The contract saves your life.
The system takes what's left.
In a future London, cybernetic upgrades aren't luxury. They're survival. For the hungry and the unlucky, a body contract offers one way out: compliance in exchange for augmentation, biometric access, and time.
After a lockdown grips a subway terminal, Vance is processed, tagged, and escorted home by a corpse unit, one of the half-dead automatons the city uses to enforce order. The warnings are absolute. Quarantine is mandatory. Testing is automatic. Refusal is not an option.
When his results arrive, they point to a lethal condition with only one approved solution.
Implants.
The cost is unreachable without signing a contract. Waiting only narrows the choices.
When the install suite arrives, the procedure is efficient, clinical, and irreversible. Vants survives, but survival comes with conditions, instructions, and a future already accounted for. As the universe refocuses around him, the line between who he was and what he now belongs to collapses fast.
Murder Bug is a dark cyberpunk horror short story about institutional pressure, artificial urgency, and the moment survival stops being a choice and becomes a transaction.
