Second Hand Spectres

Legend: Second Hand Spectres

Occasionally you hear about these popping up in the sketchiest of pawn shops, and the dark backroom clinics around Reynolds. As I hear it they were made by, and for, some old mining corp. They got hit with some legal troubles, or something like that, and the whole corp got scrapped and sold off. They came with an inbuilt prosthetic-to-mindsim system to help the adaptation feel as natural as possible; no phantom limb, just real feel.

The thing is, from what I hear, it isn't just the simulacrum of an arm. I grew up with a friend whose Dad got one. It started with voices a couple of days after getting it installed. Unintelligible whispers. Seeing people who weren’t there. Faint screams followed by dull aches to agony which traversed his body. Not just forgetting things, like familiar faces and usual routines; but remembering other things wrong, with people who weren’t there or at times that didn't make sense. Acting all sorts of strange. Last I heard from him, he found one of these strangers, and they seemed a little shocked to see him wearing their son's arm. Wasn't much after that he took his own life with a bullet to the head.

You aren't going to convince me that those things aren't haunted. That if you're not careful plugging secondhand parts into your wetwiring, you'll let those wraiths in, desperate to take what they can to live again.