Chapter 12

It was just before noon as we walked up to Doc’s ripper shop, and I was looking at my inventory avatar for what seemed like the hundredth time in the past hour. Bright pink hair perfectly matched my Sakura Pink trench coat over my red McDonald’s T-shirt. I would not have chosen to look like this. But I had to admit, it was pretty striking, and I fit in quite well with the colorful natives of Noir City. Sara seemed overly proud of herself and was now discussing with me her own look’s impending upgrade.

“If I hadn’t gone with Sakura Pink for your hair I might have done that myself…Suppose I could go blue like Lizzy, that’s a good look for sure. Hmm, but Maria’s purple curls were great too…Too many dang choices.” She was saying as Doc’s garage opened up for us on our approach. The garage closed behind us as we crossed over to the sole door and opened it just as the garage hit the ground.

We walked into Doc’s machinery filled operating theater and Doc, as per usual, came sliding out of a back corner on his wheeled chair. “Alright, so some subdermal armor today right?” asked Doc brightly as he came to stop by his ripper chair.

“Actually, Doc, I picked up some chrome I was looking to get installed as well if you wouldn’t mind taking a look?” I asked.

“Huh? Oh, sure, no problem,” he waved me towards the autopsy table. “Course, there’ll be a small fee for extending your appointment. More chrome installed means more of my time, ya know. Don’t have anything else scheduled yet for today though, so it’s no problem.”

“Excellent,” I said as I pulled off my backpack and upended it onto the table, dumping out metallic pink bones to clank on the table.

“Oh? Sakura knockoff huh? Haven’t seen one of those in awhile, they don’t tend to-” Doc trailed off as he began scanning the bones with his wand.

“Yeah, Doc, good chance those are the real deal. You might not want to mention to anyone that you saw these. People would literally kill and/or torture you just for information on them.

Doc was gaping, his mouth opening and closing without making a noise. Finally he managed to utter. “Sakura Tier 3 IA?! Kid, do you have any idea what you have here?!”

I smiled, “Yep, straight up awesome chrome. Chrome that you’re going to forget you ever saw in the hopes that nobody kills you for those scans you’re taking. Chrome that I want you to stick inside me ASAP. No better place to hide it as far as I’m concerned.” I laughed.

Doc’s expression was quickly turning serious. “10 thousand creds to keep my mouth shut. Non-negotiable.” He stared at me until I sent him the creds. “You’re right, this is the finest chrome I’ve ever personally seen. Anyone finds out you have it and they’ll scav you faster than you’d believe possible. As for the install…hmm,” he stared at his tablet as he pulled the skull to the front of the table and thoroughly scanned it with his wand from every side. “20 thou for the install. You’re fortunate, the bones are almost perfectly sized for you. Which is damned lucky because I can’t resize these. Hmm,” he held up the tablet in front of me, showing the skull as he pointed at a ring of raised pink metal that ran across the cheekbones and over the bridge of the nose. “Normally when doing a skull job you just split it down the middle and close it around the brain but I can’t replicate the microcircuits through the front of the skull, so I’m going to have to cut out the bottom of the skull instead and slide the brain in from beneath. Should be able to solder it together with some Titan Alloy. Hmm, I take it back. It’ll be 25 thousand. You’re paying for that titan alloy as well for the soldering, and this guy had very minimalist features. I can remodel the bone of the face with even more titan alloy to retain your facial features, but yeah that’ll be yet another 5 thousand…fascinating stuff. I always wanted to try something like this. Looks like the IA is in perfect shape, still got all the intracranial relay strands intact like the brain was just eaten away and left the exposed nanowires behind. This is damn clean work, just like that Samsung IA yesterday... If this wasn’t what it is, I’d ask where you got it from…but I very much don’t want to know.” Doc sighed. “Any other insanely rare chrome we’re installing today? Oh, and do you still want the subdermal?”

I’d explained the chrome I’d found in that abandoned apartment to Sara over lunch, so she wasn’t caught completely by surprise, but listening to Doc I could see her eyebrows climbing a bit.

“Ah, yes, almost forgot.” I pulled the nanomachine organ out of my pocket and set it on the table. “Might as well toss this into me while you’re at it, think I’ll hold off on the subdermal for now though, don’t want to over do it.” I said cheerfully. Cyberpsycosis was a possible issue, though I hadn’t seen anything about it in my Cyberware tab. It was definitely included in the game, and I didn’t want to wake up crazy. I’d seen some beta testers purposely add too much chrome to see what happens…and it wasn’t pretty.

Doc turned his wand to the chrome I was holding and he seemed to be making little high pitched noises right at the edge of human hearing as he read through the scans on his tablet. Finally he just seemed to slump and turned to me. “1000 creds. That’s double what I’d normally charge for such a simple install, since it just needs to be set in place around your aorta, but I’ve never seen anything like this before and if there are any complications I’m getting paid up front for all the install work just in case you die from some booby trap left in it that I couldn’t possible predict. Your sister can keep the chrome in the event of your death, but yeah I’m getting the creds up front.”

“Perfectly reasonable Doc,” I responded. “Can we get that installed right now?”

Doc consulted his tablet and clicked through a few menus. “Hmm, looks like it’ll take my equipment at least 10 minutes to burn through the bottom of the skull with a large enough opening for your brain…I’ll need to remove the IA first…hmm…” He considered his tablet silently for a minute as he continued to scroll through data. “Yeah, sure, should be doable. We can do the nanomachine organ while we wait on the skull and jump right into the skeletal installation immediately after.”

He picked up the skull and zipped across the room on his chair to what appeared to be an empty glass cabinet. It seemingly opened for him at his approach, the glass sinking down into the metallic base, and he placed the skull neatly inside. The glass zipped back up, leaving it enclosed, and a series of small robotic arms in the cabinet went to work. In less than a minute both sides of the IA had been removed from the skull and set aside. Then the robotic arms picked up the skull and a bright purple flame jetted out of one of the arms and began cutting into the bottom of the skull. Doc zipped back over to us and picked up the thick metallic pink ring that was the nanomachine organ. “Take a seat on the table and we’ll get this installed. By the time we’re done with that I should have the skull prepped and we can get the rest installed too. But first things first, kid…Ahem…”Doc rubbed his index and middle finger against his thumb. “Install fees come to 31 grand.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I smiled and sent the full 31000c, even as I inwardly winced at spending more than a third of my fortune just on install fees. Damn, and that doesn’t even include the 10 grand bribe to keep his mouth shut. I gave Sara a nod that she returned as I made my way over to the chair in the center of the room and took a seat.

“You’re gonna wanna remove all your clothes, kid. It’s not strictly necessary, but my chair will cut through everything you’re wearing when it starts the surgery if you don’t.”

“Ah, right, should have thought of that.” I muttered, embarrassed, as I started taking everything off, feeling a blush rising on my cheeks as I stripped in front of the Doc and my sister. Nothing Sara hasn’t seen before, what with changing your fucking diapers while you were in a coma, man. I told myself. And the doc could probably build a scale model of every organ in your body with the scans he’s taken, so yeah…Sara walked over and I handed her my clothes in a roughly folded pile as I stripped down to my birthday suit and took my seat once more.

“Alrighty then,” said Doc as he zipped over to the chair, holding up the pink metallic ring that was apparently to be my first install of the day. “Time to crack you open and perform some experimental surgery! My favorite!” He sounded extremely chipper as the automated arms extended from the chair and ceiling above me.

“Wait, what?” I asked, concerned. “What do you mean experimen-,” but before I could even finish my sentence I felt a needle in my neck and everything went black.

==

“Ugh,” I groaned as I sat up in bed. Wait…bed? What? Where the fuck… I looked around and my confusion only grew with every moment. I was sitting on a very nice bed. A much larger bed than I had in our apartment. Way too big for me to have missed something like this in Doc’s clinic. And Doc’s clinic didn’t have a view out a two story tall window looking out over the city. Holy fuck, now THAT is a view. I could see for miles over the crammed together skyscrapers that made up Noir City, while some jutted up beyond my current height the vast majority of the city lay below me from this vantage. I shook off momentary vertigo and focused on my more immediate surroundings.

There was a door off to the side of the bed, and hopping up I walked over and opened the door to find something of a small workspace inside with a decent sized desk and shelves around the walls. Aside from that it was empty.

Turning back to the bed I noticed a cardboard box on the floor next to it. A quick perusal showed it was the box of stuff I’d kept in my bedroom back in our apartment. Wait, Sara did say she was planning on getting us a new apartment today. Shit, how long was I out? I tried to pull up the time and date on my HUD, but all I could see on my HUD was an odd message displayed top center overlaying my vision.

Internal agent initializing…24%

Well fuck, that’s annoying. Can’t even bring up the GEMA tabs without access to my agent.

I sighed as I made my way to the railing near the foot of the bed. The view out the window was even more spectacular from here, but I tore my eyes away and looked down over the railing to find a rather nice living room. In the corner of the room a fairly large white leatheresque circular couch wound around a matching coffee table, above which floated a three sided holographic TV. The program it was showing appeared to be some sort of battle royale between a large number of small, odd looking, robots. The volume was set fairly low and I couldn’t really make out what was going on without more context than I was getting from the picture. Sara was sitting on the couch, soda can in hand, feet up on the coffee table, watching the program.

“Hey!” I said loudly, interrupting her viewing. She twitched and then spun around in her seat to look up at me with wide eyes. “What the fuck?” I gestured around myself as I looked about with a confused look on my face.

“You’re alive!” she shouted, jumping to her feet.

“Of course I’m alive. We’ve had this discussion.” I pointed at myself. “Immortal. Remember?”

She blinked and a large grin made its way over her face. “Doc said something went wrong with your chrome, and he couldn’t access any of its functions anymore. He did what he could to fix you up, but you didn’t regain consciousness even after he pumped you full of nanomachines to try to get all the connections in your brain working. Said I might as well take you home so you can be somebody else’s problem when you croak. He made sure to tell me that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with fencing your chrome after you died, and made me promise that I wouldn’t even consult with him about potential buyers since he didn’t want to get killed. Mal…he gave you a 1% chance of full recovery and 3% chance of surviving but being fucked up for life.” I could see the questions in her eyes but just shrugged.

“I get the feeling Doc has been wrong a time or two in his life. I feel fine. My chrome is doing something though. I’ve got nothing on my HUD except a message saying that it’s ‘initializing’ and is 24%...” I paused as I noticed a change. “Strike that, 25% complete. How long have I been out? I don’t have a working clock in my head at the moment.”

Sara seemingly consulted her own IA’s clock before answering. “You went into surgery 12 hours ago. Doc was mostly finished after 3 hours, but it took another hour to stabilize you enough for me to take you home…After an hour of just sitting around that shitty apartment I decided that you being back in a coma didn’t change the fact that I hated that place so I called up Lizzy and asked for suggestions on a new apartment. I actually got this place at a bit of a discount because of-” She cut off as loud music started pounding through the wall. “Ahem, because apparently they have trouble keeping this place rented due to the noise next door. I don’t mind it though, and this view…” She looked out over the city, and I could only nod in agreement.

Hmm, so I’ve been out of surgery for 8 hours? Huh, probably the sleep function fixing me up then. Doc was probably right, he just didn’t account for my bullshit healing magic. I smiled to myself. Gema for the win, baby! I addressed Sara as she continued to smile at the window. “Sounds like I’ll basically be out of commision for the next day then while this finishes ‘initializing’, whatever the fuck that means. Since I won’t be able to buy anything without my IA I’d appreciate it if you could hook me up with some food and whatnot while I’m chilling out. You got any plans?” I asked.

“Huh? Oh, right! Yeah I’m planning on going out and getting some guns and clothes and what have you later on. I messaged with Gary a bit and he’s gonna take me out to some of his favorite places and get me kitted out for merc work. You know he was actually a pretty high end merc back in the day. Guess he retired and bought the Gun Garage with some of his savings. Apparently he’s pretty rich. Anyway, he says he knows all the best spots and he’s gonna make sure they hook me up!” She sounded excited and was borderline gushing. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Good, glad to hear it. The subdermal is a good start, but you definitely want the gear to match. I’m gonna try to go back to sleep. As previously mentioned, I don’t find comas to be particularly restful, and I’m oddly exhausted. Have fun!” I gave her a wave as I stood up from leaning on the railing and jumped back into bed. I’d check out the apartment later. I felt physically fine but mentally drained. Stupid IA needs to hurry the fuck up.