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Never Fade Away: Of Fallen Angels That Have Loved And Lost (ch. 5)
🕑 Added 2022-11-21 15:47:31 +0000 UTCI woke to an unfamiliar ceiling. The segmented pale plates were gone, replaced with a uniform oneness that was only broken up by lighting. There was no momentary bliss of forgetting what happened. It was impossible when I woke up laying in a soft bed with sheets so soft and smooth that it was almost uncomfortable. The moment that I woke up, I started to push myself into a sitting position and my thoughts were confirmed.
I wasn't in the orphanage. Every day of my life, I woke up in the same room that slowly became emptier. Now… Now I had absolutely no idea where I was or what to do. The room was very different than what I was used to -- there was hardly any white at all. The opposite, really. The ground was a dark brown while the walls were matt black highlighted with gold. There wasn’t a spec of white or gray to be found.
“At least… I’m not back there,” I muttered to myself, dragging a hand down my face to find that I felt disgusting. In the back of my head, there were two charges. Meaning that it had been some time since I passed out. Swinging my legs off of the bed, I looked underneath it for a set of clothing only to find that there wasn’t a cubby underneath the bed at all. Hm. Looking around the room, I saw that there was a pile of clothes sitting on a chair across the room. They didn’t seem to be the ones I came in.
Shrugging them on, I took in a slow breath and let it out. I didn’t know where I was, but given that I wasn’t strapped to a chair… that was about as promising as I could hope for. But, it would be better to not assume that whoever brought me here didn’t have my best interests at heart. Walking to the door, I stepped from the tip of my toes down to my heel, moving near silently towards it. It didn’t open up as I approached, making a frown tug at the edges of my lips.
Reaching out with Ping-
The door slid open to reveal someone that I’ve never seen before. A woman. Asymmetric colored and cut hair -- at the crown of her head it was pink, fading down to blue, then green and yellow at the end of a long lock of hair. Pinkish blue colored eyes, face paint underneath her eyes and on her lips. Her arms were crossed and the only thing that stopped me from throwing a punch and blasting out of the door was a small, if uncertain, smile that she wore.
That, and David was standing behind her. He was fast. Unnaturally fast, with speed that came from an implant. A sandevistan if I had to guess. David offered a far more open smile and gave me a small wave. His eyes, however, told me he knew that I thought about running.
“It's good to see that you’re up,” the girl spoke, stepping forward and I reflexively took a step back. “You were out of it for about a day-”
“Why?” I interjected, keeping David in my peripheral. The only real way to beat a sandevistan was to have one of your own or wide scatter so they couldn’t avoid an attack. Neither of which were available to me. Netrunning and hacking into his implants was the next best option, but that also took time. Time that I wouldn’t have. The hacks wouldn’t upload before he crushed my head between his hands.
“Because your body has never seen a germ in its life,” David spoke up, leaning against the wall by the door with his arms crossed. “When you passed out, we brought you to my ripper since you trashed your Meditech. Your temp reached a hundred and five and your immune system is as tough as a paper bag. A wet one.” David informed me while the girl took a seat. She was looking at me weirdly. Like… I don’t know. Like she thought I wasn’t real. Or understanding?
Was it really that bad? I grew up in a sterile environment, but it couldn’t be that bad. However, I had to believe it given the look that the two of them gave me. “How’d I survive?” I asked, backing up across the room and taking a seat on the round bed that was easily twice the size of the bed I grew up sleeping in.
“Immune-boosters,” the girl answered. “It's a stimulant that’ll boost your immune system. You’ll be stuck taking them every day for at least six months until your own immune system can handle Night City.” She answered and she was still looking at me weirdly. “Your implants are still inside of you, but you completely trashed the soft to operate them.”
Six months? I had no idea how bad that was, I realized. Still, it was a dependency that I couldn’t say that I liked. Especially when I had no idea what an immune-booster was, what it looked like, or how to get more of them. “Kiwi. I trashed the software to stop her from using them against me.”
“Is that what the orphanage did?” The girl asked, something in her tone that I couldn’t identify but David did.
“Lucy…” he trailed off, a frown in his voice that Lucy heard. Her lips thinned while her gaze darted to David for a moment before looking away. Something passing between them but I wasn’t sure what. Only that the message between them was as clear as the messages that had been passed between me and… and the others.
Slowly, I nodded my head. “The implant in the back of my skull stimulates my brainstem. They used it to knock us out and wake us up. Usually to take us in for work so we miss the transport part,” I told them, not sure if the information was safe or not. Then I noticed something. The burning pain in my back was gone. “Did you take the implants out of my back?”
Lucy looked to David, who shook his head, “No. After Kiwi confirmed that you couldn’t be traced, we decided to leave them in. We aren’t scavs lookin’ to harvest whatever tech we can,” David reassured, and I guess I would be if I knew what that meant. Still, I was glad that they weren’t digging through my body, even if I wasn’t sure if I would have preferred it if they did. I had no idea what was in me, but I’d feel a lot better if it was all out.
Especially when it meant that whatever was slotted in me was still in. The pain was gone, but I couldn’t be sure if that was a good thing or not. My brain wasn’t hemorrhaging, so that was as promising of a sign as I was going to get.
My gaze flickered between Lucy and David, “Why did you help me?” I questioned, cutting right to the chase. David had an answer ready and he gave it by nodding at Lucy.
“She asked me to,” David answered, offering a small shrug of his shoulders. I looked to Lucy, expecting an answer to see that she was biting her bottom lip in thought. Her gaze went to David, who offered a nod and slight smile. Encouraging.
“Because you’re in the same boat that I was in a couple of years ago,” Lucy explained, pinning a look on me. “Arasaka took me as a child and raised me to be a Netrunner. To explore the Old Net. I managed to escape, but it took me longer to figure out how to survive -- my immune system was shot, I had no idea what waited for me around every corner… I only made it because of the skills that Araska gave me -- my Netrunning.”
Arasaka. Lucy continued, “I’ve been trying to get through their ICE for years now. It’s not easy. It was made to keep AIs out, much less me. But I’ve heard about the Wayward Home for Boys -- nothing concrete, and nothing actionable, but I knew that it existed. It's connected to black market research on products that developers want to test before it’s officially ready to be tested on humans inhouse-”
I held up a hand, warding her off from continuing as my stomach clenched. “Wait, stop. What does that mean?” My voice sounded distant to my own ears. Weak.
“Research and Development in any corporation are going to fight over funding, and the best way to secure more is to produce products with minimal wastage and maximum profits. In-house human testing… isn’t that expensive for a corp, but they still look to cut costs. That's where the Home for Wayward Boys comes in as far as I can tell. They provide human subjects that scientists can test their products on prior to officially moving to human testing in-house, and to the outside observer… their products are streamlined because they already worked out the problems-”
“On us,” I heard myself say, my throat closing up.
Sympathy shone in Lucy’s eyes, “That's all I managed to figure out, and some of its putting the pieces together on my part. I heard about the lockdown, then David told me what you said… I wasn’t even sure it was real until I saw you.”
I pressed my face into my palms, something stirring in my chest. Something dark and violent. “I’m the only one that got out,” I muttered into my palms. It was hitting me. I was the only one that got out. I left everyone else behind to save myself. I left them behind. “I- I should have-”
“I don’t know the whole situation, but blamin’ yourself is pointless,” David interjected before my thoughts could spiral. “Only you getting out is about the best thing that you could have hoped for.”
“I fucked the plan up,” I hissed back. “R died and I lost my shit. I started the plan before we were ready to get out. And out of everyone that got out, it was me. It should have been M. Or A. Fuck,” I cursed, knowing that I shouldn’t have done it. I knew. R, with his last words, had begged me to stay the course, to hold out and stick with the plan. “I need to get them out. I can get them out.” That was the plan that M gave me. One that I had to follow through before it was too late.
David uncrossed his arms, “This orphanage. How big is it?” He asked me, his tone not unsympathetic, but it was focused.
I… “I don’t know. I thought it was only our dorm until we tried to get out,” I admitted, coming up with a rough number. If they suffered similar losses that we did and they had the same number… “A thousand, maybe.” I heard Lucy take in a sharp breath at that.
“Those immune-boosters?” David spoke up, his tone catching my attention. “A thousand and five hundred eddies to last you a month. You’re looking at six months of them and that's a generous estimate. Altogether, that's ten thousand eddies down the drain just to not die. That cost? Multiply it by a thousand for everyone in the orphanage if you get them out. That’s about a million eddies for everyone over the course of six months. Best estimate.”
David pushed off of the wall, “That's to live longer than a day. But how are you going to get food for a thousand kids? How about a place to stay? Do you even know what an eddie is?” He asked me and my lips thinned into a line, not answering because I didn’t.
“The old kids like me could help,” I argued for the sake of arguing because even I didn’t believe that point. They would be as clueless as I am.
However, David nodded, “How much older are the kids than you?”
“I’m the oldest in my dorm. Everyone else in bracket sixteen died and no one made it to bracket seventeen since I was a kid,” I answered and that gave David pause. He recoiled ever so slightly, but he wasn’t undeterred.
“Okay. They help you out. Work with you. Do some gigs. The only way you can make that kind of scratch is merc work or working for a corp. Each has its issues -- it takes time and effort to make a name for yourself for jobs that make any decent amount of money. Working for a corp is off the table because they’re going to be coming for you. You and everyone else you break out -- if not to reclaim whatever they put in you, then because you have info on what a rival corp is doing and they’ll want to know. They won’t ever let you rest. They’ll hunt you down until the end of the Earth, never letting up-”
“David,” Lucy interjected, making David sigh.
“I don’t know your situation or what you’re dealing with, but from the sounds of it, you lost your shit and reacted without thinking things through. And your response to the consequences is to lose your shit and react without thinking things through," he continued, his tone unyielding. The words hit me like a punch to the gut because I couldn't argue with them. He was right.
"They're going to die," I stated, hopelessly lost. I understood what David was saying. I did. I always knew staying out of the orphanage would be a bigger problem than getting out. But everytime I imagined this scenario, I was with R, A, and M. And Z. Instead, I was alone. "If I don’t get them out, then they’re going to die.”
“If you don’t have the eddies for immune boosters, a place to stay, food, and a way to avoid the corporations? Then they’ll die a whole lot faster,” David returned. “You can’t provide for anyone if ya can’t provide for yourself. Can’t help anyone if you can’t help yourself,” he added, sounding almost as if he was talking to himself with that last bit.
It was the truth. I knew it was. It just felt wrong. It felt like I would be failing them in some way if I didn’t dedicate every second of my freedom to getting everyone else out. Like I was betraying them if I didn’t rush to get them out before anyone else died, before the consequences of my escape could be felt by them. But David was right. Staying out was the hard part. I needed to prepare and as of now, I didn’t even know how to start preparing. Eddies were important apparently and I had no idea what they even were.
Clenching my eyes shut, I swallowed down a bitter taste. "What's an eddie?" I questioned and both David and Lucy shared a glance at that, as if they were just now realizing the depth of my ignorance. "Is a million eddies a lot?"
"It is," David answered. I didn't mind going under the knife again if it meant being paid. "What are you planning to do first?" The tone reminded me of Dr. K. How she would ask questions, expecting that you would know the correct answer.
I stood up, "I need to get rid of my implants. The ones in my back especially. It killed thirty of us," I voiced and I saw alarm in Lucy's eyes. "You said that they'd be worth eddies?" Would they be worth a million? Two million? One eddie per implant? I had absolutely no idea and I wasn't willing to spend a charge for it.
"Would have been worth more with the soft, but the hardware should still be worth something. I know a ripper that'll take em out," David informed, offering me a small nod before he left the room, leaving me alone with Lucy. She looked at me like she wanted to say something, but she couldn't quite get the words out or how to say them.
Eventually, she settled on, "David is going to be harsh with you, but it's for your own good. Night City is a dangerous place, and if you aren't prepared to live in it… it'll chew you up and spit you out. It does it all the time to people who grew up here, who were ready," Lucy told me and I looked away.
"I woke up every day knowing that it could be my last. Or that someone I grew up with would be dead," I spoke up and I saw something I didn't expect. Empathy. "Is Night City that much worse?" Is this what we had longed to escape into?
"It is. It's that much worse."
…
Rebecca pursed her lips as the Cue Ball stepped into view. David sure was whipped when it came to Lucy. Couldn't tell her no even if his life depended on it. For someone with a metal spine, it sure seemed as limp as a synth-noodle after getting nuked in the microwave. Cue Ball was a kid. Ages got pretty tough to tell at a glance. He could be five years old. He could be a century old. Guessing ages was dangerous work.
Cue Ball seemed to be in his teens. Face was too pretty, though. The kind of pretty you only saw when someone was sculpted with implants to achieve a look. His gaze was firmly planted on the ground, squinting as he avoided looking anywhere else but at his own two feet. Rebecca looked to David, who just gave her a tired smile, his optics lighting up, ‘Thanks for letting us borrow your car.’
‘No problemo, David,’ Rebecca responded as David got in the passenger seat to her Turbo-R V-Tech sports car. She loved the speed. Especially after turning off the default safety measures. Out loud, she spoke up to the Cue Ball, "Get in!"
Cautiously, Cue Ball got in the back seat and she sent a questioning glance at David.
'He's not used to open space. Said that it hurts his eyes. Apparently, he grew up without ever seeing anything larger than a lobby,' David answered. And that was pretty freakin' tragic. But, sob stories were a dime a dozen. So long as he wasn't weeping all over himself and wallowing in self-pity, she wouldn't condemn him but Becca didn't really have any sympathy either. Everyone's life sucked.
"Where we goin'?" Rebecca questioned, resting a foot on the extended pedal since her arms needed some extra room, which made her legs too short to reach the gas. And the brake, she guessed. Though, she didn't use much of that.
"Doc's," David answered and she made a face. "Not for me. L."
"L is seriously your name? That's it?" Becca questioned, slamming a foot on the gas and making the tires burn out before the car kept forward to join the flow of traffic. Traffic in Night City wasn't that bad. It was just really dangerous, thus, fun. The slowest car would be going about eighty down the main roads, reliant on navigation tech. If a pedestrian got hit, then they got hit. That's what insurance is for.
"L-15," Cue Ball snapped at her, his tone testy. "Only people in my bracket get to call me L. And the rest of you people are too greedy. Why do you need a bunch of different letters for your name?" He shot back, getting a bark of laughter from her. There we go! That's the spine she saw! It took a special kind of moron to rip out a tooth with a pair of pliers and put a gun to their head with no hesitation.
"So, there was an A? B? C? L, M, N, O, P? X, Y, and Z?" Becca questioned, looking at her rearview mirror as the car briefly jumped into the sidewalk to avoid some traffic. She honked the horn to give the pedestrians some warning.
"There was," L answered, his voice holding a bitter edge there. Sheesh.
Rejoining the flow of traffic by edging out some that's jackass that honked his horn at her right until she leveled Guts in his general direction. "You know, I'm still waiting for an apology. You did shoot me. Ruined my favorite jacket."
"You were going to take me back. I'm not sorry," L responded, his tone very forthright.
'I still say we should have made that deal,' Rebecca remarked to David over comms. 'The AV got wrecked and both Arasaka and Militech were tearing up Japantown looking for him. We'd land in a nice pile of eddies.'
'No can do, Becca. Plus, you saw him in action. Decisive under pressure, a half-decent Netrunner too. He has talent,' David returned. He did. Becca could see that pretty easily. When he popped some lead at her, his form spoke of military training. She saw it in plenty of vets from the last corpo war. His eyes were clear too -- sharp. Her appearance tended to make people hesitate. L hadn’t hesitated.
Rebecca gave David a cheeky smile, 'Like you did?' She shot back, recalling the fucking adorable kid that rolled up in her doorstep. She was a sucker for dimples. And David had a pretty nice glow-up -- could stand to be a little shorter, though.
'I'm not Maine,' David responded with an echo of sadness in his voice. He said that like it was a bad thing. Rebecca had admired Maine. He was a great guy, fun, and he was reliable for work. Also had a great eye for talent. But he also went cyberpsycho and got Dorio killed. Rebecca didn't recall things with rose-tinted glasses like David did. 'I can show him the ropes. Get him started, but if he sinks or swims is up to him.'
Wow. This gonk really didn't know that was exactly what Maine did for him. Near quoted Maine word for word.
"What's a Milf?" L suddenly spoke up from the back seat, peeking out of the window with his hands around his eyes. "And why are they half off?"
Rebecca shared a look with David and she saw his unwillingness to answer the question conflict with his knowledge that he absolutely shouldn't let her answer. She smiled. Too late! "It's a mom you want to fuck."
She glued her eyes to the rearview mirror, eagerly awaiting L's reaction as they sped out of downtown and towards the Glen. Instead of some stuttering or something cute, he just furrowed his brow. "What's a mom?"
That question was a whole lot less funny to answer.
"You don't got any parents?" Rebecca questioned, still not looking at the road as they made a hard turn around the corner and only briefly merged into the oncoming traffic lane. L frowned as he peeked out the window.
"No, I don't think so," he answered, sounding like had no idea what a parent was either. That pulled at David's heartstrings, Rebecca could practically see it.
"Eh, parents are overrated. Me and my brother grew up in a feral gang. Taught us all we needed to know," Rebecca stated proudly. Parents weren't worth shit. Her gang had been filled with kids that were abandoned by their parents, and it was left to the older kids to teach them how to survive -- how to read, how to steal, how to use a gun, and how to kill a man. "You didn't miss anything important."
L grunted and fell silent. For a time.
"What's a dildo?" He asked, his eyes catching another advert. David sighed and Becca smiled ear to ear.
"A girl uses it to get herself off," Rebecca instantly replied. "Bunch of ways to use 'em, but the most common is to shove it right up in a pussy. Same with guys, just with their ass instead of their pussy. Usually."
"Why is it shaped like a fist?" Okay. This was going to be entertaining-
"We're here," David interjected, sounding relieved. Becca pouted, thoroughly dejected that her amusement was cut short. He got out, and Rebecca decided to follow along, mostly curious to see what they'd be taking out of L.
Doc was a trash tier ripperdoc, but he was reliable in how shitty he was. Becca got the story from David -- how Doc had installed his Sandy without any anesthetic or neural boosters. It was nothing short of a miracle that David was still alive. But, what Doc lacked in bedside manner, he made up for in inventory and talent. He worked with several scavs to have near the best selection of implants, and if he saw a repeat customer in you, then he'd make sure you were capable of coming back to him.
But, when they walked into his den to see the older man in the middle of busting a fat-sounding nut, Rebecca was forced to remind herself that the guy did know what he was doing.
"Doc," David spoke up, sounding like he was used to this. "Got a job for you."
"Hmmm? Borg-Boy? Oh, look at that. Seems our guest is back on his feet already," Doc spoke up, looking at L, who was drinking in the ripperdoc den. It was a filthy and dingy place, but implants hung from the ceiling and walls. The place was well stocked too. "Here to get chipped?"
"To get his implants removed," David answered for L.
Doc scratched his cheek with a prosthetic hand before shrugging. "Sure, why not. I'll scoop it all right out of you."
"I'm not going under," L informed, taking off his shirt. He was pretty fit -- fine layers of muscle. Some cyber lines hinted at implants, but Rebecca was more focused on the surgical scars. L looked like he had been carved up like a slab of meat hundreds of times. To the point that the surgical scars overlapped and you could see the variations in times he had been cut up. The guy had more scars than skin.
They outlined his muscle groups, Rebecca noticed. Additional incisions could be found within those muscle groups, or at points were bone started or ended. It was actually kind of gut-clenching -- Rebecca was no stranger to scars. They were natural in this biz. L’s looked like a picture she saw of a kid, an old one, where a cow had been divided up into sections of meat.
"Your choice. Couldn't care less," Doc decided as L got on the table, though he did accept an anesthetic shot. Then Doc got to work. Only to pause after getting everything in position, “Your Meditech is trashed.”
“I know,” L responded, sounding like he was wondering why it was a problem.
“Hm. I don’t suppose you know the encryption key on your DNA off the top of your head, would you?” Doc questioned, making Rebecca’s eyebrows shoot up. His DNA was encrypted? That was a hardcore bioware mod. It ran a cypher on your DNA, preventing it from being analyzed and connected to you if you left a little blood on the scene. It wasn’t one that could be taken out, either.
And L trashed his Meditech. Meaning that he trashed the encryption key. Wow. Rebecca honestly felt a bit bad for coming on so strong because he scorched earth.
“I don’t,” L admitted. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Eh, your Meditech is going to be next to useless until you find the encryption code, but I can guesstimate what you need. Shouldn’t be much of a problem. Probably,” Doc admitted, not exactly inspiring confidence but L just shrugged and took a seat. And with that, Doc went to work.
Rebecca wasn't a stranger to the process of getting chipped and de-chipped, but it was oddly fascinating to watch. No matter how hard you were, when you saw your insides on the outside, you panicked. It was normal. Natural.
L didn't blink an eyelash when Doc started pulling his guts out like he was performing a party trick. Seemed used to it. That was wild and very not normal. Especially not the tech that Doc started extracting -- all of it was marked. Arasaka. Kang Tao. IEC. Zetatech. All of it looked top-of-the-line too.
"David, that's military-grade hardware," Rebecca pointed out. L was full of the stuff to the point that she thought he'd be empty by the time Doc was done pulling stuff out of him. Military-grade implants were fucking terrifying. They were incredibly taxing mentally and physically. Something like David's Sandy was military grade and, if David was a normal person, that tech should have put him in the ground after the first use. The human body wasn't meant to chip in so many epic implants. Especially not so fast.
She got her arms carved off to handle the recoil of her shotguns, and she wouldn't get another implant for another year, at least. David was a freak of nature that went from nearly entirely organic to a half borg in under a year. And apparently, L was cut from the same cloth.
“I see it,” David agreed. "Doc, give him a new OS. My tab."
"Whatever," Doc responded, replacing what he could in L -- synth organs for the most part since most of his were implants. Propping L up, L's expression didn't even twitch as Doc began to carve into his skull.
"Why?" L asked over the sound of a bone drill, looking at David with a frown on his face.
"Because you already owe us for the car and the immune-boosters. You'll need a decent deck if you want to have a chance of paying us back," David informed. Wow. That was so fucking cute. He really was channeling Maine.
"You never answered how much an Eddie is worth," L pointed out, his eyes crossing as something was extracted from the base of his brainstem. He tossed it on a growing pile, but from her angle, Rebecca saw that he wasn’t touching some implants at all. She only recognized one -- a braindance scroll. She recognized it back when she ran with the Mox.
“Can’t touch some of these,” Doc muttered, going to put L’s top back on. “Not without that encryption key. Too dangerous for ya’,” he decided and L just grunted, not exactly happy about getting left with some tech in his body.
"You'll figure it out soon enough. I'm not here to hold your hand," David responded before he turned to Rebecca, and his eyes flashed. 'Know of any gig worth something to cut his teeth with?' David asked over comms. L really had no idea how lucky he was.
'I got a Gun for Hire for Regina,' Becca answered. Not exactly what a rookie should be dipping their toes with. 'Still want me to bring him along? I'm not going to be responsible if the gonk gets himself flatlined.'
'Bring him. If he dies, then he dies,' David decided. You couldn't survive in this city if you needed your hand held. David was doing L as much of a favor as he could. It was up to him to make the most of it.
“Can’t do anything about the implants in your face. They’re fused with the bone now. I’d have to replace your entire skull, and I don’t have spare laying around. If you still want it out, then hit me up beforehand,” Doc said, rolling away from the operating table and eyeing the plate of implants hungrily as he stacked another one on top of it. “You’ll be needing a new stomach, liver, large intestine, heart, and joints. No can do about putting some ‘ganic peepers back in, but I do have a wide variety of Kyoshi optics available.”
David offered a curt nod and Rebecca watched as Doc began the long process of filling L back up like a pinata. While he worked, L looked at David, his expression downright bored.
“How do I earn eddies?” He asked, and David answered. How little L knew about the world was pretty shocking, something that he proved when he followed each question up, devouring the information hungrily. By all rights, as David slowly filled L in on the workings of the world, L should be dead in a ditch. If he was picked up by anyone else, L would be dead. Even if he survived with his laughably puny immune system, he should get mugged and zeroed within the afternoon because he wouldn’t know any better.
But, as the hours went by and Doc was stiching L up and the guy just shrugged on a shirt like he wasn’t thirty pounds of iron lighter… One way or another… Rebecca got the impression that L was going to be just fine in Night City.
Comments
AlisGlaciei
"It's that much worse." Yeah, you know, I don't think it's that much worse. Also, I like your version of Doc. Still a shit guy especially when compared to Vik, but he knows his stuff and is competent in his own way when not operating on a client crossed out of his mind.
