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"Yeah, I guess. Is that what they called them?" Glenn searches your and Richard's faces and comes up with no answers. "Geez. I don't even know where to— guys?"
"You can't explain <span class="mu-i">stimmies,</span> Glenn? They keep you up so you can hit your quotas. One sentence."
"Or so you can keep watch without napping through it," Iris says snidely.
"That's what Ray's for, last I checked. <span class="mu-i">I'm</span> irrelevant. Vestigial. I take a little nap, the world keeps spinning." Allan spreads his hands. "Alternately, I'm following a schedule like anybody with a grain of sense. They haven't given you your ration yet?"
You frown. "...Of stimmies?"
"<span class="mu-i">No,</span> of— yes, of stimmies. Great. You get 40 or 48 a month, depending on the month. One per day. So that should be a little hint, right? Pop one a day? Do that. <span class="mu-i">One</span> a day, or you'll run out, and you'll get the stimmie jitters, and those things are no fucking joke. Got it?"
"Hey," Glenn says. "Everybody needs to get the jitters at least once, Allan. Rite of passage."
"Yeah, it's a rite of passage when the shark bait's called out sick for launch day and everybody else picks up the slack? The rite of passage should be slogging down to Synth and blowing your paycheck on half-tablets to keep you baseline goddamn functional. Come on."
"Unless you have a friend in Synth," Iris adds helpfully.
"The new guys don't have friends in Synth! They don't even have creds, so the takeaway should be to parcel out the damn pills. That's it. We can talk about crushing them up later, that's advanced shit."
You're not sure you understand why you'd start taking these in the first place, but something else has caught your attention. "Creds?"
"Creds." Allan leans back. "You know what creds are. Gullshit you don't."
"Uh," you say.
"...Credits," Richard says.
"Wrong. Wrong. They are HeadCreds, <span class="mu-i">tee em.</span>"
"Money," Glenn says, after a pause. "That's all. Nobody says 'HeadCreds,' by the way, so don't let Allan—"
"These guys fell and hit their head during Orientation, so I'm just getting them up to speed! Don't be a dick, Glenn." Allan crosses one leg over the other. "What other basic terms have you somehow not learned? 'Spacers'?"
You narrow your eyes.
"Cool. 'Spacers' are big fat pills. You take them to space out, i.e. start disassociating, which is occasionally useful in this line of work. They don't come in rations unless you work in Germ/Inc. What else?"
Is Allan onto you, or just veering awfully close? He's not leaping from his chair and pointing accusingly, or anything, but you're having trouble believing he'd care enough to do so. You dislike the uncertainty. "How do you know about Namway?"
"Namway?" He swivels back and forth. "They come up in passing every so often. Business partners, or business rivals, or some shit. Not really our business. So why do you care about them?"
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