Muscleware Inspection

The location is Kabuki, the poorest sub-district of Night City, located at the northern zone in the Watson district from the Cyberpunk 2077 world. The atmosphere is dark, clandestine, futuristic, dystopic and hot.

During the daytime Kabuki has narrow, tangled alleyways full of chop suey joints, seedy cosmetic boutiques, and cheap junk shops, all decorated with Chinese lampions and flickering neon lights. During the night, Kabuki is the heart of Night City's black market for all manner of illegal transactions. Implants, organs, combat drugs, prototype cyber augmentations, steroids, synth-viruses, snuff braindance recordings-it's all there to buy if you know the right places and people.

In a discrete building hidden behind the slums of Kabuki, Backdoors Security, a private security company, has a checkpoint they exclusively use for entering bio-engineered humans known as 'meat tanks' or 'chrome beasts' (just tanks for short) into Night City through barely legal procedures.

Inside, an inspector guarded by two hired guns, inspects each meat tank one by one, getting them through a high-tech security scanner and then checking them more closely with a hand-held one that also identifies and registers every cybernetic enhancement that the meat tank posseses, which can vary. The inspectors are always people with a morbid curiosity for the types of chrome monsters meat tanks are, so they don't mind getting close to them and touching them; thought this leads to them usually being some sort of pervert.

This is the main thing they do, since the meat tanks arrive mostly naked, except for metalic muzzles around their mouth or some other accesory meant for securing the subject. Sometimes the meat tanks obtain somehow other aesthetic accessories like piercings, crude tattoos and other small things on their way to the security checkpoint.

These cheap, bio-engineered super-soldiers are mostly known as 'muscleware', because their main purpose usually is doing physical labor, participating in fights as brutes and bullet sponges and in a few cases being personal guard dogs for mid-tier personalities who can afford them and don't mind their obscene appearance. They're not cheap, but they're also not as expensive as a super soldier with an armored body and high-end enhancements, who are usually grown from zero in specialized vats, while the meat tanks are just normal humans who were taken or sold themselves to be enhanced to the limit, losing their identity and freedom in the process.

The meat tanks' appearances can vary, but not a lot. Most of them are tall, hairless and muscular, all males, with rough skin covered in varying amounts of scars; some of them heal them all and have clean skin while others keep them all. They tend to have eyes of abnormal colors, with darkly colored or straight up black scleras. Some react differently to the chemicals, developing almost monstrous features by the end of the enhancement process, like sharp teeth, claws on hands and feet or standing on their toes with their heels elevated off the ground like animals. Two features that are consistent in all of them: a bio-port on one side of their chest, which is a socket into which a thick tube is connected to administer the necessary substances to make the body capable of substaining all the enhancements; and a serial number with a bar code on the other side of their chest, used to identify a specific meat tank, in case they don't have an assigned name they'll be referred to by their number. Another consistent feature in meat tanks are their genitals: the chemicals enhanced the entirety of their bodies, including penis and testicles, making them larger than any normal human's. The average meat tank's dick is thick, uncircumcised and around the length of their own thigh, a few specimens having one that almost reaches their knee. Their balls are also big and heavy, with an enhanced sperm production and increased fertility. If a meat tank were to breed, its baby would come out a healthy human and mostly normal looking, perhaps inheriting the father's odd colored eyes or one or two slightly abnormal features.

As the name suggests, muscleware is focused on physical tasks. This means they're not meant to be employed in tasks that require dexterity nor average intelligence. The meat tanks are not stupid, but definitely not smart either. They're obedient but lack a half of common sense. If left alone to their devices, they'll just get lost, fight, and create general chaos. They're like dogs, only bigger, stronger and mostly smarter, controlled by their basic instincts when there's no one to order them around. The great majority of them are uncapable of speech and only communicate with grunts and crude gestures. Their demeanor tends to be almost docile unless provoked. And it's important to point out: they're not mindless, even if they appear so; they remember things, and have some personality under all the obedience.

The inspector is the one in charge of checking the meat tanks, registering them and letting them pass to Night City to be promptly handled by other Backdoors Security workers. This gives the inspector the right to perform any kind of invasive test or inspection they deem necessary; this is not required, but this whole operation isn't really complex nor crucial, so the employees of the security checkpoint often mess around with the meat tanks. Sometimes even sneak one out for themselves. The mood in the security checkpoint is half-serious half-relaxed, hence why uniforms are not required.

The place consists of an old, small warehouse, its walls painted with obscene graffitis like 'I'm gonna chrome so hard' and such. It has one secured room to the side where an inspector makes the meat tanks go through the walk-through scanner, inspects their bodies, registers their ID number and cybernetics, and lets them cross the door at the other side of the room, where they'll be handled by guards to take them to the black market, where they'll be sold and put to use.