"If it blows up when you're testing, and you didn't want it to, then you should probably go back to the drawing board. Unless it blew up in an interesting way, in which case you should change the name of the project to 'Grenade.'" - Gabriel on the subject of testing his and Upgrade's experiements.
A trip to the bathroom had me staring at the empty socket where my false eye usually sat. Hyo had done an incredible job on short notice, and with a terrible set of tools, too. She wasn’t exactly a trained surgeon, but part of her… history had her more than capable when it came to field medicine.
Beyond simply feeling it with my mind, I could see my Cyberdeck, the part of my body that, technically, made me a cyborg. The chrome and black piece of technology was something me and Gabriel had cobbled together in a space not too dissimilar from the Garage when we all first got together using some tech we’d made off with when we first arrived in America again. At the time, Hyo was new to the group, and since it was her fault I was missing the eye in the first place she’d been kind enough to… acquire what we needed from local FORGE cells and fronts.
Usually a Cyberdeck was implanted directly on the brain via some highly invasive surgery that would allow a person to interface technology with their mind. At it’s most useful, on average, a person could emulate low level technopathy with a cyberdeck, but they’re extremely limited in application; typically they are made with a specific application in mind and the array of cybernetic connections a person can access with a normal human brain is quite narrow.
We weren’t built to work like computers. Unlike computers, we can adapt.
Cyberdecks aren’t exactly wholesale, but more and more people are being turned on to the idea of having them, and the demand is revolutionizing what can be done.
By and large, a given Cyberdeck can connect a mind to the telemetric data picked up by a gun’s scope to help you aim, or deploy viruses that can render unprotected tech temporarily imert. The strongest and most cutting edge Cyberdecks let people cut their consciousness out of their body and upload it into the net to perform cyber security… or cyber terrorism. Once you get to that level of investment, you’re what’s called an Electric Dreamer.
Those kinds of people tend to spend an unhealthy amount of time in cyberspace, to the point they need help bathing and eating so they can work. It’s no surprise, then, that the sorts of companies who have the money and research needs that justify employing Dreamers, like the FORGE, don’t usually make it optional to spend that kind of time on the net.
When a technopath has a Cyberdeck, it’s usually to get them to another level. There’s a small sample size, admittedly, but I can say from experience that my Cyberdeck is fairly useful as a point of interface between my eye and my brain. It was part and parcel with my ability to affect technology with my thoughts. The information my eye picked up filtered in through the Cyberdeck and fed into my brain, and the signals sent from my brain through the Cyberdeck into the eye were all the more precise and difficult to break into for the average hacker thanks to it.
I’d never considered offloading anything more into it for fear of it becoming a weakness, but after failing to handle Gaz, I was in the market for some Upgrades, as it were. I revieeded schematics I’d glanced across a somewhat eventful, if short, career. Upgrades, sidegrades, entire program’s worth of lines of code. I had time, so I decided to lean into the hyper fixation that always plagues me… just it a bit. Staring blankly at the mirror, I mentally placed ideas against the walls. A scanning program was first to come to mind: something to more precisely pick out the basic, biomechanical movements a person was in the process of making… maybe a bit less useful than I imagined since it wouldn’t make my body faster. Still, as an idea it could work with other things I WAS capable of. If I was going to entertain the idea of letting my cyberdeck be more offensive or defensive in application, though, I’d need to think a lot more out of the box. Shutting down their optics didn’t work on account of those… what had Jenny said… Roided-out Cyber Zombies having probably added sonar or something like it to them, and I hadn’t thought to intrude on their cyberware deep enough to see everything they had. That would be where I fucked up. Faster scanning would help there, possibly… if I needed to sacrifice some of the general scope for quicker intrusion software, I could basically write a patch and load it in on the fly if I needed to adapt, but if I preloaded it into my cyberdeck’s operating system and leaned on it a bit more? Then I could just treat it more modularly…yeah. That was doable. Throw in the fake ass Sharingan I’d thought up too for good measure?
It was a good start.
With a finger less deft and precise that the last one to enter my skull, but far more knowledgeable, I rotated the inner cuff to release the inner workings safely from within their shell.
Thank god it had survived almost fully intact… even if that had been part of why I’d had something so close to a brain bleed. The skin was still bruised around the eye and down my cheek but I’d live, against the odds, and I’d get my shot at payback later. For now, I slid a few metal rings out of my eye socket, and a long, flat motherboard no larger than a usb out of my own head, and set them on a dry towel on the bathroom counter.
I slid them aside, covered, and ignored the slight discomfort that had caused while I shined my phone’s light into the socket. A knock at the door nearly startled me, but I recovered wordlessly and called out: “Door’s unlocked, sorry I’m in the middle of something.”
The door opened and Sileena crossed the distance between us fast like lightning. “Kendrick, thank fuck!” she commented in a rush of words almost too fast to be recognizable. “Dude I thought you were going to fucking DIE!” she commented.
I felt my heart skip a bit, remembering that I HAD died. Twice.
“Yeah, well, you know me…” I weakly attempted examining where the fleshy parts inside the eye socket had healed well, and where it had been fairly badly injured by the cyberdeck getting jammed out of place. I’d have to ask Hyo how she’d reset it’s position so well while managing to keep the-
“Not funny dude, I was seriously worried. I’ve been so jittery they kicked me out of the fucking house!”
“Yeah, I heard. You been feeding yourself properly?” I asked, grabbing the towel with my unmentionables and staring her down with one eye as I did so. “Or are you two seconds from a crash?”
“Breakfast is almost done, so it’s irrelevant. I’ll get back to a good schedule, and I never burned myself out using my power all the way without a snack.”
“God, if I weren’t around a few more days you might have died. Come here,” I said, shifting into leader mode without a second of hesitation. She walked over quite sheepishly, and I exhaled sharply. I could see it in the dark circles around her eyes, in the gauntness around her cheeks and neck and the bit of her collarbone that was more pronounced under the baggy shirt. She’d been using her power too much. One of the only consistent things about… whatever the fuck Sileena’s power was… or even what SHE was for that matter… was that she had to eat a LOT when she was using it, as her own metabolism increased exponentially as she did. On top of that, I hadn’t been able to steal anything to help with her ADD, so she was absolutely awful at regulating her appetite to begin with. Didn’t make me any less annoyed that no one was on top of it while I was out.
“You have to do better than this,” I spoke, tilting my head to see how bad it was. “What if you tried to jump across a street and passed out?”
She huffed and puffed like a 12 year old. “That only happened once, and it wasn’t because I hadn’t been eating, I’d pushed too hard all at once, which I wasn’t the past three days. Like I said, I had snacks… I just… I was just worried. You were out like a light, and the FORGE put out word that the four of us and the Daywalkers are SUPER persona non grata right now. I had to scout while Hyo watched you and Gabriel… did whatever he’s been up to in the basement and garage.”
“Alright, I get it,” I said deflating. “Let’s go downstairs and face what I’m sure is a houseful of people… since I think it’s Saturday?” She nodded enthusiastically, right back to high energy and bounced out of the room.
As I emerged, it was not lost on me how much Hyobin and Sileena had been fretting over me.
Some band of thieves, killers and terrorists we turned out to be.
The bathroom I had chosen overlooked the living room up a set of stairs off. The wood was polished daily, as were the floors consistently swept, vacuumed and or mopped to keep the whole house both looking and smelling fresh. In the living room I spotted Hyobin, sitting cross legged with an old book in her lap, next to a familiar face who brightened up when she saw me.
She looked every bit as full of life as I’d last seen her, especially for a 79 year old woman. She stood up, all of 5’3 but wielding the authority of a man three times her stature, and waved. “Kendrick Carter, as I live and breathe… somehow.” She chuckled… no she cackled and I couldn’t help but laugh with her. “Bring that ass down here, Aunt Minnie’s got something to say to ya, and I can’t do much yelling no moe.”
Dutifully, I descended, feeling naked without my eye, and avoided the eyes of a dozen or so adults that were a bit more hushed than they had been. It wasn’t until Aunt Minnie spoke and quieted the room that I even noticed the buzz of noise from the crowd, but I held my head high among those I’d turned my back on once before as Minnie met me in the middle of the room and…
She embraced me, head buried in my abdomen. With both arms I returned the hug, eyes closing as the warmth of the Daywalker Matriarch filled me. As far as powers went, the ability to give people comfort and security wasn’t as offensive as shooting lasers from your eyes, no. But it was powerful all the same.
All at once, the emotion welled up.
I’d missed her, I’d missed all of these people even if they had every right to hate me. I didn’t know what to say. She let me go, and I was grateful I somehow didn’t drop the towel. She held my wrists and looked at me behind the kind of glasses that make your eyes ten times bigger with a frown. “Next time you leave, you say goodbye, lil nigga.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“And don’t act like you can’t text nobody neither. What, you think you don’t gotta check in with the elders just cause yo punk ass aint claimin gang no moe?” I shrunk. “The hell is wrong with you Kendrick? Hmm? What you think, not being a Daywalker means you aint still nephew? You aint the first lil nigga got scared off and quit. I claim you all the same,” she went on and I dared not correct her. “Besides, I heard you and ya lil ass got yo own gang now? Too big and bad for a- bend down a bit,” she ordered pulling on my shirt and I humored her. One smack upside the head later she was yanking me by the ear to the dining room.
“Too big and bad for me. No big deal, its fine. One day I’ll stop being too stubborn to die and you’ll all be sorry. No one cares about Minnie no moe. I used to run this shit!” she said finally starting to crack a smile as she pulled a chair out in the middle of the long table we’d always used for family meals. I plopped down, and Gabe, across from me, didn’t even acknowledge my presence.
“She smack you too?” I asked as Minnie wandered through the double doors that led into the kitchen. He snorted, putting the last pieces together for my eye. Jericho walked through the doors with an apron, a chefs hat, and a pan with fresh biscuits in hand.
“Got in his ass good cause he decided to talk back. Never learned fear, all that time you ran with us,” he teased.
“Can’t show fear of anyone but mi madre and la chancla, Jerry,” he commented, signing off by flipping Jericho the bird. Minnie cleared her throat, coming through the door, and I never saw Gabe hide his hand so fast before- and I’d seen him pickpocket a cop and almost get caught.
Behind Minnie, Jericho’s wife and girlfriend followed up, each carrying a pan with more food on them. “Thanks girls, Micah,” she commented and my head whipped around to look at Jericho, who immediately turned a dark red.
“Granny!” he spat out like an embarrassed school girl. Cackling followed, and Jericho took a seat at the head of a table. “I cannot wait till you croak.” She disappeared into the kitchen again, and the women sat on either side of Jehricho. To his left, Cassandra, his wife, had her hair wrapped up in a colorful scarf.
“So,” Gabe said reaching across the table with the eye in his palm. “It’s ready for reintegration. I made a few upgrades with some shit the Daywalkers had lyin around. Should be functioning much better than it was.”
With a thought I reconnected once more, taking it and balancing it on a finger before pushing it into place with practiced ease. All at once, the world felt right again.
Besides the new colors I had to really focus to stop the damn thing from acknowledging, I guess. I’d be angry about that under most circumstances, but the clarity of two eyed vision had me sighing in relief instead. Close enough to normalcy again was all I’d have wanted, but I wouldn’t look an upgrade in the mouth.
Not while actively streaming lines of code directly into my cyberdeck to do the same.
“Working like a fuckin charm, my boy,” I told him and he flashed me a grin as food was laid out across the table.
“I only produce quality,” he said as humbly as he could manage. “How are you feeling, pana?”
His tone had went grave. “Bueno, pana. I’ve dealt with worse than uh… dying from head trauma.”
“You keep joking about it, and I might kill you for real,” Hyo threatened me as she laid out the fluffiest, cheesiest eggs I’d ever seen in a massive pan in front of me next to still-sizzling sausages and thick, well done bacon strips by the heap.
“Wasn’t a fun experience for us,” Gabe cut in before I could respond. “I feel like shit. Like I should have done more.”
“I should have been there,” Hyo insisted. I narrowed both of my eyes, and chose to let them vent a bit. I couldn’t place why she was being so sharp.
“Maybe, or maybe your presence would have made shit worse,” Gabe said back, taking offense.
I zeroed in on the friction at that point but couldn’t get a word out fast enough.
“Or, maybe I would have actually done my part as his bodyguard.”
“Yo, you got something to say, hermana?”
“ I am sure your propensity to show off and act as chaotically and imprecisely as possible did nothing to aid the situation.”
“Ah yes, the FORGE assassin lecturing me about how I conduct myself.”
“Better that than a lost mother’s boy screaming to get out of his father’s shadow.” Gabe’s dark skin somehow almost turned red, features tightening with rage.
“Say that again and see what happens,” he spat with venom in his mouth and I saw his hand twitch.
“Enough,” I interjected, and the room fell silent. They maintained eye contact, the impasse of Hyo’s brown and the chaotic challenge in the hazel-green of Gabe’s. “It was on me, the whole thing. Cool off. I’m literally right here. I’m alive. I’m adapting as I always do. And besides, Minnie doesn’t like fighting over meals.”
They broke the eye-contact and the weight of the situation broke as Minnie brought the last of the food out. Sileena, suddenly beside Gabe in a blur of motion, looked like she might keel over any moment. Behind her, a baker’s dozen filed in, some teenagers, but overall mostly adults. Miles and Millie were a few seats down on the opposite side, neither of them looking too good either.
We’d come out of that operation worse for wear.
“Bow your heads,” Minnie commented, and instinctively we all, also, stood up as we followed instructions.
The moment prayer began, I opened my eyes and looked around.
“Lord, we thank you for this food you’ve put before us,” she began, and I saw Millie and Miles both exchange a look. Not quite atheists, those two, but the type of magic they practiced hadn’t lent itself super well to staying beholden to a singular god.
“We thank you for bringing our boys and girls home alive, including Gabriel, Kendrick and a pair of new faces,” she went on, clasping her hands. Gabe reached into his pocket, removing a small golden Crucifix he normally kept around his wrist when off mission, and kissing it. Sileena was stone still. Not a great sign, but it was almost time to eat.
“We thank you for taking those we lost home into your embrace, and we thank you that we yet live another day. In your name, I bless you for these and all other precious gifts. Amen.”
“Amen,” we called back.
Religion had been a part of my life growing up, even with a father as deeply entrenched in the life I now live as he was, but it was never something I was particularly attached to. Still, familiarity in spirituality gave me solace.
From there, not a lot of talking followed as we passed the plates around. It wasn’t until we were settled and eating that Jehricho spoke up.
“So, I’m going to safely assume you got everything?” Jericho asked me.
“Yeah. Keys to the kingdom,” I said projecting an image in red against the wall behind Gabe. My perspective of the full conversation, a damning one for Samantha Sims who was still pretending not to be a total psychopath named Halogen and Sway, who shouldn’t be in bed with the kind of folks at the table. It flipped into a long series of code I know meant nothing to basically everyone but me.
“What’s this?”
“Her access codes to all the FORGE buildings in the city. Lifted them off of her top henchman’s cell phone before the meeting. Didn’t have time to make much note of it. Call me the Cyberpickpocket.”
“Well, that’s certainly going to go far,” he admitted, reluctantly pleased.
“Yeah, it might help with our other mission this week.”
Hyo placed her utensils down calmly, but I knew she was about to go nuclear on me. I got out ahead of it. “After a few days to rest and recover, we’re headed to New Detroit.”
“For what reason?” Sileena, already looking a lot less green, asked me with a mouth full of grits.
“They’re putting a lot of money into keeping us out. I’m going to steal that PsyPro and make them wish they hadn’t pissed me off,” I calmly said with a smile before I fed myself some eggs.
I didn’t do much beyond smirk like the goblin I am, but in no particular order, these were the responses:
* Gabriel laughed.
* Miles almost started choking on his milk.
* Millie sighed and let her head hang backwards.
* Jericho laughed a bit more incredulously before telling me I'm a nut case..
* Shift barely noticed, I think.
* Minnie laughed, but I think she might not have really got the joke.
* Hyo stared me down.
About the response I expected, even some of the others present didn’t seem too happy with the idea of starting something else so soon, but I let everyone do their bitching before I spoke again. “Look, I have to strike while the iron’s still hot. Gaz and the scrap pack are gonna be a lot more ballsy if the FORGE is backing them. The only saving grace we have right now that will let us operate is that he most likely didn’t come here in force. Just enough to watch his back and then get home. By the end of the week, he’s going to have the gang from the whole midwest and the south here and organized.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Aren’t the Scrap Pack more like a lose connection of nomads than one group? How’s Gaz their leader anyway?” someone I had never met asked. To my surprise, Minnie spoke up after swallowing a mouthful of grits.
“It’s a nation within a nation, Bobby. Scrap Pack used to be different when I was comin up in NOLA. Originally, after the hurricane hit and the folks down there realized the corpos and gov were both abandoning the poor folks, they decided to fight for their own place. Built it up as best they could, but the city around them became a den for criminal activity without any sort of oversight. The Scrap Pack started fighting back against raiders and looters. Set up their own little police and medical services. It was all on the up and up until the original leader got to thinkin he could rule the world,” she told him. “And then all manner of corporate-plumbing of the very land itself made everything from Louisiana to So-Cal into even more of a hellscape. It was all they could do to survive.”
“So how does that become a group like Gaz’s gang?” Sileena asked.
“Well, first thing ya gotta know kid, absolute power don’t corrupt. It reveals. That lil nigga Carter, the OG, he wanted to reach further. Dig his hands in more of the pie than a city struggling to get on its feet had pie to give . Even though old NOLA did bounce back, he expanded into the rest of the southern states like a locust. With our increasing reliance on tech and metal, he went from a scrappy little angry boy to the Kingpin. He got in close with some medtecs, scavengers and rough riders. Started arming himself and his growing gang until he turned the Scrap Pack into an army. Can’t deny his silver tongue, but I do condemn his choices. Reached as far west as New Mexico, up into Ohio and East straight to Virginia. When he finally got killed, the Scrap Pack had turned into a nation of Might makes Right. Gaz is the 4th, and he killed the 3rd for trying to fold the gang into the US military, so I hear it he ain’t as much of a dick as his predecessors, believe it or not.”
Well. That was surprising, actually. And highly insightful.
I raised a brow, and she lifted the sleeve of the cardigan she’d had on. Skull tattoo with a Magnolia in one eye and the barrel of a pistol sticking out of the other. “I get around, kids.”
With that she got up and hobbled away to leave us to it.
“So, that said, looks like the group is still mostly under the same banner, but the unity is… rocky. I give it till the end of the week before we’re up shits creek,” I refocused.
“So, we gotta hit em now, if we’re going to at all,” Gabe said. I nodded. Bobby looked over at Jericho.
“We goin to war boss?” he asked, and all of us followed his gaze, to where Jericho looked both amused and agitated.
“We already are, kid. But…” he stared me down. “I can’t commit any bodies to this one. Needless risk.”
“I’d say anything that hurts them is worth it.”
“That’s why you’re in charge of your gang and I’m in charge of the Daywalkers. Keep your head on straight Kenny,” he admonished me.
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped in response. “And don’t act like I don’t know the stakes.”
“Do you know how many of my boys are recovering from that debacle of a meeting? Cause we wagered a lot on that meet, and while we got some dirt we didn’t really GET shit out of it besides bulletholes and stitches. I can’t commit anyone to help. That’s it.”
I paused and took a breath. “Alright, that’s fair. I couldn’t ask you for more than you’ve done already anyway. Not in good conscious. Thanks for everything so far…” I trailed off.
He gave me a long, leeching leer that made me feel like he was both seeing through me and extracting a price for the gamble I was making. I broke his gaze only when Miles peered at me with a glowing eye from behind the long bangs of his locs. “Quit pouting and trying to guilt trip me like I’m your uncle. I said no bodies, not no help. Any supplies here you can use, and I’ll drop you off wherever you need.”
“Two days,” Miles cut in, holding up a hand and waving it to and fro until wisps of smoke took shape in front of him. “That’s the best shot, but it’s hazy. Not gonna be easy regardless, but that’s when you’ll have an opening. I overexerted myself a lot during that raid of yours, so everything’s still a bit foggy for me.”
I nodded without needing to hear much else, and scarfed down a full plate of food fast enough to nearly choke on it. I downed a cup of apple juice, argued with Gabriel about whether apple or orange is better, and got up to head down the stairs to the basement of the safehouse with him in tow.
“So,” I began turning on the lights with a blink and scanning the room. “Whatcha got for me? I’ve been out long enough I know you didn’t exclusively work on my eye.” He led me around the frankly huge basement space of this safehouse. I knew we weren’t in the city anymore, but I hadn’t cared to check exactly where we were. I could tell that he’d turned it into a workstation as a way to keep himself busy while I was out by all the chaos. Pieces of things he’d cannibalized from other tech that was either lying around, given to him by a Daywalker, or something he’d taken.
It would look like a mess to anyone but me.
Immediately I saw the shield I had stolen myself on the table, missing key components and the power supply from the glove itself. I could see what he’d taken at a glance, and he was smiling wickedly as he patted a vest.
“I figured something out,” he commented. Before he said anything further I narrowed my eyes and reached out, literally able to see that he’d wired it to activate at a signal I could easily replicate. Inspired.
“And you turned what was a shield that required use of my hands into a personal one that I can just turn on at will, without needing a glove…” I trailed off. And then looked at the inside. “Oh.”
“Yeah, bigger battery means better shield, normally. Lemme talk for a bit so I can get my juices flowin. See, the way those dumb gauntlets work came about with the advent of mass produced, high powered single shot weapons. A single impact will distribute through the shield, and the battery will increase power momentarily to balance where needed along a sort of grid, and smack the offending attack away. That way a single impact will always be rebuffed, but could overload the battery and render it useless,” he explained proudly, eyes on the work he’d done while I was out.
“And that’s why we either have backup batteries, bigger batteries, or capacitors that can store enough power to push out and protect you while preventing the battery from being fried completely,” I cut in.
“Exacto. And a strong enough battery and capacitor can work in sync to create a riot shield that works better against, say, frontal assault from a shotgun, but the nature of the shield is such that…” he trailed off letting me pick up.
“Repeated fire will, eventually, cause the shield’s power to momentarily fail as the capacitor is emptied faster than it can store the power needed to protect and will eventually overload the system until it can fully charge again. I know how they work, so what’s it you’re walking me towards?”
He held up a hand. “Ay ay, hombre, let me cook. NOW. The reason that your shield failed when Gaz punched it with a graze seems counter intuitive even though he’s that damn strong, but that was it. His strength wasn’t something that the projected-shield could slap aside and in the moment of impact, he immediately overloaded it. I figured out a way to work that little weakness against him.”
“Ah, I see,” I commented. “That’s why instead of a big battery, this vest has more capacitors and batteries involved in a circuit. Not untread ground by any means…” I said, still impressed. I pointed at some circuitry he hadn’t seemed to know what to do with yet. “And this isn’t finished.”
“Indeed. More power, but not on the onset. Took apart a few other hardlight shields and weapons to get the parts I needed to make the shield also able to project from multiple parts but work in concert still. The thing I’m missing is something that makes this not just a good shield. Cause it’s a damn good shield, but it’s also missing something, jefe.”
I could see what he meant. It would make a shield in front of me, and that would be fine, but I didn’t know what good that would do if someone had the drop on me, or just swung at me from the side.
I looked at the capacitors, the batteries, the shield projectors strewn about he had depowered and had a stroke of genius.
No, the blueprints I wrote out in my mind’s eye were, in fact, two.
“I know what we can do with this. Good work, Gabe holy shit,” I told him impressed that he managed to create a system that was this stable. “We got enough to make more?”
“Nah,” he said. “They aren’t well stocked on hardlight. Lots of guns and mundane energy weapons. I also cooked some explosives,” he grinned. “So, what’s your idea?”
“I’m gonna take this innovation you’ve managed and make it better. I think it’s time for an Upgrade,” I said, surprising him with how eager I was to get to work. He had heard the line before, and called it my catchphrase. Nevertheless, he groaned when he heard it, and slapped down a box of tools.
----------------------------------------
After a few days of tests, I found myself with some downtime; Gabriel and I had magnanimously decided to give each other some space. We worked very well together, in fact the process of creation was something we bonded over. It was also, somehow, the thing that made us butt heads the most. A simple disagreement about power distribution and limitations on power draw had landed us squarely in the “taking a break before I kill you” camp. I’d decided to spend a bit of time with Hyobin, since it had been a little while since the two of us had run diagnostics and maintenance on her implants, or been in a room alone to have a chat.
I knocked on the door of the same room we’d been in when I woke up a few days prior missing my fake eye, and she answered before my knuckle hit the wood 3 times, looking from my face to the set of tools in the bag I’d stuffed them into. “Someone call the repairman?” I asked, and she rolled her eyes despite the smirk, letting me in.
“You remain the least funny mechanic I have ever met,” she began closing and locking the door. “Not that you’re actually a mechanic.”
“Ouch, my poor feelings,” I commented, laying out the tools, a scalpel, a mini screwdriver, and a 10 inch long needle.
“Do not worry, Kendrick, I bet I can make up for it,” she commented while dragging a pair of chairs, a stool from the vanity in the corner and a rolling chair from the computer desk, next to me. I plopped down, and she wasted no time in dragging the loose shirt she’d been wearing over her head, and unhooking her bra with one hand. Once it slid off of her shoulders, she, with her damn hawkeyes, stared at me, and I returned the gesture with a blank expression, centered directly at her freshly exposed breasts. “What, no gasp or even slight widening of the pupil in your real eye?”
“No,” I replied dryly. “I’ve seen your tits almost as many times as Gabriel’s and he sleeps in nothing but boxers. “Now have a seat.” She almost gave away how cheated she felt, and the aperture on my fake eye narrowed ever so slightly as I focused it on an almost imperceptible slit running just below her right breast. I closed my real eye, and let the false one feed sensory data beyond just the visual into my brain. As she sat, I reached for the scalpel, and smiled victoriously.
“That used to always work on you,” she lamented as I pressed one hand against the warm skin of her breast and sank the blade into the slit where synthetic skin met the real deal. She didn’t even finch, and in fact kept speaking. “The fun in teasing you wanes as you adapt.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t stay a boy at the mercy of my errant heart forever,” I gave her as I separated the plate and opened the panel with a practiced motion. There I found a patch of metal and wires coiling around a central node that pulsed in time with her heart beat. Around it, exactly what I’d been worried about. “Dammit, you’ve been pushing too hard again.”
“You died,” was her sharp reply as I zoomed in on the heat damage that her implant had been doing, magnified 4x and in high definition. More than that, I had waited too long between checking to make sure things were okay there. The intricate weave of implants and her natural biology had been far out of my wheelhouse until I’d spent hours and hours examining her entire body to become capable of doing the maintenance that she needed a cyber-doc for.
At the time, it had been significantly more awkward for me to stare at her naked body, because despite having been trying to murder me, I couldn't help but think she was one of the most gorgeous people I’d known.
“Fair enough, but that’s no excuse for pushing this hard.The overheating might have killed anyone else. I don’t have replacement parts here, but…” I pulled the implant’s central chip out with the screwdriver and my index fingernail, and she twitched and closed her eyes. I reached into the pocket of the overalls I’d been wearing as my bodyguard and confidant slowly started to shut down. I removed a microchip, a lucky find in the targeting matrix of a broken rocket launcher they’d stashed here for some reason, and replaced it in the implant. It would do the job I needed it to do, which was to replace something broken in a circuit.
I slipped it back in, and she took a deep breath. Without every single thing in the network of her cybernetics, she wouldn’t live longer than a few hours, but if the two of us had anything it was trust. Trust enough she could dig around in my brain, and that I could go into her literal body and pull shit out and slide it back in.
“That feels nice, actually. I hardly noticed that particular node was going bad.”
“It wasn’t, but it would have soon. I scanned you while you were flashing me, and it stood out. Turn,” I told her, and she did as I asked on the stool, revealing more easily visible nodes down her spine, starting at the base of her skull. A patch of hair would never grow in a ring below her bowl cut, easily accessible if I ever needed to. As for the rest of the nodes, they weren’t access points, just smooth circles of chrome periodically placed down the center of her back.
For someone so tough, it was shocking how soft her skin was. I ran my hands down over her shoulders, pressure at a level where I knew she would feel relief. She hung her head as I worked my way down her back, fingers pressing against the spots where data was processed and let it flow through my mind, pressing deeper into muscles that were knotted despite her best efforts in stretching and yoga. She groaned, and I found another place where I’d need a knife. My eye highlighted a red zone near a node, and I placed my palm against it. After a second of fighting against my own intrusion protection, I was in the system.
“Alright, I’m in. Keep still,” I said.
“Make a joke about being inside of me and I will remove your ring finger.”
“Don’t threaten me while I’m trying to focus.” Ignoring that I had actually been inside of Prodigy, I took the needle and pushed it about halfway into her skin to access a button that popped out the node, and then used the mini screwdriver to remove it. This time, I just examined the node and purged a bit of garbage code that had been collating and causing the surrounding nerves to overreact to stimuli in order to fix it. Once it was replaced, I went back to the massage-but-also-troubleshooting phase until I reached the base of her spine.
“You’ve got a lot of heat damage at the base port on your neck and all the auxiliary nodes,” I reported once I was finished.
“You died,” she responded.
“I know!” I responded. “But that’s not an excuse for not taking care of yourself.”
“Kendrick, if I do not put my life on the line it is because I am not trying,” she responded as I pressed my fingers less intrusively and more massage-ly. “I can fix the heat damage with meditation, I have just been busy.”
“Busy worrying about me, which I appreciate, but-”
“But nothing, Kenny, you and Gabriel are too… chaotic and indelicate. Imprecise may be a better word. Sileena… too delicate a tool despite all the power she has. You are fragile, like most people. You need a bodyguard, and an element that can remove threats. I can do both.”
“Ouch, my ego again,” I grumbled, “But that said, I am working on the fragility thing actually. Trust me.”
“I do,” she told me in a softer tone. “I trust no one more than you, in fact. But that is that, and this is this. My cause is yours, and you could go on fighting without me. The opposite might be less true. You are a leader, and perhaps you could stand to allow yourself to BE the leader, and not a punching bag for those stronger than you.”
“Third time on my ego.”
“Be serious,” she chided me as I sat back in the chair and she turned to face me. Already, she’d healed the incision in her rib, and that hawkish stare held me hostage.
“Alright, fine,” I told her, “Seriously, I am on the cusp of solving the issue of me being easy to take down, okay? But while I AM still the leader of our little group, you have to listen to me when I say to ease up. I can’t exactly keep up our little crusade if I don’t have my muscle. When you overheat, despite your best efforts healing there’s always a chance you do damage you can’t just magic away, or whatever, it is you do.”
She snorted. “It is more than magic, but point received. A compromise then? If I promise to play it safer, will you promise to treat yourself like someone who wants to live?”
“Yeah, I can acquiesce to that.” I held out a hand, and we took each other by the forearm in tight clasps. She was always so brutally pragmatic, practically precise that it was easy to forget that Prodigy isn’t an unfeeling robot, and that as much as she regretted what had happened between us, she respected me as much as I did her. When we’d first met, I’d been on the FORGE radar once I landed stateside, and they’d sent Prodigy to kill me and Marauder. It was dumb luck that I’d broken the code keeping her mind suppressed so she’d follow whatever orders they sent her.
It had come too late for my eye, which she had buried a knife into just a millisecond before I succeeded. It had been a gamble, one I’d not regretted for even a second. I may have sung a different tune if she hadn’t had the reflexes to stop pushing the knife downwards.
She let me go, and offered a wry smirk.
“Now, what is it you and Marauder were yelling about?” she asked genuinely curious.
“Decoupling power bands in short range energy transference. He thinks that it’s slowing down charge time between batteries and capacitors to wrap them in an extra two layers of conductors end to end, but I keep trying to tell him that if we don’t, there’s every chance under the sun that they burn out completely. I’d rather have a strong shield that recharges a few seconds slower than one that is as strong and charges faster but has a shorter shelf life. He won’t be saying it’s a bad idea when I’m still alive after they overload for the third or fourth time and keep coming back. His idea is a lot more guerilla than it is practically sound.”
“Which of your ideas is the one most likely to be practical in the here and now.
“That question is why I took a break,” I told her frankly. “I’d like to have something that works long term. We don’t exactly get to raid a Daywalker Safehouse often, and even our stockpile in the Garage is only gonna go so far.”
“That is easily fixed if we find more FORGE facilities to raid,” she spoke earnestly. “I will say, however, your point stands and if you don’t think the short term boost is worth the chance of burning the shield out, keep your foot down. But if a few seconds of difference might save you, is it not better to gamble on it?”
“I’d argue its almost futile either way. If the shield takes too long to come back online, then I’d be dead all the same as if it comes back faster and then shorts out after one more hit more likely than not.”
“In the second example, you made it through a second hit, though.” She hooks her bra, I hadn’t even realized she was getting dressed as I tapped my foot, weighing options. “You could play riskier in the short term.”
“No, I couldn’t,” I reply to her vaguely, “Because I need those batteries in place longer for a reason besides the practicality involved in keeping my gear functional longer. Actually, speaking of that, can I borrow you for some tests?”
“You have that look on your face that tells me you are planning something.”
“Yeah, I have blueprints in my head for something based on a phenomenon I noticed in the shields. Don’t worry, it’s nothing worrisome.” I winced.
“It’s you and an idea, Kenny. Of course it’s worrisome.”
----------------------------------------
To the tune of destruction, Gabriel dos Santos and I got back to the work of creation, more or less in concert once more. The end results would be both beautiful and terrible, and in my heart I couldn’t deny wanting to implement them sooner than later.
After some testing, some involving Hyobin, and others Sileena, and some time spent getting a few other pieces of equipment together, we were pretty sure that we had a solid set of loadouts just in case the mission got harder than I was anticipating.
All in all, it was a busy few days.
I managed to convince Jehricho to lend us just enough manpower to set up a drop on a nearby rooftop with some equipment, but otherwise didn’t see much of him or his siblings during the week. The twins slept all of that first day, and were gone by the end of the second, back to putting boots on the ground in what Jehricho called “more useful ways than a stupid mission sure to get someone killed.” As for the leader of the Daywalkers, he spent some time coordinating his people, and then took his leave as well.
That left a full day to prepare, clear our heads, and for everyone to make any last second changes to the plan.
The next day, we loaded up a car I hustled off of Jericho and set out from where, I learned, was actually a few cities away but still deep within Daywalker territory, ambushed a work van on it’s way into the city and infiltrated on the luckiest day possible; it turned out security was light that day due to an unrelated incident pulling their attention and people away.
They’d gotten too sure no one would try them with the Scrap Pack on payroll and the better half of the active criminal elements paid off or uninterested.
That same day, we walked right into a cleverly timed trap, and…
“Okay, this is fine. It’s just the hard part now.”