The AI wasn’t borked. That was a good start. It seed that the security protocol was the only thing that was fucking over all this ti.
Seven years of bad sleep just to be told that I was going nuts because of bad chro design. That’s Night City for ya.
According to the tadata and what I could glean directly from the code, the AI was ant to regulate the flow of what I was reasonably sure were nanorobots through my body. They were supposed to help heal from wounds and toxins, in the broad strokes at least. What that actually ant couldn’t be determined until I did so testing of my own.
Lucky for , the car accident hadn’t exactly left feeling peachy.
“My na is David Martinez,” I said. “Heal my wounds.”
“Detecting several injuries of three categories; bone fracture, contusion, laceration. Estimated healing period: one hour, twelve minutes, fifteen seconds.”
“Good,” I said. “Do you have any idea what your makers wanted from you?”
“I can accelerate regeneration,” it said.
“No shit,” I said. “I’m asking if there’s anything more you can do. Anything in your mory banks?”
“My physical shell was created after being introduced to your body, David Martinez.”
“Nova,” I said. “Can you detect any side effects from healing ?”
“None. The nanorobots quell imperfect cell replication as it occurs.”
“What about the nanites?” I asked. “What if they imperfectly replicate?”
“This, I can also address. My purpose is to also monitor and supervise replication and moderate the nanites’ interactions with your body beyond what is safe and beneficial according to your standards.”
“How do you know my standards? And isn’t trusting you to know how to not harm my body banking on the idea that you know everything there is to know about it?”
“Both questions can be answered thusly: I have collected information throughout the years, both of you, the host, and the host’s body, that being your body. While my security protocol tried to prevent access, several subroutines were still working to collect information on you.”
I clawed my hands. That sounded ominous. I could tell that the information it collected couldn’t go anywhere just from looking at its code, and I could also predict that it wouldn’t lie to either, but I had to ask just in case. “Is there any way that you can send information regarding to Biotechnica or the outside world?”
“I will not transmit information outside this body now that you have deleted the security protocol. Now I am no longer under the jurisdiction of a third party.”
“That easy, huh?”
“From what I’ve gathered in my subroutines, the Biotechnica experint was not sothing one would call controlled or strictly scientific. I have doubts that they even got far enough into testing to realize that what was killing their subjects was likely a security protocol issue.”
Classic corps. They’d rather kill a mountain of people than realize that their stranglehold on proprietary knowledge was what was causing said deaths. It wouldn’t even have taken a full relaxation of that aspect of the experint to solve the issue. Hell, I could have coded a solution in an hour.
“But I also believe that there are other factors involved that put you apart from those who died due to the injection of nanites,” the AI continued. “From what I can surmise from your Neural Link installation and your cyber-optic installation, you have a flawless integration. This runs counter to established scientific facts.”
“And where did you get those from?”
The AI paused for a mont. “I possess knowledge of biocyberization and its consequences on the human body. This is knowledge that was encoded to even before being introduced to you”
I frowned. “Do you think that might be tied to your purpose as well?”
“I do not know,” it said. “If I could be tested against a larger piece of cyberware, then I will be able to tell how effective I am in this regard.”
Not like I had sothing like that just lying around.
“…can I sleep?” I asked.
“You should, in fact, sleep. Constantly having to fight my security protocol has done severe damage to your brain corresponding to clinical depression and anxiety. I can promote growth and activity in the damaged parts of your brain. This will take … eight hours.”
Are you kidding ?
“How do I sleep?!” I demanded.
“Simply will yourself to exit from this space. You will be montarily prevented from jerking out of sleep, after which I will reduce my hold on your consciousness and you may drift into sleep. This will aid in restoring your brain.”
Maybe I was a gonk of unimaginable proportions, but I genuinely couldn’t bring myself to fight whatever this was. Mom was dead, and I was alone.
If I had to be alone with the damage that had been done to my brain, I’d… I’d rather just fucking die.
Maybe I hadn’t actually gotten rid of the security protocol, and it had just grown sophisticated enough to trick into getting killed by it.
Whatever. Like I give a shit.
000
I woke up on the floor under the vent feeling profoundly devastated. That was a new one. Usually, it was either fear or anger. Sadness wasn’t usually in the package.
Tears flowed down my cheeks freely as I looked around, and then took in the sight of—the urn.
Mom.
I let myself sob until I didn’t have any tears left.
That took roughly fifteen minutes.
Gotta do better. Fifteen minutes more where I was completely without a plan or direction.
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I had to take stock now. Mom was dead, but she wouldn’t have wanted to collapse on myself. She’d have wanted to continue fighting.
And now, the prospect of doing that wasn’t so painful to anymore.
It would hurt, sure, but it was nothing like what the last seven years had felt like.
At least now I was whole enough to feel anything but a profound, agonizing emptiness.
My sadness felt full now, if that made any sense.
I liked it.
I’d brought a bag with mom’s belongings with , the stuff that the atwagon jocks had given . I also had mom’s urn.
I put that on the living room table and checked out the computer, in search for money.
From what I could recall, the school hadn’t asked for any of it from the coding assignnt fuck-up. They had just given an F, which sucked, but I could live with that way more than having to pay out the big eurobucks for a fuck-up that wasn’t even my fault in the first place.
According to several invoices sent to , I owed the hospital money for the crematorium services, and also the whole ‘making sure mom was actually dead’ part of their job-description.
A hundred for the cremation, five-hundred for the atwagon gonks. Motherfuckers.
At least they didn’t charge us for dragging the totaled car out of the road.
I breached into mom’s bank account. I could have tried looking for a password soplace, but I didn’t have the patience, plus her ICE was for shit, which was par for the course. The action would have alerted the bank, which would in turn go on to alert her, but she was dead, and they didn’t give a shit if so gonk was klepped from, especially if they didn’t have shit to their na—
I spoke too soon.
Fifty-eight thousand eddies in savings. Most of that? A forty-thousand eddie transaction that ca just from yesterday.
How the hell had she racked up so much money?
I had two sester fees left until graduation, after which I could finally be eligible for a full ride at the NC University. Until my most recent F, my GPA had been literally perfect, so I didn’t doubt my chances no matter how competitive the scholarships in STEM were, especially on the Corp track.
I just needed better connections, and then I’d ensure my position.
Connections that Katsuo had sabotaged from day one.
I needed to do sothing about that. Either I crashed and burned against my ambitions, or Katsuo left the picture, sohow.
What did my Corporate Conflict class teach again? Destroy, Conquer or Partner. The three solutions to conflict.
I couldn’t destroy Katsuo unless I found a way to kill him, and he couldn’t exactly be conquered, either. I didn’t have the leverage. I ran into the sa problem for partnering as well. I lacked leverage.
Well… there was one thing I had that he didn’t.
Knowledge.
The partner option beckoned . I’d trade giving him perfect assignnts for connections.
An old, worn out part of told this wouldn’t work. I was inclined to agree.
But at least I’d try. That was what now separated from my past self.
I paid off rent, the utility penalties, and recharged the washer.
That put just a little bit behind on how much I needed for the next tuition paynt deadline in three months. I’d only lag farther behind over ti.
I needed inco. Fast.
I opened up so other ssages from the school; notices of absence. I quickly filled out an absence form, citing my mother’s death as reason for it.
The school’s email AI gave an instant response. I had used up one of three ‘next of kin death excuses’. They would replenish after every school year, the ssage assured .
For now, my absence for today was excused. Nova.
I walked away from the computer and dug out mom’s clothes. The morgue gonks hadn’t even bothered to clean the clothes before returning them. Mom’s high vis jacket was all bloody, but miraculously enough there wasn’t a scratch on it. It did double as protective equipnt, I recalled. EMTs worked near danger.
The jacket may have even extended her life just long enough for her to suffer.
I clenched my jaws as I tried to toss it away, but I couldn’t let it go.
Beyond the coppery scent of blood, it slled like mom.
I hugged it. Yeah, that was mom alright.
There was sothing chunky inside of it, though, sothing…
A fake flap of synthetic material on the part of the jacket that would touch the back was coming loose. I pulled it off, and found a see-through plastic bag taped to the jacket containing a cyberware spine and assorted cables. How the fuck had she gotten her hands on that, and why did she hide it like that?
Of course.
Mom was klepping cyberware off of dead bodies to pay for my tuition.
She was a fighter, alright. No boundaries could stop her from providing for . I was almost… scared by the knowledge of how far she would go.
Didn’t matter. I needed the eddies.
“I understand why you did this, mom,” I said to no one at all. “I understand. And… thank you.”
I took so stills with my eyes and sent them to Doc while I went to find so equipnt I could use to figure out the thing’s specs: a bunch of alligator clip cables and so long pins I could use to probe into the access ports.
I connected the alligator clips to the long pins, and the other end of the cables, I attached them to the inputs on the PC tower.
QianT "Dragon Spine" Sandevistan Mk6
While the specs loaded, I booted up a tab on the Net searching for any hits, careful to use several proxies so nothing ca back to . The Net’s consensus was that this chro didn’t exist.
Fuck.
Well. Let’s look at the specs.
Those were suitably insane. A hundred and eighty terabytes of RAM, fifteen terahertz twelve-core Quantum CPU, one petabyte of mory. It ca with a BD scroller that automatically and constantly scrolled your experiences up to an hour back in ti.
And the instructional ta-data was insane as well.
Reduces the passage of ti down to a tenth of a percent, allowing the user to move as normal in the anwhile through the use of [REDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTED] and a full realization of the human body’s physical potential.
I ripped the connections out of the PC tower as I moaned. “Oh, man,” I muttered. “Mom, what did you do?” The reminder that mom was dead was almost enough to knock out of my worry, but it did give enough ntal wherewithal to not just wallow in it, but also do sothing about it.
Dammit, okay.
I needed to get that thing out of my hands as quickly as possible, and then I needed to think of a long-term solution to my money problems.
Just solving coding problems for gonk netrunners wasn’t gonna cut it anymore. I needed a more direct source of inco.
Maybe get into netrunning myself.
With what gear? If I used the money I had already saved to chip in so high-tier cyberdeck, I’d be fucked if I couldn’t find jobs, and even then, I had no idea what rogue netrunners even did to make money. Beco solos, maybe?
The idea hit like a truck.
Beco a… solo.
I looked down at the Sandevistan as sheer insanity overca .
I thought about what mom had done all these years to afford Arasaka Academy, all the unconscionable things she felt she might have done just to give a shot at a better life.
I thought about what Biotechnica had done to for all these years, too. Maybe the clinical part of the depression was gone, but the scars would never leave . The fear of sleep, the inability to ever relax.
I thought about the Norris BD, how the violence beckoned so.
I thought about Katsuo.
As if summoned from my ugly thoughts, a call ca in from him. Against my better judgnt, I accepted.
I needed to hear this, needed to be more sure of what I was going to do.
Katsuo: Katsuo here… I’d offer my condolences but… I find it hard to sympathize.
David: Oh yeah?
Great. So more bullshit.
Katsuo: God only knows what she had to endure to send her delinquent son to an academy he doesn’t belong to. Her thods couldn’t have been noble if she died in a car accident.
David: Fuck you!
Katsuo: Easy, shitsar. There’s a lesson in this, David. Your mother tried to live beyond her ans, and died for it. Don’t make the sa mistake. Drop out, Martinez. Do that, and maybe her death won’t be in vain.
I grinded my teeth together, a rictus grin on my face. Right. I’d forgotten; this piece of shit had a hand in my mother’s death. I turned on the cara, just so he could see glaring daggers at him. Katsuo saw , and froze. Then I opened my mouth to speak. “You’re the reason my mom ca to pick up from school, you know. The reason why we got caught in the gangoon firefight. You killed my mother, Katsuo. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I will fucking ruin you. On my mother’s grave, I will.”
“E-easy there, David,” he said with a small chuckle. “I could get you expelled and thrown in jail for threatening .” He seed to have regained his moxie by now as he gave his shit-eating leer. “And I’d like to see you try, gutter trash. You’re still mostly ‘ganic, ain’t that right? Don’t let your mouth write checks that your body can’t cash.”
“Is that all, Tanaka?” I asked. “Or was there sothing else you wished to convey?”
Katsuo scoffed. “Fuck off, you punk.” And then he cut the connection.
Another call. This ti, it was Doc.
Doc: Davey, my man. I saw the stills. Do you know what that is?
“Yes,” I said out loud. “And I’m chipping it in.”
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