Never Fade Away: Gr4ves (ch. 28) (Patreon)

I hadn't even realized that the encryption to my DNA was something that I had lifted from the orphanage, but now that it was unlocked for me to see… honestly, it was nothing short of a miracle that a couple of tumors in my brain was all that I had. My medical records read like something out of a horror show. Over ten years, I had had hundreds of implants taken in and out of me. All of my organs showed evidence of extreme damage. My bones were marked and scarred from the surgeries. There was even some damage done to my DNA.

"I wouldn't have lasted another six months," I muttered, flipping through the files. Even if I didn't have another work day, I was already dying. Still am, technically, but outside of the orphanage, I had a lot of options to extend my life. I could clone or replace my organs with synth variations for instance. That alone would extend my life to around what it would naturally be, and there were practically no downsides or reasons why I couldn't do so repeatedly.

The one thing I couldn't do that with was my brain, sadly enough.

"Still looking at your files?" Kaiden asked me, setting a box down. We had found a place up in Arroyo -- a train station that hadn't seen any use in at least fifty years. It wasn't a great location, but it was good enough for what we needed. Defensible, too.

"Yours too," I told him. Kaiden had been in even worse shape than me -- at least until they put in the implant to stabilize his biotics. Before that, he had maybe a month left. At best. After, he should live to see another twenty years without anything being done. A lot longer if he underwent treatment. Jack was the healthiest amongst us -- well, she should be. She was overly fond of being intoxicated, which was negatively impacting her health, but even then, she was healthier than most people in Night City. By a pretty wide margin.

"What are you hoping to find in them?" Kaiden asked, unloading what was in the box while Becca and Jack carried in my fabricator and recycler.

Why I'm dying. However, I couldn't say that. Kaiden and the others had enough to worry about. With some luck, I could solve the issue before anyone knew about it. The best option was to develop my own tech to cure myself -- remove the tumors, or create a chemical compound that would shrink them into nothingness. Not to mention, it was possible to shrink someone down and go inside my brain to remove the tumors that way. Simply put, I wasn't that worried about them.

Vik gave me a year left due to them, but the damage done to my internal organs was far more pressing. The tumor would kill me in a year, but everything else? Something huge happened between my last check up and Vik giving me one. According to my file, back in the orphanage, I wouldn’t have lasted another six months but in my current condition I’d be lucky to see the end of the month. And that was only because my body was flooded with immune boosters.

I needed replacement organs. I needed to know what caused such a huge downswing in my overall health while I was at it, or it wouldn’t be the tumor that killed me. Then I could worry about the tumors. But, before all of that… well… death by overexposure to lead seemed a lot more likely.

"My charges," I told Kaiden, still looking through my files and catching his attention. "I found out how I have them." I saw it on a brain scan -- near the center of my brain, split evenly between the left and right side, was a golfball sized… something. A biopsy back in the Orphanage revealed that it was a cluster of hyperdense neurons -- less of a tumor and more of an additional part of my brain that grew. "I just don't know why I have them."

I couldn't tell if the answer was buried underneath layers of damage done to my brain due to implants and drugs, or if it was a freak accident, or if I was just a freak of nature. Or all of the above. I wasn't a doctor, but I did have access to some pretty robust meditech, and what was going on with me had never been seen before. Or, if it had been, then the megacorporations kept it a secret.

The official listing under the Orphanage called it a compounding issue. There was no listed surgery or compound that was meant to make me grow any additional brain matter. There were, however, several best estimates -- drugs that were tested on me in conjunction with implants that were meant to make me smarter. To make me think faster. To give me more awareness and control over my brain -- such as slowing down my perception of time without the need of a Sandy. However, there didn't seem to be a use for the additional brain matter, so the Orphanage never bothered to investigate.

"It's not because of a surgery?" Kaiden asked, faintly surprised. That's what we had figured back in the Orphanage.

"Doesn't seem so," I said, offering a small shrug of my shoulders before dismissing the files from my optics. The very last one was the brain scan that Vik had sent me -- the golf ball remained the same size, but now there were tumors growing in clusters around it throughout my brain. Some of them in my brain stem. Once they were cleared off, I was looking at a message from V.

'Arasaka is going closed network. Quickhacking won't work anymore.'

I couldn't say that I was too surprised by the information, but it was unwelcome news all the same. I couldn't hack a closed network. I'm sure that I would still be able to breach the sub-systems for things like cameras, but only if they weren't being guarded by an AI. Sending out mass Synapse Burnouts and Suicides wouldn't be an option going forward. Not unless I found a way to reopen the networks -- something I'm not quite sure was possible. It was going to be costly for Arasaka. It was going to cost them some level of the control they had over their employees, but it was the simplest way to render my greatest weapon useless.

I had seen it coming, but I did find it annoying. Mostly because it left me with a choice -- focus on fire power? Continue to develop my netrunning abilities? Or do I focus on my health?

"Hey, Becca -- how do the streets look?" I asked her as she stretched her new arms over her head. At some point, while I was out of it, she had chipped in the arms I had designed for her. They kept the red and blue color scheme, but now they fit her body. It was almost weird seeing her with correctly portioned limbs.

"Hot, but not as hot as anyone expected. The Mox ended up claiming Chinatown, but they left Kabuki and Japantown up for grabs. I seriously can't believe you tried to give them a third of the city," Becca chided me. Apparently, that had been a bad idea. The Mox weren't that big. I figured they would just grow the gang to fit it, but I guess that was too much of a hassle. They took Chinatown, and the portion of Kabuki that they were in. As for the rest, they publicly declared that they didn't want it. "And Arasaka gave up on the checkpoints. Still a shit ton of gonks on the streets, though -- Arasaka, Militech, Biotech… pretty sure you have Netwatch on your ass too. You really kicked the hornet's nest, L."

She sounded faintly impressed. I was glad that announcing my continued presence in the city had the effect that I wanted. Plus, it made a perfect cover. "Falco?"

"He's talking shop with the Aldecaldos. You, ah, scare the holy hell right out of them. It might take some sweetener to convince them to make a deal." Becca replied, and that was annoying, but not entirely unexpected.

I thought it over in my head for a long minute, my gaze finding my prosthetic arm. I was still using the basic model -- Vik wanted me to keep it for at least a month, but I didn't have that kind of time. Not with the enemies that I had. The greatest danger to me wasn't the tumors. I didn't know if I could ever brute force an opening into a closed network. Which left firepower.

"Let me know what it'll take to sweeten the pot," I told Becca, who gave me two thumbs up. I turned my attention to a screen in front of me, one that was half covered in various designs for a new arm -- I had the common models up already. The projectile launcher, monowire, mantis blades, and the gorilla arm variants -- I could build them all. I had the materials, I had the designs.

Would it be enough?

I thought of Adam Smasher -- how he threw us around like it was nothing. No. No shot. The implants were military grade, but against that… I needed something… more.

2 charges have been spent!

Devil May Cry: Prosthetics -- 2

Designs flooded my head, ideas popping up as fast as I dismissed some of them. Some of them were missing parts -- something that I was missing -- but other pieces snapped into place. I could use a GN Drive for a power source to generate the necessary energy. PYM Particles solved any space issues in the design. They would also allow me to fit more into the arm. I had energy weapons -- both laser and plasma based. They required nuclear fusion, but I had managed to make due with a sufficiently powerful GN Drive.

I started to sketch out the designs, using the base gorilla arm as a template, but I quickly found myself growing frustrated with the design. For multiple reasons. Because of the PYM Particles, I could shove a great deal into the arm. It would be better to focus on energy based weapons, but the pieces weren't clicking in my head. The base design for implants didn't really allow much leeway when it came to utilization. I-

1 charge has been spent!

Transformers: Mecha-shifting -- 1

I could feel another charge being spent as the block in my design suddenly vanished, leaving me with answers on how to make the pieces fit together smoothly. The arm would be able to effortlessly shift between design models -- an arm that generated electric shocks, a drone complete with a thruster and a turret, both plasma and laser based weaponry, and it could throw a solid punch. Enough to knock Adam Smasher on his ass when I saw him again.

The arm was good. Really good. The design started to take shape as the fight with Smasher played over in my head. I was vaguely aware of the others putting the base together, and I did feel a little guilty about not helping, but my attention was completely stolen by the design. I had always used pistols or snipers as weapons. Precision was what I preferred because I rarely needed more than a single well placed shot. That wasn't really an option anymore with a closed network. I couldn't rely on my quickhacks to do the heavy lifting anymore.

So, I needed firepower. Something strong. Something unique. Laser based? Plasma? Maybe. Possibly. But I shouldn't leave myself a single point of failure -- if my arm ever got smashed or the GN Drive got damaged, I'd be without a weapon. Exactly how I found myself against Adam Smasher. That wasn't something I was keen on experiencing again. Precision and power were difficult to balance, however. In general, the stronger something was, the less precise it would be. Likewise, the more precise something was, the more difficult it was to maintain that level of precision at higher levels.

2 charges have been spent!

Blame!: Gravitational Beam Emitter -- 2

Unless, of course, you went with the more is less mentality. My arm could handle a lot of recoil, and I could redesign the shoulder if needed. A design started to take shape in conjunction with my arm. It was designed with my own personal aesthetic -- which was none once so ever. A blocky gun with a grip jutting out of the bottom of it -- the block was the mechanism that would focus and harness gravitational waves, focusing them into a single point. Not wholly different from a mass effect field. Only it didn't need element zero to function.

It was powerful, I realized as I finished up the design. My mind knowing exactly what shape it should take. It wasn't limited by chemical reactions or mass -- not like a normal gun was. Gravity was one of the most fundamental laws of existence. It could be manipulated and harnessed, but it was one of the most primal forces of nature. When something fell off of a shelf, that was gravity. When a planet orbited a star, that was gravity. When a black hole spun countless stars, suns, and other black holes around it… that too was gravity.

It was something that could scale infinitely upward, only limited by mass.

Or, in my guns case, internal structure and energy.

When the design was done, it was the very first time that I was ever dissatisfied with something I had created. Simply because, with only a look, I knew it could be so much more. The design that I had wasn't even close to fully discovering the potential for the Gravitational Beam Emitter. I was still miles away from perfecting what it was truly capable of -- limited by design and structural integrity. With the PYM Particles, I could have a weapon that could destroy planets that fit in the palm of my hand, and instead, the most I could manage was punching through a building.

Impressive, sure. Just not when you knew what it could really do.

I-

"L," Becca's voice interrupted my thoughts, and I looked over to see that she was giving me a worried look. "You're nose. It's bleeding pretty bad," she told me and I quickly realized she was right. I hadn't even noticed. It was a bad one that was dripping a large stain onto my shirt and covered my lips, dripping like a busted faucet. I quickly grabbed a grease rag and went about cleaning myself up. "Came to tell you everything is hooked up. You doing okay?"

My nose wouldn't stop bleeding. My meditech said that my platelets were low, not enough to trigger an alert but low enough to turn a bad nose bleed into a terrible one. "I'm fine. Pass me the stim?" I asked, and Becca tossed me it after opening the drawer labeled 'immuno-boosters.' injecting my thigh with some, I saw my platelets jump up, and the flow of blood lessened substantially. Blowing out the rest and washing my face, I saw there was no saving the shirt and tossed it into a hamper for dirty clothing.

Becca was still giving me a worried look when I looked back at her. "You've been getting those a lot lately. You sure you're okay?" She asked, her tone faintly suspicious.

I'm dying. For some reason, the words tried to jump off of my tongue. "It's stress and the immuno-boosters," I lied easily enough, wiping my nose and grabbing a new shirt. Becca hesitated before offering a small nod, accepting the excuse. "I'll be fine. They're just annoying to deal with. You said you have everything hooked up?" I asked, and Becca watched me for a moment longer.

"... Yeah, think so," she said, and I stepped out into the train station. The first thing that I noticed was the heat. I wasn't entirely sure how trains worked, but this seemed to be a relay station where they would be loaded up and switch tracks, and stuff. For that reason, it was made out of pure concrete, something that retained heat pretty well underneath the unmerciful sun. Having grown up in a perfectly air-conditioned room… I couldn't say I cared for the heat very much.

Or at all, really.

Given the fact that every megacorp and nation was probably hunting me, it seemed unwise to maintain a permanent base. For that reason, everything was mobile -- the GN Drive, recyclers, fabricators. Including my PYM Particle generator. All could be shrunk down easily for the sake of transportation. It simply wasn't safe to put down roots.

I checked everything on my OS to see that it was all green lights.

I put the fabricator to work, creating my new arm and weapon. To that end, it was almost a good thing that the Pacifica base was destroyed. It had developed along with my tech, so there were a number of inefficiencies -- some I knew about, but put up with because it would have been more inefficient to take everything offline and redo it. The others were revealed when I changed my perspective of what I needed in a base. So, not only was I able to start fresh, but I had a much better idea of what I needed.

One of the biggest changes was the fabricator. The one that was sitting on a counter could be mistaken for a microwave. In reality, it was roughly the size of a small building. I spent too much time printing off items and piecing them together, so I could shrink them, then continuing to build. Instead, I developed a program for the fabricator -- as it created the large scale parts and equipment like GN drives, it shrunk down the pieces that needed to be shrunk while they were being built.

My arm would have been a project that would have taken me a week at the very least. The GBM? Several weeks.

Instead, I heard a ding come from the fabricator after a bare second. Both items were deposited in a tray where they were enlarged to their proper portions. The arm was pretty similar in appearance to my current one in terms of coloration -- silver with a black undermesh. Thin lines marked where the various equipment under the surface would shift to reveal themselves while a GN Drive -- a rather powerful one that was as big as the one that had powered my old base -- would fuel the various energy based weapons. It was at the elbow, currently, it was smooth but when I activated it, it would spew out orange particles.

The GBM looked exactly as I designed it -- blocky with a simple grip jutting out the bottom of it. Picking it up, I tested its weight and smiled to myself before sliding it into a holster at my hip.

“Gonna chip that in, already?” Becca questioned, looking curious. “Vik’s gonna yell at you,” she pointed out, lazily spinning in my chair.

I smiled. Vik was a good guy. “Probably,” I admitted -- under different circumstances, I would have listened to his advice. Now? When I had the entire world bearing down on me? This wasn’t the time to take it easy. “But he’ll chip it in all the same. Where are Kaiden and Jack?” I asked, glancing around and not seeing them.

“Escorting Falco. You were in a fugue for a good six hours. I stayed behind to make sure you didn’t forget to breathe,” Becca told me, casting me a look. I noticed that she had been doing that a lot more lately. I was used to her being exuberant and laughing at danger. So, seeing her worried like this was a real first for me. “You sure you’re doing alright? I don’t want to hear any of that macho shit,” she said, and I paused.

“I’ll be fine,” I decided to answer after a moment. “It’s… a lot right now. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better, but I’ll be fine. Eventually,” I told her before I returned the look. Becca… had been down, I guess was the easiest way to say it. It wasn’t just that she was worried about me. She seemed sad. “What about you? Are you doing okay?”

She seemed caught off guard by the question for a brief moment while she continued to spin in the chair, but quickly wiped it away by the next go around. "Suppose so. Pissed about Kiwi."

I twitched at that whole I went about doing system and integrity checks for my arm. Kiwi. She wouldn't be easy to find, but not impossible. "I can't believe that she did that to us," I muttered under my breath. She betrayed us. She sold my tech to Arasaka. Getting the medicine with Falco didn't wash out the taste of what she did.

Becca snorted, "I can. Kiwi was an old bag. She was pushing ninety, you know that?" I hadn't. That was… very old. Unthinkably old. I considered myself an old man at sixteen. I couldn't even imagine living to a hundred. "She was old enough to see Night City get founded, way back when it was going to be some fucking utopia. Saw the Corpo Wars. Saw Silverhand drop a nuke on Arasaka. Saw it all. And she managed to survive it all by being cautious and careful and boring."

I paused my system checks to listen as Becca continued. "She always had one foot out the door. After Maine and Dorio's deaths, I was surprised she stuck around at all for David. Wasn't really her style. But, when David started back sliding -- chroming up too much and too quickly, kept on saying that he was fine when we all knew he wasn't… then you popped up. They shut down an entire district to catch ya', and instead of handing you over for a payday, we ended up taking you with us." Becca began, sounding reflective as she continued to spin. "You got grown pretty fast, L. You went from gaping at everything to flatlining entire crews overnight."

I looked back at her to see that she had stopped spinning. "Now you're taking shots at the megacorporations," she finished.

My lips thinned, "I can win." I said, almost defensively.

"Maybe. And that's incredible in itself, L. But, you also don't know what they are to us," Becca told me, her tone taking a sad edge to it. "By the time I was born? The megacorporations won. Sure, they have to toe the line a bit with actual nations, but ones like Arasaka and Militech are nations in themselves. By the time I was born -- you too -- it was already too late. The world's fate was already decided by a couple of gonkbrained corpos -- the megacorps were gonna keep sucking the life out of the planet and people until the whole world ended. Hopefully with nuclear hellfire. But you," she jabbed a blue finger in my direction, "Are rebelling against that forgone conclusion."

I didn't know how to respond to that. I wish I did, but I didn't. Were things really that hopeless?

"Kiwi saw it all happen -- how the corpos took this world and drained it of life to the point it's barely worth living. Not saying I forgive her for what she did, but I get why she did it. You're one crazy bastard, L, but you're stacked up against the world and she didn't think you'd win. So, she got out while she could," Becca finished. I didn't like it. I didn't like how Becca was making it sound reasonable.

I would have stayed. If it was Kiwi who was challenging the megacorporations, I would have stayed to fight. Like Becca did. Like Falco did. Like David and Lucy did. I wouldn't have cut and run just because we might lose.

"So… what? Forgive her?" I asked, my tone doubtful.

"Fuck that. She betrayed us -- we gotta zero her. It's a matter of principle," Becca said, hopping out of the chair and walking to me to punch me in the side. "I'm just saying all of this because you have a serious set of blinders on. She betrayed us, and she's gotta die, but it's important to understand why she did it."

I… think that was fair, I thought, turning my attention back to my arm. I hadn't really cared why she betrayed us. Only that she did. Was it fair of me to expect her to stay with us? Was it wrong of me to assume that she would be okay with everything because she never voiced any disagreement?

"Like how you're sad because David is gone?" I ventured, stealing a glance at Becca, who froze at the remark. "I'm not that oblivious."

"I'd argue that. Will argue that, but… ahh…" a sigh heaved out of Becca as she leaned over the table, inspecting my work. The arm was hooked up to my OS, so I was able to shift it between the various built in weapons -- plasma rifle, laser minigun, electric discharge, and so on. "Fuckin' sucks. Couldn't even talk them into doing a thropple. Monogamy is lame." She unleashed another sigh, propping her head up with a hand.

I suppose I would have to take her word for it. "I'm sorry," I told her, not really sure what else I could say. I had no idea if David, Becca, and Lucy could have all ended up together, but I did know that they were seperated because of me. For that, I felt guilty.

"Nothin' to be sorry for, L. Can't control how people feel," Becca told me, but it sure sounded like she wished she could. She delivered a soft punch to my arm, a sign that the conversation was over before she began to walk away. But I wasn't satisfied with ending the conversation like that.

"The world won't end," I told her, making Becca freeze in place. I focused on the arm, seeing that it was green light all around. I just had to chip it in. "I won't let it. Okay?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Becca giving me a long lingering look. I could see it in her eyes.

She didn't believe me, but she hoped that it was true.

"If you say so, L."