“Quickly, quickly,” said “Doctor” Strauß. “We have only a few moments before the effects wear off.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” groused Müller. He had been employed by Strauß and the Stuttgart Biergarten in central Kowloon for over a year, and he knew that the drugs slipped into the bar patron’s drinks wore off quickly, and that he had to attach the that didn’t keep the good “doctor” from berating him at every opportunity.

Müller attached the endocranioscopy harness to the unconscious patron’s head. The man, roughly tattooed and bearded, looked like an ideal candidate for some interesting neural patterns, but there was no way to be sure without a quick indexing scan.

“Bah, garbage! Nearly all garbage!” cried Strauß. “The man is a poser! Uneventful childhood, public schools in the United States…tattoos copied off of a picture on the internet! Never served in any navy, and…gott, still a virgin!”

“Fancy that,” Müller said. “Anything usable?”

“Bits and pieces only. A few sweeteners I can add to other patterns, and a decent breakdown in tears during a police interrogation for cannabis possession that could be tweaked into something usable. But not much else. Get the harness off of him and get him to the recovery room!”

Müller grudgingly pulled off the endocranioscopy harness and hauled the prostrate form, now beginning to twitch and mumble, to a filthy couch in the back. Bar patrons who legitimately passed out ended up there, as did customers who had been overwhelmed by imprinted or simulated experiences in Strauß’s underground memory parlor.

“Pussy,” snarled Müller as he dumped the poser onto the couch. “Fitting that your blubbering to the cops over weed will be the only part of you that lives on after this city eats you alive.”

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