I was sitting on the edge of my recovery room bed when the door opened once more, but this time instead of one of the doctors it was my mom and Noe.
“Hey Mal. How’d it go? You look better than I thought you’d be. I thought you’d be all bundled up in bed with tubes all over you for your first chipping in.” Noe said as she came and sat on the chair at the table where I had grabbed a juice earlier.
Mom came over to the bed and started moving my arms and head around a little to look at the bandages. Finally she seemed satisfied that I wasn’t going to fall apart like a torn open pack of staries.
“You should have woken me before coming down here, you know? I woke up and was panicking and ran down here and found Noe waiting to see you. Apparently only family are allowed into recovery. We’re here now though, so if you need anything we can help.” She said with crossed arms.
“Thanks for coming mom, Noe. Everything went fine with the surgery, no issues. Apparently I’ll be healed enough for normal stuff in a few hours so I’ll be home tonight at least. By tomorrow I’ll be glued together enough to get started on the netrunning training as long as theres no climbing or running to do.” I said from the bed.
“And you won’t be stuck all small because of the chrome?” Noe asked while drinking what was left of my juice from earlier.
“None of the spec sheets the doctor sent over said anything about affecting growth weirdly, most of it just clamped on bone or just hanging around lose in the meat. Should be able to grow twenty feet tall without issue.” I said while scratching at the edge of my irregular shaped bandage.
“Pfft, twenty feet tall. You’re gonna grow up to be like five two and I’m going to tower over you at six foot in my workshop packed with tools while you run around gutters hunting for whatever shiny thing is the objective today. I’ll be kind and share my amazing guns though, I’ll always look out for old friends. Even the ones I’ll need to look lower to find.” She said as she finished the juice box and leaned back.
“Please your mom is maybe five three, my mom is right here and nearly six foot on her own. Unless my dad was a some sort of insect I’ll be topping off at least six foot.” I said, firing back.
“That’s enough you two, you’ll both grow up whatever height you end up. It doesn’t matter how tall you are anyway, adults don’t even care. Short guys can carry just as many guns as tall guys and that’s before chrome. Same with the woman. Mal your dad was about six foot, I know we don’t bring him up but he was about that height, so you’ll likely be tall enough for whatever eventually. Unless you take after my mother more, in which case you might be a bit shorter.” Mom said while holding her chin in contemplation towards the end.
Mom actually talked about my dad almost unprompted, that was unusual.
“What’s up with that mom? You usually don’t say a word about the guy who got you pregnant with me.” I said, curious.
“You’re getting older Mal, just as quick as kids down here tend to do but it’s still catching me off as it happens right in front of me. I can’t just not talk about the man forever, even if it wasn’t anything special.” Mom said looking old for a moment.
She wandered over an sat down opposite the table from Noe.
“He was some sort of either high level corpo or just a rich kid. He was slumming it in the gang bar I used to see my friends at the time in and buy my incarna shards. It was a big party for something or other, likely a gang thing went well.” Mom said, picking at her fingernails. “We were both in the cluster of the non-gangers at the bar, all just bunched up because the gangers were all about the gang that night leaving outsiders with nothing to talk about.”
She shifted in her seat for a moment but seemed to find some courage.
“We got talking as the night went on in that little seating area with all the others around us. He was trying to pick me up and I was a little interested but mostly just wanted to go home. Then he offered to go back to his place instead of a motel. I needed money at the time, and his home would be a lot safer than a motel in the area after a gang celebration and he seemed nice enough.” She said looking a little sad. “So I told him I’d go with him for the right price, said I worked the local area on and off but I’d make it a work night for him if he wanted. He seemed a little surprised but then took the offer and we went back to his apartment on the surface.”
“You know I don’t need a complete breakdown here mom right?” I said nervously.
“Mal, I wouldn’t do that to you. No, we got to his place and it was bigger than my apartment at the time by a factor of more than twenty. It must have been a quarter of the entire floor just for him. We drank, we talked, he told me nothing of note and I still didn’t know his name or him mine.” Mom said. “In the morning he was already gone despite me waking up at dawn, he left me a blank IRC and a piece of a menu torn off with a number to call him, along with an aura shard with a few thousand on it.”
An IRC was a infra-red contact, it was basically a mailing address for a grid that you could leave mail at. It was usually separate from other contact methods, if mom’s was blank it meant he didn’t leave her any identity details from the box.
“That was much less romantic but also much more romantic than a lot of my ideas about how you ended up with me.” I said, leaning back with my hands on the bed.
“I think it was super romantic, like a forbidden love story but darker.” Noe sighed from the sidelines. She was holding her head in her hand while her elbow was on the table as she listen to mom.
Stolen story; please report.
“It was just a dumb decision that worked out well at the time, it got my immediate debt problem solved and a few weeks later I even discovered that I was pregnant despite both of us using protection. So while that was scary and unexpected it still led to me having my little boy, which I can never regret.” Mom said, getting quite fiery at the end.
“I know you don’t regret having me mom, me and Noe know a whole bunch of kids who’s parents just left them somewhere and left. You could have done that and nobody would even care. You looked after me though, despite your incarna burn out. It’s fine, I know you love me mom.” I said, slowly getting up and walking over to mom and hugging her.
Noe was smiling from the side while drinking a purple juice box. It was probably prunes, luckily mom’s smell was protecting me from the prune smell.
I pulled away and backed off to sit on the bed and mom wiped her eyes. She was smiling though.
“Well, it doesn’t matter much outside of genes really, not like I’m going to go looking for some random guy my mom met ten years ago. I’ve already got my mom and my own stuff going on, I don’t need any more.” I said just putting it all aside, I had stuff to think about that was far more current and important to me than hunting down a corpo guy from a vague ten year old description just to satisfy a curiosity I didn’t even have.
“So… When does your netrunning training begin? I’m curious how you even get started with something like that, most I’ve seen is a kid unlocking doors with a deck and you’ve gone right past a deck straight to cyberware.” Noe said, trying to avoid the residual awkwardness of the conversation.
“It should be soon, if not tomorrow. Marchand isn’t one for… I was going to say sitting around but I’ve never seen her doing anything else so whatever. She doesn’t waste time. As for the cyberware to deck thing I think a lot of mid-range decks can probably outperform my cyberware, all the parts were earmarked at thirty years old, or older. I won’t be surprised if some of them don’t even connect with some systems properly.” I said, leaning back on my hands.
Suddenly I had a connection request from my interface, I allowed it. A video of Marchand opened in the corner of my view. At the same time the vid screen on the wall that had been turned off turned on and showed the same video of Marchand sitting in her parlor.
“You should find no problems connecting to modern systems with that cyberware Mal. The last user did keep them up-to-date as they went, as I’m told you noticed. Hello Noe, Miss. Beckett. I hope you don’t mind me checking in on Mal?” she asked. The parlor was quite dimly lit leaving Marchand mostly a silhouette surrounded by her cig smoke as she puffed away between exchanges.
“Not at all Mrs. Marchand. It’s very kind of you to take an interest in Mal so early in his career with you.” Mom said, her smiling expression tightening just a little towards the end.
Marchand sighed in the video, smoke pooling in front of her for a moment.
“I haven’t taken an interest in Mal out of the kindness of my heart, Cara. It’s a business strategy to bolster my netrunning operations with new talent. Mal merely offered me the highest chance of return compared to his peers.” Marchand said, a little coldly I and mom clearly thought until she spoke again. “I don’t consider my operators simple variables to counteract hostile variables with no thought of the final outcome outside success or failure, despite some of my peers finding it absurd.”
She took a long drag from her cig. Mom shifting in her seat, maybe thinking she’d said too much.
“Most of my operators are essentially children, Mal among those. I work with younger operators both for simple business reasons, as they charge less, and because they often display latent talents that can sometimes be turned into higher levels of capabilities compared to their peers even when they get older. Talents that might have never been realized.” Smoke quickly filled the video feed, clearing in a few seconds. “I do not send my operators to their likely deaths and certainly don’t risk my budding talents lightly at all. You can be sure that Mal’s last job was well within parameters for his skill set and competence, although in the operation he did tackle the job a little below what I have previously expected of him but he got the job finished properly either way.”
Noe looked pointedly at me for a moment before turning back to the screen.
“As for his future works, Mal will be training netrunning with a personal trainer guiding him to start with, for a short time. After that I already have some mundane and less mundane work lined up to get him the experience he’ll need. Beyond that I have only a single major job in the works for Mal that I hope he’ll be able to perform well in, after that I’ll consider him one of my mid-level agents and let him wander as he will without direct supervision. The Dr. Wood who performed Mal’s surgery is a similar case where her skill and drive took her up to mid-level with me before she decided to go gallivanting off into the wilderness beyond the city limits for years.” Marchand said, her silhouette looking a little grouchy with lots of little angry movements towards the end. “I don’t lock my operators down after all. They are free to wander off if they desire, though most do come back eventually like Dr. Wood.”
“I’m sorry I insinuated you don’t value your operators Mrs. Marchand.” Mom said. “I just don’t like Mal moving into dangerous jobs so quickly, he’s only done a handful of missions with you after all.”
“He has only done a few with me that is true, but I’ve kept myself informed of his other activities where possible. His little jobs from his last few years, his scavenging work, his overall handling of danger and people. He has mostly displayed a mature and careful outlook and I value that in my young operators. That combined with his performance on my jobs and other ventures has secured him on my list of talents for now.” Marchand said with a smile. I kind of knew Marchand would keep tabs on me, this is just Marchand all over, but it was still weird to hear.
“He has been very mature for a while now… I think it’s my fault, because I’m not around enough with the incarna. He’s had to grow up faster.” Mom said sadly.
“I’ve seen the bad side of that arrangement and worse Cara, Mal’s outcome is among the better ones you can be assured. You’ve done more than enough to provide Mal with love and care while preparing him for life even at his young age. Perhaps a few more years of youthful play could have been nice for him but this city makes demands of us all and cares not for youth as an excuse.” Marchand said, her grimace just visible in the gloom.
“We’ve both done fine with our moms not always around, neither of us ended up in a crazy gang or missing or worse like a lot of other kids. We’re still going along with our plans for the future without bringing trouble down on us.” Noe said as she drank a new juice box.
“I’ve been fine mom. Really, I haven’t had a moment where I’ve thought my life was awful even once. I’ve wished it were better sure, but not often really and everyone wishes that sometimes.” I said to make mom feel better.
“I’ll contact you tomorrow Mal, from there we’ll begin with the basics of your training. Hopefully your recovery is quick enough to allow some local travel soon, as netrunning these days is a far more physical arrangement than it once was, before the dark war and the surrender of the true net. Unless you already have a technical field team, which you will not have for some time.” Marchand said from her smoke filled vid screen and on my interface.
“I’ll visit in the morning then Mrs. Marchand, thank you.” I said.
With that the vid screen turned off and she disconnected from my interface. Never really out of Marchand’s web was I?