Sam, groggy and heavy as a dwarf star, dragged himself through the dim, dusty corridors of the central station.  He casually moved his head out of the way of a dangling wire, the red plastic vine catching a bit of his long hair, though not actually flesh.  As he trotted around it, he pressed his fingers against the cold metal of the device inside his ear, triggering a microphone by his mouth.  “Hey, uh, engineering?  Yeah, ceiling’s coming apart again.  Opposite the library.  Someone might want to get on that?”

To no one’s great surprise, there was no answer.  Just the constant stream of voices screaming ‘shitcurity’ and ‘traitor’, and reading off erotic fiction in some dark, dingy maintenance shaft.  Nothing from engineering, though.  He took the ID card from his waistcoat, name, age, a small picture that made him look like a convict, and a barcode, and slid it through the scanner in one of the airlocks.  Machines read the barcode, bolts undid themselves, and with a jolt of energy, the three-ton airlock doors slid open to the half-lit bar and diner, ironically named The Maltese Falcon.  Sam slid in through the doors, broken floor tiles caked with crap and blood beneath him, tables with age-old drinks and half-rotting food surrounding him, a cheap-ass black piano brutally torn apart, the offending axe still lodged in its wooden flesh inhabiting a corner, and of course, blown or flickering lights and graffiti lining the walls.  Oh boy, back home.

Apart from the ragged-looking, albeit dapper bartender, there was only one other living being in the Falcon’s premises.  The monkey, cloned a thousand times and distributed to a thousand stations to be the bane of every bartender’s existence, was nowhere to be found, but the trail of dried blood and monkey hair leading from the bar to the airlock leading to the kitchen gave a few clues where the thing had disappeared to.  Antipathy towards the creature’s fate filled Sam as he hopped over the glass door to his bar and turned to the half-dead looking asshole leaning on the rusted metal bar.

Sam put on his least convincing smile, flicked a zippo lighter out of his waistcoat pocket, and lit a cigarette, flipping the lighter shut with a flick of his wrist and tucking it back into place.  It was an old crowd-pleasing trick he’d learned back on Earth, though he didn’t have the energy or urge to really make it look as convincing or cool as his mentor’s example.  “Sup, bro?” he asked, leaning against the back of his bar, the alcohol vending machine spitting out obnoxious catchphrases next to him.  “What’ll you have?”

The patron, dressed in a grey jumpsuit adorned with empty titles and badges like, “Nanotransen Elite Engineering Corps” and “Earth’s Finest: Fighting the War on Obsolescence” glared up, his head adorned with fresh scars, burns, and unsurprisingly a lack of hair.  “Fuck off.” He snarled.  Sam parched his lips and threw up his hands in mock fear, “Oh shit, Badass McDouchebag’s having a bad day, who’d have guessed?”  He sighed, fresh cigarette almost falling from his lips.  “Sorry ‘bout that, bro.  What’s your poison, we’ll make you forget about the hot chick in Medical who turned you down or whatever.”

The patron raised his head again.  In the dim light of the Maltese Falcon, Sam could identify the older man as ‘vaguely dark-skinned’, and his eyes as empty.  Well, the fact that one of them was a cybernetic prosthetic sort of helped.  “Ya fuckin’ disgust me.” Spat the engineer.
	Sam shrugged, prying the cigarette from his lips, “Yeah, alright.  Guess I wouldn’t know jack shit about lady problems.  Still, a drink helps.  I’m pretty fond of whiskey soda, myse…”

“Ya didn’t even notice, did ya?”

“That you’re augmented?  Ain’t too hard to see, bro.”

The engineer pointed a thick, yellow-glove covered finger at one of the tables across the bar.  Atop it was a mutilated body, blood oozing off the table onto a pile of broken glass and abandoned monkey burgers.  Sam, unfazed, glanced back at his patron.  What he once assumed was plasma-laced oil staining the hazard vest and jumpsuit was quite a bit more crimson than he had realized.  “Well…” he said, taking another puff from the cigarette between his fingers, “It was a clown.  Not.. really a big deal, but if you’re having regrets or some shit, we can like, call up genetics or something.”

The engineer, who Sam recognized was some antisocial prick who went by Hayden, looked up at the bartender, eyes squinted and mouth slightly ajar.  “Ya don’t even fuckin’ care.  I murdered a man, yeah?  And no one bats a fuckin’ eye!”

Sam averted the engineer’s gaze, “Yeah, I guess I can’t blame every bad smell on Luke’s cooking.”

Hayden, the engineer, threw himself up, marching back and forth across the bar, raving.  Sam, bemused, just watched him, keeping a hand on the revolver on his belt in case the fucker got violent.  “Tha’s EXACTLY what I fuckin’ mean!  I found a guy shot seven fuckin’ times with lethal rounds by his commandin’ fuckin’ officer, and people jump towards his corpse to steal his fuckin’ gloves.  Someone pushed into someone in a fuckin’ line, and he beat him to a fuckin’ pulp, gave him a concussion!”

Hayden marched back up to the bar, “Why the fuck don’t ya people care?  What happened to fuckin’ human decency?  To people’s lives meanin’ more than some company’s profits?”  He forced his fist into the bar’s tabletop, “Why?” Twice.  “Doesn’t?”  Three times, oh boy.  “Anyone?”  Four times, now it’s dented, fantastic.  “Care!?”

The engineer’s desperate, teary brown eyes met against Sam’s bag-lined green ones.  “I don’t get it.” Wheezed the engineer.

“So uh, you going to fix the ceiling in the hallway out there.”

“No.” he snarled.

“You going to get something to drink?”

“No.”

“You going to stop being an existential bitch?”

“Ya gonna start carin’ that yer fellow man is treated like shit on a regular basis, shot down, and left to die horribly?”

Sam shrugged.  “Not really.  You could just clone them anyway.”

“Ya fuckin’ disgust me.”

“Buddy, you never tried out Luke’s meatbread, have you?”

“Jus’ get me a fuckin’ beer, Christ.”

“Whatever you say, bro.”