AN: You lot have reached 400 stones, and as promised, here is the bonus chapter!
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The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Clm1022, Andres919, Frank Contreras, Myrdvang, Tyler Ray, and Sabre.
Operatives shishus, EternalCosmos, Blank602, Seraquel, Justin Bennett, Melnik5, EagleEyes777, Familiar21, and Dvalin Prime098.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
- H. P. Lovecraft
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Santi opened his eyes to the surgical lights above Vik's operating chair, which were dialed to their lowest setting and cast the clinic in a soft amber that was easier on post-anesthesia optics than the full-spectrum whites Vik used during procedures. The cardiac monitor beside the chair was still beeping and the telemetry display on the wall showed a readout of Santi's vitals.
He blinked, and everything felt different. The room felt as if someone had moved things around by an inch, and although everything was where it was supposed to be, the space between things felt off.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, kid," Vik said from somewhere to his left.
Santi turned his head, and the motion sent a rolling wave of nausea through him. Vik was standing at his terminal watching a boxing match.
"How do you feel?" Vik asked without looking away from the fight.
Santi looked out of it as he felt a headache coming on behind both eyes as the neural tissue was still adjusting to new chrome. His spine felt noticeably warmer than usual as the thermal signature of the SRN relay fibers began its bonding cycle along his vertebral column. His fingers tingled at the tips, as Vik had warned him, a side effect of the relay network establishing new signal pathways to his extremities.
"Like someone rearranged the inside of my head," Santi said.
"No shit?" Vik said, and the faintest smile pulled at his mouth. "Everything went smooth, and now you have a brand new Paraline Mk.3 ready to go to work along with a new Ex-Disk Mk.3. I also made sure that the MCU was integrated into the memory bus and running its first compression cycle, and last I checked, the SRN relay fibers are in position and bonding is at... Eleven percent."
"Eleven percent?" Santi repeated.
"It'll climb to full integration over the next forty-eight hours or so," Vik said. "In the meantime, your body is going to feel like it's running on a half-second delay. Nothing new there since your Neural Link is rebuilding its signal routing table to accommodate the new relay architecture, and until that process completes, your reflexes and sensory processing are all going to be slightly out of whack with what you're used to."
He turned from the display and looked at Santi directly.
"I'm going to keep you here for the next twenty-four hours," Vik said. "I don't do many SRN or MCU ops, so I wanna keep an eye on you so that I can monitor the SRN bonding curve and make sure the relay fibers are integrating evenly along the spinal column. If there's an asymmetry in the bonding rate, I need to catch it early, otherwise..."
"Do I need to spend all of that time on the chair?" Santi asked.
"Nah. You can move around, sit at the workbench, use the bathroom, or whatever you want to do. I'll even do you a solid and put something on one of the screens if you get bored," Vik said as he walked to one of the supply cabinets on the far wall and pulled open the bottom drawer. He stood there for a moment, his hand resting on the drawer's edge as his brows narrowed.
"What's wrong?" Santi asked.
"I'm out of immunosuppressants," Vik said. He checked the shelf above, then the adjacent drawer, moving containers aside. "I've got a box of fresh supply up in my apartment. Give me a minute."
"Take your time," Santi said.
"Don't touch anything," Vik said as he walked toward the door, then stopped and turned to face Santi before leaving. "And don't jack into anything either."
"I know," Santi said.
"I mean it, kid," Vik said.
"I know, Vik," Santi sighed.
The door slid open, and Vik's footsteps climbed the concrete stairs, their rhythm fading as he ascended toward the street level above. The door slid closed behind him, and the clinic settled into a dense quiet.
Santi sat in the operating chair and let the silence sit with him.
The radio on the shelf had been turned off at some point during the procedure, and the only sound accompanying him was the annoying cardiac monitor. The air smelled of isopropyl, surgical adhesive, and the faint ozone of recently powered-down medical equipment.
Santi found himself being unbelievably bored.
He knew he wasn't supposed to jack into anything since the SRN was still integrating and the relay fibers were still bonding and the whole point of the twenty-four hours was to let the hardware settle without interference.
But connecting to the Net to stream a show didn't require him to jack into anything or do anything that would stress his brand-new cyberdeck. It was passive data reception routed through the Neural Link's entertainment subnet, the same thing millions of people did every day without any chrome more advanced than a basic interface plug and cybereyes. The SRN wouldn't even register the activity, and neither would the MCU.
He pulled up a stream of some Japantown animation that Sasha had mentioned a few weeks back, something about a kid with a sword and a robot companion traveling across a wasteland that looked like a scaled-down version of the Badlands. The show loaded onto his Kiroshis with sharper colors than he expected.
He had spent about four minutes enjoying the little show when he heard someone whisper to his close right. It was as if someone were in the room with him and let out a sound at a frequency on the threshold of human auditory perception, like a compressed breath of syllables that carried the shape of language without delivering its content.
Santi's head snapped right, but the clinic was empty, and the wall to the right of the operating chair was blank reinforced concrete painted in a flat grey. The instrument tray sat exactly where Vik had positioned it, its surgical titanium tools arranged in their labeled rows. Santi looked around the room a bit more, staring at the closed supply cabinet with its magnetic latch engaged.
He killed the stream and noticed that the silence that replaced it was not the same silence that had existed before whatever he had just held. It had weight to it now, pressing against both of his ears in a way he could not explain. The cardiac monitor beeped at seventy-four BPM and the sound of the cooling system engaging resounded throughout the clinic, but nothing else made a sound.
"Must've been a glitch," Santi said in a low voice since it was the only rational and medically supported explanation. The SRN was integrating, and the relay fibers were bonding to neural tissue along his spinal column, which had probably sent a phantom auditory input as a side effect. "Maybe a signal ghosting or stray electrical impulses cascading through incompletely bonded relay nodes and being misinterpreted by the auditory processing layer as external sound. Shit's not unheard of, but it sure as fuck is creepy. I should probably run a diagnostic on my systems."
He started a passive self-check protocol that his Neural Link could execute without engaging the Paraline or activating any SRN relay, scanning existing signal pathways for irregularities and logging results against the baseline, when he suddenly heard voices overlapping. They were layered in a compressed harmonic way, emanating from Vik's terminal on the workbench eight feet to his left. They were conversing, trading information in a structured pattern that he identified as communication before his conscious mind could process. However, when he finally tried to process the content, he couldn't, because it wasn't a language.
His bare feet hit the cold concrete as he swung his legs off the chair, and the thermal shock traveled up through his soles and into his calves.
He walked toward the terminal, noticing that it was no longer on and its screen was dark with the power indicator unlit. He didn't remember Vik shutting it down before leaving.
He stood in front of the dark screen, close enough that his own reflection cleanly materialized in the glass, and suddenly, the whispers he was hearing stopped and his heart skipped a beat.
In the reflection, he saw two figures. To his right was an easily identifiable feminine physique, with a radiance that had nothing to do with photons and everything to do with presence. Her features were indistinct, shifting and reforming like data being rendered by a processor, leaving the impression of warmth that bloomed against the inside of his sternum.
Then he looked to the reflection on his left where there was another figure. It was dark, with an active, consuming corruption of the absence of light that ate the space it occupied. Its edges stuttered like a corrupted video playing at a very low frame rate, and the shape had a vague resemblance to something humanoid and Santi could feel it eminate hatred. Both figures felt like they were old and as if they were being patient while looking at him.
Santi felt his heart rate spike, and he turned around, but once again, the clinic was empty. Neither figure that he had just seen standing behind him was there, and nothing in the room had changed with the exception that the temperature had suddenly dropped from 68 degrees to 46 degrees, a full 22-degree drop from the climate control's set point. He felt his hands involuntarily tremble.
The light headache he had felt a few minutes earlier detonated with a sudden and expanding pressure that spiked his internal temperature up 5 degrees above baseline in the frontal cortex, accompanied by an anomalous data cascade in the primary sensory processing layer that the diagnostic could not identify.
Neural Link thermal alert: +5F frontal cortex.
Anomalous data cascade: Unclassified.
Diagnostic status: INCONCLUSIVE.
His Kiroshi optics glitched and the clinic's ambient lighting fractured across his overlay into stuttering, red-tinged streams of code that painted the walls and ceiling in scrolling patterns bearing no resemblance to cyberdeck syntax. The code was unformatted and old yet advanced, running in sequences that his Paraline attempted to decode only to return null on every pass.
And standing before Santi was the dark figure. In the room. Eight feet away, radiating a hatred so dense and so targeted that it registered as physical pressure against his chest. It was advancing slowly towards him.
Santi's motor functions locked and his legs seized from the hip down, his arms froze at his sides, and his breathing quickened as his nervous system attempted to execute a response. He could feel his heart slamming in his chest and the cold sweat breaking across his forehead. Whatever this thing in front of him was, it was reading him, running its attention along the architecture of his chrome and nervous system, mapping the nodes, learning the shape of what it was touching.
Heart rate: 182 BPM.
SRN thermal anomaly: +10F spinal relay nodes.
Motor function: COMPROMISED.
Four voices spoke at the same time. They came from inside the walls, from the floor, from the ceiling, from inside the terminal, from the door, from inside his own cranial cavity, layered in a frequency that humans had never been designed to receive. His Neural Link's parsing subroutine crashed three times in under a second, restarting each time into the same incomprehensible input.
He could smell something that smelled like heat without combustion, like the sealed atmosphere of a room that had been holding its breath for a very long time.
And when the dark figure was four feet away, the air between them shimmered with thermal distortion, except the room was actually freezing cold. The figure stepped closer, coming within a foot of Santi, who was being taken over by the sensation of being read by an intelligence using his own hardware as its access point.
Then the overhead light panel blew, its four high-intensity bulbs detonating in sequence from left to right with sharp cracks that scattered glass across the place. The telemetry display flashed a single frame of red code before dying. The ambient LED strips burst in a cascade traveling the full length, each dying with a brief red flash that left afterimages burned into Santi's optics.
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