The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Twining T86, 66835, and Catcher Jones.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Resources
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Santi's curse was interrupted by Vik's call. His eyes flickered yellow as the Agent interface activated, and Vik's voice filled his auditory cortex.
"Hey kid," Vik said with a tired sigh. "So, I've managed to get my hands on the tendons, the monowire, and the subdermal armor. However, the subdermal armor is only for the chest and ribs. That's about all of what I could source on short notice without getting us put on a list."
Santi pulled his attention away from the chaos that was the Mantis Blade's firmware, though he subconsciously cycled his cyberdeck so that it could keep a background process running on the tracker code.
"Thanks, Vik," Santi said as he felt an invisible pressure loosen from his chest.
"Don't start with the thanks," Vik sighed. "I'm doing this against my better judgment, and I want that to be known for when I'm standing over your corpse telling your mother I had warned you about it and you decided not to listen-"
"Yeah, yeah, duly noted," Santi interrupted Vik. "Anyway, I'll swing by tomorrow."
"Tomorrow..." Vik said, pausing as he looked over his calendar. "Yeah, tomorrow works. Just make sure you come in the morning with an empty stomach, and for the love of God, get some sleep tonight. The last thing I need is to be cutting into a gonk who's pumped full of synthi-caf his body has yet to digest."
"Sure, I'll get some sleep," Santi fake-yawned.
"You know what, just do whatever you want," Vik sighed once again. "I'll just pump your system dry and leave you feeling like shit."
Santi didn't get the chance to reply as Vik immediately hung up the call. So he shifted his focus back to the Mantis Blades code and worked through the night.
It was around four in the morning when he finished editing the code surrounding the trackers, which included the deletion of the trackers themselves, which were embedded in some important code he was forced to rewrite since without it, the Mantis Blades were pretty much bricked. Once he was satisfied with that, he moved on to the chaos incarnate that was the factory firmware.
However, this was much lighter work since he was not rewriting everything. Doing so would have taken weeks he simply did not have. So he instead wrote a supervisory layer that sat on top of the factory code and intercepted the conflicting priority calls before they reached his neural interface. It was, by all intents and purposes, a traffic controller.
The supervisory layer caught every conflicting instruction the factory firmware generated, evaluated it against a priority tree Santi had defined, and either passed it through as a single instruction or discarded it as junk. The factory code would still run underneath, generating conflicts as it tried to drive its user insane. But Santi's layer should be able to limit the damage it could do.
It was, by no means, a permanent solution. The supervisory layer would need to be maintained, updated, and monitored as the factory firmware evolved its conflict patterns in response to the suppression. But for now, it would be enough to install the blades without the code eating his mind from the inside out and turning him into a full-blown cyberpsycho.
The sun was starting to come up when he finished, and his internal clock marked the hour to be six in the morning. He knew getting some rest, even if it was only a little, would be wise. So he saved his work and went to bed for three hours.
Then he got up, showered, told Julia he was going to Vik's, and caught a cab to Little China.
The hydraulic door of the clinic slid open at Santi's approach, and the familiar smell of antiseptic and machine oil wafted into his nose. Vik was sitting by his terminal, watching a boxing fight like he always did, while the surgical tools were already laid out on the tray beside the chair, the diagnostic monitors powered up and running pre-op calibration cycles.
"Mornin', kid," Vik said. "I don't want to spend too much time beating around the bush, so I'll give it to you straight. Once you go through with this, there is no turning back."
"Vik," Santi sighed. "I appreciate how much you care for me. I truly do. But like you had said a few days ago, you gotta stop babying me. It's about time the bird left its nest."
"Not babying you anymore," Vik said. "Just making sure you're not going to go through with something you'll regret. But since you've clearly made up your mind, then there's no need to waste any more time. We're going to do this in stages. Take off your jacket, shirt, and pants. Keep your boxers. I don't want to see something I don't need to see."
Santi did as Vik told him, and shivered as he felt the coolness of the surgical chair when he leaned back onto it.
"I'll be installing the tendons first," Vik said as he gave Santi a hit of anesthetics and then started marking his legs. "While I'm working on that, it should give my fabricator the time to fuse the monowire with the Mantis Blades according to your design. And then I'll wrap everything up by opening your chest, exposing your organs, and installing the subdermal armor. Well, business hasn't been all that good as of late, so maybe I'll just harvest your organs and sell them off to some rich corpo."
"Wa..it.. Vik..." Santi slurred his words as the anesthetics had already kicked in.
"Don't worry your little head about anything," Vik said, grabbing a saw-like device. "It's not like you'll remember a thing."
"V...k..." Santi couldn't even form a word as he passed out. But as soon as he did, he found himself waking up.
However, his surroundings were unfamiliar. The sky was a clear blue unlike the Night City smog and haze that accumulated atmospheric residue. It stretched from horizon to horizon without a single plume of smoke, chemical haze, or the faint amber tint Santi had grown so accustomed to.
He looked around and noticed he was standing in thick, green grass that reached up to his knees. The grass swayed as a breeze that carried the smell of soil, wildflowers, and something sweet and vegetal. The grass stretched outward in every direction, rolling over low hills covered in wildflowers ranging from white to yellow to blue to red to purple. More color variation in natural plants existed in a single square foot of ground than Santi had seen in all of Night City's concrete and neon.
His eyes scanned the horizon, and beyond the hills he spotted a forest. It was dense and full of layered green from trees that had grown for centuries without anyone cutting them down. The canopy rose in irregular peaks and valleys that followed the terrain beneath it, and actual birds were moving through the upper branches in flocks that his dreaming mind could never have envisioned.
The closer he looked at the forest, the more he noticed the movement inside of them. He saw the animal-shaped machines he had hallucinated. They were made up of metal, cables, and other components his dreaming mind could not classify, walking through the tree line with an unhurried grace. They were creatures that didn't belong in this landscape, yet they appeared not to be imposing upon it.
He saw a herd of what could only be described as mechanical deer, though they were twice the size of any deer had ever been in known Human history, and their bodies were assembled from articulated plates and servomotors, with optical sensors that glowed a soft blue in the shadows beneath the canopy.
The world was alive.
Santi stood in the grass and took a deep breath. The air entering his lungs was unlike anything he had ever felt before. He had inhaled processed clean air before, but this was clean in a way that went beyond the absence of pollutants and was actually nourishing. As he breathed in the air, he recognized that this was what air was supposed to taste like. That this was what the world was supposed to look like. Full of natural greenery and alive.
As he reflected, he thought about Laguna Bend, the memory slotting into the dream without even breaking the immersion.
He remembered being nine years old and finding the footage from the cozy apartment in Charter Hill. Everything was good then, so peaceful. He was so full of innocence then, until he saw that footage.
That day had been the day his facade of the world had been fractured. The videos showed men and women standing in the streets, shouting at heavily armed corpo soldiers who, on behalf of NC Dam Ltd, had come to force them to leave their homes and lives with whatever they could carry.
Nine-year-old Santi had watched it with analytical detachment, which was shattered by a riot officer swinging an electrified baton into an elderly man's jaw, causing him to crumple to the dirt, blood pooling underneath him. A woman was dragged from her home by her hair, her belongings tossed to the ground. The terrified sobbing of the boy holding the recording Agent as the boots marched closer.
"Why did they hit them?" he had asked his father. "They didn't do anything wrong. They just wanted to stay in their homes."
"Because they could, mijo," Alejandro had said, pulling him into his chest. "Because in this city, logic doesn't matter if you don't have the strength to back it up."
The corpo news networks had reported the "incident-free" flooding of the valley over the following weeks, never mentioning that the town of Laguna Bend had been swallowed by millions of gallons of water, erasing the lives of anyone who had lived there.
Standing now in the grass, breathing the clean air, watching the machines walk through a forest that an AI had grown to replace a biosphere that humanity's own creations had consumed, Santi held the Laguna Bend memory beside the world around him, and the two images sat together in his chest with immense weight.
He wanted this. This was what fixing looked like. Fixing the real world, regrowing the greenery, cleaning the air, rebuilding what had been poisoned and stripped and flooded and sold.
He wanted this with the same fervor as he wanted the Widowmaker to run, with the same fervor that he wanted every piece of engineering he touched to work the way it was supposed to work.
He wanted to find a way to fix the rot instead of just focusing on building cars and running gigs just to survive Night City. He wanted this to be a project that ran parallel to everything else, just like rebuilding the Widowmaker ran parallel to his netrunning career. Just another thread in the architecture of who he was becoming.
He did not know how or where he would start. He also didn't have the resources, knowledge, institutional support, or lifespan that a project of that scope would demand. But he had something that most people in Night City did not have, which was the stubborn refusal to accept that a broken system could not be rebuilt.
He had rebuilt a Kerenzikov's hardware trigger with a simple software override. He was currently rebuilding a ninety-nine-year-old Mustang from raw stock in a converted warehouse he currently called home. Fixing things was what he did, and the scale was the only variable.
The dream held him for a while longer as he stood in the grass, watching the machines and breathing the air. And then the wind gradually died down, the blue sky gradually faded, and the green hills dimmed, and Vik's voice replaced it.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," Vik greeted Santi as he opened his eyes.
Santi's body felt different. It was heavier in some places and lighter in others. The subdermal armor across his chest and ribs registered in his senses as a new layer between his skin and his musculature. It was thin enough to be invisible under clothing but present enough that his nervous system was aware of them and had yet to get used to it.
"How do you feel?" Vik asked, standing beside the chair with his arms folded.
"Like a train ran me over and..." Santi said and paused. "I guess a word for it would be heavy?"
"That's the subdermal armor weighing you down," Vik said, picking up a light and shining it into Santi's optics. "You'll adapt in forty-eight hours, but your nervous system needs to remap the sensory inputs from the armor's pressure sensors. Until then, you're going to feel like you're wearing a vest you can't take off. Track my finger."
Santi tracked Vik's finger with ease.
"Good," Vik nodded. "Now try to activate just the monowire on your left hand. Just the wire, don't extend your Mantis Blades."
Santi focused, and he felt the neural command travel through his freshly connected interface and into the wire's spool mechanism in his forearm. He felt it engage with a faint hum that his SRN amplified into a vibration in his fingertips. The deployment port in his palm opened, and the first three inches of thermal monowire extended from the aperture, glowing a faint orange-red at the filament's edge where the thermal coating was active.
"Good, good," Vik said, sounding both surprised and satisfied. "Don't know how you came up with it, but it seems to work. Question is, will it retract-"
Santi retracted the monowire back into his palm, and the deployment port closed before Vik finished speaking.
"Okay," Vik said. "Now try standing up."
Santi stood, and he felt the reinforced tendons in both legs engaged with the motion. His standing posture shifted as the synthetic fiber bundles took tension as he had never been able to before. His weight was distributed with a mechanical precision that made him feel like he was standing on springs.
"Now walk to the door and back," Vik ordered, and Santi did as he was told.
Each step felt different. The landing was harder and crisper, and the reinforced ankle joints absorbed the impact like springs, feeding the energy back into the next step.
"Now try running in place," Vik ordered, and once again, Santi did as requested.
The tendons' synthetic fibers fired with a snap he had never been capable of before, and his knees rose higher the harder his feet struck the floor. Each impact was significant enough that he felt as though he could jump across a whole building.
"Alright, that's enough," Vik said, and Santi stopped.
Santi's breathing was barely elevated since the reinforced tendons had handled the impact cycling without transmitting the fatigue signals that his biological tendons would have been screaming by now, and the energy return from each footstrike was giving him a bouncy readiness in his stance that made him feel like standing on the edge of a sprint even while motionless.
"So, what do you think?" Vik asked.
"Everything seems to be in order," Santi replied.
"Well, no shit. I'm good at my job, kid," Vik said as he stretched. "Now, you have to listen to me, and listen to me well. Give your body two weeks or so to adapt, and then come back so I can run the full post-integration diagnostic."
"What about the sandy?" Santi asked. "When can I get that installed?"
"As soon as I can find one," Vik scoffed. "You wanna go Cyberspsycho, fine by me. Getting as much chrome installed in one sitting as you just did is already an immense feat, but I'd still recommend waiting at least a month or two before getting any more chrome, or you'll end up hunted by MaxTac."
"Guess I don't have much of a choice on the matter," Santi sighed.
"It's conveniently the only way I can slow your speerun to cyberpsychosis," Vik nodded. "Besides, I don't think the NUSA will hit us too hard. Night City is far too lucrative to just destroy."
"I hope you're right, Vik," Santi murmured. "I hope you're right..."
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War is at the door! Your stones help reinforce the defenses!
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