Chương 94: The Unseen I

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted." - The Assassin's Creed I really wanted to keep my secrets, maybe even take them to the grave. But in my current situation, I had to be truthful with Vik. So I told him everything while he worked on me. From the moment I had gotten my Kiroshi's chipped in and had pretty much seen a speedrun of the end of the world, to the events HADES had shown me, down to the vault architecture pretty much calling it quits and telling me to go fuck myself.

I told him about the hallucinations I had been experiencing after the cab dropped me off, and even seeing my mom standing by the door. I also mentioned the whispers I was hearing that basically played back on repeat. If he wasn't judging me about any of these things before, he sure as shit was now. I could see it in his eyes.

"That's a nice fairytale, kid," Vik said as he finished working on my head. I turned over and saw him leaning into his chair.

"But to me it just sounds like that fucking Link your ol' pops had me chip you with is finally starting to give way. Though I couldn't really find anything that pointed its way..."

"I know how it sounds," I sighed.

"I mean, come on, Santi," he said, shaking his head.

"You're telling me an AI from something like a parallel universe that ended the world multiple times poured a piece of itself into your Neural Link and is now feeding you visions of a red-haired woman fighting robot dinosaurs."

"He said that he was from a past of this world," I mumbled.

"And when you say it like that, it sounds like I'm slipping into cyberpsychosis."

"Yeah, no fucking shit. It sounds like what it sounds like," Vik said, throwing his arms in the air before planting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward.

"How do you know any of what this thing told you is real? How do you know it's what it says it is? You're a netrunner, for crying out loud. You know better than most people how easy it is to construct a narrative inside a digital space and sell it to whoever you're talking to."

"I know," I said.

"I've been asking myself the same questions since I woke up in a ripper's clinic in Wellsprings. That shit about some Faro Plague, a whole terraforming system with nine subroutines, the supposed savior that came from nowhere as Sobeck and then cloned as Aloy, I know that shit can all be fabricated since there is nothing, historical or whatever the fuck that can prove what I was told."

"So you're taking it on faith," Vik said, running a hand through his hair.

"I mean, I can't just write everything he said as bullshit," I said.

"I mean, with his ability to completely manipulate the environment around us, Vik, I don't think anyone would go to that extent to just spew some bullshit." Vik looked at me for a moment, then stood, walked to the terminal at his workstation, and pulled up a display of the neural diagnostic suite he used for deep-chrome assessments.

"Let me offer you another possibility," Vik said, typing something into the terminal.

"What if this HADES is just another netrunner?"

"A netrunner that can manipulate the Blackwall and rewrite NetWatch architecture in real time?" I asked.

"Why the fuck would that be possible?"

"Why not?" Vik turned from the terminal and looked at me over the top of his glasses.

"I mean, you're living proof of someone who just might be able to do that. Plus, back in the day, there were runners who could interact with the Blackwall directly. There was this one serious runner called Spider Murphy who worked with Johnny Silverhand during the Arasaka Tower hit in 2023, and the things she could do inside a network would make most runners look like script kiddies.

From what I know, she could touch parts of the Net that nobody else could reach and manipulate architectures that were supposed to be untouchable. She was able to do things that the people watching her couldn't explain."

"Yeah, but Spider Murphy was a legend," I said as I rolled my eyes.

"Yeah, but she was still human. A very talented person with skills that she developed over decades of work. And she's been off the grid for years. Nobody knows where she is or what she's doing or if she's still even alive," Vik said before sitting back down and folding his arms again.

"Look. The point I'm trying to make is that you're describing an entity that can manipulate the Blackwall, rewrite architecture, and communicate directly through a runner's Neural Link. That's extraordinary, but it's still within the range of what an extremely gifted human runner has been documented doing.

Maybe this HADES is a runner with capabilities nobody else has seen, who has decided to operate from behind the Blackwall using a persona and a story designed to make themselves appear to be something more than human."

"And what about the other figures?" I asked.

"Shit, I don't know. Maybe they're an underground group," Vik said with a shrug.

"I mean, the Voodoo Boys are a thing, so why can't runners working together from behind the Blackwall be one as well? The only difference is that this group is much stronger and is using fabricated identities and a mythology they've constructed to protect their anonymity. It wouldn't be the first time a group of netrunners built a shared legend to keep people from looking too closely at who they actually were." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

I thought about that for a minute. I mean, Vik's explanation did make sense. Plus, it accounted for almost everything I had experienced without requiring me to believe that an AI from a forgotten past had survived twelve thousand years of drift and arrived behind the Blackwall of our current day and age carrying memories of ending a world just to rebuild it. But they still didn't quite explain everything.

"What about the hallucinations I'm having?" I asked.

"That's where I'm concerned," Vik said.

"It could be cyberpsychosis caused by the code they plugged you with, but it very well could be some virus that is just fucking with your visual and auditory receptors. If it's a virus, it would explain why your self-diagnostic is returning null because whatever was introduced to your firmware is operating outside the parameters your diagnostic was designed to detect." He stood and walked back to the terminal.

"I've run every hardware test I can think of," Vik said.

"You had some circuits cooked, which was causing you to run hotter. I already patched those up, but aside from that, I couldn't find anything."

"So my chrome is fine?" I asked.

"As far as I can tell, hardware is all good," Vik nodded.

"Which means whatever is causing the hallucinations and the diagnostic failures is a software problem, which is why I think you got plugged with a virus or something."

"Can you remove it?" I asked. Vik looked at me and took his glasses off.

"Santi, I'm a ripperdoc. I fix, install, calibrate, and tune chrome." He put his glasses back on.

"But I'm not a coder by any means. What you need is someone who can get inside your firmware and identify whatever foreign code this entity introduced. Then they can either remove it or isolate it so it stops producing artifacts."

"So I need to do it myself," I said.

"Well, if you don't have someone you can trust digging into your chrome's coding, then yeah, you need to do it yourself," Vik nodded.

"And that is a very short list for anybody, let alone a runner with custom firmware that nobody else wrote... You wrote your own firmware, Santi. You're the best person alive to debug it. That's my two cents."

"Thanks, Vik," I said.

"Anytime, kid. The rest is on you." He paused, then added, "And come back after you've dealt with it. I want to run the full diagnostic again once your firmware is clean, just to make sure nothing migrated into the hardware layer."

"I will," I promised.

"How much do I owe you?"

"Only two thousand eddies," Vik said.

"And get some sleep." I sent Vik 2500 eddies for seeing me at such a time, and stepped out to the early morning air. The sun was already up, and it looked as if it was going to be a nice sunny day sicne there were no clouds to see, not that I could see many due to all the buildings around me. As I stepped out of the alley and into the street, the sunlight felt like the light from the world with the blue sky and the red-haired woman. I blinked, and the feeling passed.

I checked my internal clock and saw it was seven in the morning, meaning I had been awake for just over twenty-four hours. I ordered a cab, and a minute later I was watching the city slide past the window. Twice during the ride I felt dizzy and suffered the hallucinations. I saw a flash of green forest that quickly turned into a billboard and a silhouette of one of those animal-shaped machines that turned out to be a construction crane.

The hallucinations had significantly slowed down, and I noticed that while I had been talking with Vik, they hadn't even affected me. By the time I got home, I felt another headache come over me. I walked into the building after feeding a new 94-digit passcode into the door's system. I had updated the G240's ECU with it as well so whenever it pulled up into the parking lot, it would feed it to the system and open Bay 2's door. I climbed the stairs to the third floor and went straight to my room.

I pulled off my boots, pants, jacket, mask, and gloves, threw myself on the bed without showering. I closed my eyes, and a second later, I opened them only to see that I was standing in a flat desert that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The sun was hot as hell, and the air smelled like sand and something else. I noticed people around me. They were thousands, at the least, and they hauled stone blocks with coordination on wooden sleds across a ramp system that climbed the side of a pyramid.

I was staring at an actual pyramid being built by human hands. As I watched them work, I noticed the landscape in front of me shift, and instead of pyramids being built by hands, they were being built by massive machines with humans at the helm, coordinating everything. It was as if I was looking at an alternate history where humans had built a civilization that was considerably more advanced than anyone in my world would have ever imagined.

Before I had even gotten a chance to fully process what I had just seen, I found myself no longer standing in the middle of a desert, but rather on a coastline. The air was warm and humid, my surroundings vibrant with greenery, and there was a structure rising out of the jungle that looked like a cross between a pyramid and a tower. The entire structure was covered with some sort of runes, and there were also carvings of faces and figures I couldn't even begin to define.

And just as abruptly as it had taken place before, I found my surroundings shifting, and I found myself standing in the midst of mountains. It was cold, extremely cold. I looked around and noticed that I was really high up since I could see the peaks of other mountains as if I were standing at their level. As I did, I noticed a terrace system carved into the mountainside with a great deal of precision.

Fascinated with what I was witnessing, I tried to step closer to get a better look, and I noticed that the terrace system carved into the mountainside had a great deal of metal and glass, and it was full of those same ruins I had just seen a bit ago. But before I could get any closer, my surroundings shifted once again, and I found myself on an island, surrounded by a ring of massive stone heads staring outward at the ocean with varying facial expressions.

I watched as time seemed to reverse and the heads appeared to shift, but the scene in front of me changed before I got to see what happened. I knew that I was dreaming, but it all felt so real. The dream held me in the ancient world for what felt like hours, cycling through construction sites, engineering projects, and the accumulated evidence of a species that had built and destroyed.