I laid there for a while just resting my body and munching on staries while watching the silent KAN news broadcast and it’s endless fluff pieces inter-cut with the occasional hard hitting corpo street battle aftermath report or some crime scene breakdown and ACPS response and reassurance that the criminals in question wouldn’t escape justice for long.
Whatever that meant in this city. You either got gunned down at the scene, on the way from the scene or you were free into the wind as far as the ACPS were concerned. Actual investigation was for corporation investigators to do if it was worth their interest, effort and cost. At least until your name or face came up on another crime anyway, at which point you just went back to step one.
You could kill hundreds of poor citizens individually and if you weren’t at the scene of any of the crimes then the ACPS just rolled their eyes, shrugged their shoulders and went back to breaking up protests with flash bangs and warning shots. If those citizens weren’t important to their corps then they’d just be forgotten, written off the budget.
The only justice you would see then would be one of the dead having a family member with enough cash to hire an operator or a gang to hunt the killer down. Unless they did it themselves… But that rarely ended well.
A good number of operator types spent a lot of their time just doing bounty hunting and rarely did other types of jobs. It wasn’t the most common work or the most lucrative but it didn’t make you many enemies and it rarely had a lot of risks when it came to failure, if you didn’t find them then you walked away with a little bad reputation that would blow over quickly and if you killed your target when they were wanted alive then it was unfortunate and you might not get payed but again you just walked away.
It was the kind of work I would take if I was interested in regular combat risk and could carry a grown adult around for a while. At most I could drag one a little at my size, maybe I could use a little hand cart or something. Nah.
An exploded tanker truck was on the screen with a skinny female reported talking about something that had happened to it when my alarm started ringing in my interface. It was time for the surgery. It got up and checked on mom to find her still asleep, fine enough. Heading out the apartment and down a level to the floor below was simple and quick, I buzzed the gate and rang the bell at the first door there on the left and was let in quickly to find a doctor and a assistant waiting there for me.
“Hello, Malcolm is it? Or is it Mal, like Mrs. Marchand said?” The blonde female doctor asked. She was wearing a long white coat and was covered with surgical gear and little devices I assumed were scanners or similar. Tall and white but with blue matte faceplate the same color as her scrubs she wore under the tools from the forehead to the top lip, maybe a medical grade piece from an injury? No idea.
The male, Asian assistant was similar but with just less of everything, although they did have a cyberarm with a lot of unfold-able parts if all the synthskin seams with little black, ceramic edges were anything to go by. No face plate either.
“It’s Mal, hi there. Are you two the doctors working on me today?” I asked.
“We are, yes. I’m Dr. Wood and this is Dr. Nguyen, we’ll be installing your cyberware today once we’ve gone through the pre-op work. Come on in and we’ll go through that.” She said and gestured for me to follow. Nguyen just smiled and me and wandered off to a side room.
I sat down on a couch in the corner of the little living room set up they had, maybe a waiting room? The blonde doctor sat down opposite me and I had a connection request from her on my interface which I accepted.
“So the first things first is overall health and allergies that you know of, I can request some of your medical data from the city system but the rest is with Klearway Medical Systems and they charge an arm and a leg to outsiders, not to mention I doubt they have much since your birth unless you went to one of their supported hospitals since.” She said and a document arrived on my interface listing my name and birth date along with a couple of identifying traits like eye color and skin color and so on, all recorded at birth and not updated since. “So let’s go through anything you can think of now and any known allergies.”
“I don’t have any known allergies, so that’s fine. As for medical stuff I think my skin is still healing from a chemical exposure thing a little while ago and I got into a rough fight recently and came away with a lot of little aches and pain, I think I pulled some small muscles and maybe bruised some bones.” I said, just rolling stuff off vaguely for them.
“Alright, that’s great. None of that warrants a hold on today’s operations, so we can go forward with confidence. We’ll do some scans before we start anything major on you just in case there’s something you haven’t discovered, so don’t worry too much.” She said while smiling.
“Nova, I was kind of looking forward to finding out what the cyberware is actually, Mrs. Marchand said it was better as I surprise so I’ve come down here with no real idea of what is going into me apart from it being netrunning related.” I said with a little bit of a frown.
“Hah, yeah she can be like that sometimes. Especially to you kids. Don’t worry though, it’s actually a pretty safe set of gear she’s put aside for you even if some of the parts are bordering on antique, if you wanted my opinion on them at least. I’ll send you the specification of them now, let me know if any of them stick out to you for some reason, good or bad, more information is never a bad thing before an operation.” She said and then a load of files arrived on my interface.
The first one opening to show a cranial implant hugged around the skull near the spine and reached up just above the ears where it had two little black disks which sat just above the skin, a wide-band IR connector, or just connector implant. It would let the user connect to an IR network or grid with an extreme throughput maximum, a very normal type of cyberware for netrunning.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The second was a vertebral mounted circuit looking implant that was apparently what a motor interface chip looked like inside someone. MICs were there to transform conscious movement into digital action while keeping your real body from punching a nearby wall. They’d lock you down out in the real world while sending your actual movements to the net to do whatever you were doing there.
Another normal cyberware, although this one was old, the model being made thirty years ago. I’m really getting the bottom of the hand-me-downs here.
The third was a very weird shape that sat on the top of your chest cavity just below your neck tangled in all your pipes, apparently a RAM unit and a processor in one. Something called a MPD or memory processing device that handled the virtual load of whatever programs or computations the user was running.
It generated a lot of heat so it used blood for cooling once it got past a certain threshold, this combined with the heat from the cerebral implant meant the user’s body could reach fever temperatures quickly without care. That was netrunning basics though. Everyone knew about burnt out netrunners.
The last piece was a long thing that sat in the neck, called a chem-brace, it stimulated a bunch of chemicals in the body like adrenaline, cortisol, orexin and some others in certain scenarios to protect the user in an emergency or attack. Whatever that meant. Was cortisol a brain thing? Like cortex?
So all the parts were fine enough if a bit old. I’d at least be able to use the net with these which was enough of an adventure for me. I looked away from the documents to find the doctor fiddling with her own interface and decided to ask Sanctum some stuff.
What do you think of these implants? Looks like preem cyberware, if old, I think. I don’t really know if the numbers are good though.
[The four cyberware listed are included in high grade netrunning equipment lists from forty to thirty years ago and if in good condition should be acceptable for a novice to use safely. There appear to be modifications to the second and third and extensive modification to the first and fourth models. Functions of these modifications are not listed but User should use caution as repairs would not explain such extensive additional bulk.]
“Hey, Dr. Wood. I’m looking at the cyberware you’ve got here and I noticed some of the photos of the actual pieces doesn’t match up with the documentation pictures.” I said, I had not noticed that in fact, the differences were very small. “I hope you’re not looking to put a bunch of kill-switch bombs into my body or something?”
I was being a little aggressive and crude in my accusations but this was cyberware here, you don’t mess around with stuff like that. So much stuff can go wrong.
“Ah, you noticed the modifications, there are no bombs in these Mal. The previous user of the cyberware had made extensive use of them over the years and needed to keep them upgraded to keep up with shifting technologies. The differences are mostly just simple personal adjustments to increase the performance numbers or in the case of the chem-brace it was to increase efficiency and scope of function.” She said looking excited to talk about the topic, she must love cyberware.
“That makes sense then, more sense than Marchand putting me on a leash by rigging my head to explode at least. She has my mom right next door, she doesn’t even need the bombs.” I said, muttering towards the end.
“Mal you should be nicer to Mrs. Marchand, she doesn’t pick a lot of operators to invest some time or capital in you know? Usually she just maintains a healthy working relationship with a lot of distance with most operators. When I was a kid I was blown away when she asked me to drop out of the little operator gang I was in with some other kids she had working for her and get into medicine.” The doctor said, clearly reminiscing. “She said I had an eye for detail and was smart, I thought nothing of the compliments at the time but she put me to work sewing up hurt operators and even got me working with ripper docs around the city until I had enough experience and knowledge to take the medical exam.”
“So Marchand has had you working with all your life?” I asked, kind of culty, I thought.
“What? No. I got my ripper license and moved out of the city for a long time, spent a few years working with nomads and divers along the coast. Went down to the NY ruins and worked with the botters down there, learned a whole lot more. Only came back to the city about three years ago when my sister hunted me down and told me mom was on her last legs.” The woman said, her eyes refocusing on me at the end.
“Oh damn, sorry. About your mom I mean.” I said. I didn’t want to lose my mom.
“It’s alright, she passed peacefully and with her family around her a year back. About the best you can hope for in this city. I came back to Mrs. Marchand and offered to be her doctor for now. I might move on eventually but for now I’m going to stay within reach of family. That’s my life story at least, what about yours? Although, I’ll be surprised if a ten year old has done more traveling than me.” She asked, smiling.
“No traveling here, furthest I go is a few subway stops. I just rolled around with the other kids getting into fights and stealing until it just got too much, went solo and just salvaged what I could find. About three years ago I started working as a guide for Marchand and she liked my prep work and carefulness so she picked me for a bigger job with the eyes on getting into netrunning if I could pull it off, and here I am. Nothing big really. No wide travels or coastlines or botter tribes in my story. I did recently fist fight a borged out ganger high on scratch in total darkness and come away the winner though.” I said with my arms crossed and thinking back.
“Oh wow, you’re a little warrior aren’t you? Is that how you got all banged up? My scanner is only running passively and I can already detect a lot of minor injuries. Like so many minor injuries that it overfills the screen level of a lot.” She said with a wider smile.
“Yeah, I had to pull out all the stop just to avoid his hits, all I had to go on were grunts and the air swooshing. Lots of close calls very quickly and a lot of jerking around and then he fell on me and we tumbled about before I got my knife into his eye at last. Think I did more damage to myself than he did to me, mostly because if he did do damage to me I’d be flattened.” I said with a grimace.
“Hopefully your new career in netrunning can keep you from fist fighting more crazed borgs for a little while. You can fist fight daemons instead which is much more sanitary at least.” She said standing. “Shall I lead you into the operating theater?”
“Sure, if we’re doing this right away. It’s all fine with me.” I said while standing up myself.
Sanctum, you need to do what you can to keep an eye on me in there. If they start going rogue you need to do something drastic alright? This is a level of vulnerability I’m not used to and won’t be common.
[User’s vitals are being monitored at all times to the resolution that Sanctum is able to without access to medical aide cyberware. If the User is compromised below thresholds or the doctors attempt hostile actions Sanctum will initiate emergency protocols and spend any available nanite mass to extradite the User from danger until User is aware again.]
That’s likely the best I can hope for, here we go then.