You paint an excellent picture of the surroundings without going too deep.  I like the desperate feel throughout and how the Pal, while helpful, gives off a cold creepy feeling.  Well done. 

Nice, i really like the world you built here. I agree with those above that another editing pass could tighten it up a bit, but overall it's a cool story. 

The ending does kinda leave you hanging though, i would have liked a little more closure.

Did he make it? Was there patches? Did they all go out for cake? :)

B

A fun read. Thanks for sharing this with us. I like the world you've built.

You've got a depressing little story here and that's okay. Hopelessly addicted, and in constant pain, your character is heroic simply because he (actually, I'm not sure you ever refer to their sex, but my mind said it was a he) has chosen to live as long as possible. In the end, the weight of the inevitable is a fatal blow.

Won't be reading this one to the kids before bed.

I've attached my LBL. Some minor suggestions in there. I think you have a good command of the environment. Due to the structure of your story, there was a lot of commentary on the world at large. I do sorta wish the main character had experienced that first-person instead of just having it told to the reader.

Your character is pretty real. I'm still deciding whethere your use of repetition to cement the reality of his pain and situation is too heavy-handed. I tend to think it worked well.

I do think the ending could be punched up a little. I think the Pal's final words are a distrction right there. Also, the last sentence doesn't work for me because he's not returning to anything. Survival is all there is, and in the city above, nothing's different. I'd explore what that revelation means. I don't think we need to know what happens next, but I think it would be better if you say it a different way.

Good work. Keep writing!

Great story, very moving once it gets going. My only suggestion is that you start with action, rather than back story. Nothing happens in the present time until the end of page three. If you moved the Pal error message to the first paragraph, you could have weaved in her story more naturally. But other than that, you did a great job of painting a bleak and terrible world.

Great job! ~Sam 

Once the narrative got rolling it was a good, swift read. The exposition at the beginning slows things down a bit for me. What might work better is if that information was spread around the rest of the story, inserted as needed. And some of it, although good for world-building and something that you as the author definitely need to know, isn't necessarily needed by us the readers. We eventually learn through context what the patches are, what they do for the enhancement rat. Through descriptions of the protag's surroundings we get a sense of the fallen world, the hope for what lies above.

I like your into: "The salty smell of rusting steel plagues the air beneath the decaying cities of the old world". Connect that up with "I live in the Rust Dungeon" and now you've hooked the reader and drawn them forward with a narrative that promises to rush from the depths to the heights.

On that last, though--the what lies above part--it seems almost too easy for the protag to go up. That moment on the stairs should be a nail chomper. There's where we might need some exposition. Do the guards always let people past? Never? And once the protag decides to go up, really build on that desire to see it, so that the tragedy becomes that much more potent.

Once past the expositon, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

PS (post-reading the comments above): I liked the ending. I thought it was a strong one. That return to survival mode means that that hope--that the above-ground world would be better, even if the protag couldn't live in it--is crushed. Thus, it doesn't really matter if the protag makes it to the house, finds more patches. Patches, no patches--life is grim. Again, building up to that point might require some more work, but I don't think the narrative would gain much (and might lose much) by going past the return-to-survival part.

Call me morbid, but I liked the misery of the story, and the inevitability of decay and death.  The story is unrelenting and light on hope, as it should be for a tale such as this.  You deal with the need very well, and the characters are good if a little lightweight.  It’s a bit exposition heavy at the start, and I agree with the other comments that maybe this information could be drip-fed throughout rather than presented in full at the start.  It means the story itself doesn’t really get going for a while.  I’ll admit to being a bit confused by the ending, it is very abrupt.  It took a second read to grasp how important it is to reach the surface but instinctively I feel you could have made more of it.  I do like the bleakness of the ending, the hope being dashed.  This doesn’t feel like a happy ending kind of story, and I’m glad you chose not to go down that route.  I’d have liked to have seen them find a patch, and have that bittersweet moment of relief and despair to prolong a life that has little meaning.  The question does spring to mind as to why the search for a patch was left so late, but it’s a minor quibble.