Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier

The Rep

Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is a space folk horror anthology podcast and as such may not be suited to all audiences. Listener discretion, is advised.

Let me hear you now, Belters. When I say it's too good to be true? (IT AIN'T!) That's right, it ain't. When they say with a stroke of their pen they'll clear all debts and offer fresh starts. (THEY LIE!) Damn right, they lie. And when the Devil shows up with a cred swipe that could beggar half the worlds turning with a single dance of digital code and cold hard cred, and they tell you that all you gotta do is sit down and shut up and do what you're told. (DON'T DO IT!) Well, you best believe that the Devil's always going to get his due. Tailored trouble in coreward fashion, waving a sealed biometric read only contract that you can only read after you press your thumb to the scanner and sign your life away. Why would you? Why would you?

Because you've got hope, Belter. See that's the magic trick they work, the one they learned at the right hand of darkness and learned well. "Just sign right here, friend, and all of this" and they'll wave a hand at your debt and desperation, the raw deal freeze-dried meals and long shifts and aching back and ragged coverall and fumes in the tank, "can go away."

And you know what. They aren't lying.

Oh, it'll all go away, alright. Say Amen.

[Intro: Bad Boy]

Y'all heard of the Black Contracts, I expect. Belter's Legend. Like a Golden Ticket handed out to those who are too close to putting one over on the banks or in so deep that there ain't no way they'd ever manage to dig themselves out. Just when things are at their brightest or when it seems like the sun'll never shine on you ever again, you understand, that's when the Rep comes.Plenty of folk seen the Rep. Won't say for certain who he's contracting for. B&S, maybe. Or Lyrandari. Or Ashton-Mars. Hell, maybe it's the /Concordat/, the Core sending scut in their grand and vaunted tradition out to the edge of perdition and laying it on the shoulders of folk who got too little to lose or too much to gain to see a raw deal for what it is. Stories never do rightly mention.

But we'll get there.

What they all agree upon, those folks that I've gotten the stories from, those with the good sense to never trust a job that they ain't seen before pressing their thumb to the scanner, is that they all dealt with the Rep. They can describe the meeting down to the smallest detail with perfect clarity, even though none of these folks ever met to my understanding.

They know the suit. It's plenty flash, but the kind of thing you saw in fashion in the holos came out back when the Rails were first waking up. Sharp lines, angular and precise. Like geometry homework hung on a tailor's dummy that decided it had something to prove. The suit's clean and sharp, but doesn't move quite right. It creases wrong when the Rep reaches out to present the envelope.

They know the smile. It's bright, pearly, very even. Ordered and regimented and precision-crafted like a military graveyard. It tugs at the corners of the Reps lips, just a hair too wide to be friendly. They say that despite that, the smile's always fleeting. There and then gone just when your hackles start to get up, just when you start to get the pinch. Here comes that smile. Broad, even, ingratiating. "Yeah, I know it sounds silly, Belter, really I do. But you know how it is." It's got to be fast. Because Molly Eldridge tells me that if it lingered we'd all realize that those teeth don't end. Like a Consolidation memorial, they stretch back to the horizon and the black hole of the Rep's throat.

They know the eyes. They're black. Not dark. Not the kind of brown or hazel that looks fathomless or alien under the glare of a bank of hab-lights. Not the washout of pupils shot wide with Props or Payloads or Sootheez. Behind the mirrored spectacles which the Rep WILL NOT remove, you'll see a darkness swimming that only finds its match for depth and hunger roaring at the center of the Dead Belt. Rep's got eyes like SAG-A, Belter.