Period of HOZ

Speaking of currency, you're here for an infojob. You are to gather intelligence on a conflict of which you know exactly two things: it constitutes a crucial threshold in planetary history and everything that could be communicated about it publicly is necessarily a cover story. Of course what it will look like instead is that you're just another libertine out chasing your fix, but that's perfect camouflage. Besides, unsound methods are just tactics that have become so ruthlessly efficient they cancel out the strategic directives they were ostensibly facilitating. At least that's what you tell yourself before passing beyond the main seating area. Behind an unassuming curtain, a corridor equal parts sleek and sleazy reveals itself to you. You search among the numerous doors, first for one labeled with what might be the figure of a snake, a stylized representation of a spine or the letter 'S' — then for another marked with what could be an 'L', a masonic square or a crook.

What these grant you access to is a world never explored by most who find their way here. Arcadia offers its own brand of hypersexbots: machines perfectly fitted to the fundamental drive to melt into another. You enter a dark room. What is perched before you has only dim shadows of the human figure, none of the flaws that usually go along with it and would incite your empathy: only utterly abstracted, aniconic curves of dewy silicone. What little there remains of life in the thing is not helped by the fact that it’s suspended from a mercilessly angular arch of aluminium casings stacked together in timeless, Gothic complexity. Strobing and buzzing to syncopated inhuman rhythms, a transluscent plastic circulatory system is the only thing that connects the two components in their respective expression of anorganic vitality. Milky white fluid pumps between them before collecting in oval catheters that sit on either side of the lump of synthetic meat.