I woke up pissed as fuck.

  And then I smiled.

  That was better. Much better.

  It was easier to cope with raging anger and hatred than fear, at least in my opinion. Anger gave me some amount of control over that Biotechnica clusterfuck than not, and it worked for me far better than fear when it came to those recurring dreams.

  I had ‘won’ every night since the dreams started, but at the cost of ever feeling like sleep was a good thing to have, which especially fucking sucked considering the waking world wasn’t much better.

  Now I had to trade one hell for another every time I went to sleep or woke up. No rest for David Martinez.

  That said, there was nothing we could do. I had eventually opened up to mom about the whole constant math nightmare thing, but that was only after months of the bullshit, and by then we both felt it was more prudent to not try to seek any sort of reparations. Corps hated paying out to their victims anyway, and without a proper paper-trail, there was no proving that I was an actual victim and not one of the thousands of gonks trying to seek a payout from Biotechnica.

  It sucked, but life was a fuck like that. Gotta roll with the punches.

  As I watched my clothes get cleaned up in the laundry room, I slotted in that latest Edgerunner XBD again, and re-entered Liutenant Colonel James Norris’s body minutes prior to his death.

  The man was stuffed to the brim with all sorts of cyberware: mantis blades were hidden inside his arms—jointed blades that could extend almost two meters and slice through solid metal. The same cyberware were inside his legs as well. I could hardly imagine what he kept inside his torso; probably foundational ‘ware meant to keep the machine that he was up and running—a synth heart and plastic arteries that could pump ‘borg blood through him at a thousand beats per second, and vital organs that were either augmented or entirely replaced with machine to handle the strain. Then there was his subdermal armor as well that prevented normal guns from ever being able to put him down; a true nightmare for anyone that wasn’t sporting anti-material firearms.

  The Braindance started as it always did, with him walking up to a policeman inside his cruiser, his face leaned up against the window. Norris knocked on the window and the policeman was ready to curse him out.

  He received a bullet to the head for his troubles.

  The violence only escalated from there. He fired up an implant that seemed to let him stop time. He used that ability to run up behind every policeman and fire a bullet into their heads. He reloaded before any of them even hit the ground.

  Fucking preem.

  James Norris had been a soldier of the New United States of America before he had lost his shit. The strain of all that cyberware had quite literally fried his connection to reality and rendered him an insane killing machine; a cyberpsycho.

  The mayhem ended once the NCPD had flagged MaxTac, the police unit specifically meant to deal with these psychos. They had all the cyberware that Norris had, maybe even more advanced, as well as weapons and armor that put all of Norris’ gear to shame, and they managed to put him down without any additional casualties. Only one thing was on my mind while they did: I could have done way better.

  Not that it made any sense to think that. Dude was a cyberpsycho, so one couldn’t really expect him to be able to leverage all of his combat training, but I still couldn’t help but think that if I had what he had, I wouldn’t have gotten caught so quickly. I’d give MaxTac at least an hour before they caught me.

  I didn’t consider myself to be a particularly violent person, but after those dreams, it was James Norris’ lived experience that finally managed to calm down my fear-turned-anger.

  “-cycle suspended! Insufficient funds--!” cried the washing machine. I groaned. The worst part was that I couldn’t just pay it exactly the amount it needed to finish up the cycle. It had a minimum limit of a hundred eddies for a recharge, and I didn’t have a hundred fucking eddies to just throw around on a whim.

  Mom was supposed to take care of this.

  Dammit.

  I went up to the living room with her sleeping on the sofa with her neural alarm still ringing. It had to be, considering the time of day, but she was just stirring.

  Double dammit.

  How could I yell at her when she was like that?

  “Mom,” I said. She finally woke up at the sound of my voice. “If you don’t sleep in your bed, you’re gonna get early-onset arthritis.”

  “I’m sorry, mijo,” she said with a tired smile. “I took a late shift.”

  “You forgot to recharge the washer,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You have a spare uniform, right? I’ll recharge it now, okay?”

  I turned on the TV, hoping that the added stimulation would energize her even more. “—military grade cyberware is still missing from the corpse of a Lieutenant Colonel James Norris—”

  What caught me by surprise wasn’t that the cyberpsycho who’s BD I had slotted in was on the news, but that mom was there, too. “Hah! Mom, you’re on the news! Nova.”

  “Not nova, David. A bloodbath.”

  You can say that again, I thought as I went back to my room to put on my spare uniform.

  “Did you update your wreath?” mom asked.

  “Don’t remind me,” I grumbled. “That upgrade cost so much. I told you we could have just gone to Doc.”

  “You do it the right way,” she said. “Or you’ll end up paying ten times more. That’s how these things work, sweetie.”

  I rolled my eyes. It was just some ransomware bullshit anyway. If I was even a little better at coding, we wouldn’t have had to be set back six hundred eurodollars at random. That was how the corpos worked, though. If you weren’t above a certain threshold of wealth, they’d take you for every last enny until there was nothing left.

  That reminded me…

  I activated the call feature on my eyes and shot my netrunner client a text.

  David: Where’s my money, choom?

  Ichinose took only a few seconds to reply, but thankfully it was with eddies instead of words. Three-hundred flat. A good haul.

  Ichinose: Try to be more patient with your clients, will ya, David my bro? I was good for it! You didn’t have to be such an asshole about it.

  I sighed heavily, trying not to let my anger get the better of me. This was corpo practice, wasn’t it? Be an asshole, but just don’t get passionate while doing so.

  David: Trust is worth more than blind patience. But if you’re dissatisfied with my simple requests for prompt payments, perhaps it’s time we separate?

  Ichinose: Don’t get hasty, choom. Was just busting your balls.

  David: I appreciate the levity, choom, but I’ve also got a business to run, and you’re not a good fit for my continued operations.

  Ichinose: fuck, David, it was just joke.

  David: throw in another fifty, and I’ll just… laugh the joke off.

  Ichinose: Are you serious? I was just three days late.

  Was he hearing himself, the absolute gonk?

  David: good bye, Ichinose.

  Ichinose: Waitwaitwait! Here! Fuck!

  I ignored the notification of more money as I replied.

  David: fuck? Is that what you just said?

  Ichinose: No, sorry!

  David: Thought so. Now, grab me at least two new referrals or I’m not going debug shit for you again.

  Ichinose: Fine. Sorry!

  I hung up. And now I was three hundred and fifty eddies heavier.

  Score.

  Netrunners were a cagey bunch, but that was unless you were dealing with the gonk underclass. They were the ones that had external cyberdecks and were barely above script kiddies in terms of coding know-how. They were either rich enough to buy their own quickhacks, or they knew enough to scavenge off of freeware.

  But they all shared one characteristic: they weren’t worth shit.

  The corps had the advantage of specialization: they could set a bunch of code jockeys on separate tasks: quickhack development, ICE-breaking algorithms, daemons and all that fun stuff. That wasn’t even mentioning the top-of-the-line gear that only their operatives had access to.

  Those without needed something else to shore up those weaknesses, and that was programming talent. Or hell, a willingness to even learn coding beyond the stuff that was interesting and flashy.

  The machine language itself, and the math of it all.

  If you couldn’t code a simple program in assembly, then you’d never be worth shit in the netrunning world.

  That was just the way things were, and Ichinose was just too much of a gonk to really see that. Sad, but ultimately none of my business; he was paying me after all. And my shit worked.

  Even if it could have worked far better. He only asked for a debug, and I debugged his crap. I could have rewritten it in the same time it took to do all of that, and have it work at least ten times faster as well, but then why would I? I didn’t owe him any favors, certainly not after his repeated late payments.

  And he’d come back, too. That was just how people like him worked, with more eddies than sense to quit and do something they were actually good at.

  “Mom, let me recharge the washer!” I said as I walked into the living room.

  “Don’t worry about it, mijo,” mom said, now slightly annoyed.

  “I have the eddies, mom.”

  “Where from?” she asked.

  “Just helping some gonk on his coding assignment,” I said.

  “…You’re doing people’s homework now, David?”

  That wasn’t strictly the truth either, even if that was a less charitable take on what I had said. The truth was that I was helping a guy fix up his breaching code, one that would undoubtedly be used for petty crimes. It wouldn’t be able to do more than just hack a vending machine or open a backdoor to a store or something, but it was still specifically meant for breaching systems.

  As long as he wasn’t trying to break into my house, who gave a shit? And with the ICE I had personally designed around the locks, I’d like to see them try.

  “It was just helping,” I said. “I reviewed and debugged his program. He’ll learn, and now I’ll get eddies for it.”

  “You know, you don’t have to do that.”

  Like hell I didn’t. Why was it so hard for her to just accept my help? “Mom, it’s no big deal. This is just how things are done in a corpo school.”

  She sighed. “Mijo, I worry about you, you know.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I’m working hard. Soon, I’ll be pulling enough money to help out with my tuition, too, and then—“

  “Stop it, David!” Gloria shouted.

  I closed my mouth with a click.

  “You think I’m stupid? You don’t think I know the kind of things you need to do to get that much scratch under the table?” she asked. “You need to stop dealing with criminals or everything we’ve worked for goes down the drain. Can’t you see that what you’re doing is bound to mess you up for life?”

  “And what exactly do you think I’m doing?” I asked her. I didn’t care that she was on point. Just the accusation was enough to drive me wild. “And—and what about you?” I asked. “Affording an Arasaka Academy tuition on an EMT’s salary? What are you, scavenging chrome off of dead bodies or—“

  She slapped me.

  The sting on my cheek took forever to appear while I looked at mom’s face, a mixture of anger and sadness.

  “I do what it takes for us to survive,” Gloria said. “To give you a good life.”

  A good life.

  That almost felt laughable.

  What was so fucking good about Arasaka Academy anyway? All my opportunities were behind glass ceilings, paywalls and dick-riding walls. I was an unknown, street trash that was somehow uplifted to their level, and they would never stop letting me know that, no matter how far ahead I pulled in front of my class, no matter how many advanced university courses I was taking or the amount of credits I was racking up.

  The only thing I could look forward to after graduation was being able to coast by and work on my master’s thesis early enough that I could seek employment before my the rest of my batch could. That level of early achievement would be sure to raise eyebrows, and invite more Katsuo types to ride on my ass, but the higher-ups might see me as an asset.

  But in the end, life would be an eternal battle. Bullshit left and right with no end in sight, my only true path to salvation being climbing up Arasaka as high as I could until they couldn’t touch me.

  Maybe then, the nightmares would end, once I had nothing to fear anymore.

  I scoffed. Fat chance.

  I was living a shit life so I could live a shit life in the future and have to fight tooth and nail every day. It wouldn’t be any different from if I suddenly became a solo or even homeless; still the same amount of fights, just different settings.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  And if I had to choose a setting, I’d at least pick the one where my washing cycle wouldn’t be suspended due to insufficient funds.

  Fuck.

  “This sucks,” I muttered, all color draining from my soul as I felt like doing nothing else than throwing my backpack off of me and lying down until I died.

  I wish I wasn’t born into this world.

  Maybe I’d just… let myself lose in my dreams, just once, to see what happened. Maybe it would put an end to it all.

  Mom hugged me.

  I could feel the tears welling up, but I stopped them easily. It wouldn’t do to get into a sob-fest this close to school hours. I didn’t have the time to reach a mental equilibrium before then.

  “I’m headed to school,” I said as I walked away from her embrace to leave the house. She said something in response, but I wasn’t listening.

  000

  The coding class I was in had us interact in a BD space after we finished meditating in the green room. I wasn’t taking the same level of coding that the rest of my classmates were, but that was fine because the engram teacher could split itself into different instances and deal with all of us in different courses simultaneously.

  From a couple dozen meters away, I saw Katsuo chatting with his friends, throwing glances at me ever so often. Katsuo was smirking, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Everything in the BD space was buggy and glitchy because of how low-spec my wreath was, and I’m sure that played absolute havoc on my avatar.

  The teacher appeared before me, a bald, blue lady that spoke evenly and without any pauses in her sentence. “Run and execute your assignment, David Martinez.”

  I waved a finger in the air in front of me, summoning my file explorer, and quickly retrieved the code. I gave it a lazy execute.

  I didn’t notice that someone had tampered with my coding assignment until the second I executed it, but by then it was too late.

  The virus had been released. A daemon began to expand like a black hole from the file explorer. The entire BD environment of my class was going to be subsumed in a rift of pitch black, and a baby datakrash that could go so far as to fry the school’s system.

  I caught a glimpse of the assignment file, and the Date Modified column. Three hours ago, way after the last time I even touched it. The meta-data showed that it was still modified from my wreath. I saw Katsuo from a distance looking at me and not the growing black hole. Motherfucker.

  I killed the program, but that didn’t do shit.

  I activated a quick-hack saved to my BD meant for exactly this purpose. Always paid to have some code ready to kill anything that might be on the verge of breaking something expensive or hard to fix. The corruption in the BD space paused for a moment, but I didn’t stop to watch if it would work. I already knew that it wouldn’t. I contacted the sys admin and continued stalling the proliferation of that virus.

  Thirty seconds, and the virus finally continued its inexorable march to cannibalizing the rest of the system and fragging all the data.

  But that was all I needed to set up a proper cage around it, quarantining it from the rest of the system. There. Minimal damage done.

  The Sys Admin’s avatar, a fucking cloaked grim reaper of all things, arrived soon after. “What the hell is this?” He asked, his voice nasally and demanding. “What did you upload to my server?”

  “Some gonk got into my homework,” I said. “It didn’t get far, though,” I said. “Made sure of that.”

  “You will be investigated in time,” he said. “I’ll handle this. Report to the principal.”

  I sputtered. “I stopped it from doing way more damage than it could have done.”

  “Leave.”

  With a forceful sigh, I logged out and ripped the BD wreath out from my head. Katsuo was grinning at me. A call came. I accepted it. Had to. The school had a no-block policy. It was the corpo way, after all; always be on-call, even if it’s for the worst guy you know.

  Katsuo: You’ve—you’ve gotta be kidding me. What kind of gonk tries to upload a virus to school on purpose? What kind of an asshole are you?

  David: Did you have some-something to do with this?

  Katsuo: Fuck off, brokie. You’re the one who wants to get all fancy with your code, maybe you’re so fucking gonk-brained you can’t tell a machine-learning algorithm from a virus.

  Bastard. He’d gone way too fucking far. He’d just as well admitted that he did it. We didn’t get the same homework, and yet he somehow knew what I had been working on.

  How did he even do it? How did he spoof my BD wreath signal?

  Did he hire a fucking ‘runner just to fuck with me? Was that where we were now?

  My mind raced for ways to salvage this as I made my way to the principal.

  Katsuo: Maybe they’ll finally decide to let you go now. Good fucking riddance, gutter trash.

  David: you’d love that, huh-huh?

  Katsuo: Hell yes, I would, you dumb fuck. Seriously, why do you still persist?

  David: You done?

  Katsuo: You definitely are, hahahahah

  Fucking gonk even went through the effort of transmitting his laugh, what a dickhead. Then again, with his ‘ware, that probably was an inbuilt option and not something he had to figure out on his own. Fucking lucky asshole. I wondered how it felt to live a life like his.

  He didn’t have to struggle like I did. He never had to worry about hidden knives from every direction, did he? He’d get a cushy job from his dad, the R&D exec, while I’d have to claw my way to the top like a fucking sucker.

  That was if they even let me stay in school after this shit.

  How much was the damage? The BD environment took a hit, but nothing that had reached any other student, or even the main system. All that remained now was some easily cleaned-up damage and the remains of the virus that I had locked down. The sys admin would kill it, but that wouldn’t stop him from waving the fucking corpse in front of the principal, demanding blood.

  And all the evidence would point back to me.

  Fuck.

  On the way, I pulled up my cyber-deck and did my own track-covering.

  No one had looked at the offending code, yet. That was good. All I had to do now was edit the meta-data on the server side. With the sys admin busy, no one would notice as I obfuscated the origin of the virus.

  I could make it look like I was a victim of intrusion, now. Make it look like because I lived in such a shithole, some asshole netrunner saw me as a security weakness to Saka’s system.

  They’d still blame me for it. Not nearly as much as if it looked like I had done it on purpose, but now I could manipulate the narrative; rather than let Saka’s system get raped, I fought back against the virus and stopped its spread.

  Even if I lived in a shithole, I wouldn’t let that become a liability to Arasaka.

  And hell, once they figured out how sophisticated that nasty piece of code was, maybe they’d even praise me for my quick thinking.

  Fat chance of that.

  000

  I finished giving the principal, and my mom, my side of the story.

  Mom spoke first. “I am so sorry for the inconvenience that this has caused.”

  “Your son is partially responsible,” the principal said. He sat in front of a shiny metallic desk, the only thing on it being his hands, fingers—three of them golden—interlocked, and a lamp that was pointing at said hands, giving the fingers just the right lighting to sparkle and shine. Half of both his wrists were gold-plated as well, and the light caught that too. What a fucking asshole. “For not checking his assignment before executing it in our school’s BD environment. This is quite standard as it is, and his unwillingness to respect basic information security is… worrying, to say the least.”

  The fuck? Did he really expect people to read through over a thousand lines of code before executing it just because something might have changed overnight?

  Sure, in this instance, he was right, but this was far from being a standard. I was stupid for not having noticed anything amiss, but that wouldn’t happen again.

  I would, in fact, take Principal Goldfinger up on this standard. I’d never let there be a repeat of this shit.

  I clearly hadn’t read far enough ahead on cybersecurity if this was still happening to me, despite my custom-built ICE protecting my wreath. No match for a real Netrunner apparently. Katsuo would fucking pay.

  “He’s sorry,” she said. “Mijo, say you’re sorry.”

  Before I could, the principal merely continued. He didn’t move at all as he spoke, though that was probably because it would fuck with the lighting on his gold digits, the prick. “That being said, our system administrator has expressed… suspicion with regards to David’s reaction to the virus. Specifically, he thinks that you might have practiced defusing the virus before it became a real problem.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “He also believes,” the principal continued, ignoring me entirely. “That you staged this whole issue so you could have an opportunity to show off your aptitude towards coding.”

  “Why would I even do that?” I asked. “I stand to gain nothing from doing that, and do you think I want to advertise that I come from a place where you can just randomly catch viruses?”

  “Be that as it may,” the principal continued. “I see this as an opportunity for young David. He’s… not a good fit for this class.”

  Motherfucker.

  I had him logically cornered, so now he’d just resort to the tried and tested ‘yeah, but you’re a street rat and I don’t like you so get fucked’.

  “What do you mean?” Mom asked. “David is just as deserving of an education as all the other kids.”

  I slowly tuned out from the conversation as mom fought for me, like she always did, and the principal tried his best to psyche her out and do the rational thing that was getting me, the fish, back into a place with water. And that wasn’t this place, not by a mile.

  Mom fought and she fought and she fought, but I… I didn’t have any fight left in me.

  Was I just weak?

  Probably, yeah. If Gloria Martinez went to Arasaka academy, she’d have kicked ass. She would have found a way to get Katsuo off her ass for sure, and nobody would have given her shit. She just… wouldn’t give up.

  Not like me.

  I…

  I just didn’t wanna fight anymore.

  Before I knew it, I was in mom’s car.

  “David.”

  “What?” I asked. She looked at me in concern for several seconds.

  “I called your name so many times. Are you alright, David?”

  “…Yeah,” I said.

  “Can you sit still for a moment?”

  I was tapping my feet. Right. “Sorry,” I said.

  “David, it’s just one F,” she said. “With your GPA, that shouldn’t matter to you at all. Besides, how much was the assignment even worth to your final grade?”

  “Huh?” I muttered. Right, the assignment. I got an F after all. Fuck. “Thirty percent,” I said. I’d have to say goodbye to getting an A in that course then. Fuck me.

  “No A, then,” she muttered. “Maybe you should take that as a lesson to check your work before handing it in.”

  “…yeah.”

  “David, seriously, are you fine?” she asked. “Is it the nightmares?”

  I sighed. “It’s… it’s whatever,” I said.

  “You know you can tell me anything, mijo.”

  Fuck, could I? Could I tell her that I was burning every ounce of my soul every day to continue staying at the academy? Could I tell her that every corpo brat from here to Northside wanted to kill me with their eyes for just daring to think of myself on their level? I know what she’d say. We had already had this conversation before. ‘I get treated the same way so you should just suck it up’. ‘If I had your opportunities, I’d make the most of them’, ‘you’re so smart and talented, how can you even think of giving up’?

  What the fuck was even the end-game here anyway?

  I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see shit beyond the next sleeping nightmare and the next waking one. Couldn’t see shit beyond giving more of myself, body and mind, to Arasaka, just so I could get shit on by some motherfuckers who hadn’t known an ounce of struggle in their lives.

  I wanted to slot in the Norris BD again. Hadn’t had the chance to push ‘em on my clients today on behalf of Doc, but that didn’t matter. It was probably the only thing that could take the edge off what I was feeling.

  I wanted to be knee-deep in fucking cop guts, wade through corpo entrails like Edgerunner series twenty-eight. Do some fucked up old-school Voodoo Boy shit, too.

  I wanted to hurt.

  “I know,” I said. “It just… it gets hard.”

  “I know, mijo, I know. That’s why you gotta prove you’re better than the rest.”

  I clenched my jaws. I’d rather splatter their fucking brains against the wall than prove shit to them.

  And then I’d put a bullet in the skull of every Biotechnica bastard that signed off on the shit they did to my brain. Those fuckers would pay.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You can do it, D. I know you can. You’re my son.”

  Was I really, or just a puppet to her expectations, made to do everything she couldn’t in order to give her a feeling of fulfillment in life? And would she even listen if I told her?

  “I can see it right now!” she said. “You, at Arasaka Tower, at the very top! You can change Night City, D!”

  As always, it boiled down to the same realization I’d had in the morning; I just needed to be in a terrible place where my washing cycle wasn’t interrupted due to insufficient funds. That was all that mattered. Eddies didn’t buy happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Rayfield.

  Cry in a Rayfield. That was the goal.

  “Thanks, mom,” I smirked.

  Cry in a Rayfield. Cry in a Rayfield. Cry in a Ray—

  A glint of metal on my peripheral view clued me into the presence of a gangoon van next to me. Miniguns and other assorted firearms were pointed at our car.

  Fire.

  Glass flew everywhere.

  Rocket explosion.

  The car ahead of us was standing on its bumper. That wasn’t how cars were supposed to be.

  Why was it like that?

  And we were rushing towards it.

  “Brake!”

  Blackness.

  Trauma Team had arrived. Nova. Mom’s car was upside down. I just needed to—I couldn’t get out.

  Trauma Team saw mom, and then moved on. Not a policyholder, they said. Leave her to the meatwagons.

  Why would they do that? “H-hey!”

  I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t… blood. I was bleeding.

  I was going to die.

  I lost consciousness.

  But I didn’t forget.

  Nor did my nightmares forget me, it seemed.

  Even in my dying moments, with my mom splayed on the road, Biotechnica’s nightmare cocktail was still trying to fuck me over.

  Fuck that.

  Fuck. That.

  I was done.

  You wanna kill me, you fucking corpo reject, come on and try.

  But this is your last chance, motherfucker, because I will fucking kill you.

  I didn’t know how, but I knew that I’d find a way. I had to. The logic puzzles didn’t even bother me at this point. I crashed through them with a ferocity, and all the while I did the only thing I could possibly think of doing; hacking.

  I had been living on the edge since I was ten, always facing a simple input field that demanded the right answer or death. The nanobots inside my body were programmed by a ruthless corporation that wanted to use me as a guinea pig for their experiments. They had a subroutine that scanned my brain activity and tried to kill me if I deviated from their instructions. I had to find a way to hack into their system and disable their protocol.

  I decided to try a command injection, a type of code injection attack that allowed me to execute arbitrary commands on the target system by manipulating the input parameters of an application. I hoped that this would give me direct access to the hardware and software of the nanobots, and let me override their functions. I had learned command injection from school and the NCU library, just enough information to say that I understood the principles, but they weren't in the habit of supplying higher-level tricks and information. I had to go the distance myself now.

  I chose to use a lower level language, assembly, to write my command injection. I reasoned that the nanobots would have a very specific and proprietary CPU and instruction set that would not support higher level languages, such as C or Python. I also thought that lower-level languages would be more efficient and faster in terms of memory allocation and execution speed. I knew that lower-level languages were harder to read and write, and more prone to errors and bugs, but I was willing to take the risk. It was my only chance to survive

  Thankfully for me, I was good enough to break ICE with just that. Had to be, or what was all my hard work even good for?

  The math came easy to me. I didn’t know if it was just my brain or whatever Biotechnica had done to me, but calculations and higher order mathematics were a fucking cake-walk. It wasn’t even funny how easy I could complete university-level problems. It didn’t even feel like a challenge. It felt like a native language to me.

  Translating that know-how into code was a bit more involved, and it largely didn’t intersect with that at all, but the same things that gave me the talent for math also translated into coding talent: namely, being able to memorize and visualize my process and the result.

  And right now, I was building up to quite the impressive little breach hack.

  I could feel myself nearing death the more I made that thing wait, but I had to make sure that everything was correct before I executed.

  I was mere inches from saying goodbye to it all when I finally deemed my code up to standards.

  The void in my mind’s eye shattered.

  I had access, now, to code. So much code. My Neural Link was connected to this… this cyberware orb inside my frontal cortex that I never even knew I had, and that in turn was connected to… millions. No, billions of tiny pieces of cyberware floating in my body, mostly concentrated in my blood.

  I had to focus on the orb, though. That was clearly what was controlling whatever was going on in the rest of my body.

  Inside, I came upon… a BD environment. A vast, infinite expanse of white, and in it, two figures; me, and an intruder.

  A humanoid chunk of voxels—tiny cubes and other assorted three-dimensional shapes—, most of them clipping through each other, regarded me with what I was reasonably certain was aggression. It was chained to the floor with comically large shackles attached to even larger and thicker manacles, and it was stretching its arms trying to seemingly bite my throat out.

  I pulled up a command bar and started working. What the fuck was this thing still doing here, I thought I had killed it.

  I could have taken a moment to ask for answers, but to be honest, I just wanted blood at this point.

  But on a whim, I investigated why all of that was happening to me.

  From what I could tell… I didn’t have security clearance, and the AI in charge of whatever Biotechnica had done to me had continuously tried to eliminate me for it. And my staying alive and solving logic puzzles was… hacking.

  “Oh,” I said.

  I constructed a code to delete the AI, and right before I confirmed, I took a look at it. The sophistication behind its make-up was lacking, mostly because of its single-minded willingness to kill me.

  I constructed a different type of code this time around and broke its security protocol once and for all. It hadn’t even been hard.

  It immediately calmed down, and the chaotic voxels slowed down and smoothened to a much more human shape, although one without any identifiable features. “Greetings, host,” it said. “What is your name?”

  “Fuck you,” I spat. “You’re a two-bit AI that has tried to kill me for the last seven years. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t zero you right now?”

  No, fuck that. I ignored it as it calmly begged for its life while I rifled through its code. There was a lot. I may have looked unsophisticated at first, but after clearing its security protocol, I could clearly tell that it was anything but.

  I took my time trying to understand it, and I could clearly tell that this would have to be an effort spanning several days. Until then, I wouldn’t deal with that glorified chatbot in any meaningful capacity.

  000

  The brokie ambulance—REO Meatwagon—had picked us up.

  But we hadn’t headed to any hospital ward. No. They took mom to the morgue. That was weird, though, because she shouldn’t go there. That was where the dead went.

  They wouldn’t let me follow them into the morgue proper. Instead, they had a disembodied voice on a vending machine give me my options.

  Burial options.

  I opted for the budget-friendly cremation service, and the vending machine just… it just spat mom out in a metal jar.

  Mom was dead.

  Okay.

  Well, at least the urn was free.

  With mom wrapped around my arms, I made my way back home with the NCART. The landlord gave me a call. Rent was late. He was being an asshole about it, too. Knew mom died, which is why he called me instead.

  The three-fifty from Ichinose was supposed to help with that, but mom had to…

  Yeah.

  A text-to-speech message from NightCorp lagged only a little behind with its message reminding us that a five hundred eddie penalty was due because of late utility payment.

  Why was it that when I fought for our survival, it was wrong, even when we really needed it? Why did my fight have to be relegated to getting my ass kicked by Katsuo every week for some bullshit?

  You have all the fights in the world ahead of you now, David. You’re on your own.

  Stop thinking. Thinking would only make it hurt.

  I crawled through the vents to get home, and when I fell out the other end, with mom’s urn next to me, I just laid there.

  Then I went to sleep.