Prologue

  “Are you afraid, mijo?”

  Mom held my hand as she walked me through the hallways of the clinic. For a hospital, it was… inhospitable. The walls were cold white that reminded me of the inside of a freezer, that thing called snow that we never got in Night City. Even though it wasn’t that cold, I still shivered, but that had probably more to do with the dead-eyed nurses and the haughty doctors who walked around unheeding of the rows of diseased and injured people seated on the chairs.

  The walls were white, but the white-tiled floors, especially near to the seating areas, were smeared red, and a thick, coin-like smell permeated the air.

  People were dying right before me.

  “No,” I replied. “I’m not,” I said. “Why are we here again?” I asked, unwilling to work that out myself. She must have told me at some point, but I couldn’t remember it. Maybe if I tried harder, but I was too busy trying very hard not to barf.

  “We’re getting your Neural Link sized up, and your vaccine shots as well.”

  Right. That was true. I was ten now, and that meant it was time to chip in my growth neural link made to handle the changes in size that the body went through during puberty. Without it, my skull would deform as it grew around the undersized cyberware.

  Come to think of it, I was almost old enough for cyberoptic corneal implants as well. Then I could make calls without the use of a dino-phone. Hah, that’d be preem. I couldn’t wait.

  Rather than sit next to all the sick people, mom pulled me into a room where a doctor was waiting. “I’m Gloria Martinez, here with David Martinez—” she began without preamble, only to get interrupted by the doctor in the room, who held his silver hand up to forestall her.

  After a short moment, he spoke. “You were thirteen seconds too early. Now we start. So, what was it?”

  “Neural Link installation and a shot,” she said.

  “My receptionist mentioned an… experimental treatment option,” he said. “Have you given any consideration—”

  “No.” mom said.

  “Are you sure? The payment is one hundred—”

  “No,” mom said, with a strained smile. “I did not give my consent, and therefore you may not go ahead with this experimental treatment option. Are we clear, doctor?”

  The doctor seemed to roll his eyes.

  A bad person, I immediately decided. Mom told me never to trust these types, who would push and get angry when denied, especially if they were the corpo type. This one wasn’t, but he still gave me that impression.

  And now I was supposed to trust my health to this man.

  “Mom,” I muttered.

  “Let the man take a look at you,” mom said. “Don’t worry, I will be here watching.”

  I went ahead and took a seat on the chair.

  The man injected me with a local anaesthetic on the back of my head, and I started feeling the unmistakable sensation of cutting. It felt weird, but… a good kind of weird. Satisfying. I didn’t mind, really.

  Then I felt a profound emptiness as something happened. I couldn’t turn my head to see what that something was because it was locked to a cage to prevent exactly that, but I suspected it was because the doctor had pulled out my Neural Link. It was a thin piece of machine, wider and longer than it was actually deep, and replaced a section of my skull where it could interface directly with my brainstem.

  It was supposed to be a foundational piece of cyberware, and would be connected to every other piece of chrome I would chip in in the future. Without it, I’d never be able to overcome my human limits.

  That was what I wanted to do. If I did well in school, I could become successful at a megacorp and then I would be able to chip in all the chrome that I wanted. I wouldn’t be gutter trash anymore.

  The Neural Link re-entered my skull again, and this time I felt a slight pressure, but one that I recognized was right. I didn’t realize how wrong it felt to walk around with undersized cyberware until it had been readjusted.

  This was preem.

  “All done,” the doctor said. “Time for your shot.”

  Before I could even ready myself mentally for that, the doctor had grabbed my hand and jabbed me with the shot inside my forearm, slowly pushing the fluid inside. That, too, felt weird, but not quite painful or wrong.

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  It wasn’t a big deal, though. I felt embarrassed that I was even afraid in the first place. Oh well, what was done was done.

  000

  Benedict Hatchet, the hospital ripperdoc, felt profoundly terrified.

  Biotechnica was riding his ass about his debts to the corp. How was it fair that he was the one to get laid off, but he still had to pay a fine for violating that frankly tyrannical noncompete by getting a job in the same industry after five years of unemployment?

  He had burned through the entirety of his savings waiting out the worst of the noncompete’s clauses, only to get hit with an ‘actually, we don’t just want money from you’ bullshit which always heralded a shitstorm of unimaginable proportions.

  Case in point, the ‘experimental treatment option’.

  He just had to let a hundred people volunteer. Ten thousand eddies down the drain for a hundred eddies a pop as a reward for risking life and limb for the advancement of proprietary science, but unfortunately, the people of Night City weren’t born fucking yesterday.

  They all said no.

  That’s when he had to get… creative.

  Creative meaning that he just didn’t care whether they consented or not. He injected them with the experimental nanites and recorded them on his private server, ready to send the information of the experiment subjects to Biotechnica for them to work out their experiment parameters. It was an unscientific and uncontrolled way to go about it, but they had asked for this, and Benedict wasn’t going to ask questions when he had corp ninjas and solos up his fucking ass reminding him of his ‘debts’.

  His only saving grace was that the shit-storm cocktail in those syringes were always slow-acting, at least giving the poor patients enough time to fuck off back home before they either keeled over or went cyberpsycho or some shit, whatever it was that the ‘experimental treatment’ even did. Benedict had fuckall of a clue, and he wasn’t about to ask, either.

  In the end, Biotechnica would have to protect him anyway from legal reprisal, not because he was important to them, but because covering for him would also mean covering their own asses.

  They might zero him to get rid of loose ends, too, but what the fuck was he supposed to do about that?

  No. Benedict had fought. He had fought as hard as he could, done unconscionable things for his own survival. If he died now, that was fine. He could do that with no regrets.

  His only regret, really, was getting mixed up with the megacorps’ black ops R&D all those years ago in the first place. Everybody knew that their severance packages were just a delayed flatlining. Benedict had thought himself above such repercussions, but like all things, his actions had caught up to him, and here he was.

  In his office, late in the night, he downed a measure of well whiskey from his glass, and pressed send on his encrypted e-mail to Biotechnica.

  There was a gun in his top drawer.

  He could just… do it now, right?

  He scoffed. After all the men, women and children he had injected fucking corp R&D juice into? Nah. He didn’t kill himself before doing all of that. If he died now, then what was it all for?

  He’d wait out the consequences, face them eye to eye like a man.

  He filled himself another measure of whiskey and downed that, too.

  000

  Logic puzzles of infinite stakes flashed through my mind. I completed them as fast as I could, fearful for my life. I knew, deep in my bones, that I would die if I fucked up. I could feel that threat creeping up on me constantly, never giving me a moment of rest.

  In the void of my mind, I was prompted to… straighten things out. I couldn’t put a name to what those things were, but they needed straightening out.

  But even the verb ‘straightening’ was wrong.

  Sometimes, they would ask me (not really ‘ask’ either, but I got the picture) to find efficient… pathways, given certain limitations. Sometimes, I would be made to optimize values as well.

  It was math, alright.

  Luckily for me, I did know a thing or two about that.

  The only problem was that I wasn’t fast enough to not worry about what would happen should I slip up and fall. I was tap-dancing on a tightrope here, and my death felt like an inevitability at this point.

  I woke up with a whimper.

  Death flashed in my mind. Terror and death.

  I was going to die.

  No, no. It was… it was just a dream.

  I was fine now, because I was awake.

  I rolled out of bed and went to the living room where mom was seated on the couch, watching TV. Her eyes were wide and her mouth wide open as she looked at the hologram.

  “…man responsible is still at large, and the death toll is now numbering in the dozens. Victims and those who have been patients with the clinic for the last twenty-four hours are now requested to immediately contact the authorities and seek medical care, but we suspect that it may already be too late for them.”

  Mom spotted me, and immediately pounced at me. She fell on her knees right before me, hands on my shoulders as she looked me up and down. “Mijo, how are you feeling? Are you okay? Anything that hurts?”

  Not at all, actually. Even the back of my head that had the Neural Link tune-up only hurt until I went to sleep. Now I felt fine; better than ever, in fact.

  “I’m okay, mom,” I smiled.

  The raw terror of my waking up notwithstanding, I felt fine.

  And what was mom going to do about that anyway?

  “Are you serious, mijo?” mom said. “You need to tell me, David. You need to tell me if there’s something wrong. Anything at all.”

  “W-what happens if there is?” I asked.

  “Then we go to another hospital to get you checked up.”

  “Mom, what happened?” I asked. “Why are you so worried? Did something happen?”

  “It’s…” mom looked down with a sad smile. “Just… please… you have to be honest with me, David. Tell me if there’s anything wrong.”

  Ice filled my veins as I watched her begin to tear up. “You’re scaring me.”

  “Sorry,” she said as she got up to her feet. “I just… don’t worry about it. Just tell me if there’s anything wrong.”

  What would she do if there really was, though? We didn’t have the eddies. She was never home, and when she was, she was always too tired to do anything.

  I couldn’t just… tell her about my nightmare. It was just a nightmare after all. I wasn’t really going to die, right?

  Mom stayed home for the day just to watch me, and I didn’t go to school either.

  The next few days, I kept having the same nightmares, kept having to do the same work just to… stay alive.

  I didn’t know if that was true, but I didn’t dare to even test if it wasn’t.

  The dreams continued on and on.

  They never stopped.