Lost Clinic - Part One

Floorboards creak underfoot as I pace into the cramped dank apartment, a deep moist funk clinging to room as the stagnant air slowly circulates for the first time in who knows how long. Clutching the last of my boxes in my hands I slowly trudge towards to pile in the center of the mall central living room, a series of three windows illuminating the rather open space through a set of sickly green curtains.

"This..." I begin to huff, inhaling sharply as the sickening moist scent begins to overwhelm my sense. Looking at the pile of boxes I place the one in my hands the floor, watching as the loose board shift beneath its weight, before rushing over to the pile. One by one I read the labels, my gaze soon locking to one before I move to rip it open.

In one swift motion I pull free a full bottle of air freshener, spraying wildly as the room soon fills with a caramel and cinnamon scented mist. Sighing to myself I look around, my heart sinking as it slowly dawns on me that this was my new home. Rents were high and only getting higher, and without a job to help me pay for the drastically increasing cost of living I had been made to make sacrifices. Thankfully, before it had gotten too bad I had found this place, a severely neglected apartment sitting above an equally empty and forgotten storefront.

"Should have just sold pictures of my feet or something..." I grumble, eyeing up the L-Shaped kitchen counters sitting beside front door and opening up into the sparse living room. The mint green counters are scuffed and damaged, small specks and dark spots either being stains or some kind of mold infestation that I'd need to deal with later. The over and stove top sit beneath one of the windows, the green tinted light highlighting the rusting edges around the metal appliances.

Look back to the front door I slowly tun left, looking at the tiny heavily outdated bathroom with a soap-scum coated shower and bath combo sneaking just into view through the slightly ajar door. To the left of the bathroom sits the one and only bedroom, the small room struggling to even fit a wardrobe alongside a single bed.

Pacing deeper into the apartment I keep spraying the scented mist, knowing full well I would need to be doing this for days and weeks to come in order to remove the disgusting fuck clinging to the orange shag carpeted bedroom in particular.

"Or married rich..." I chuckle weakly, making light of my situation as I step onto the well worn and filthy carpet in the bedroom. "Maybe I just a fresh start or..." I continue, pausing as I gag at the sensation of the carpet shifting beneath my feet. The aging flooring almost squelches under foot, the plush pile shifting as whatever glue had held it to the floor boards had eroded long ago.

With a small kick I push the carpet back, revealing more floorboards covered with an off-colored coating of worthless glue. Slowly but surely I shift he carpet back more and more, the fibers releasing some odd moisture as it begins to scrunch up more and more. As the carpet reaches the far wall, the water damaged flooring now on full display, I quickly spray as much of the air freshener as I can.

"This is going to fucking..." I wheeze, pausing as I watch the mist shift and settle into the exposed corner of the floor opposite the door. The faint and tiny droplets are almost drawn the to the space, the haze soon slipping down between a series of cracks and gaps in the floor.

Cocking an eyebrow I slowly approach the area, spraying the sweetly scent air freshener as I try to pinpoint just where it was going. As I stand by the corner of the room I squint down at the floor, my gaze soon falling on a section of wood seemingly separate from the floor itself. Reaching down I try my best to get a grip of the panel, the lightweight wood quickly coming free as I'm met with the sight of a ladder leading down into the storefront below.

My mind turns to the shop downstairs that I had seen when I moved in, an empty shopfront with boarded up windows to cover the broken glass and a heavy reinforced door out front. It had seemed like it had been boarded up and left abandoned between tenants, the hint of boxes I could see though the gaps in the windows leaving me to believe whoever had leased it last simply failed to outfit the space and gave up halfway through.

"Hello?" I call out, pausing for a moment as I await a response. Fishing around in my pocket I grab my phone, the flashlight quickly flickering to life as I find myself staring down at a partially tiled floor with a small stream of water coming from deeper within the space. The faint sound of dripping and dribbling water emanates from somewhere down in the store, my shoulders slumping as I realize where the dank moist air was coming from.

"God damn..." I grumble, placing my foot onto the ladder as I test its strength before slowly descending. With my phone in my mouth I try to ease myself into the abandoned storefront, the fear of the ladder breaking beneath me leading me to jump from the last few rungs.

Grabbing my phone I quickly begin to look around in order to get my bearings. Boxes sit piled up against the walls, the bottom of the piles having grown dark and ragged thanks to water damage. I quickly find myself reading the masking tape labels slapped on the boxes, many of the labels having fallen off or having become nudged over time.

Goth/Alt/Rave/Punk

 Nerdy/Conservative/Vintage/

Preppy/Cute

Hangers

Storage

Whipping the light around I spot a half-finished desk, the front counter lacking any sort of bench top while a set of disassembled seats sit beside it. The water trails out from a door behind the desk, slipping out from under an closed door.

Grumbling under my breath I slowly approach, my hand reaching out for the door handle. Despite the handle not moving as I try to turn it I find the door yielding as I push at it, the wood warping and snapping around the lock as the water damaged fixture slowly creaks open. Inside I find myself staring at a small break room, though it lacks much in the way of the usual amenities. Half a dozen boxes sit up against the wall, one showing an image of a table while the others each display a chair. To my left I find an unfinished kitchen counter, with many of the cabinets missing doors as the only thing in working order appears to be the tap.

A slow stream of rapid drips come from the end of the stainless steel faucet, the sink having overflowed sometime ago thanks to the steady dribbling of water. Inching closer I reach out, quickly turning off the tap with a slight struggle with the aging knob. Sighing to myself I turn around to leave, my heart catching in my throat as I find myself staring at a massive hole in the wall. An entire section that had once separated two rooms appears to have been torn out, with only the wooden beams holding up the second floor remaining.

My jaw drops as I spot something sitting at the far end of the room, a massive shiny tube with a small touch screen on the outside.

As I step closer I can't help but mutter under my breath "was this... a Swap Clinic?" 

The sight of a failed Swap Clinic sadly wasn't the most uncommon around the world. During the company's meteoric rise thanks to it's mind-boggling and completely proprietary technology, they had quick set about making as many shopfronts as possible to try and service as many people as possible.

They had thought themselves much like a supermarket or doctor's clinic, aiming to service suburbs or portions of towns with a dedicated local populace. However, this plan was soon halted and scrapped as it became apparent that most people were fine with the travel and that dividing up their customer base into such small segments simply meant they were paying far more on running costs compared to what each Swap Clinic brought in.

Those finished clinics were quickly scrapped, with the assets inside being warehoused and used solely as replacements for the more profitable central hubs that remained. The process was simple, with head office merely closing down those clinics with the lowest monthly intake and any currently under construction.

However, one oversight in all this came from those scant few worksites that had been paused or halted partway through and set to resume later down the line. With no one on site to report in these rarities were simply skipped over, left forgotten and abandoned with their inventory sitting to rot in the dark. Boxes of clothes and partly assembled furniture were all too common a sight in these 'Lost Clinics'. Though rarer still were one's with the actual devices and infrastructure to perform the miraculous swaps.

These devices were rare of course, and would normally never leave the Swap Clinic's control. Worse still, these machines never got the maintenance nor updates that the other models would receive on a regular basis. The thought was simple, should a missing machine be turned on it would attempt to connect to the network, the database of traits moving through the clinics around the world, and would be flagged by their system in an instant. Unfortunately, years of iterative updates had made these old machines unable to make any sort of substantive connection to the network at large.

While this would otherwise have been cause for celebration, the lack of planning had merely left a backdoor into another system. When traits entered the Swap Clinic, be they physical or mental, they first needed to be flagged and categorized accordingly. For the longest time this was a manual process done by the relevant staff member effecting the swap. However, with one of the widest sweeping updates the Swap Clinic automated the process and locked out access to the In-Take Box from any other system... or so they thought.

These derelict devices soon were left being not only the only things to access the In-Take Box, but also were left with the ability to 'take' these traits without the system even noticing. The fact these devices were so rare merely made any theft seem more like a bug in the system, the person at the other end simply getting something they didn't order thanks to the intermediary taking their prize before it could become theirs.

Beyond the theft, the lack of updates had left a sever vulnerability in the system. The first update for any Swap Clinic machine helped to set just what could be taken, preventing people from giving away too much of themselves in a single go. Not so for these forgotten machines as some intrepid urban explorers had found out on occasion. Should the right parameters not be set, or worse the machine simply be broken, people could soon emerge from the device lacking limbs, the knowledge of how to speak or walk, or even just vanish nearly entirely as they are reduced to naught but a small lump of thinking flesh or a partial nervous system.

Many of these 'Missing Persons' cases simply would go unsolved, their traits slowly working their way through the In-Take Box at the Swap Clinic as 'Unlabelled Traits' to be sold at a discount later down the line.

As I step through the smashed in wall I tentatively approach the towering device, the shiny exterior catching the light of my torch and reflecting it back into my eyes. I jump with a start as a delightful tune crackles over a set of hidden speakers, the screen flickering to life as it lags its way through a Swap Clinic loading screen.

"Wel...come... toooooooo" the device crackles, the massive cylinder opening with a grinding hiss. "The Swap Clinic 'User Unknown'. Timesheet inaccessible... Update server inaccessible... Trait Bank inaccess... Partially accessible... Begin procedure?