As I walked into Misty’s Esoterica, my eyes were narrowed in suspicion, and my hand gripped the iron inside my jacket pocket. The place smelled like a different incense than it had on my last visit. Just like the previous time, the lady started to smile welcomingly towards me before pausing as she saw me more clearly. Her eyes saddened and became slightly concerned. She eyed the hand inside my jacket pocket holding my piece.

  “I need to talk to Viktor.”

  My childlike voice contained a hardness unsuited to it.

  She just nodded and gestured me through. I stalked my way through the back door and down the stairs to Viktor. When the old man turned to look at me as I entered, his face fell into what seemed like a well-worn visage of tired sadness.

  “Yeah kid, what is it?”

  I eyed him, looking for the ill-hidden scheming and malicious intentions so common among those who seek to use children like me. With time, I’d come to see them easily in the faces of adults. I may not like people or want to spend time with them, but I wasn’t stupid. I watched. I saw other kids disappear after talking to the wrong person, after being taken in by bad debts and honeyed words. Their faces—their eyes almost always gave it away. Even if their faces and words masterfully hid their covetousness, maliciousness, and other ill intentions, the cold eyes would give them away. Almost every time.

  I saw nothing in Viktor that twigged my highly tuned senses. I didn’t understand.

  “Why?”

  Viktor raised a silent, questioning eyebrow.

  “Why did you lie to me? Why did you chip me with ware I can’t pay for? What do you want?”

  He sighed and dragged a hand down over his face, the exact same affectation as the last time we talked.

  “Kid. Niko. I didn’t have anything cheaper in stock, and you didn’t have the eddies for it. But you had something. Some cash, some trade. I can’t be seen handing out charity. But if some random kid—some random kid who I don’t expect to ever see again—gets more than he paid for? And even he doesn’t know? Then, no one else needs to know either. If I can make it a little more likely for a kid to live into his teens without drawing a crowd crying for free chrome, then I will.”

  It made some sense, but charity wasn’t something I was familiar with. I’d yet to experience more than a few eddies thrown to a crippled beggar. But I didn’t like this debt hanging over my head.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Kid, just let it go. If you wanna pay me back, live long enough to come back in a few years. We can talk about it then.”

  I shook my head, “No. How much?”

  With another sigh, he exasperatedly told me, “20k.”

  I furrowed my brows, “I read that they cost 20,500 together. What about the optics I gave you? Don’t they pay for some of it?”

  Viktor shook his head, “The optics you gave me were worthless. They weren’t taken out properly using the internal release mechanism. The only reason the total isn’t higher is because the chrome I chipped was preowned. Previous owners outgrew them. And you forgot surgery costs. I don’t just charge the market price of cyberware and leave it there. I still need to make a profit. Anyways, I don’t expect you to pay me that back anytime soon.”

  I just blinked for a moment, taking that in.

  He continued, “Now, let go of that iron in your pocket and come over here so I can give you a checkup. I didn’t expect you to actually show up again, but since you’re here…”

  He gestured to the operating chair and turned to grab a datapad. I let go of the synthetic handle of the Nova, warmed by my hand and made my way over to the chair.

  “Internal release mechanism? I brought two more pairs of optics.”

  He rolled over to me on his stool, holding a datapad. With his free hand—covered in that spindly mechanical glove—he brandished a tool extending from the end of his middle finger. It was a three-pronged gripper with a thin rod protruding from the center.

  “Yeah kid, internal release mechanism,” he repeated. “If you don’t use a tool like this, the optic nerve and the whole sensor suite inside the socket won’t be disengaged properly. See this rod here?” He tapped the thin metal piece. “That slides into a lock in the optic’s core, releasing the nerve interface and the hydraulic clamp on the eye’s anchor points. If you just cut the nerve, you destroy the nerve connector, the data bus, and half the microcontrollers inside. Makes the thing completely worthless to resell or reinstall.”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  The tool whirred as it spun in place. He shrugged, “Some low-end optics don’t even have that mechanism, but anything big-name or half-decent is locked tight to the socket. Pull it out wrong, you break the sensor arrays, fry the onboard encryption, and leave half the muscle anchors behind. That means no one can reuse it—not for parts, not for anything—except maybe scrap metal. So, if you scavenged those two pairs the same way… well…”

  He set the tool aside and pulled up a file on his datapad, nodding at the operating chair. “Anyway, that’s why what you brought in didn’t knock a single eddie off your bill. Now sit down so I can see how your new ware’s working out.”

  I sat down and asked, “Can you show me how to do it right?”

  As he opened an exterior panel on my leg, he asked, “Why? So you can go flatline some gonk and take his optics? I’m not looking for scav money if that’s how you’re planning on paying me back.”

  I looked away and didn’t answer immediately.

  After jacking a cable attached to his datapad into a port he’d revealed, Viktor reached out and grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to look him in the eyes, “Niko, if you go down that path, you’re going to have a solo kick in your door before you know it. And no one will mourn the death of a scav.”

  I knew that, but I had no clean way to make money. I was a child with no rep, no money, and no connections. No one wanted me. I needed a way to make a living. Begging was dangerous and shit money. Beggars died daily to gangoons wanting to test out a new piece, to cops looking to reduce the homeless statistics in their area, to upstart gangs looking to initiate a new member. No one cared. If I had a connection in a gang, I could deal some Glitter or stims, but if I tried to do it alone, I’d be killed by whatever gang that had claimed the turf I was dealing on.

  Stealing was the only option, and honestly, cyberware was some of the most valuable stuff I could get my hands on without pissing off the wrong people. Out of every four people, one would have some chrome, even among the poor and destitute. Flatlining someone no one cared about and pawning off their cyberware was the easiest way I could think of to make money quickly. It was dirty, despicable work reviled by society at large only undertaken by the desperate and amoral.

  I can find other ways. Door locks aren’t that hard to get through. I’ve cracked open so many rides for the Rats that I could get into a junker with my eyes closed. Apartments aren’t much harder. I just won’t have other people to choose my targets for me. If I steal from the wrong guy, I’m fucked. But I guess I’ve just been lazy. I haven’t been thinking much. I mean I’ve been pretty fucked up so it’s alright, but I can case a target, right? I just need to watch ‘em. But, I won’t be making the sort of eddies I need to pay Viktor back like that. I guess if he won’t call me on my debt, should I just let it go? Ahh, fuck. I don’t know what to do. Is he going to hold this over me? Should I just walk away? What if he’s for real? Fuck. If this isn’t all just to get me in his debt or something, then he’s helped me once already. Maybe I could at least learn what he’s doing with my leg. Should I ask?

  I nodded and looked down, “I… I know… I won’t do it. I’ll find something else. Can… Can you show me what you’re doing?”

  I didn’t see it, but his eyes softened for a moment at my words, “Sure kid, look here.”

  He moved the datapad so I could see, “First off, I’m running a quick diagnostic on the servo alignment. See those lines here?” He tapped a series of pulsing bars on the screen. “They measure real-time stress distribution along your footplate. If any section’s taking too much strain, it’ll throw off your gait—lead to a limp or worse.

  Next, I’m checking the feedback loops for the neural interface.” He brushed a thumb across a glowing schematic of cables and connectors. “We gotta make sure your nervous system is reading everything right—temperature, pressure, balance. If the connection’s jittery or delayed, you might not feel a step till after you’ve taken it. That’s how ankles get twisted, and kids wind up back under my knife.”

  Then there’s the power draw test.” Viktor pointed to a graph. “This line here shows how much juice the limb’s pulling compared to your baseline. If it spikes too high, we gotta calibrate, or you’ll burn out the actuators.”

  I frowned slightly. I didn’t know some of the words he used, but I thought I mostly understood. With some confusion, I pointed at a readout, “I see the lines saying how much energy the actuators have,” I said the unfamiliar word carefully, “but how are you making sure they each get the right amount? Don’t they have to change whenever my weight shifts? Like, if I run or jump, wouldn’t that need more energy than just walking?”

  Viktor’s eyebrows raised in surprise, “Yeah… You’re right, they do. Everything needs to be recalibrated on the fly to match your intentions. It’s basically a constant balancing act moderated by a small microcontroller inside the limb. See, it checks your weight distribution, nerve impulses—like how hard or fast you’re trying to move—and environmental data.”

  He tapped a line of text on the screen. “So if you take off running, the system sees the stronger signals from your neural interface, picks up the extra force when your foot hits the ground, and automatically ups the power to the actuators. If all that data doesn’t line up or calibration’s off, you’ll end up tripping or blowing a servo. That’s why we watch these readouts here,”—he pointed—“to keep everything in sync. You just walk, run, or jump, and the limb adjusts itself, no second-guessing on your part. But if you push it too hard without proper calibration, you’ll be back here for a full rebuild in no time.”

  I nodded hesitantly to show that I mostly understood. Again, I didn’t understand several of the words he used, but I was familiar enough with how cyberware worked from my past tinkering to get the gist.

  Viktor looked at me thoughtfully, “Kid, you’ve spent some time messing around with cyberware, right?”

  My eyes narrowed slightly in suspicion as I answered with a drawn-out, “Yeaaah?”

  “Well, how about this? I could use a hand in here every now and then. If you come by, say, three days a week for the next six months, we call this debt you’re insisting on cleared? What do you say?”

  He held out his hand to shake. I hesitated. Was he trying to work an angle? How was he going to use this against me? I couldn’t think of anything particularly likely. Nevertheless, the allure of learning more and getting rid of my debt was just too tempting. I felt something unfamiliar in my chest, a lightness, a longing, a desperate hope suppressed by well-practiced skepticism and suspicion.

  Fuck it.

  I reached out. His large hand engulfed mine as we shook.