Chương 92: Dino's Gig: Project Chimera VII

The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome: Novices Baduf, Majid Harms, and Ed Terlouw. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - Allen Saunders

"Fuuuuuuck," I groaned as I opened my eyes and my Kiroshi's booted up to a ceiling fan, my left eye calibrating half a second before my right. Wait, a fucking ceiling fan? The last time I had seen one of those was when I lived in the ivory towers of Charter Hill. Then I noticed a man leaning over me with an Airhypo in his hands, and I determined that he had just jacked me full of drugs to wake me up.

"There he is," the man said.

"Welcome back, choom." I blinked a couple of times as I wondered who the fuck was the guy standing over me. My overlay loaded with a fragmented pattern, as if it were still processing something, making the room around me render in pieces. After everything finished calibrating, I was able to get a good look at the man standing over me. He had to be in his late thirties, if I had to take a guess; his skin complexion was similar to mine, and he had a ripperdoc glove in his hand.

That explained who he was and where I was. But as I looked him head to toe, I noticed that he had no visible implants. I even scanned him to see if I was just tripping balls after waking up, but nope. This motherucker had no chrome, which was something I had only ever encountered with one other ripper in my life.

"Where the fuck am I?" I asked.

"You're in my clinic in Wellsprings," the ripperdoc said, setting the Airhypo down on the instrument tray beside the chair.

"Name's Santiago Molina. Your chooms brought you in about five minutes ago. The big one carried you through the door while the broody one stayed outside."

"Santiago?" I said.

"Yeah," Santiago perked up.

"Nothing," I said, shaking my head.

"I go by Ghost."

"Okay, que bueno," Santiago said.

"Well, nice to meet you, Ghost. Wish it could be under better circumstances."

"You and I both," I said as another groan escaped my lips.

"Well, Ghost, it looks like you had a rough night," Santiago said.

"Your neural chrome was running hot when they brought you in. Whatever it is you were doing, you ended up pushing right past the redline and kept pushing." I pushed myself to sit up in the chair and felt the room tilt as a wave of dizziness struck me, then left as quickly as it came. My head felt like a fucking cement block, and I could feel the heat around the back of my head. I looked over my own systems real quick and noticed that my SRN was online but running at reduced sensitivity.

Either I fried half my shit when that fucking AI did whatever it was he did to me, or my relay grid was still recalibrating. I tried to do a quick self-diagnostic on my chrome, with my Neural Link returning status codes I had never seen before while the diagnostic failed on everything else. Yeah, I probably fired some shit. Thank fuck that AI didn't turn my brain to soup. I heard a door open, and someone walk in.

It was Torque, and he was still wearing that shitty tactical jacket while carrying around his suppressed Tsunami Kyubi. I did notice that he had unloaded the magazine and the trigger was pinned back, meaning he had cleared it.

"You gave us a fright, kid," he said.

"Yeah, didn't mean to do that," I said.

"I think I'm all good now."

"You're not all good," Santiago said, pulling up a diagnostic screen on his terminal.

"Your neural chrome is running temps that are almost twenty percent above what they should be, not to mention you had some other things wrong with you when they brought you in. I want to run a full diagnostic before I let you walk out of here."

"Look, I appreciate the sentiment," I said, sliding off the examination chair and finding my feet.

"But, no offense, choom, I've got my own ripperdoc."

"Some taken," Santiago said.

"But I understand. Most runners have their guy."

"Yeah," I nodded.

"Everyone has someone they run to with these sorts of issues."

"Then go see your guy," Santiago advised.

"Tonight, if you can. Whatever happened to your rig, it's not something you want to sleep on." He gave me this concerned look, which kinda threw me for a loop considering nobody really gave much of a fuck about somebody else unless it was their choom, family, or output.

"Look, muchacho. The Airhypo I gave you is a cocktail of neural stabilizers and anti-inflammatories," Santiago said to me while waving one of his hands around.

"It'll keep your chrome from overheating for a little while, maybe four or five hours. But after that, you're gonna need to go get yourself a proper diagnostic, o estaras jugando con la Santa Muerte, you're playing with death." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"I got the message, doc," I nodded.

"Thanks."

"Hey, don't forget to pay me," Santiago said.

"That Airhypo is two hundred eddies, and I'm not running a charity." I flicked my hand his way and transferred him the two hundred eddies for the Airhypo. Then Torque and I walked out of the clinic, took a right, then a left, and then went down some stairs to see Moth leaning against the freight van with his arms folded.

"Is everything alright?" Moth asked me.

"Yeah," I nodded.

"Everything is preem. Let's delta." As soon as the three of us got into the van, we started heading towards teh Afterlife. As Torque drove, I listened to the distant sound of gunfire, which was probably from some gang war or whatever. I didn't really keep up with all of the shit that went down in the city unless it posed real danger. But gangers were usually gonks who could hit a giant shitstain while they pissed, let alone while shooting.

I also noticed that there were very few NCPD vehicles on the street tonight, but there were a fuckton of cars on the road. Most likely people trying to leave the city due to what happened yesterday to Sacramento. But where the fuck were they gonna go? Whatever road they took, they would just end up facing the NUSA military one way or another. I slipped my hands in my pant pockets and noticed that I had both of the shards in there with me.

So I inserted my personal shard, which was supposed to copy a lot of shit for me to use or sell at a later date, and contrary to my expectations, it wasn't corrupted or damaged at all. I felt the headache I had gotten when I woke up slowly return, and it only got worse the longer we drove. The silence between the three of us was finally broken by Torque as he asked me a question.

"What happened in there?" I turned my head to look at his eyes through the rearview mirror, noticing that he hadn't turned his head and had kept his eyes on the road.

"There was another runner who had infiltrated the facility offsite," I said.

"He was a Voodoo Boy. Came in right as I was finishing the extraction and was about to pull out."

"And?" Moth asked.

"And he decided that although we weren't there for the same shit, he just had to flatline me," I said, carefully considering my next words so that I wouldn't reveal anything about what happened after I met that Voodoo cunt.

"We fought, and with the Voodoo Boy's fame for diving behind the Blackwall, it was actually a bit of a challenge. Closer than I would've liked in the beginning."

"But you won," Torque said.

"You bet your sweet bippy I did," I said, smiling to myself as I remembered how quickly I shifted the playing field.

"I decided to stop playing by his rules and closed the range. Be the snot out of the fucker after that." Torque glanced at me through the rearview mirror, and I could see the calculation running behind them. I don't know why, but I got the feeling he didn't fully buy into what I was selling and knew I was leaving things out. Thankfully, he chose not to push it.

"Glad you're alright, kid," he said as he turned his eyes back to the road. I leaned my head against the cargo compartment wall and tried to run another self-diagnostic on my Chrome. It seems the ripperdoc was right in advising me to get myself checked as soon as possible, because now I wasn't even getting the information I had when I was in the clinic and instead got an outright error. I could still see the status of my chrome, and could see that it was all online.

But the meta-layer that was supposed to tell me whether all of those functional reports were accurate was telling me to go fuck myself. I tried another diagnostic again, only to get the same shit. Okay, if doing it the regular way won't work, I guess I'll have to do it the old way. I tried a third time, manually specifying each implant in the query string rather than letting the suite poll the full array. Everything came back fine, with my SRN giving me a thermal advisory flag that I already knew about.

However, something new was now going on with my Neural Link. It gave me a status code I had never seen in my life, a string of hexadecimal that none of my chrome knew how to handle. I thought back to HADES' "microscopic fraction." That could be the only possible explanation for what was happening to my chrome. Whatever it contained, it was still doing whatever it was going to do.

Sure, the name HADES didn't really inspire much trust in me, since that was the name of a literal god of the underworld, and this thing was an AI living beyond the veil of the Blackwall that quite literally housed straight-up demons. But the way it acted told me it held no malicious intent towards me. And if it did, I think I would've been done like that Voodoo Boy runner. I closed the diagnostic window and closed my eyes for the remainder of the drive.

I looked at my internal clock when I felt the van take two turns and slow down to a complete stop. It was 2: 30 AM, and there was music blasting outside.

"We're here," Torque said as he killed the engine. I stepped out of the van and took a look around. It seemed like tonight had been a busy night for mercs, as there were a shit ton of them walking around with their iron on display. There was a line to enter the Afterlife as well, and I noticed fixers in the mix. How did I notice that? Well, I saw that one of the people in line was that Faraday guy I had hired to remodel my current home.

However, since all of our biz had been conducted through messages and calls, he didn't recognize me as Torque, Moth, and I walked right past the line and towards the front of it. The people in line were about to talk shit until they saw us reach the bouncer, who stepped aside without saying a word to let us in. The bar was being worked by the same man who had been there the night Dino had made me create my own drink.

He had just finished serving someone a drink when I approached the bar, and before I could even order-"Purple Ghost," Idris said.

"Four ounces vodka, one ounce blackberry, quarter ounce black cherry synth. Three cubes to top it off." I closed my mouth and nodded. He built the drink with ease, his hands moving as if they had a mind of their own. He set a glass in front of me fifteen seconds later, the violet liquid turning white at the edges and around the ice.

"Purple Ghost," I said.

"Every drink needs a name," Idris said.

"Figured this would fit yours quite well." I picked up the glass and took a sip, nodding at the taste. Liquor was beginning to grow on me, and with this headache I had right now, it even served to alleviate it. Moth appeared at my shoulder and glanced at my drink.

"I'd like to try what he is having," Moth said, and Idris quickly made another drink.

"Let me just get a bottle of vodka," Torque said, leaning against the bar.

"Nothing fancy." Idris bent down under the bar and brought out a bottle of glass that Torque almost snatched from his hands and unscrewed the cap to take a long swig.

"Aaahh," Torque sighed.

"Now that's some good shit." We carried our drinks across the floor toward the private booths in the back, towards a private booth Dino had apparently booked. As we opened the bead curtains, we noticed that he wasn't alone. There were three women sitting with him, and all of them were- holy momma bazookas! My eyes quickly locked onto one of the women's bare chests. Her skin was pale, and though she had chrome, none of it was within the immediate vicinity of their breasts.

I was never one to be hooked on those porn BDs or anything, but damn. I forced myself to look away from those holy mountain peaks and look at Dino, who had a bottle in one hand and a boob in the other. He had been enjoying his evening and was not expecting it to be interrupted by biz. But when money calls, all else can go fuck itself. His expression shifted from leisure to attention in a split second as he released the breast he was holding and leaned forward.

He said something to the three women, and they stood up and left the booth with their drinks in hand.