It was the middle of the day when I t Reyes at a driving track, a red Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X next to him. He gave a wave. “D, my main man! You finally wised up or are you still thinking of using those death mods? Speedware or no, you gotta think that through.”
“I’ve thought about it,” I said, and with a sigh, I gave a nod. “I want the mods.” It was a dumb waste of money, but from what I had learned in my ti as a solo, it was that I really fucking liked speed, especially my speed. If I could have more of it, that would be great. Besides, it would co in handy soday, I was sure about it.
“Okay,” he said. “Installs gonna take a couple of hours, but for you, my good solo, I’d do anything.” He was really laying it on thick, but I appreciated it still. “Here’s the girl. Wanna give her a test drive right now?”
“Does it co with a user manual?” I asked.
He NFC’d the details and I read through it quickly. I hopped onto the bike and slowly got it started, making sure to start slow this ti. I didn’t want to have a repeat of Allister’s Caliburn when it pulled out of that parking lot so quickly.
Yep. This bike was fucking fast. Even a light touch made it accelerate more than I anticipated, and I used the Sandevistan just to be safe. I took it around the track a couple of tis, slowly learning the controls. Once I felt confident at one level of speed, I kicked it up, and added more leeway by increasing the speed of my Sandevistan, over and over until I maxed the bike out. Then, I slowly weaned myself off the Sandevistan, just until the bike beca exciting to ride.
Then, I slowed it down next to a clapping Reyes. “Nice ride, don’t you think? Sixty-six sound good?”
He sent the paynt interface and I sent him the eddies. Then another for the mods, and I just handed over the data shard for Trauma Team’s policyholders. Fuck them and that greedy fucking corp, anyway. They were part of the reason why mom wasn’t with anymore.
I only had eighty-three left now after purchasing the VIP garage slot, and that would be three k monthly henceforth. From nearly three hundred to eighty-three. Sure, that was eighty-three thousand, but it was a far cry from what I used to have.
Didn’t matter anyway. I’d get more eddies in ti.
Always would with my set of skills.
I shook hands with Reyes and left him with the bike. I had already paid for a VIP garage slot that opened for no one but . It required special access to even get the elevators to go to that sub-basent, and I could do whatever I wanted with the electronic locks. And I would fill that lock to the brim of its mory with as much ICE as it could hold, as well as a program to detect and report intrusion. It wouldn’t hold up against a good Netrunner who would have anticipated such a asure, but against the vast majority of thieves that thought they were targeting a normal person, it would give an instant report to as well as NCPD.
I’d have to get the bike registered first, though. Reyes gave an anonymous bill of paynt, aning I could assign my na to it at the DMV without him knowing, unless he was specifically looking for soone registering a new Yaiba Kusanagi and already had access to the DMV database.
Yikes. What to do, then?
It wasn’t like I didn’t trust Reyes.
I just didn’t trust anyone. He wasn’t special in that regard. Anyone outside of Maine’s crew, who already had by the balls, I couldn’t trust, and I only trusted them because I had no other choice.
But no, I wasn’t about to start trusting Reyes. He was a good fixer, did right by since day one, but that didn’t an I owed him my entire identity.
I could still use a VIP garage with an unregistered vehicle. Only for a day before NightCorp started asking questions.
I could use a fake I.D for the ti being. Hack into the NC DMV, add a fake na and registration, and use that to park the car.
Hell, I’d need a driver’s license, too.
Shit.
I took a stroll to the local DMV and went into a cafe a street away. I was still wearing a mask, but nobody really asked questions about stuff like that unless you were a cop, gangoon or terminally curious. I ordered a coffee and unleashed Ping.
I arrived at the door of several systems and began on breaking the ICE as gingerly as I could.
The ICE fucking shattered under a tap. I panicked, waiting for an alarm which never ca. After five minutes of no cops, I took a sip of my coffee and continued poring over the databases to look for what I needed.
I found it quickly: a database of driver’s license holders in Arroyo. That list was fucking thin, though. It seed that people really didn’t give a shit about getting a driver’s license.
How did they make sure their rides weren’t klepped, then? I checked the list and found that most license-holders did in-fact have high-end cars: Quadras, Herreras, Mizutanis et cetera. Only owners of nice cars bothered to have them registered and have themselves licensed. They had more to lose. That was the general tendency of the people of Night City: upwards social mobility ca at a cost. The cops would watch you—they’d help you out, too, but you had to play by their rules as well, unlike the poor whom the cops had a far more hands off approach to, unless it was for the purpose of bullying. They cared less about responding to petty cris, though, and only ever mobilized in Santo Domingo when it ca to murders or soone klepping corpo property.
I found one of the edgerunners’ nas in the database, too: Maine Williams. Maine had a fucking driver’s license. I downloaded it and sent it to Lunacy for fun. His eyes looked so kind and gentle underneath those shades he always wore. It was hilarious. His EMP threading gave him the illusion of wrinkle, but he had a remarkably young face despite his age, being thirty-nine and all.
Well, if Maine had a license, then so should I.
I pulled up a photo of my face—my student ID—and used that as a basis for a driver’s license. The Kiroshis had an inbuilt photo editor with an AI generation module which made the task far easier. I inserted the driver’s license as well as all the relevant docuntation, forged of course, in the automated queue for the DMV’s AI algorithm to read and automatically produce a license.
All that was left was to go in there and get it printed.
And just like that, I was a registered driver of Night City. That was easy. Certainly not the most ethical way to go about it, but, co on; it was driving. Millions of idiots knew how to fucking drive. How hard would it be for ? I’d just skim the rule book or whatever and be up to speed in literally no-ti.
Lunacy: Is that Maine? Why does he look so… cute?
David: I know! Also, I got the Kusanagi. And the mods. Wanna go for a ride?
Lunacy: …what mods?
David: You know, the stuff you suggested yesterday: removed speed-lims, ChewTwoCharge X, engine overhaul, whatever.
Lunacy: What the fuck? You bought a Kusanagi with that? Are you fucking crazy?
I gaped. What the fuck was her problem?
David: You told to!
Lunacy: I was fucking shitfaced out of my mind, of course I would tell you to!
David: Just tell if you’re into it or not.
Lunacy: Of course not, I wanna fucking live! Go die on your own, you gonk!
I frowned. What was her problem? Was she just going to switch up on after yesterday?
David: Okay. You wanna hang out and do sothing else then?
Lunacy: Why would I wanna hang out with you?
David: What about yesterday?
Lunacy: Yesterday was because you lost a bet. Don’t get any ideas.
David: Oh. I thought it was… nice, though. Going to the moon with you. Was that just because of the bet, too?
Lunacy: What the fuck are you talking about?
David: You-you don’t rember?
She hung up the call.
I sighed.
She forgot.
She fucking forgot.
Or, maybe the only reason she was nice was because she was drunk all along, and would never have given so much respect while sober?
You know what? Fuck her.
I was done trying to figure her out. Fucking done. Her psycho routine was never cute to begin with, but this sohow felt worse than anything she’d ever done to before. I almost felt violated, breached.
Was that really it, though? No. I felt frustrated, too. I’d made progress with her, gotten to know a person that I really couldn’t bring myself to hate. For a while, it was like I had back the Lucy I made chooms with on that NCART, only for life to snatch that thing, that nice thing we had away.
It wasn’t her fault if she forgot, though. Nobody’s fault, really. Maybe mine, for buying her all those drinks. Maybe I shouldn’t have goaded her? Maybe I got her to do sothing she wasn’t ready to do at all? Maybe I should have respected the wishes of sober Lucy and declined the first ti she told she had sothing to show to ?
All I knew was that if Lucy was going to continue hating , then I’d rather not see her again. I couldn’t handle her right now. She wasn’t good for .
I hacked the DMV to put in a request for a printed license and made my way to it after paying for my coffee, trying not to think of Lucy and her bullshit.
000
Lucy spotted the two BD wreaths on her nightstands. Both of them contained a soft copy of her moon BD.
When David was here last night, they had watched her favorite moon BD together. Why?
Sothing about… nanobots. Right. David got injected with them as a kid. It traumatized him. He almost died. He knew what it felt like to lose one’s bodily autonomy to corporate greed.
And so… she had let him in. Let him get through her gates to a place where no one else had ever been, a hole that no dick could fill, a cold firepit that no empty yet sweet words could ignite.
She had let him in.
Why?
Fucking why?
She stopped herself from calling David again and asking if they had sex. That mattered very little compared to what was actually confird to have happened.
Yesterday was a mistake.
No.
It shouldn’t have happened.
You don’t believe that.
She didn’t want for it to have happened.
That’s not true.
Her hangover blended with her anxiety, creating a near-unbearable whirlwind of emotion. She buried her face into her mattress and scread.
This wasn’t fair.
Then again, love usually never was.
She laughed. No. Screw that. I’m just hungover and horny. Yes. She decided that was the most logical explanation. People got horny when they were hungover, or when they were drunk, which was the case last night. That was an established fact. And she had just decided to make a move on the nearest pair of balls, and now she felt the aftereffects of that.
It was literally nothing.
Yeah. Nothing at all.
She needed another drink. Nothing cured that old hangxiety like more alcohol did.
000
The modded Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X was a fucking monster.
The first thing I learned while driving down the highway was that my Ping didn’t regenerate nearly fast enough to keep up with even a quarter of the top speed of the bike, aning I had to rely entirely on my eyes and the Sandevistan to know where I was going and what was happening on the road, which was unimaginably unideal.
For ten glorious seconds, I floored the fucking bike until the speedoter (a digital replacent because the analog default literally didn’t have a large enough range) topped out at six hundred kiloters an hour. I had to use the Sandy to slow ti down to ten percent to feel safe.
Absolutely demonic.
I slowed down to saner speeds and started driving ho to figure out how I was going to work out a Ping that traveled far enough to keep up with the Kusanagi. I could sacrifice omnidirectional range for the ability to hop between other cars, constrain the range to everything in front and behind . That didn’t take into account cars that might enter from on-ramps on the highway, though, or just roads that connected with the main road.
I could download a map of Night City roads actually, and figure out a way to Ping within the constraints of the road, using my bike’s inbuilt GPS to determine where I was in the model map.
I ran so rudintary calculations in my head and figured that I could end up Pinging a pretty sizeable stretch of road if I kept the scan to those constraints.
The only other way to increase the range of my Ping was to find out how I could transform intervening devices into signal repeaters that I could use to extend my range. That would take a lot of maths to figure out—a generalized decrypter to break ICE, and an algorithm to determine what devices to break and use Ping from, and what devices to not break in order to still remain an untraceable and undetectable quickhack. The amount of cyberspace noise I would be making was crazy, though. I had to make sure it remained untraceable.
That couldn’t work if the quickhack had penetrative power. That, by definition, would make it traceable. ICE disturbances always did that.
It was a fascinating area of study, though. I think I just found my next big project.
What was on my to-do list again? I pulled it up on my Kiroshis because I could now. It had so many quality-of-life apps that it almost made my head spin.
Tasks
Touch base with Nakajima (whenever he hits up)Upgrade factory Breach ProtocolUpgrade ICEPick DaemonBuy cheap Daemons for inspirationDecide on next chro (review necessity steps below)
Will I be incapable of doing without it?Am I currently incapable of sothing such that only more chro can help ?How will this chro help take over Arasaka or stay alive?Figure out a way to break it to my gonk chooms that mixing chro == fucking bad news… (T_T they don’t wanna listen)Decompile the OS and get to the bottom of what the fuck Sandy even does.
Daily Task
Look for any new JK XBDs Sword training Stare at gun and refuse to fire it
I added the road Ping to my list of tasks, but didn’t plan on getting to that anyti soon. I know I told Pilar that coding felt like another language to , but fuck if I wasn’t tired of that goddamn language. I needed to do sothing fucking new or I’d kill myself.
All I ever did was either train or code. What did I use to do for fun again?
Well, that was easy: JK’s XBDs. And I already knew that no new ones had co out yet.
Maybe I should just… rest.
I’d been going full energy for the past two weeks and I hadn’t given myself the chance to just relax and do nothing.
I usually hated relaxing and doing nothing. My body craved movent, and my mind craved stimulation, but under the weight of all the movent and stimulation I had received, I fell in love with the idea of just doing nothing. I didn’t have to be totally still. I just had to not focus on work.
I parked my bike in its VIP parking spot, locked behind a one-inch thick steel wall, and took the elevator to my floor and apartnt. I didn’t even get to my bed before deciding that the sofa was a good enough place to collapse.
To my surprise, I didn’t even feel like moving about much. My entire body felt still and energy-less.
I eyed the counter in my vision, the Sandevistan’s integration tir. It was only six days left now. Another adjustnt had occurred, but it was minuscule enough that it didn’t affect the ti too much. I’d finally get that squared away.
Compared to when I had first installed it, the Sandy felt right on my back. The plating surrounding it had gone from completely sensation-less to just very numb, but I could feel touch on the plating as if it was a part of , like thick skin on the soles of my feet.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The flexibility of the Sandy bordered on absurd, now. My back could twist and bend almost every way, and was only limited by the flexibility of my ribcage or the stretchiness of my muscles
I lounged around, doing nothing at all and playing retro video gas on my Kiroshis—Snake and Brick Breaker.
They were too easy.
Way too easy.
After losing a couple of tis, I managed to beat Snake five tis in a row, having figured out the optimal pattern to use. I got tired of that ga, and began on Brick Breaker, which was more about reaction speed. I didn’t know if it had sothing to do with the fact that my thoughts and eyes were faster than my fingers, but even the max level couldn’t stump .
The only other options past that required speedware to use, but that sort of ruined the point of the ga.
I tried doing them anyway without using the Sandevistan just to see if I could.
The answer was yes: for the first level. In the second level, the ball was a blur, and there was sothing that stopped from reacting to it in ti. The Kiroshis had a 144 gahertz refresh rate, aning it could process 144 million fras per second individually. My eyes weren’t what made the ball blurry. It was just the speed of my perception.
But why couldn’t I get to the ball in ti? I felt like a deer caught in headlights.
Was this just the reaction ti of my perception being sohow disconnected to the reaction ti of my eyes?
That made sense. Your perception worked at the speed of thought. Your body worked at the speed of your nerves sending signals to your body and your body throwing them back. That ping would always be greater than your perception speed.
I decided to use the Sandevistan for the following Brick Breaker levels. As expected, I ended up beating the ga very shortly after.
At that point, I started getting tired of doing pointless things.
Just in ti, too, as Rebecca shot a text.
Rebecca: Word on the street is that you’re going to BD stores for combat training.
David: Yeah, just one ti, though. Wasn’t as much of a waste as I thought it was. I know how to train efficiently.
Rebecca: You’ll only get as good as the person who scrolled the BD. You wanna learn sothing from a BD, learn from the best. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way, and still learn from the best. Like .
David: I’m not super into shooting.
Rebecca: Aww, co on! Just pay a visit at the gun range, we’ll shoot a little and shoot the shit, too. Drinks afterwards?
David: Okay, I guess.
000
Rebecca shot using two pistols, hitting every one of the hanging tin targets dead center with a manic grin. Then she turned to .
I was unmasked, since this was more of a social call than anything. I had brought both my guns, the one I had taken from the scavs that had kidnapped , and the one that Maine had given .
“Your turn!” she said.
I put the scav gun down and held Maine’s gun with both hands, aiming at the first target.
I couldn’t pull the trigger.
I couldn’t shoot at all.
Why did I co here? Why would I put myself through this bullshit again and again?
“Am I gonna die if I can’t shoot?” I asked, still pointing at the target.
“Huh? Of course. Even with your Sandy, you gotta be able to shoot,” Rebecca said matter-of-factly. I appreciated that. Didn’t wanna let her know I was having a hard ti. She might care. I needed the truth now.
“I’ll get one of you killed if I can’t shoot, right?” I said. “And it’ll be my fucking fault.”
“Uh, you good, D?”
“Can’t half-ass it, not just my life on the line. Can’t let you guys down.”
“What’re you talking about?”
I took a deep breath, tensed my finger, and saw the heavy machine gun from that day, mom’s hopeful expression, and blood. So much blood.
And then I imagined the dead bodies of Maine, Rebecca, Pilar, Dorio.
Lucy bleeding out on top of that pile of corpses.
I fired.
I couldn’t breathe. I doubled over, clutching my chest.
I couldn’t even stand.
I grabbed onto the counter, gnashing my teeth, activating the Sandevistan to fix it.
It was like cold ice washed all over , and whatever was going on was replaced with pure shock and adrenaline.
I stood straight.
“D!” Rebecca yelled. “What’s going on?!”
“I’m fine,” I said, jaws clenched.
David: Nanny, what the fuck was that?
[This is a classic example of a PTSD-induced panic attack. Your ntal condition was in such an incipient form that I was not even aware of it. Now that you have had an episode, I can work to heal the physical manifestations of your ntal illness—the way that it has deford the shape of your brain and the places with the most harmful neural activity.]
Fuck. I had PTSD? I was ntally ill?
David: You’ll fix this, right?
[I can heal the physical manifestations, but you must make an effort as well to overco the ntal manifestations of your illness. If we work together, you can be fixed, yes.]
“I’m fine,” I repeated. “Just… forget you saw that.”
I held the pistol up and aid it at the target again.
“D, I’m being serious. Was that a panic attack?” Rebecca asked.
“So I panicked! Big deal! Shit happens,” I said with a laugh. “Relax, I’m handling it. Just, look.”
I focused on the target and fingered the trigger. The mories ca back, but they didn’t overtake .
I almost lost myself in them, though.
I saw mom in my mind’s eye.
Sorry, mom.
I pulled the trigger again. The sa wave of adrenaline ca back, but my composure didn’t shatter.
The shot missed, though.
“I can do it,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Alright, then. Let fix up your form, then, because you shoot like a gonk!”
She changed the grip I had on the gun, my stance, and how I aligned my vision with the barrel, and told to fire.
I hit the target, but on the edge only.
“You pulled when you should have squeezed.”
“What’s that an?” I asked as the target lowered once again.
“Pulling is jerky. Squeezing is smooth. Be smooth. Be slow.”
“What about the grip?” I asked. “If you’re telling to squeeze, it sounds like I should hold the grip tighter, too.”
“Just focus on your trigger finger, champ.”
I repeated the action, pulling the trigger smoothly. The bullet edged closer to the center.
“Now focus on not being so shaky. Be tight, but don’t be too tight, or the shakes get worse.”
And on it went. Rebecca supplied with several magazines and always had sothing to say and a tip to supply with, not to ntion countless reminders to rember her other tips. In the end, it all ca down to experience. I’d have to practice while consciously rembering what she taught .
In the end, we walked from the gun range to a nearby bar, Rebecca smiling smugly all the while. “How does that compare to a damn braindance tutor?”
“It was aweso, really,” I said. “How’d you get to know so much about shooting, anyway? You sound trained, too. You ex-military or sothing?”
“?” Rebecca laughed. “You’re fucking hilarious, you know that? It’s like you don’t even try, too. No, I’m not a fucking patriot bitch, do I look 6th Street to you? I just really like guns. And using them. Doesn’t take boot camp to learn how to use your fingers.”
“So you’re all self-taught?” I said. “Wow, that’s pretty impressive.”
“I hang around in gun ranges a lot,” Rebecca said. “I hear tips and tricks all the ti, talk guns with other gun nuts, practice as much as I can afford. It’s really just a combination of experience and talking with others. No one in the world is actually self-taught. Those who say they are just didn’t have a single teacher.”
“Fair. You’re fucking nova, though. Was that speedware when you shot all those targets so quickly?”
“Just practice,” she said, but I could tell she was preening under the complints. “You can get there, too, you know. You just gotta practice.”
“Thank you, Rebecca,” I said. “I an it. I’m really grateful you took your ti doing this. I don’t know what I did to deserve any of that. If there’s anything I can do to make it up to you, just say the word.”
Rebecca gave a wide smile. “That’s a bold promise, cutie. You really capable of putting your money where your mouth is?”
My face started burning at the complint. “What, what do you an?”
“I scratch your back, you scratch mine?” she said. “I help you shoot bullets, then help you shoot loads?”
My jaw damn-near dropped. “What?!”
“Co on now, handso,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you show what that Sandevistan can really do? Bet you’d have a killer vibrate function, no Mr. Studd needed,” she slid her hands up my chest as she said that. My face was burning.
“Co on now,” I said. “Quit joking around. This is going too far.”
She giggled as she stepped back. “Oh man, you are too pure for this world, you know that?”
I chuckled uneasily. That had happened way too fast.
I an, clearly she was joking. You don’t co onto a guy so hard for anything but a joke, Fei-Fei notwithstanding. But then again, she straight up kissed . That didn’t happen for jokes.
Rebecca was clearly joking, though.
Ugh, whatever. Not like I couldn’t take a joke or anything. “I’m serious, though,” I said, choosing to just forget the last fifteen seconds. “I’ve got your back for anything. You saved my life, rember? Now you’re helping out with shooting and I don’t wanna feel like a burden or anything.”
“Okay, then,” Rebecca said. “First thing I’ll ask you to do is call Becca.”
I blinked. “Okay. Becca.”
“Second, what was up with your panic attack?”
I pursed my lips. I didn’t want to talk about that at all. I heard stuff about how if you talked about your ntal illness while working, then you could get fired for being crazy, especially if you did military, private security or cop stuff. Edgerunning wasn’t far off from that either. What if Rebecca just ran up to Maine and told him I was nuts? What if they decided to ditch ?
The thought of him ditching hurt way more than if he’d suddenly decide to turn on for the Sandevistan. Aggression, I could handle. I was no stranger to that shit. But abandonnt?
I didn’t want to be alone in this world.
But I owed the truth to Becca for all that she had done for . If I didn’t repay her kindness by following her request, then what did that make ? Not sobody worthy of her friendship, that was for sure.
“Promise you won’t tell anybody,” I said.
“Trust , D,” she said. “I won’t tell a ghost.”
“Guns remind of… my mother’s last monts,” I said. “Our car got gunned down by so gangoons. Can’t think of firing a gun without seeing her face, without rembering the rolling barrel of that machine gun. So I’ve been leaning into my swordplay to compensate. And Netrunning too, sure.”
“Shit,” Becca said. “Yeah, that’s a tough break. You had a pretty nasty reaction, too. You sure you’re fine right now?”
“I an,” I shrugged. “I’m a little bumd out, but more because of how fucking useless I am than anything else. The panic attack is pretty much gone for now. Just need to work on practicing shooting, so it won’t hurt as much.” I smiled. “And I can do that. I just did, today, so it’s not impossible. Just hard. I can handle that.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, you’re not useless,” Becca said. “Just dealing with it. Dealing with it better than most people I’ve seen, too. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Hey, you want my advice?”
“Yeah?” I said.
“I know a place where there’s no noise, no distractions. Where you can just shoot without worrying about anyone else or judgnt and all that crap. Just you and your thoughts. And so chooms by your side to lean on. You want my take on it? That’s how you deal with those problems.”
I gave a grateful nod. “Sounds preem.”
“And also long drives,” Becca said. “They clear your head up like nothing else.”
“Oh!” I said. “Well, I just bought a new ride today actually. Might wanna take you up on that.”
“What’d you get?”
“Yaiba Kusanagi CT-3X.”
“No shit?!” she howled. “Fuck yeah! You wanna ride out now? Can I co with?”
“Sure,” I said. “We can go to that gun range, too.” Still an hour or two until nightti hit as well.
“Fuck yeah!” she turned to the side. “I’ll hit up the store for provisions, then we can go to my house to get more guns!”
I hit up my bike and the garage, telling the latter to open up and the forr to start making its way towards . I spent so extra eddies on buying a better self-driving AI module that worked better in high speeds. Of course, it couldn’t handle anything the bike’s new max speed could throw at it, but it would still get here in probably ten minutes. I had to tell the building’s VIP garage elevator to lift the bike up as well, holding gates open until it finally managed to hit the road.
Becca ran out from the store with plastic bags heavy with cargo. And my Yaiba Kusanagi pulled up in front of us, still factory red. Had to figure out a different design for it soon, maybe yellow and white to go with mom’s jacket.
“Hop on,” I said. “I’ll hold you from the back. I’d suggest you face and hug with both arms and legs, too,” I said.
“D, is this you flirting right now?” she said with a tilted head and an expression that said she was clearly not impressed.
“Just giving you a warning. I modded this bike.”
“You modded a CT-3X? Are you crazy?”
I walked up to sit on the bike. “I’ll go slow for you. Just hold on tight. And give the bags.”
She did, handing them over to . I wore them around my wrists while holding the handlebars. The magnetic key in my pocket confird my identity and gave controls. Rebecca jumped behind and started hugging tightly.
“Your place, right?” I said.
“Yeah. You rember?”
“Yeah,” I said, and I pulled off.
Rebecca’s hold started slipping, so I slowed down, which let her fight the G force enough to hug even tighter, holding both her wrists with a white-knuckled grip as I made a sharp turn and shot off.
We were by her house in one minute flat.
The mont we stopped, Rebecca jumped out from the bike and started hollering.
“Holy fucking shit, D! Holy fucking shit! Fucking motherfucking shit! Holy father-fucking shit!”
I laughed.
“That was nova!” her eyes sparkled. “Never seen anyone push the Kusanagi so hard in tight traffic before! And that handling was god-like! Your speedware is fucking crazy!”
I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t use the Sandy for that.”
“Bullshit! You topped out at like two hundred kiloters and threaded the needle between so many cars faster than most people would be confident even driving at that speed without obstacles.”
Okay, that sounded crazy. Did I maybe use the Sandevistan without knowing?
[You did not use the Sandevistan, but both it as well as the changes I have made to your body suggest that your baseline reaction ti has been improved drastically.]
My mind shot back to when I played those gas with my Kiroshis. All that ti, it was because of the Sandevistan and Nanny?
Better yet, this was just their passive effects on ?
Fucking nova.
“I’ve got like a passive effect thing going on,” I said, because now I felt like an idiot for bragging about not having used the Sandevistan, and I didn’t want Rebecca to think less of so I’d rather just co clean. “With the Sandy, that is. Didn’t fire it up, but I guess it still helped out.”
“Man, that’s fucking preem!” Becca said. “Wait here while I get the guns!”
I started talking to Nanny.
David: I first started being able to tune the output of the Sandy, and now it gave superhuman reaction speed. Is there like an end-ga to this?
[The second was my attempt to streamline your skillfulness, using the data I learned from observing the Sandevistan. I am working on increasing the density of your nerves and will endeavour to grant you greater dexterity and nervous feedback.]
David: I an, thanks, but… don’t love being left out of the loop so much, too. Can we do like a patch notes thing every Sunday where you tell about the major changes you’ve done to my body where it impacts my performance?
[Certainly. I have finished constructing this list. Do you wish to read it right now?]
David: Sure
The list was pretty long. Nanny kept testing out different chemical and biological configurations for my muscles, different fiber placents for my bones that granted the most amount of resilience, and through repeated trial and error, had arrived at the current blend, which in her words, were stronger and more resilient: for the bones it was an average of 35% past organic limits, and for my muscles, that figure was just 20%.
Then there were a plethora of different chemical changes that worked to increase my energy efficiency and keep alert and fresh at all tis.
My eyes stopped at one line in the patch notes.
Increased neuroplasticity levels in order to facilitate ntal rebalancing as well as rapid learning.
David: How much faster do you think my learning is? And what exactly does it extend to? Purely ntal learning or training, too?
[Both ntal as well as physical pursuits. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact rate of learning as it is not an easily quantifiable activity. In the list, I have also included an increase in ability to retain information. That, combined with your increased neuroplasticity allowing you to easily create new neural pathways, you should have the rate of learning several tis that of a small child.]
As counterintuitive as that sounded at a glance, children could learn entire languages in just a scant few years and absorbed information like sponges: everything they saw and heard figured into their personality and views as they got older.
And now I would have that sa sponge-like tendency.
That practically guaranteed that my personality would change much faster over ti. That thought scared for just a mont before I realized how dumb that was.
It wasn’t a change that I couldn’t control, certainly not one that I should fear, either. I had my values right now and they worked for . If anything, I would just be able to adapt faster to upholding them better and more efficiently. Or the values might not work out for my longterm goals, which absolutely wouldn’t change anyti soon. I was happy with my dream. All this ant was that I would just beco better at reaching it.
Hell, it was probably exactly this that let get over my inability to shoot a gun.
Just one more shooting session and that shitty PTSD will disappear, just like Nanny said.
I wouldn’t be held back by sothing so stupid like trauma. Not on my life.
Rebecca kicked open the front door to her apartnt block, a huge duffel-bag strapped to her back. “Ready!”
She shot the coords to her out-of-the-way gun-range, a place bordering on the west wasteland. Then she jumped in front of and hugged with both arms and legs. “Ready to roll!” she said. I’d been the one to suggest this positioning in the first place, but now that she was like this, butt pressed to my crotch, I realized just how much of a mistake this was.
David: Nanny! Give ED right now!
[From context, I assu you’re referring to Erectile Dysfunction. Be warned that this will significantly impact your ability to mate and pass on your DNA—]
David: I DON’T WANT TO DO THAT RIGHT NOW, JUST DO IT, YOU CAN FIX IT LATER, RIGHT?!
[I can.]
I started riding off. Rebecca sunk further into from the G-force and I could feel everything. And to my surprise, it did nothing to . I overrid my worried impulse—I chose this, and it was better this way. I just had to focus on the road right now.
I activated the Sandy and sped the bike up. The cars on the road felt like they were still as I neatly slid between them, around them, and sotis even above them.
I sped up as we got farther and farther away from the city centre and there were less cars to constrain . Rebecca’s grip slipped and redoubled every now and then, but her positioning was ideal—unless I did sothing really crazy, she wouldn’t get thrown off just yet.
We got to the coords she gave —not an address since this place wasn’t even near streets. It looked like it used to be an air strip, but now it just had shooting targets arranged in various distances.
I got off, Rebecca still stuck to like a barnacle. “We’re here,” I said with a chuckle.
She let go and landed on her butt, then got on all fours and started wretching.
“Not fun,” she whispered. “Not fun at all.”
I’d topped out at about eight hundred klicks per hour this ti around, just to shorten the ti she spent on my crotch.
I failed to realize what the G-forces I went under would do to her. The accelerations alone had been massive. My bike could do a clear zero to one hundred in point five seconds, generating enough G forces to knock an unsuspecting person out.
“I fucking fainted!” Rebecca hissed. “Twice! What the fuck!”
Ah. That explained why she kept losing her grip so many tis. I chuckled. “Got us here pretty fast. Took two minutes.”
“Need a broseph,” Rebecca muttered. “Or I’ll really hurl. Gim.”
I looked inside the plastic bags I was carrying for the first ti and saw two twelve-packs of beer.
“I don’t think it works that way,” I said.
“Cut the shit and gim!”
“Okay!” I said quickly and took out one of the beers and gave it to her. She opened it up and downed it all in one go. Then with a satisfied sigh, she stood up.
“Holy shit,” she said, then looked up at to smile. “That was fucking fun!”
“You just said it wasn’t,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s cuz I was stone cold sober! But fuck! D, you’re crazy. Those mods aren’t street legal for shit. And I don’t think there’s even a gonk in Night City crazy enough to drive that fast even with them. Imagine how much faster you’d go with super-chew? You rember that shit we klepped back then? Fuck, with that stuff, you’d take off!”
I wondered how much more expensive an AV module would be to make my bike be able to actually take off, or if it was even possible to fit a bike with that stuff. Turning my bike into a flyer would be fucking nova, but I doubt the cops would let get away with that.
Eh, best not get too greedy.
Actually? Fuck it. Why not try and extract the bike for every ounce of speed it could possibly give ? Maybe make it a project with Pilar?
Huh, would he be mad that I went to Reyes to get it modded instead of him? He was a techie, sure, trusting him with everything seed a little foolhardy, especially because I didn’t actually know how good he was.
Good enough to give Lucy advice, sure, but that couldn’t possibly extend to everything.
Rebecca slid the duffel bag around in front of her, opened it, and handed a pistol by the barrel. “Nobody’s here today, too! Nova, right?”
I chuckled. “Yeah. Nova.”
000
Dinner with father was always a quiet and solemn event, and Katsuo wouldn’t have it any other way. The old man was a stickler for professionality to the point that nothing Katsuo did, no matter how objectively impressive, would ever do anything but make the man ask him why he couldn’t have done it better.
And now, more than ever, he wished to avoid father’s attention the most. Once upon a ti, father had asked Katsuo why he couldn’t be the best in class, and why so Santo Domingo piece of shit was able to upstage him, why the latest in chipware, tutors and all the help that money could buy couldn’t bridge the gap between his son and so destitute child who had nothing.
The first year that David had gone to Arasaka Academy was the worst year of Katsuo’s life. Beatings were only the tip of the iceberg. It was the repeated humiliation, the removal of privileges, and even having his organic arms removed and replaced with worse dical-grade prosthetics that made him feel like a cripple. He was told that he would receive upgrades if he could retake his number one spot in school.
Nothing worked. Until Katsuo lost his cool and punched David right before an exam. David received perfect scores across the board except for that single exam, allowing Katsuo the opportunity to pull ahead and retake his number one spot.
Father had nothing to say to him, having been complicit in covering up the incident so no one else on the academy board would know. No congratulations were given. Instead, sothing far better happened: father had given up on Katsuo, given him leave to be the number two. But with this surrender, Katsuo lost all the residual warmth left in the man. He hadn’t heard a word spoken in kindness from him in years now. Which was fine. Mother was warm enough for the both of them.
She was dressed in a traditional kimono, plain white with pink cherry blossom patterns on it, and pink lapels. Unlike most other won married to powerful corporate n, Katsuo’s mother preferred a natural beauty unmarred with chro or excessive biosculpts, and kept her features as closely to her birth features as possible. She had made the conscious decision to do so after Katsuo had his arms removed, prompting the first big fight between his parents.
Father put down his chopsticks and cleared his throat, looking at Katsuo. “You’ve accessed the academy board’s internal files. What were you looking for?”
“Information on a rival,” Katsuo replied. “I was sure to not touch anything.”
“You looked at young David’s file,” father said. “I did the sa. It is surprising to that he already managed to pay off both sester fees, even though he has a history of only being able to pay at the very last minute, sotis even going as far as requesting extensions of paynt.”
Katsuo clenched his jaws. “It’s peculiar. If possible, we can have him formally investigated, to better understand where this money cos from.”
Father nodded. “That would be in order. I will be in touch with my contacts at the bank, and see if we cannot have his account flagged for fraudulent behavior. And boy,” father said. “Do not hesitate to use any ans necessary to take a step forward. This child has been in your path for far too long, and it is ti you do sothing decisive. I will leave it up to you.”
Katsuo’s expression was calm, but inwardly, he was terrified. Father wanted David dead. And what’s more, he wanted Katsuo to arrange it.
The thought terrified him. He had no idea where to even start.
He just hoped that this fraud investigation would co through and David would be an ugly mory.
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