Renée had set up shop in the old industrial quarter of town. Simple medical tests and procedures for those on the poorer fringes of Society.

Help negotiating the electronic colossus that was Society's bureaucracy.

He found folk willing to pay him in cold hard cash and stayed under Society's radar. Earned a decent living through his legitimate work.

He even made enough to buy some more artwork, collecting pieces here and there, becoming ever more fixated on the surreal.

But his real income came from the highly illegal prenatal, pre-180 tests he offered. Two grand to give parents a heads-up, what they did with the information didn't concern him, most simply accepted their fate, some ran, some decided to end their lives as a family, but a few decided to rebel against Society.

For an extra ten thousand, Renée offered a solution. He'd access the databases on Day 179, enter a few pieces of backdoor coding, and ensure that the baby was within the acceptable, safe, parameters.

Nothing too obvious, all in the 90s, just in case junior went off the deep end. As most in these percentiles ended up serving the Agency, outlets for violence would occur in their everyday working lives.

A win/win!

The credits Renée amassed were ploughed into his art collection. A pastime became an obsession. Renée's mental state deteriorated as he immersed himself in the world of the surreal, spending most of his time drinking, Chilling, and staring for hours at impossible scenes. Mind returning, as ever, to that dreadful day.

Over and over in his head.

Renée would simply forget to eat, for days on end, when he acquired a new work. Personal hygiene was ignored, the world inside those paintings was preferable to his world.

The land of the impossible, the weird, the sometimes obscene, each painting drew him further from reality, drew further on his income, made him the uncaring, greedy criminal he was today.

Renée simply didn't care. He'd do whatever, exploit whomever he could to fund his obsession, his addiction to the bizarre.

He became shoddy in his work, clients for his legitimate business dried up, frightened off by his appearance and manner.

Only those desperate enough chose to employ Doc Renée, and, once the deed was done, regretted ever meeting him.

But where could a blackmail victim turn to? Admission to falsifying 180 results would lead to the deaths of their children, most now on the verge of adulthood, some still toddlers.

As Renée's clients dwindled, his actions became riskier, alienating even those few who were genuinely grateful to him, but sparking hatred in many more, but hatred was nothing new to Renée, knew the hatred he felt for his former self vastly outweighed theirs for him.

Hatred that they themselves couldn't act upon, but their DDV offspring?

That was a different matter.

Freewayriding

24.04.23 Front Page

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