everywhere’s tough now. New Chicago won’t hold your hand, but it won’t lie to you, either, and these days that’s in short supply.

I guess that’s why I came back.

I had no illusions that being a battle medic for the Conglomerate was going to earn me a life of leisure and luxury when I signed up. It was just that medicine, my only true calling, was the stuff of scanners and computer readouts now. All the major hospitals employed CATvance scanners to diagnose everything from the common cold to Ion disease. Even if I had dreamed of the glorious, tumultuous life of a paramedic (I didn’t), they’d gone the same way as the dodo when Conglomerate lawyers figured out that putting emergency medicine in the hands of bots would save them billions in malpractice lawsuits.

At the end of the day, anyone serious about the real practice of medicine signed up when the Conglomerate put out the call. Thousands of jobs in real, bone-setting, infection-fighting, hot-blooded medicine, needed on the frontline out West where the edge of the Federation of American States met the burgeoning power of the Diné Empire. I spent two years in the ranks of the 66th Light Infantry Battalion, where there were no CATvance scanners, no thermobots, no Surg-o-matics, and you could barely requisition a pack of plaster bandages without getting your ass lit up by your superior officer.

That is, until a Diné Sun-gun shot me clean through the shoulder. When it’s you, bleeding out in the dirt of the Lesser Plains, you wish you had the damn Surg-o-matics, because their needles don’t shake like the hands of mind-rended teenage soldiers.

The Conglomerate sent me home, half-stitched and addled with river virus from the stinking banks of the Mississippi. I spent the next six weeks in a hospital, though I remember little of it. When I woke, they told me I had been discharged, had me sign a military NDA with my good hand, and sent me back out into the world with a weekly allowance only big enough for a room at the seediest motel I could find and a half-glass of gin before bed to keep the nightmares at bay.

I lived like that for six months. I spent my nights in restless sleep, and my days sitting on the balcony, blearily looking out into the world I’d given my right hand to defend. I thought about leaving — I knew there were smaller settlements out there, places where you could still breathe without a purifier, even. But New Chicago gets into you. Like fucking hookworm. It won’t lie to you — it will whisper in your ear at night, saying, what I have is what you deserve. You belong here. You and the dirt of my gutters are made of the same stuff.

It was right.

I was contemplating this problem — half a fifth deep — at a moonshine bar in Motor Row, just above the Scaffs, when I ran into an old acquaintance.

Ford looked too nice to be there, that was for sure. His clothes didn’t smell like gin, for one, and he sported an Ocular, a kind of monocle-like implant issued to doctors at high-ranking Conglomerate hospitals. He sat down and ordered a drink before he recognized me.

“Jon?”

I winced when he said my name. Ford had known the version of me that existed a decade prior, fresh-faced and idealist, an exceptionally gifted member of the last graduating class of the Conglomerate Institute’s School of Medicine, after which the whole degree was discontinued in favor of a small certificate program. The Ford that knew me then didn’t know me now.

“Jon Watsin?”

I plastered a smile onto my face, ignoring how twisting in my barstool made my shoulder twinge. “Ford — I thought I recognized you.”

“Jon! I thought you’d gone out to the — what are you doing here?” He searched me, his Ocularly-improved eye whizzing around my person, no doubt diagnosing my arm, my blood-alcohol level, and my profound halitosis all in one.

“I could ask you the same thing. Bit of a dive, for someone who’s clearly doing well for himself.”

Ford smiled, almost guiltily. “Well…”

“In fact…” I had been sharp in medical school, once, but months of sickness and isolation had taken it out of me. Still, though, I knew a sore thumb when I saw one. “Looking like that, I’m surprised you weren’t robbed on the way here.”

“I’ve just done the right work for the right people, Jon.”

“Damn,” I swore under my breath. “You’re harvesting for them, aren’t you?”

Healthcare in New Chicago was a simple affair. Pay your monthly fee to the Conglomerate, the gov-corp that cropped up in the city in the failing corners of the Federation, and the hospitals would serve you. Not for free, mind you, but even dying’s expensive these days. Fail to keep up your Conglomerate subscription, however, and you could only gain access to Federation clinics. Good for an antibiotic or an STI test, but not much else.

That left a gap. And gaps are filled with — what else? — organized crime.

Around here, it was the Hope Cartel, as in the Hope Family, as in the Hope Diamond. Need a new kidney? Dialysis? A bone marrow transplant? You could get it, for a price, in a Hope Cartel chop shop, a Frankenstein’s laboratory probably in the back of an auto yard or abandoned warehouse. But the cartel needed parts. And that’s where people like Ford came in.

“Relax,” Ford assured me, speaking quietly so as not to be overheard. It wouldn’t matter, though — if Ford was a cartel supplier, he’d be virtually untouchable, even in the dark alleys of Motor Row. “I’m Head Coroner at St. Lucy’s. What I take, nobody ever knows is missing.”

Well, that was a comfort.

I raised the glass of gin to my lips again, allowing the bitter liquid to ease the consternation that had lodged itself in my mind. “I’m not judging, Ford. There’s no angels in New Chicago.”

“There certainly aren’t,” Ford said sympathetically. “While we’re on the topic, want to tell me how you got your wings clipped?”