“You ever wonder why they call it the Slow Stick?” Marcus leaned back in his worn synthetic leather chair, twirling the metallic rod between his augmented fingers. The neon lights from the window cast a purple glow across his scarred face.
Sarah shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I assumed it was because it takes time to work.”
“That’s what they want you to think.” Marcus’s cybernetic eye whirred as it focused. “But really, it’s because time itself slows down when you’re under its influence.”
The dingy office felt smaller somehow. Sarah had come seeking answers about her brother’s death. The police called it an overdose - another victim of the latest designer drug sweeping through Neo-Shanghai. But the security footage showed something impossible: Tom aging decades in minutes before crumbling to dust.
“Your brother wasn’t the first,” Marcus continued. “The Slow Stick doesn’t just alter perception. It manipulates temporal mechanics at a quantum level. One hit feels like living a lifetime.”
“That’s impossible,” Sarah whispered, but her augmented reality display was already pulling up similar cases - all carefully buried in restricted corporate databases.
Marcus smiled grimly. “Nothing’s impossible anymore. The corps found a way to harvest time itself. Each Stick contains compressed temporal energy. Users trade their future for an eternal present moment.”
“But why? What’s the point?”
“Think about it. What’s the most valuable commodity in a world where everything can be replicated? Time. Pure, unfiltered human experience. They’re farming it, collecting all those stolen years to power their quantum computers.”
Sarah’s hands trembled. “Tom was trying to expose them, wasn’t he?”
“Smart girl. He got too close. They made an example of him using their own product.”
The office door burst open. Corporate security troops poured in, weapons raised. Their leader stepped forward, face hidden behind a mirrored tactical mask.
“Mr. Chen, we’ve been monitoring this conversation. I’m afraid you’ve said too much.”
Marcus laughed, raising the Stick. “Too late. The truth’s already out.”
“The truth?” The leader removed his mask, revealing Sarah’s own face. “There is no truth. This entire conversation is happening inside your head right now, Marcus. You took the Stick twenty years ago. None of this is real.”
Marcus looked down at his hands. They were withered, ancient. The office dissolved around him, replaced by a sterile hospital room. Dozens of bodies lay in suspended animation, temporal energy being slowly siphoned from their dying forms.
The last thing he saw before everything went dark was his reflection - young again, sitting across from himself, asking about the Slow Stick for what felt like the millionth time.
In Neo-Shanghai, another dealer handed another curious customer a metallic rod that seemed to move just a little too slowly through the air.
“You ever wonder why they call it the Slow Stick?”