Pain, that was all Trace seemed to be aware of as he came around to consciousness. The feeling in his leg seemed to be missing, though he was distantly aware that it was still there. The same couldn’t be said for his hip, side, or shoulder. Those portions of his body were nothing but pain.
Even before he tried to open his eyes, notifications from the G.H.O.S.T. system began scrolling down from the upper corner of his vision. The majority of which were letting him know that certain poisons had been neutralized as they entered his system. A few were related to the life-saving measures the nanites had performed in their efforts to save his life.
Even as he watched, more notifications continued to appear in relation to the poison that they were neutralizing.
His mind was barely functioning at the moment. It was addled by pain, a likely concussion, and who knew what other issues. Still, eventually, he understood what was going on. The nanites believed that whatever medicine the doctor was giving him was poison, and they were working to neutralize it. Just like they would any other poison.
It took everything he had to force his mind to focus enough to pull up the settings for the G.H.O.S.T. menu. From there, it was a simple matter of finding the option in the appropriate subsetting and disabling it. Still, it took all his concentration and effort just to complete the task.
As soon as he did so, the new notifications stopped rolling in and a cool sense of disconnect began to settle over him. Within moments he was unconscious once more, unaware that Sevorah and Ko had been struggling to hold his screaming body down the entire time.
***
“Were you able to find out anything about the gonk shazbot who did this to him?” Ko asked Monroe quietly, her voice tight with barely restrained fury. She was only now coming to understand how much Trace had begun to mean to her in the short time since they had met. For whatever reason, she had let him in, past her usual boundaries, and now she was paying the inevitable price.
Monroe had a fierce scowl on his face as he shook his head. “The rotten prick fled as soon as he saw me run out of the store. I sent an alert to Revlock, and he said he would send it on to Stick-Point for me.”
“I got it,” Another voice said as someone else entered the conversation. A man approximately in his mid-fifties could be seen walking down the hallway toward them. He was wearing a light-grey three-piece suit, with a long fashion scarf draped down both sides of his chest and a light silver fedora that matched his hair.
“Stick-Point?” Ko wondered, having never met the man before despite Sevorah’s crush on the man.
He nodded and pulled the hat from his head, revealing a full head of slowly greying hair as Sevorah burst from her office.
“Dr-” She coughed and tried again. “Stick-Point, you didn’t tell me you would be coming here.”
“I thought it would be obvious concerning who is the one laying on your table in there.”
She sighed and nodded in acquiescence to his point. Expecting any less of him had been her mistake. She knew that he cared for the boy in the same way that she cared for Devko.
The man’s eyes lingered on Ko. “Would you perhaps be Devko?” She nodded once, hesitantly. “Yes, you will do nicely. I can see why my little Tune, rather Trace, keeps talking about you. Not only are you cute, but you also don’t look as though you have left his bedside for more than a few moments at a time. Though, I suppose the latter could just be a dedication to your profession.”
Sevorah snorted.
“Yes, I thought not.”
Ko blushed and unconsciously let her hand go to the exposed cyberware of her throat.
“You don’t need to be so self-conscious about that, my dear. I doubt he even cares. He mentioned it one time in passing and said it made your voice have an oddly sexy robotic quality.” The man laughed as he spun his hat. “He said he found it confusing. That’s the only time he’s ever mentioned it to me at all.”
Ko blinked and fully grabbed her throat. “My mostly robotic voice is sexy?”
Sevorah shrugged. “I mean, the way it mingles with your paralyzed vocal cords does create a certain amount of husky undertones. Besides, you know the way I installed it was designed to rehabilitate your vocal cords. At some point, they will recover as a result from the constant massages and indirect usage.”
Beside the smaller girl, Monroe shrugged. “It’s alright, I guess. You’re a little small for my tastes though. If you were a little taller and had some more muscle on you, then maybe we could talk.”
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
She finally shook her head and refocused on the question that had started the entire absurd conversation. “You said you got his message? Do you have any idea on who might have been the one responsible for doing this?”
“I do. He is a tier one edger who has been doing the job for just over a year. According to him, he thought breaking into the store in that fashion was a smart idea.” Stick-Point walked up to the doorway and looked in on Trace, lying unconscious on the table. His right arm was missing, and the entire right side of his body was a mess of holding pins and casts. “No one ever said those who entered the edger field were smart, but this move was beyond the pale.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Sevorah asked. “We’ve stabilized him for the moment, but doing anything more than this will require credits.”
Monroe growled at her. “I already told you, woman! I’ll sell everything we brought back from our trip. We had planned on keeping most of it, but if we sell it all, it should fetch between thirty-five and fifty thousand credits.”
Stick-Point raised an interested brow. “What exactly did you bring back?”
“A ton of ammo in their cans, and a bunch of mixed supplies in boxes. The big earner is something we wanted to keep for ourselves.” He scratched at his throat, imagining what he was giving up on. “We brought back hundreds of cans of food. Some are newish, within the last thirty years or so, but there are others that are labeled as being from fifty and even a couple of from seventy years. None of them were bulging either, so they’re all good to go.”
The three others hissed in appreciation and awe at that.
“What about the arms we retrieved the other day?” Ko asked her employer at last.
“No good. They have to be used with their specific NetConnects. Which I admit are good, but they have layers of security. I haven’t been able to check the programming on either item, yet beyond a few basic tests.”
Ko nibbled at her lower lip before coming to a decision. “Trace and I have a friend who can probably help with that particular problem. I’m not sure, I’d have to ask, and it could take a day or three, but I believe they can do it. We’ll just need to pull out the best items for him to work on.”
The mender crossed her arms and began pacing up and down the hallway as she thought. “Are you sure your friend can unlock them, and remove all traces of the original owners and corporation control programs?”
Ko shrugged, and then slowly nodded.
“Talk to your friend. I want a definite answer on this one,” Sevorah told her. “If they can clean up one of the NetConnects and an arm for him, then that will drive down the cost a lot. We’ll only need to replace the shoulder joint, along with a few bones, and add some synth-muscle to reinforce everything.”
Her apprentice winced, turning to Monroe. “You better hope you can get the full amount for that food and ammo.” The supplies probably weren’t worth all that much.
Stick-Point coughed. “I am unable to offer monetary aid to Trace. No job broker is allowed to deal with any edger in that fashion. Otherwise, we could simply raise up our favored edgers with all the best gear and modules. However, you just so happened to have brought back a good that I am allowed to purchase without notifying my peers. The cans of food. Unfortunately, the ammo you will still need to sell on your own.”
Sevorah grinned and turned to Ko. “Grab the best ones from the freezer and get your friend working on them. I’ll go order the items we need to finish up his surgery. You two,” She pointed to Monroe and Stick-Point. “Go complete your business and then come back here. I’m going to need that money to buy the synth-muscles. I’ll need to take some measurements of his existing bones in the places we are going to be replacing them. Lots to do.”
She left in a sudden flurry of activity.
“You heard her, get moving.” Ko clapped her hands and ran to their cold storage. She was going to fetch some of the dead cyberware pieces for Deckard to look at first. After he had played around with those pieces, then she would bring him the real thing.
***
Deckard was sitting on the counter of her apartment, his avatar looking incredibly bored. Without the 3D printer project to keep him busy, he had nothing else to do. What was worse was that Ko didn’t have a desk computer or anything else for him to interface with. All he could do was sit there for hours on end and think.
There were benefits to be had in the progress of defragging his mind and fragmented memories. However, overall, it was dull. His mind wanted stimulation.
Still, he found himself startled when Ko burst into the apartment with a long duffel bag that he soon learned contained an arm and a bare NetConnect. It only took a couple of minutes for her to relay everything that had happened to him.
He agreed to help instantly, only partially because of how bored he was. The NetConnect was plugged into him, and the arm, in turn, connected to it through the test connection port.
He delved into the code of the NetConnect first, and it was here that he ran into a curious problem. The device was using a kludged together OS. It was a mix of the old-school programming language he liked and that infernal new programming language that he had already come to despise. In fact, the longer he looked at it, the more obvious the changes became.
The OS proper had never actually been updated. It was just that shizz-filled programming language covering everything. They had overlayed all the original pieces with a fancy-looking interface and then called it a day. Even this supposedly corpo-locked-down version was no better. All it actually did was prevent the user from accessing certain items in their updated interface. It did nothing to lock away the functionality of the original OS because it couldn’t.
The people in that day and age could still learn to program in the old style. He had talked to Trace about it and knew the information was available on the learning modules he possessed. They were simply being lazy and didn’t.
A rather poor showing for a corporation with enough power to be playing around with aberrations. Supposedly, none of this was that corporation’s specialty. Still, he found it rather hard to believe that they could be this… Ignorant? He wasn’t even sure, really. When the incompetence happened at such a high level as this, what did it actually signify?
Fund embezzling? Lack of awareness?
There were many options, really. All that truly mattered was that it meant he would be able to fix the problem with little actual issue. Eventually, he would need to return to the OS and create an actual update for it, if for no other reason than because now it would bug him until he did it.