The AI wasn’t borked. That was a good start. It seemed that the security protocol was the only thing that was fucking me over all this time.

  Seven years of bad sleep just to be told that I was going nuts because of bad chrome design. That’s Night City for ya.

  According to the metadata and what I could glean directly from the code, the AI was meant to regulate the flow of what I was reasonably sure were nanorobots through my body. They were supposed to help me heal from wounds and toxins, in the broad strokes at least. What that actually meant couldn’t be determined until I did some testing of my own.

  Lucky for me, the car accident hadn’t exactly left me feeling peachy.

  “My name 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 memory 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 me?”

  “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 me either, but I had to ask just in case. “Is there any way that you can send information regarding me 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 experiment was not something 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 experiment 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 moment. “I possess knowledge of biocyberization and its consequences on the human body. This is knowledge that was encoded to me 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 something 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 me… eight hours.”

  Are you kidding me?

  “How do I sleep?!” I demanded.

  “Simply will yourself to exit from this space. You will be momentarily 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 me 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 me 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.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  I had to take stock now. Mom was dead, but she wouldn’t have wanted me to collapse on myself. She’d have wanted me to continue fighting.

  And now, the prospect of doing that wasn’t so painful to me 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 me, the stuff that the meatwagon jocks had given me. 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 assignment fuck-up. They had just given me 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 me, 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 meatwagon 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 someplace, 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 some gonk was klepped from, especially if they didn’t have shit to their name—

  I spoke too soon.

  Fifty-eight thousand eddies in savings. Most of that? A forty-thousand eddie transaction that came just from yesterday.

  How the hell had she racked up so much money?

  I had two semester 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 something about that. Either I crashed and burned against my ambitions, or Katsuo left the picture, somehow.

  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 same problem for partnering as well. I lacked leverage.

  Well… there was one thing I had that he didn’t.

  Knowledge.

  The partner option beckoned me. I’d trade giving him perfect assignments for connections.

  An old, worn out part of me told me this wouldn’t work. I was inclined to agree.

  But at least I’d try. That was what now separated me from my past self.

  I paid off rent, the utility penalties, and recharged the washer.

  That put me just a little bit behind on how much I needed for the next tuition payment deadline in three months. I’d only lag farther behind over time.

  I needed income. Fast.

  I opened up some other messages 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 me an instant response. I had used up one of three ‘next of kin death excuses’. They would replenish after every school year, the message assured me.

  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 equipment, 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 smelled like mom.

  I hugged it. Yeah, that was mom alright.

  There was something chunky inside of it, though, something…

  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 me. 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 some stills with my eyes and sent them to Doc while I went to find some equipment I could use to figure out the thing’s specs: a bunch of alligator clip cables and some 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 came back to me. The Net’s consensus was that this chrome 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 memory. It came with a BD scroller that automatically and constantly scrolled your experiences up to an hour back in time.

  And the instructional meta-data was insane as well.

  Reduces the passage of time down to a tenth of a percent, allowing the user to move as normal in the meanwhile 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 me out of my worry, but it did give me enough mental wherewithal to not just wallow in it, but also do something 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 income.

  Maybe get into netrunning myself.

  With what gear? If I used the money I had already saved to chip in some 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. Become solos, maybe?

  The idea hit me like a truck.

  Become a… solo.

  I looked down at the Sandevistan as sheer insanity overcame me.

  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 me a shot at a better life.

  I thought about what Biotechnica had done to me for all these years, too. Maybe the clinical part of the depression was gone, but the scars would never leave me. The fear of sleep, the inability to ever relax.

  I thought about the Norris BD, how the violence beckoned me so.

  I thought about Katsuo.

  As if summoned from my ugly thoughts, a call came in from him. Against my better judgment, 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. Some 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 methods couldn’t have been noble if she died in a car accident.

  David: Fuck you!

  Katsuo: Easy, shitsmear. There’s a lesson in this, David. Your mother tried to live beyond her means, and died for it. Don’t make the same 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 camera, just so he could see me glaring daggers at him. Katsuo saw me, and froze. Then I opened my mouth to speak. “You’re the reason my mom came to pick me 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 me.” He seemed to have regained his moxie by now as he gave me 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 something else you wished to convey?”

  Katsuo scoffed. “Fuck off, you punk.” And then he cut the connection.

  Another call. This time, 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.”