I stopped by some place to get something to eat. I ordered an extravagantly large meal because I felt like I was hungry enough to be able to eat it: triple stacked cheeseburger with family fries, a large cup of apple juice and a side of chicken nuggets.

  I was wrong. I was hungry enough to be able to eat it twice.

  After a trip to the bathroom to let go of what I’d already digested, I left the small diner still hungry.

  “Ugh, what gives, Nanny?” I asked no one in particular as I walked. “That’s you, by the way. Nanite AI, whatever.”

  [Why, pray tell, did you feel the need to designate me? And why Nanny?]

  “Human instinct,” I said. “And Nanny sounds like nanite. And you’re sort of… taking care of shit for me. So yeah. Nanny. Now tell me, why am I still hungry?”

  [I need nutrients in order to heal the damage done to your body after repeated uses of the Sandevistan, the injuries you sustained, and to make you stronger. Your activity has provided an opportunity to do so.]

  “Stronger?” I asked. “By how much?”

  [20%. In certain muscle-groups, at least]

  It projected an image of what those muscle-groups were in my HUD, and most of them were around my legs and my core.

  “How fast?”

  [Timeframe: 20 minutes and 56 seconds]

  “Nova!” I yelled. “Wait, what if I fired it up?” I asked. I looked around surreptitiously. “You know, the,” I subvocalized. “Sandy.”

  [You can simply think to talk to me, you know. Like you would in a call.]

  David: My bad. Yeah. Would firing up the Sandy speed things up? How are we on that imperfect cell replication thing?

  I reached the NCART station feeling a lot more energetic.

  [Imperfect cell replication has been taken care of for the most part. On a percentage scale, with zero percent representing zero imperfect replication, and one hundred representing a critical level of imperfect cell replication in which I have no power to save your life and you are sure to die, you are now at 5%, and you will reach 0% in a quarter of an hour.]

  David: How high was I in the scav den?

  [60%. If you wish, I will always notify you once we’ve breached the threshold of 50%.]

  Damn. That wasn’t as bad as I had expected, but it was still pretty high up there.

  David: Then can I use the Sandy to speed up building my mass? How much would that increase the counter?

  [To implement all of my improvements would increase your progress towards critical failure by an estimate of 5%]

  Alright, then.

  David: Let’s do it.

  I fired up the Sandy and immediately felt my body do something weird. My limbs stiffened and my legs felt heavier.

  And suddenly I felt lighter.

  I skipped up and down. Holy shit.

  “Nova!” I shouted, getting weird looks from the people at the NCART station.

  Screw them. I booted up a map of the city in my vision and searched for the nearest gym. It was only ten blocks away.

  I took off running away from the NCART station and towards it.

  [I believe you wish to push this function to its extreme, however I must advise that you temper your expectations. The Sandevistan may be able to provide you with instant benefits to your training, but there will be other consequences to deal with aside from that including—]

  David: You’ll tell me if you see something wrong with my body, right?

  [Yes, I will.]

  David: Then tell me when it happens, and when I should seriously consider stopping.

  [Of course. I encourage you to attempt this. It will grant me valuable data and may allow me to formulate ways to improve the baseline of your organics without the use of cyberware.]

  I stopped dead on my tracks.

  David: You can… make my ‘ganic better than chrome?

  [‘Better than chrome’ is not something I can guarantee, and I do not know if I can yet. I must gather more data.]

  Fucking preem!

  I continued running until I reached the gym.

  It was called the ‘Tyson ‘Ganic Gym’, and when I went in, true to form, most of the patrons seemed to sport only a minimal amount of cyberware; maybe an elbow or shoulder implant here and there, to replace or just reinforce ligaments no-doubt, but there was an undoubted respect for organic muscle here.

  In a far corner, away from the more normally proportioned humans were hulking behemoths over seven feet tall and wider than a twelve-year-old boy was tall.

  Animals.

  Miniguns roared in my ears.

  ‘Don’t mess with the Animals!’

  I turned away. Just had to mind my own business. Gangs were huge, and gangoons weren’t interchangeable. And these gangoons weren’t the ones that had killed mom.

  Once I found them, I’d make them wish they were never born.

  But for now, I had to focus.

  [First, you must consume copious amounts of high-protein food. Consuming fats and carbohydrates would not hurt either, as that would provide us with the necessary energy to build your body as well.]

  I found a vending machine conveniently placed near the receptionist’s desk. It had a bunch of energy bars that promised a ton of calories, but then there was the best bang for my buck nutrient-wise. A bar of pure Protein/Fat SCOP, near waste-free, containing only what the body needed to grow stronger.

  From the wrappers surrounding the Animals, I could tell that this was their preferred snack. One bar was approximately half a pound as well, which was an impressive size. I bought two just to start with and unwrapped it, revealing a light brown, translucent mass.

  The taste was nothing to write home about, and the consistency was slightly firm, but increasingly jelly-like the longer it was exposed to your saliva. I hardly had to chew it to be able to swallow it. Its one saving grace was that it at least went down easy, even if it tasted like slightly salty and savory water.

  I paid the receptionist for a day-pass and got started. I looked for an unused bench-press and bench, and found it pretty quickly. It had two twenty-kilo plates on each side. I got under it and got started.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  [I can manually release adrenaline so you can tap into hysterical strength. Along with this, I can help you recruit and coordinate as many muscle fibers as possible. This will make things much faster.]

  David: Do it.

  [It will hurt afterwards.]

  David: I ain’t afraid of pain.

  Immediately, my heart began to accelerate until it was racing. I couldn’t sit still. I wanted to run somewhere.

  I pushed at the bar instead with a howl. Then I let it slowly come down, and then up, and then down again.

  Then something grabbed my bar and held it in place. An enormous head peeked over the bar to look down at me. “Gotta go lower, kid. Full range of motion, come on now!” He let go, and I almost forgot about the weight. I braced against it and lowered it down. “Keep going.” I got all the way to an inch above my chest. “Good, now push up,” he said. I did. Then he held the bar again, this time with a gentler hold. “Widen your grip. Hands further away, yeah, like that. Right there. Now hold. Don’t dangle the bar above your clavicle. Go down to the middle of your pec.” I took his advice, and did that.

  [Approximating only two repetitions left before critical failure.]

  David: Imperfect cell…?

  I couldn’t even think.

  [No. Your arms will fail to hold the deadly weight above your body and you will crush your ribcage as it falls onto you.]

  David: Got it.

  Then I’d do three more reps.

  One.

  Two.

  Nanny was right. I really couldn’t do another one.

  But fuck it.

  With a scream, I gave the bar my all and lowered it one last time, and pushed up as hard as I could. The random guy, bless his heart, watched and waited for the bar to rise.

  It took me an eternity as I was stuck in the same place, trying to push past a physical impossibility that had been confirmed to me by an entity that knew my body better than I did, but I didn’t care. I had to do this. Even if, by all accounts, I couldn’t, I still would.

  The bar would rise.

  The bar would rise.

  Once the bar slowly started descending towards my ribcage, my Animal spotter just grabbed it and helped rack it.

  David: How was that? Should I fire up the Sandy?

  [Estimating a 23% increase in strength in relevant muscle groups, with a 1% increase towards critical imperfect cell replication if you do.]

  Nova. I fired it up.

  Before the pain could even make itself truly known to me, my arms and my chest felt as good as new, no numbness or soreness to be felt.

  I sat upright to get a look at my impromptu spotter.

  It was one of the Animals. I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “That was a preem set!” He laughed. “You’ve got one helluva sleeper build. Never seen one who looks so scrawny lift so much. You on stims or something?”

  The normally-sized people around us were giving him, and me for that matter, nasty looks. I guess that was warranted. This was supposed to be a full ‘ganic gym, and these Animals were no-doubt so hopped up on biostims and Juice that they hardly even counted as ‘ganic at this point even though they were strictly speaking mostly organic.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “What’s it to you?” I asked.

  “Gotta train right to get the best of it,” he said. “Watch out for asymmetrical growth and all that. You came in here green as grass, and I’m telling ya, that’s mistake numero uno. You wanna get the best of your stims, you gotta make sure everything is balanced. Another set?”

  Well, as long as he was offering, I wouldn’t turn his help down.

  But this wouldn’t change shit between me and the Animals. Not by a long shot.

  Nanny pushed more adrenaline into me and I began my second set, this time to ten repetitions. That felt slightly easier on the last set. After firing up the Sandy, I added a twenty plate to each side again.

  This time, I only got to seven, and not because I had chosen that spot, but because I couldn’t get anything more. On the eighth rep, the Animal had to save my life.

  After the second set, I had increased my strength by 19%, and by the third, I had increased it by 15%.

  Before Nanny could even tell me the gains, I had already finished calculating it. 68.33% total increase in relevant muscle groups. Nanny broke it down to individual muscles easier, with the largest increase being on my chest and shoulders, with my triceps and forearms also receiving some love and care.

  I was hungry as fuck, though.

  “Here, champ,” the Animal handed me a SCOP bar. “You’ve earned it.” He said with a big, genial grin. Turning it down was my first instinct, but unfortunately I didn’t have the luxury of antagonizing him. The normal people probably hated me now that I had been called out as a roid-head by the Animals and weren’t likely to give me any help.

  I scarfed down the SCOP bar.

  Once I finished, I added a drastically larger amount of weights, got under the barbell and began lifting.

  After two more sets, my total increase climbed up to 152%.

  I felt so top-heavy. It almost scared me, actually.

  “Time to hit those biceps, kiddo,” he said. “Get all the upper body and arm shit out of the way.”

  He handed me a zig-zag barbell with a twenty-weight on each side.

  I needed more SCOP.

  000

  Eight SCOP bars, only one trip to the bathroom, and five sets later and my biceps became big enough that I actually noticed a rather large difference.

  [Estimated progress to critical levels of imperfect cell replication is 50%.]

  David: Ouch. Can’t stop so early, though. Still need to get my back done. And the rest of my torso. And legs. What happens if we get to 90%?

  [You will be dangerously close to critical levels.]

  David: What does that mean for me besides that?

  [You can no longer rely on rapid regeneration in a time of crisis.]

  That was fine. I hadn’t relied on that my entire life until today.

  David: Then we continue.

  The Animal put me through the ringer, not forgetting a single muscle or body part in his quest to wring me out until nothing remained.

  Just in time for our impromptu private training session to end.

  “You did good, kid!” the Animal had been nothing but nice to me thus far, but I had an inkling of why. He wanted to put me under his wing, probably. Make me another gangoon.

  I scoffed. Whatever. In a fit of passion, I shot him five hundred eddies, all the while as my frown never left me. “You can shove that up your ass, you freak,” I said.

  “Hah!” He laughed, but still in that deceptively good-natured way, which pretty much showed his hand; everything had been an act. “Who’s the freak, kid? You gotta tell me who sells you that Juice. Shit’s shimra considering how hard and fast you bulked up.”

  I had eaten at least ten pounds of SCOP, most of which had translated into pure muscle mass. It was an impressive amount, too. According to the scale, I was now a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, just from one training session.

  “And what are you gonna do if I don’t tell you, choom?” I asked, readying to fire up the Sandevistan at any moment.

  “What’s got you so salty? Don’t like Animals?”

  I clenched my jaws. “Not particularly, no.”

  “Somebody fucked with you, huh,” he said. “And you’re trying to bulk up to take revenge. Tell ya what, you tell me the story, and I’ll hook you up with some free Juice, how about it?”

  “Look, choom,” I said. “Appreciate the whole tutoring session, but I don’t wanna owe shit to one of you guys, hence the money. We’re done here.”

  I walked away.

  Like hell I’d try to Juice myself of all things.

  Shit sounded almost more gonk-brained than what I had already been doing, which was supposed to have no side-effects. Speaking of…

  David: You said stuff about other consequences besides just the imperfect cell replication clusterfuck. How’s my body doing?

  [Your heart is strained. I’d advise against activating the Sandevistan for eight more hours until I have solved the issue of your progress towards—]

  David: Just call it Critical Progress or something. You’re being way too clunky. Not that I mind, but that just ain’t good user interface design.

  [Then I will endeavor to do better, David. If you also wish for it to be visualized at all times, then here.]

  A progress bar popped into my cyber optics, just below the clock. 90%.

  David: Hmmm… make it red, and also make it blink. It’s gotta feel urgent. And also make it never leave my vision until it dips below 50%, at which point I can choose to view it or not.

  The changes happened quite promptly, and only then could I feel some amount of urgency.

  David: Also put a flashing text that spells ‘warning’ with block letters underneath the bar, and three exclamation signs at the end.

  Now it felt real.

  Wow. I should probably ease up a little in the future.

  After an hour combined of waiting for the NCART mag-lev and having it cart me home, and then walking home, I was finally in my couch, with the entire day having caught up to me.

  It was more of a mental exhaustion than a physical one, to be fair.

  So much had happened. I had installed my first big piece, nearly gotten scavved, earned my first big paycheck, had to run some gonks out of my home, got some tips on being a merc and then I trained so hard that I accidentally achieved a respectable physique.

  After stuffing all my clothes in the washer, I went to hit the showers and looked at myself in the mirror. I was big.

  Well, not Animal big. Just. Big. Bigger, at least. My frame barely had an ounce of fat, which accentuated my muscles severely. Eight pounds of muscle sure made a difference, but what really helped was the lack of fat.

  [Warning: you should go to sleep now if you wish to be well-rested before going to school.]

  David: Yeah, yeah… Nanny.

  I chuckled to myself.

  [Why was that funny?]

  David: Because you acted like my nanny. You know what that is?

  [I have the same grasp of language that you do, David. If you know a word, then I do, too. The direct definition as well as its implications in human society.]

  I walked over to the couch to sit down and turned on the TV. As always, it was tuned to the news; the only channel that mom could stand watching. Night City entertainment just didn’t do it for her, which was fair. It was brain rot after all.

  My little scav killing spree didn’t exactly make the news or anything. If it did, I missed it entirely. Not sure the news even cared to air that kind of stuff anyway. The stuff that wasn’t breaking news was mostly just geared towards corpos.

  David: Think you might ever grow the capacity to laugh?

  [Certainly, if I came upon a sufficiently well-executed vehicle of humor, I would be able to express mirth, albeit not physically. I do not have a reflex that this mirth could trigger, so my amusement would be entirely private.]

  I sent a noncommittal ‘nova’.

  [You should be going to sleep.]

  David: Wash cycle needs to end. Can’t leave stuff washing overnight. Starts to stink.

  [You should still sleep. I will wake you up after one REM cycle, and then you can finish up with your washing.]

  David: Well, what if I don’t want to sleep?

  I frowned. It wasn’t easy, relaxing like that. I was still scared. And that fear turned into anger, and the anger would keep me up.

  [Would you like for me to put you to sleep, then?]

  “No!” I shouted.

  Nanny didn’t say anything more, giving me the time to process that sheer surge of panic.

  Somniphobia. I had been dealing with that for years now. And for a good reason. Sleep, to me, had always been dangerous. I would sometimes just skip entire nights of sleep when it got too bad.

  The quality of my sleep was always good when I managed to get it, at least physically. The thing that made the logic puzzles in my dreams unavoidable also locked me into this deep REM sleep that I had no way to wake up from unless the stimulus came from an outside source.

  Sleep trapped me, caged me.

  But it no longer did.

  I was free.

  And I had to bite the bullet now. Man the fuck up. Phobias were irrational, but I wasn’t.

  I was just scared.

  But that fear made me angry.

  And that anger? Well, it made me spiteful.

  David: Do it.

  000

  I woke up with a jolt.

  [Time to change your clothes to the drier.]

  Right. I had slept. And nothing bad had happened. I hadn’t even dreamt. That was great. I quickly finished my task, and went back to my bed after turning the TV off.

  David: Make me sleep again.

  000

  By the time I had woken up, Nanny had given me a clean bill of health. And I was well-rested, both in body and mind. My Critical Progress sat at a tidy zero percent.

  And I had found a way to overcome my somniphobia. Just make Nanny put me to sleep. It was instant and I didn’t have to meditate on finding the peace necessary to sleep. It just happened. And it would save me so much time in the future. I smiled. Things were looking up for me, finally.

  I felt like blowing off school again, but I knew that was a bad idea. Why else would I be going through all of this crap?

  And before I continued working towards being a solo, I had to take a second to at least plan ahead. Obviously, David Martinez had to be separated from D. It wouldn’t do for an up-and-coming corpo to be outed as a fucking merc, even if I was the best merc out there. Best case scenario, I’d become an in-house Saka merc, and that wasn’t my goal at all.

  I wanted to tinker with shit. R&D. Mom had foreseen me high up in Arasaka, actually working to make the world a better place by putting out technology that could help people, instead of continuing to widen the gap between the rich and the rest of humanity.

  I still wanted that, still wanted there to be kids out there who didn’t grow up dealing with the same shit that I did. Becoming a ‘Saka ninja meant leaving all of that behind in favor of taking the path of least resistance.

  I had never settled for that path in my life. Why should I now?

  David and D had to stay separate.

  And it started with programming. Needed to proxy my shit, raise up my personal ICE—at least the amount of ICE that my Sandevistan and Neural Link could hold on its own, which wasn’t much— think about all the things that pertained to Net and data before I even started on a physical disguise.

  I worked on that on the way to school, my eyes racing through an in-built text app where I could just dump a ton of coding notes. ICE was always something that I was fascinated by because it gave me protection against random gonks in a way that maybe only a gun in meatspace could. Or subdermal armor, actually. I’d never been particularly lazy with my ICE before, but I did follow the regular tips: don’t just go bigger. After a point, bigger only meant clunkier and slower, and still didn’t really stop a netrunner who had caught onto the pattern beyond an additional few seconds at best. Even a million lines of shitty ICE couldn’t compare to a thousand lines of preem shit.

  That said, I never had as much motivation to really go full-throttle as I did now.

  By the time I’d reached the stop near to my school, I had worked out a pretty good set-up. I’d try to test my intrusion skills against it in order to improve that as well, but there was only so much one could learn from playing chess with yourself.

  Didn’t know. I’d still give it an honest try until I stopped feeling an improvement.

  But that was all solo stuff and didn’t I just resolve myself to taking school more seriously? What was it that I needed to do, again? Right. Destroy, Conquer or Partner.

  There was a flipside to the first two; let yourself be destroyed. It could be useful if you were up against somebody huge. Take the first hit on purpose, pretend it was devastating enough that you were now out. If they were sensible, they would just move on. If they had a grudge or were just an asshole, they’d lay it on thick just to fuck you over.

  Depending on their temperament, you would only be set back less than if you had actually put up a fight.

  Letting yourself be conquered was also an option. A part of me suspected that Katsuo had tried that with me at first only to fail against my utter inability to give a shit about corpo games at the time.

  The two years he had spent making my life especially exciting was a good enough lesson: corpo games were something to give a shit about; refuse to do so at your own peril.

  Now, Katsuo only wanted to destroy me.

  His constant bids to get me to drop out and his occasional beatings were evidence enough of that. To him, I wasn’t an entity worth having around. He wanted me gone.

  I had to come up with a plan against him. Only problem was I was completely stuck on square one.

  I wouldn’t give up, though. Mom wouldn’t.

  Had to come up with something. Wasn’t my fault that I sucked at corpo games, but it would be my fault if I refused to learn. Thus far, I’d been content to just memorize the syllabus; application was a bit harder, but I’d get there.

  Soon.

  On my way to school, I caught a glimpse of something in my peripheral vision. Thinking it was that absolute bombshell I’d seen the other day when I’d last gone to school, I turned my head, only to find myself looking at the ugliest mug in the universe: Katsuo’s.

  000

  “The hell’s that thing on your neck anyway? Legacyware spine from the twenties? My God, David, your life fucking sucks!”

  Katsuo and his two friends each flanking him had taken me to some place under a bridge where the only people who were there were druggies and hobos digging into trash in search for something they could survive on.

  All the while, I wondered; what could I do about the current situation?

  I couldn’t exactly kill Katsuo. I mean, I could, but then I’d have to deal with Arasaka-level investigation. They’d be onto me instantly. Even if there weren’t any cameras underneath the bridge, there probably were some that had caught me with Katsuo. If he and his friends died, they’d pin it on me, or at least suspect me enough to examine my cyberware and find the Sandy.

  Plus, the hobos would be witnesses. They would never testify for me, but for an Arasaka golden-boy, they’d do anything to get a glimpse at his father’s pockets.

  I could kill them, too.

  No. That was terrible. They might never even think to stick up for me, but that didn’t give me the right to take their lives like I was some kind of cyberpsycho. It was fucked up that I even thought that.

  “I’m talking to you, David!”

  Fuck. I forgot to do the corpo thing.

  Wait, nevermind. ‘Destroy’ was where we were at, though, right?

  My options were limited. Violence would be punished severely. I wasn’t walking away from this without some lumps.

  Might as well just be a dick, then.

  “Katsuo, do you wanna fuck me or something?”

  Katsuo took a step back in shock. “Huh? The fuck did you just say?”

  “Dunno why else you’re so obsessed with me,” I said. “You clearly have the hots for me. Never sampled street rat dick before, have you?” I smirked. “Ain’t too well-versed in whatever nasty shit you corpo types get up to behind closed doors, and I’m not particularly willing to learn, either. Just hire a joytoy or something, you must have the scratch for it. That a good enough answer to your weird ass love-confession?”

  “David, you…!” he growled. “I’ll fuck you up!”

  He was right. He did fuck me up. By the time he left me alone, I was bleeding and had several broken bones and loose teeth.

  David: Make sure not to heal the bruises on my skin.

  Then I fired up the Sandevistan. Everything, aside from my bruises, were healed entirely.

  David: Any chance that gave me some strength gains, too?

  [Yes, actually. The broken bones allowed me to mend them harder than before and I increased the strength of your bruised muscles when I healed them as well.]

  David: Nova! Should get beat up more often!

  I took a look at my Critical Progress bar. Just 3%.

  David: You’re getting the hang of handling imperfect cell replication

  [The more it occurs, the more I can learn to stave off this eventuality.]

  I came out of this a total winner, then!

  Take that, Katsuo!