Ko ran a few quick scans on Deckard while he worked. Her equipment was no longer in danger of melting down now that he was awake and in control. She still couldn’t do any scans through his braincase; however, she hadn’t brought the equipment along for that anyway. Regardless, his nanites gave her all the information she needed at his prompting.
“This is incredible,” She muttered after a few moments of staring at the ink-sheet in silent awe. “They have mapped your brain so thoroughly it’s incredible. They have a record of what your brain looked like before you were shot, though it doesn’t seem to be quite as detailed. The point is, using that as a sort of blueprint, they were able to keep your brain in mostly working order. Pieces died and were then brought back early on.
“I’m guessing that is where the fragmentation and general fuzziness is coming from. As they mapped more of your brain, and I almost want to say, learned what they needed to do, their methods improved. Looking at the scans they took from when you first woke up, versus right now,” She shook her head. “These little buggers might not ever be useful for anything else. They’re too specialized at this point. You’d have to wipe their programming and start over, but one thing is for sure, they know your brain.”
“How’s he doing, recovery-wise?” Trace asked, peering over her shoulder at the image and text that meant absolutely nothing to him.
“Better. They could only do so much from a blueprint. Everything from here on out will be up to Deckard and simply exercising his brain as much as possible. The mental exercise seems to be doing him the most good. Everything else is just a matter of time. That said, if he did lose some memories, they might be gone for good.” She shrugged. “There’s a lot of information here, but I doubt anyone has ever worked on a case like this before.”
“I appreciate you taking the time to look me over, Ms. Devko,” Deckard thanked her politely. “I was indeed worried that I would lose more of myself. Instead, I can be hopeful that I will regain that which has been lost.” The avatar yawned as the eyes flickered shut. He had been struggling to hold on long enough for her to finish going over the data and say something. Now it was time for another nap.
“So, how is Pushman?”
Ko groaned and flopped back onto his bed. “Ugh, he is so annoying now! He will not stop sobbing. Sevorah finally just hit the guy with some tranquilizers to shut him up. I’m not sure we did him any favors when we saved his life. He might thank us eventually, but it certainly won’t be anytime soon.”
Trace thought about that for a moment. “I should visit his apartment again.”
“You just want to grab more of his stuff, since he can’t use it anymore.” She accused him.
“Yup,” He agreed readily, seeing no shame in admitting to what he was going to do.
“Whatever, just don’t take everything. He might not be able to go on jobs anymore, but he still needs to be able to defend himself.”
The two settled back to eat and chat, gradually getting to know one another better a little bit at a time.
***
Trace heaved the new hip-height shelf unit into place. The three on the back wall of the apartment were now filled with all his previously gathered weapons and ammo, along with the new items he had just gathered that morning. The majority of Pushman’s module and weapon armory had now been moved to those three shelves.
The new shorter shelf was where he was going to move Deckard’s braincase setup, along with the 3D printer. He was currently on the desk computer, with the printer on the floor.
It was messy for one thing, and it also kept Trace from using the computer for anything.
His new home was slowly coming together.
With that completed, he finally forced himself to do what he had been putting off since the day before.
He had already read the morning message concerning his skeletal and muscular repair statuses. Both had increased by several points, as expected. The nutrition shots were still working, and Ko had brought him a few more the night before.
Trace opened the G.H.O.S.T. System menu and looked through the menu for the Perks function that he had unlocked the day before. However, there was no new entry in the main menu, or in the subsequent submenus of the existing items. It was as though he had imagined the entire notification.
Luckily, he could go back through them, assuming he hadn’t fully erased the message and re-read them. There was one particular notification that he had not erased due to it pertaining to something he had not seen before. A precaution that worked out this time in his favor.
“I unlocked the hidden function Perks,” Trace mumbled to himself as he went back to the system menu. “Where is it then? I don’t see any Perks?”
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
As if by magic, a new entry appeared at the bottom of the list for a few brief seconds before fading away again.
He concentrated on that spot, and before he could even say the word, the entry reappeared.
“When it says hidden function, it means that seriously. Even after it’s unlocked, you still have to prompt its entry into existence.” Trace was stupefied at how ridiculous that was. It felt kind of cool, but at the same time, it also seemed like overkill. Not that he was going to complain. Supposedly, this system had been created with the idea of everyone using it in mind. Perhaps certain safeguards such as this made sense when you thought about it in that way.
Clicking on the option before it could disappear again revealed a vast list instead of a new submenu. A small message appeared on top of the list, momentarily obscuring it from view.
- Perks are granted to the Administrator when they have shown enough familiarity with a subject that their nanites have completed all pre-requisite connections.
- Perks require a vast number of special and regular nanites throughout the learning and activation process.
- Without an incredible amount of resources at your disposal, you should not expect to unlock more than a few perks.
Trace dismissed the message with a grunt. That explained where everything had gone yesterday. All the nanites he’d been gathering for the upgrades had vanished in an instant.
The list of possible perks was a long one. It was also completely useless. There might have been hundreds of entries, but they were all greyed out with question marks where the names should be. The two sole exceptions were the ones he had already unlocked.
When he clicked on them, he got two pieces of information. The first was the same short description he had received in the original message. The second was a list of requirements to upgrade the perk.
It was nice to at least know that much, but for everything else, he was going in blind.
Closing everything, he readied his pack and guns. While the information the menu had given him was ultimately useless, he still had things he needed to do. The world didn’t stop turning simply because the information he received was less than helpful.
All you could do when that occurred was buckle down and keep on working. Which is exactly what he was going to do. He needed money, lots of it. So, that meant jobs, big ones, small ones, all of them.
More than that, if he was going to be effective, then he needed a partner. A team would be even better, but Trace needed to be realistic with himself. Finding one person you could trust these days was already a miracle. Two was practically unheard of, in his opinion, and more than that was just a joke.
Oddly enough, Trace felt as though he could trust Ko, and to a lesser extent Sevorah, in that way. However, they were non-combatants, so it didn’t count. They were menders; they weren’t meant to be fighting.
The question of the moment was whether or not he could trust Monroe, or rather Flash-Fry, to have his back in a fight.
It was a question he just didn’t have an answer to, and one he wouldn’t without working with the man further. Which is something he would need to do before they went and got that truck if they went and got the truck.
Trace needed to clear his mind, and that meant going to the junkyard and fetching some more sheet metal for the roof. After spending so much time there over the years, the place had turned into his own therapeutic zone of sorts.
Before heading over there though, he was going to take a look at the building he had gone to the day before. He was even bringing along his new sniper rifle just so he could do it from even farther away than he had with the scout rifle.
What he saw after climbing to the top of a building he deemed tall enough had him using the scope and his eyes to zoom in as close as possible. There were bodies everywhere in front of the building. They were scattered all along the road in careless piles.
He would be the first to admit he had probably killed a decent number the day before with his guns. If he was lucky, then maybe that same number with all the grenades he had tossed.
There was a reason he had chosen to leave though, there were simply too many of them. He had given them a decently bloody lip, maybe even taken a finger or two as a result of his attack. Nothing more.
What he was seeing spread across the old, cracked pavement was far more than a missing finger or two.
Someone had gone in after him and taken out their whole fracking head.
Trace took a moment to count but stopped when he reached a hundred. There were still a few more piles still. He had thought this was a small-time gang, but no small-time anything had those sorts of numbers that quickly.
Feeling a little numb, he climbed down and got back into the truck.
The junkyard could wait a little longer. He needed, or at last really wanted, to find out what had happened.
Passing the bar he had spotted as a hangout before, he saw another pile of dead bodies in the street, the first of several that he needed to drive around.
He stopped the truck just shy of the office building and flagged down a nearby kid. “What happened here?”
“Someone invaded their turf yesterday and caused a mess.” The kid told him, while his finger was jammed so far up his nose, searching for gooey treasure, that he was likely scratching his brain at the same time. “Everyone here decided that was a good time to expless-” His nose twitched, and he sneezed, expelling his finger along with a glob of goo, which he promptly plopped between his lips to snack on. “Express their something or other with them.” He shrugged. “I don’t remember the exact words used, but they shot everyone still alive in there.”
Trace edged away from the kid. He had been off the streets for a couple of years by that point and didn’t want to relive the experience by being too close to him.
It didn’t take much thought on his part before he was moving the truck closer to the building. This was his chance to get a few things before the others got to them, if they hadn’t already.
He headed inside after locking the truck and made a beeline for the stairs. Looking around could wait until after he got what he wanted. The server was first, and then the heavier items.
The door to the server room had been opened, and the rack with all the data prisms had been taken. The server itself, however, was still in place. It seemed as though, someone had their eye on his prize as well. Without wasting another moment, Trace unplugged everything and stored it in his duffel bag along with the cables.
Since there was still some room in the bag, he moved about the floor, grabbing all the nicer components he saw. There were bags and small boxes of everything, from micro-capacitors to resistors and switches. They were all basic items, but pieces that were also generally needed in bulk.