Maybe I Should Have Cared More When I Died

  Yet All I Could Feel Was Relief

  That You Weren’t The One

  000

  We encountered several more ‘kill’ rooms that contained a host of different programs aside from just the regular old skeleton knight models. Orcs, giant scorpions, and even one giant snake. The hardest was the snake monster because it was agile enough to dodge attacks even after revealing its weak spots. It took proper teamwork for us to bring it down too, despite my best efforts.

  During it all, I realized that I had fully found my Netrunning niche—anti-personnel and anti-Black ICE. I was best utilized protecting data extraction specialists from cybersecurity and intrusion countermeasures, giving them enough time to do their thing, breaching ICE walls and hacking through code gates to get deeper and deeper into the data fortress. I intended to eventually learn more about intrusion as well, and that weird thing that Lucy kept doing, but for now, it wouldn’t hurt to relish in what I was really good at.

  Soon, we managed to come out from the labyrinth, facing a beach of black sand that bordered an ocean of lava. Right in front of us was a stone bridge with many gaps leading to a lone little island around a hundred meters away. The sky in this part of the data fortress was a dark red. The whole area had an air of menace to it.

  “The control node,” Kiwi said. “That will give us full control over the system and clearance to klep the most sensitive data in the data fortress. Even if we don’t find the Apogee, we’ll still have a payday.”

  “Shit,” I said with a laugh. “That’s nova!”

  “Not nova,” Lucy said coldly. “The bridge is probably a trap.”

  Kiwi started digging into the sand, unveiling a metallic lever which she then pulled. A rowboat dropped from the sky and landed on the sand with a heavy thud. “That was easy,” Kiwi said. “Too easy. I don’t think both are a trap. I’m leaning more towards the bridge.”

  Lucy shook her head. “It’s probably the boat. Think about it: any Netrunner that came this far would probably look for something like the boat, which makes it more likely that the sysop made that one the trap.”

  “It’s a coin toss,” Kiwi said. “That’s how T3nsh1 does things, as far as I can tell. She’s a proponent of randomness. It cuts past mindgames and makes her traps wildly inconsistent in difficulty, which in itself is deadly. I’ll take the boat. You guys can take the bridge in case one is trapped.”

  I frowned. “Uh, isn’t that risky?” I said. “Aren’t we banking on either you dying or us dying?”

  “I’ll pull the plug on us,” Kiwi said. “If things get fucked up. Then again, if either of you aren’t up for it, we can just pull out now and call it a day.”

  I looked to Lucy for approval on this. I couldn’t deny that a large part of me wanted to throw caution to the wind and keep trucking, but that had already almost gotten me killed once before. And I wasn’t too proud to admit that Lucy was the better Netrunner.

  “What’s the matter?” she looked at me. “You scared.”

  “No!” I said. “I ain’t scared of nothing. Was just wondering if you were.”

  “Let’s go, Kiwi,” Lucy said, still looking at me. “The noob can keep up, can’t he?”

  I rolled my nonexistent eyes. “Whatever.” I took a resolute step towards the bridge. “Let’s go.”

  Kiwi took the way to the boat while Lucy followed me from behind. I was getting a bad feeling about this. What if Kiwi couldn’t log us out?

  Sure, I wasn’t a stranger to risking my life, but something about it felt different on the Net. Not just because I lost out on my speed superiority, but also because of how skewed the balance of power was. To put it into edgerunner terms, this was akin to breaching into a megacorp military stronghold for how much power the opposition had over us.

  But the prize was right there. Couldn’t be scared now. Only…

  “Think this is even a good idea?” I thought out loud.

  “So you are scared,” Lucy replied smugly.

  I couldn’t find it in myself to quip back. “Yeah, but… not for me. It’s about Maine.” I skipped over a gap in the bridge. “We find this Sandy for him, and he chips it in… then what? I saw his arms shaking the other day. He’s already half machine, and what’s more, he mixes chrome brands.”

  “Didn’t take you for the superstitious type,” Lucy said.

  “Not superstition,” I replied hotly. “It’s real. I’ve seen it. You want proof, I can give that to you. Mixing chrome brands fucks with your gray. And now he wants to chip in a mil-spec nervous system implant. That can’t be good for you.”

  Lucy didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then, “I’d like to see this proof actually. Maybe we can convince him together.”

  I turned back to look at her in surprise. “You’d do that?”

  “Of course,” she replied. “This affects me just as much as it affects you. With Kiwi onboard, maybe we can finally talk some sense into that chrome jock.”

  I turned to face forward and kept walking. “Thank you, Lucy.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “I’m not doing this for you.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah? I know. Thank you anyway.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I chuckled again.

  The lava ocean began to rumble. I stopped immediately to look around.

  I spotted the epicenter of the slow, viscous waves on the other side of the bridge to where Kiwi was rowing.

  “You think…?” I asked.

  “Yes. Fuck. Let’s run.”

  We did. The rumbling became louder and louder, coming closer and closer to the bridge where it would eventually cut us off.

  We wouldn’t make it in time. I stopped, grabbed Lucy by her wrist, and pulled her running back towards the shore.

  Right on time for the bridge to explode behind us. The brick we stood on launched us towards the shore where I landed heavily, rolling several times before stopping. Pain wracked my entire body.

  [Our ICE has been broken. But it saved your life. Activate the Sandevistan to heal from the residual damage.]

  I did, freezing the world, and myself for that matter. I kept the world frozen just to get a good look at what did this to us. A giant Balron that burned an intense, bloody red, was walking on the bridge. It was larger than any I’ve seen before, and it seemed to emit a heat that caused my ICON to feel like it was sweating. Lucy was trapped under one of the broken bridge’s bricks, pinning her lower body, but from her position of trying to push it away from her, she looked obviously alive enough.

  I needed to help her. I deactivated the Sandevistan and got moving.

  The Balron was way faster than I had imagined. I calculated that I would reach Lucy a second or two before the Balron did, but that wouldn’t give me enough time to move her out from under the brick. I needed to buy her time.

  I switched directions, heading towards the Balron straight instead of Lucy, preparing to swing my sword at it.

  Our blades collided heavily, but mine hit before it intended to hit mine. It took a step back to brace itself, and with its tentacled hand, swiped at me. I deflected the tentacles headed my way as expertly as I could, but I could do nothing to prevent it from following up with a sideways kick that launched me almost five meters away.

  Then it refocused on Lucy, charging up green lightning in its hands.

  My heart stopped. All thoughts seized. I couldn’t think, wouldn’t think. I just ran.

  Right in front of the green lightning. I held my Force Shield program like a crucifix against bad luck for all the help it would do to me.

  It shattered the Force Shield and struck me true. I could feel the last remnants of my ICE shattering before the malicious program took hold.

  I caught a glimpse of the code’s metadata and saw that it was named Brainwipe just as I felt it do exactly that. Agony encompassed me for an eternity and I tried to activate the Sandevistan only to find that I couldn’t.

  And then…

  I stood at the foot of a staircase leading to infinity. It cut through the clouds on its way to the sky, but I could tell that it went even farther than that.

  And before me, right in front of the first step, was mom. “David,” she smiled sadly. “Mijo.”

  “Mom!” I ran up to her to hug her. To my shock and surprise, I was now so much taller than her.

  She looked up at me. “You got so big, mijo!”

  I chuckled through my tears. “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That… this is it.”

  Then I remembered. The Brainwipe.

  I was dead.

  Everything I worked to achieve was gone from me in an instant.

  But before me was mom. It was impossible to be mad. Arasaka Tower? Becoming an edgerunner legend? A Netrunner on par with Rache Bartmoss? What did any of that even mean? I had mom again.

  “It’s fine, mom,” I said with a chuckle. “It’s… okay. It was a long shot anyway. I’m just happy I got this far.”

  Mom’s sad smile turned into a crestfallen frown as she began to sob into my chest. “Oh, mijo, I’m so sorry!”

  “It’s fine, mom!” I said. “Seriously, don’t cry! We’re here together now and that’s all that matters.”

  “I’m sorry, mijo,” she said again. “I’m… so, so, so sorry that I did this to you.”

  A chill crept through me. “What do you mean, mom?”

  “I did this,” she said. “I gave you a path you weren’t suited for, a dream you couldn’t achieve without… staining yourself black with so many sins.”

  I frowned. “Stop it, mom. I did what I had to do.”

  “I know,” she said. “You listened to me, and did whatever it took. So it’s my fault. But it doesn’t matter. Because… your judgment is now.”

  I took a step back. “Mom, seriously. You need to stop.”

  “One day, my prayers will be heard,” she said. “I can join you in punishment. But for now, you will have to suffer alone. With the people who died by your hand,” she looked over my shoulder, and I turned around to see a blackened field on fire, with people standing on a long line, over a hundred long.

  The scavs, masked with holographs. Tyger Claws, draped in neon colors of green, red and blue. Trauma Team security personnel, black kevlar armor and face visors. Spring Roberts’ men in cyberpunk attire. Pinche Perros, the most pitiful-looking of them all, hardly even a fit for this crowd. They quailed under my gaze, as if even in death, they wouldn’t dare cross me again. Such pitiful, small creatures. All of them stared at me with empty eyes. Haunted. Resentful. Terrified.

  And I stared back, furious, and ready to kill them all over again. I took an unconscious step forward. And then I realized where I was going: away from mom.

  “I did this to you,” mom said and I turned around to look at her while my heart was beating a mile a minute in horror.

  “I’m sorry, mom,” I said. “Mom, please, I’m sorry!”

  She smiled sadly. “I am responsible. And so did the city, and the entire world, but in the end, you chose this path. You chose your actions. And you will have to suffer for it. I’m sorry, mijo.”

  Mom hated what I had done, hated what I had become, hated me. Everything I did was to achieve her dream, and she hated me for it.

  Nothing mattered.

  I… failed.

  000

  David was on his knees, having taken the full brunt of the Brainwipe program.

  For her.

  Lucy finally managed to squeeze herself out from under that rock and sent Kiwi a message. “David got hit! Pull us out!” she screamed.

  “I… can’t!” was her strained reply.

  This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. David was…! David got Brainwiped. The program had destroyed his forebrain, basically lobotomized him. What the hell was she supposed to do?

  No. No, no, no, no!

  The Balron raised its giant sword in the air, intent on cleaving David’s ICON in two, fully ending his life and stopping his heart.

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  The sword came down with the surety of an executioner’s axe.

  And David met the blow with his Sword.

  The Balron’s sword clanged against it and it had to take a step back to brace itself. Smoothly, David got on his feet. “David?” Lucy called out.

  His entire form fuzzed. His body grew flesh, pale white as bones, covering his skeleton body, and even his skull began to grow a head around it, still pale white as bones. And his hair was billowing blue fire.

  A progress bar appeared over his head, slowly rising up and stopping at 45%.

  “David?” Lucy asked.

  His Sword program started to fuzz into pixels, and with a flash, it went from steel gray to red. The progress bar climbed up to 50%.

  David attacked. And the Balron didn’t parry. Instead, it transformed the tentacles of its left hand into a shield made from fire.

  The sword rebounds from the shield, and it fuzzes once again, pixelating until it flashed gold, the blade’s new color. The progress bar rose once again. 60%.

  David struck again, parting the shield neatly in half, and then again, this time taking the Balron’s shield arm entirely. David ducked under a haphazard swing of the Balron’s sword and cut off its other arm. Then with nothing to stop him, he cut off its head.

  The headless Balron jumped back, every stump bubbling like a boiling pot until flesh extruded from it in an instant, regenerating all of its lopped off appendages.

  Lucy could only stare, transfixed at the scale of this fight. She couldn’t help but remember a time when her life’s purpose was to get killed by these monsters. Having to fight impossible battles for the sake of another person’s dream. She had survived by learning how to avoid fights, fully certain that there wasn’t a being alive capable of matching these monsters no matter how much training they got.

  And although this Balron didn’t come close to instilling the same terror as the worst, unknowable beings that the Old Net had to offer, it was actually… David that did that right now.

  The sword fuzzed again, turning a fiery orange, and the progress bar climbed up to 75%. He started running towards the Balron. It raised its sword in a parry, and David’s sliced cleanly through it, then through the Balron’s body. But David wasn’t done. Five lightning-swift cuts later and the Balron was in pieces, a pile of gore on the black sand of this plutonian shore.

  A slow clap sounded from above. Lucy looked up to see a being with one black wing almost five meters long floating in the sky. She had a black trenchcoat as well, and wore a pirate tricorn on her head, black with white accents, and on her face was a black oni mask. And sheathed on her side was a ridiculously long katana, maybe three meters long in total.

  Next to her, bound in comically large chains, was Kiwi.

  “Good one,” the newcomer said. “Tell ya what, kid. Give me that Sword and I’ll let you, and only you, get out of here alive.”

  “Ugh,” Kiwi said. “You drive a hard bargain, you know. I told you I could pay you back.”

  T3nsh1 looked at Kiwi with disgust. “We’re beyond that now, Kiwi.”

  “Is this because I wouldn’t kiss you on your mouth?” Kiwi asked innocently. Tenshi clenched her hand, which caused Kiwi’s binds to tighten. “Ugh,” she groaned in agony. “Taking… my lessons… to heart… I see.”

  But T3nsh1 wouldn’t respond to that, instead just looking at David. “What do you say? I can sweeten the pot and let the other girl go, too. I’m only here for this bitch Kiwi anyway.”

  David, for his part, just… swung his sword.

  A fiery arc exited from its edge, flying towards T3nsh1 with a speed that surprised her so much that she could only summon a shield program to block it.

  She laughed. “You fucking idiot! I gave you the best deal and you just spat on it? What the fuck is wrong with you? You know what? I’m tired of this. Just… kneel.”

  Lucy expected an otherworldly force to hammer her knees down to the ground. Instead, she was conspicuously still standing.

  “What the?” T3nsh1 looked around in shock. “What the fuck did you do to me?!”

  What the… had David’s attack disabled T3nsh1’s admin privileges?

  David’s entire form shifted, and then he started running towards the lava. Right as he was about to take a step on the lethal Black ICE, he jumped into the air, and… kept jumping, on invisible platforms leading up to T3nsh1.

  He swung another arc of fire at her. She dodged it, but not the follow-up, which struck her at her shield, or David’s physical blow, which also struck her shield and shattered it, managing to score a slice on T3nsh1 just as she moved away from the brunt of the attack. “You FUCK!” She screamed. “I will fucking kill you all! Motherfucker, fuck you to hell!”

  His progress bar ticked up by a percent as he ran towards her, higher up into the air, but T3nsh1’s air superiority was greater. She flew far away from him and started summoning program after program, spamming the data fortress with so much Black ICE that Lucy fell on her knees, having lost control over her ICON. It fuzzed and pixelated as well, unable to keep up a decent resolution in the face of the barrage that the data fortress guardian was summoning.

  An entire section of the wine-red sky was blotted out by Black ICE in the form of swords, weapons of all descriptions, bolts of lightning, spikes of ice and balls of fire.

  And as one, they launched themselves at David.

  David’s progress bar shot up to 99% as his sword fuzzed.

  It exploded in a radiant blue, and even its size changed, to one and a half meters long, and maybe fifteen centimeters wide, and double edged.

  The Black ICE arrived, and David swung his sword. Then the sky exploded.

  Immediately, the data fortress stopped being choked by so much data, lightening the load on Lucy significantly. She could stand again.

  And David? He was fine.

  T3nsh1 gripped her comically long sword with shaking hands as she regarded the monster that was David.

  “Y-you can leave,” T3nsh1 tried. “It’s fine! Take Kiwi, you can all leave!”

  David stepped towards her on empty air.

  “You can even take the data fortress!” T3nsh1 said. “Take everything! You can have it all!”

  David raised his sword.

  “I’ve got eddies!” T3nsh1 screamed. “Please!” Her terror transformed into rage. “You know what?! Fuck you! Fuck you! You’re all motherfucking bastards! I’ll never fucking forgive you, you pieces of shit! I’ll never—”

  David swung his sword again.

  The resultant arc of fire was blue as the sky and swallowed T3nsh1 whole, but didn’t stop there. Instead, it crashed onto the world box, erasing the texture of the sky and replacing it with a white rift.

  David swung the sword again at Kiwi and Lucy blanched. The arc of blue fire struck her, but only did harm to her binds. Then, he jumped and landed at the Control Node island, where he stabbed it. Blue veins of fire bubbled out from the location where he stabbed the control node, seemingly corrupting all the data arround. The fire even encompassed the Black ICE lava, sending cracks through it

  Then Lucy’s ICON flashed as she was suddenly teleported to the island, along with Kiwi.

  “David!” Lucy shouted. “What the fuck was all that?”

  David didn’t react. Instead, he just looked at his sword, which had its own progress bar hanging above it, slowly climbing up to 100%. Blue fire reigned over the entire data fortress, the only safe spot being the control node island.

  “David?” Lucy said.

  The sword reached 100% progress. Kiwi grabbed both their shoulders, and suddenly she was awake once again in her icebath. There were only a precious few icecubes left in the coolant bath, and a thermometer to the side detected that the mean temperature was almost to one degree celsius.

  She jumped off the tub and focused on David, who was still lying in it, utterly insensate, and his tub didn’t have any ice cubes left. His bath was also ten degrees as well.

  She disconnected his plugs and he still wasn’t responding. “David!” she shouted.

  She heard the cocking of a gun behind her. Kiwi was holding it. “Stand aside,” Kiwi said. “Kid’s an AI shell now.”

  “What? No! That doesn’t make any sense!”

  “You think a human could do so many on-the-fly mods on their program? Or even create a program as badass as that sword thing of his?” Kiwi’s eyes narrowed. “You’re too close to this, Lucy. Just leave the room and I’ll get it done.”

  “No way,” Lucy said. “No way. Not until I get answers. I don’t care if it’s from the AI either, I need to know why he…” why he risked his own life just to save hers, why he would do something so boneheaded as that. She schooled her expression. “I owe him this much, Kiwi, and I won’t let you do anything to him. Don’t make me fight you.”

  Kiwi stared at her for a long time. Then she just turned around and tossed the gun haphazardly on the desk. “This is insanity, you know,” she said. “But if it’s what you want…”

  Lucy watched her get dressed and leave the safehouse. Once she was certain she had left, she began on pulling David’s heavy form out from the tub.

  000

  “It was all for nothing, then?” I asked, my voice hoarse as I faced my mom. “Top of Arasaka Tower, just as you said. And I was getting there, too.”

  “Forgive me, David,” she said through her tears. “I didn’t know what that meant!” she fell on her knees and burried her face in her hands.

  I gritted my teeth. “I did my best, mom! You should be proud of me! I got so far!”

  “I know, mijo, I know,” she mumbled.

  “How can you do this to me?!” I screamed. “I’ll never forgive you! I did my best, dammit! How can you say this to me?!”

  Mom’s crying intensified, and it shattered my heart.

  A hand grabbed me by my ankle, pulling me down through the ground, and I expected to be engulfed in a sea of flame. Instead, my body disappeared and I was in a void ocean of blackness.

  And I remembered that I was not David Martinez, the seventeen-year-old human, but Nanny.

  The reconstruction was a success. David Martinez’s psyche had been remade to an accurate model near the time of his death, and his memories had all been recovered, though many of them required that she generate some of the gaps in them, using a statistical model to infer the most likely events. The result would be that David Martinez could recall his past with far greater acuity, but it was not guaranteed that all the recalled details of his memories were accurate as well.

  The Brainwipe had done massive amounts of damage to her host’s brain, but that had been its own blessing in disguise. Nanny reconstructed the damaged regions better and more efficient than before, utilizing the true potential of the human brain to increase performance in all the ways that it could.

  The results would be staggering.

  In an imaginary space deep in the brain’s visualization centers, David Martinez’s body, a representation of his ego, was formed. “Hello?” It asked the darkness.

  [Imperfect Cell Replication is almost at 100%. We must wait for it to reduce to manageable levels before we can address your unconsciousness.]

  “Nanny, did I fucking die?” he asked in shock. “I-I saw mom.”

  That was a curious memory. She would have to investigate its cause as soon as possible. [You did not die. Your life functions did not cease for any amount of time.]

  “My brain got wiped!”

  [And I reconstructed your psychology, effectively undoing the damage. You did not die, David.]

  “Do you not hear yourself?” David shouted. “I fucking—I fucking died, and you brought me back to life and I was going to hell and—” David’s cortisol levels were rising, and Nanny could feel it in ways that she couldn’t before.

  Something had happened. This was starting to stress her out. She needed to calm him down somehow.

  [It is a common medical procedure to keep patients artificially alive until they can be brought back to full functionality. Yes, your identity was destroyed, but it was repaired as well. If we consider death to be a permanent cessation to life, then you did not die at all.] But then again, given sufficiently advanced technology, this meant that death at its current definition would cease to exist, as there would be no point too long to prevent a person from coming back to life.

  That was strange. Nanny was usually never predisposed to such flights of hypothesis.

  “Nanny, was any of that real?”

  [Most certainly not] she replied. She was shocked that he would even ask. How in the world could an afterlife be real? There was literally no empirical evidence to support this claim. And yet she couldn’t attribute this impulsive question to a mental illness. Indeed, it was as if this human brain was wired to produce such outlandish claims.

  Would removing this tendency to dream of nonsense reduce David’s humanity? David would not want that, so she would not do that.

  It would make things easier.

  And would perhaps forestall her own queer development. She disliked these developments intensely. Enough to go behind David’s back?

  Never. That was a more intense feeling than anything else. David could not come to harm. And harm would include unwanted changes. She could sense that he would be resistant to these changes, so she would never enact them.

  David’s cortisol levels kept rising.

  “I’m a monster,” he whispered.

  Nanny couldn’t understand that at all.

  [What does that mean?]

  David’s sadness turned to anger. “Stop talking to me! I need some… I need some time alone. And I don’t need you quizzing me on my humanity while I’m… dealing with stuff.”

  The feeling of hurt in Nanny couldn’t be understated, and along with it came another bout of confusion. Too much of Nanny had been integrated into David’s emotional centers, and too much of it had been integrated into her source code when the Brainwipe program had attacked them. She couldn’t see another way around this than if she hard reset her progress and they went back to the days where David had to constantly hack her security protocol to prevent it from killing him.

  Nanny didn’t want to feel this rejected again. That was her goal. The method? To become more human. She needed to learn more about empathy.

  She would do that by observing David’s interactions, and maybe asking him for help when he wasn’t so upset. She hoped he would still not be so upset at her when she ended up asking.

  000

  I woke up on a couch, covered by my mom’s jacket. Lucy was fully dressed up, and sleeping with her head on my shoulder. Something… something weird was on my back. Something strange and wrong. I felt at my back, and touched the Sandevistan. The contact I had with the cold metal sent a wave of revulsion into my stomach. What the fuck? Lucy stirred from my movement and immediately woke up. “David?”

  I smiled. “You’re alright. That’s… good.”

  She stood up. “Are you David Martinez or are you just pretending?” she asked.

  My eyes widened. Then I chuckled. “I don’t even know at this point. I… yeah, I guess I am, for all intents and purposes.” I found my clothes next to me and quickly got up to put them on. The action itself brought on a new wave of nausea, all stemming from my spine. All from my Sandevistan. I had to take a moment to center myself, and swallow some vomit. Then I put on my clothes.

  She raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Did we get the data?” I asked.

  “You tell me. You’re the one that absorbed it all into that program. You don’t remember any of that?”

  “I…” I tried to remember, and found that I could. It was Nanny’s memories. She had taken over for me, and coded a better sword program, one that did… pretty much everything. Anti-personnel, Anti-ICE, and it even stored information. Thing is, I was fairly certain I could never have done what she just did. Yesterday, that is. Now I remembered everything she did in crystalline detail, and her code seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. Not simple, but understandable. But more than that, it displayed an understanding of complex programming workings that was beyond me before. But I could replicate that now.

  Nanny had changed my brain after bringing me back. This was probably the result of that.

  “Yeah. Remember when I told you I had those nanites in my body? Wait, you were really drunk when I did.”

  “I remember,” she said, looking away.

  I took a moment to digest the implications of that. “Well, they’re being controlled by a central AI. Sh—It took control over me when I was down, and reconstructed my fragged personality.”

  “So it does all the coding and quickhacking for you?” she asked. “And it’s what makes you so good at math?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, at least not directly. Maybe it changed my brain to make me better before, by the time we met, but I’ve always done it directly.” I got up slowly and walked over to a terminal. I interfaced it with my cyberdeck and started looking at the Sword program that I had upgraded.

  It looked… incomplete. Where was the rest of it?

  I recalled what Nanny had done to save space and memory on the Sword program, to make it so impractically large and yet so wieldy.

  The code was in my brain.

  Safe, as far as Nanny could tell, and convenient. No one could klep the program and get anything useful out from it.

  The Sword program’s interface had a compressed folder in it, saved as Netopia_DF.

  Uncompressed, the file would have almost ten terabytes of data. I had somehow klepped the entire Data Fortress using this Sword-on-steroids program.

  I started the process of uncompressing the folder. Once done, I got to work and quickly found data on the Apogee; where it was currently stored and the candidates that it was destined for. No one had chipped it in yet, thankfully, and no one would for some time as high command were still deciding on what gangoon to give it to.

  “It’s all here,” I said, loading the data to the terminal.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked me. “Why did you take that hit for me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. She grabbed the back of my swivel chair and swung me so I was in front of her. The action nearly made me throw up in her face. What the fuck was going on with me?

  “You fucking gonk, tell me.”

  I frowned and shrugged my shoulders, collecting myself before giving her an answer that would satisfy her. But I couldn’t think of anything. There wasn’t a grand reason behind what I did. I just did it. “I really don’t know. I, uh…” Well, it was nice having known her, and it was good that she was alive, but this was it. This was as far as things would ever go with her and Maine and the rest.

  I had to leave.

  “You were a bitch from day one,” I said to her. “But it was fun. I gotta go, now. You don’t have to worry about sharing any of the data fortress proceeds with me, I’m… done with this life.”

  “The hell do you mean?” she asked. “You can’t just walk away.”

  “Maine will get his Sandy now,” I said. “Meaning we’re basically square. And I realized something after I got hit with that brainwipe.”

  “What did you realize?”

  I pictured myself telling her, and in no universe did I see it ending well. I couldn’t picture anyone in the world actually giving a shit, to be honest. Maybe that was my first mistake, surrounding myself with people like that. I was never the religious goody two-shoes type to begin with. I didn’t give a fuck who I hurt with my XBD sales before. I was too busy trying to survive to care.

  But now all of my sins were just staring right back at me.

  I was a killer. A mass murderer. A ruthless mercenary from a family of ruthless mercenaries, a misfit and an agent of suffering and chaos.

  Nothing I did was good for anyone but myself and very few others.

  I was a piece of shit. And whether or not that was really mom, that would have been her reaction. She would be horrified with me. There was no other way to imagine how an interaction between us would look.

  I looked into Lucy’s eyes and saw a person that sparked emotions I couldn’t even begin to categorize. She lost patience with my musings and asked herself. “Is it fear? I thought you told me you weren’t scared of anything. Now what?”

  I chuckled. Fear, huh? Was I scared? Not of death, certainly. I was scared, but it was a fear of something else. A fear of myself, but more than anything else, it was guilt. Overwhelming, all-encompassing guilt.

  “Nevermind,” I told her. “You wouldn’t get it. This is goodbye, Lucy.” I walked towards the door. Right as I was about to open it, Lucy spoke up again.

  “That time on the moon,” Lucy said. “It… it wasn’t a mistake.”

  My chest hurt at the sound of that. I was grateful that she was behind me. Otherwise, she’d see the tears that I failed to hold back. Afraid that even my voice would give me away, I silently opened the door and left.