When I woke up, it was already late in the afternoon, and I felt like I had been beaten with a sock full of rocks.
I lay in bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling, feeling the last fragments of the dream dissolve into a fuzzy residue. HADES had said the world suffered a reset approximately forty-five hundred years ago, and if I wasn't wrong, the pyramids were roughly forty-five hundred years old, give or take a few centuries.
I pushed myself out of bed, stripped, and went to shower with hot water. I stood under the water, letting the heat and the pressure pepper my back and work on releasing the tension in my shoulders and the back of my neck. I still had a headache, though it was much more bearable.
It was around four in the afternoon when I stepped out of the shower. It had been rather quiet since I woke up, so I called out for my mother as I toweled off, but she didn't respond. I wrapped the towel around my waist and checked the kitchen, but it was empty; the only thing around was her mug on the drying rack, still wet, which meant she'd been here not that long ago. But her tablet wasn't on the table where she usually left it, and her jacket was also gone.
She was probably out running whatever errands kept her busy, or out eating with friends. I didn't really know what Mom got up to while I wasn't around. Which was good and bad, because it meant that she could do whatever she wanted. But I know she felt like she was failing as a mother, having to rely on her son to do all the work and bring home all the money while she just lounged about.
Meh, it's whatever. I got dressed and headed down to my server room on the second floor. I shouldn't waste any more time without looking into this shit that this HADES character had injected in me, so I locked the door behind me, sat in the terminal chair, and plugged myself in.
I then dove into my server and was immediately greeted by multiple giant three-headed dogs I had created. They were defensive daemons that I had made in the form of a Cerberus because, let's be honest, shit was nova. They didn't really do anything except lounge about waiting for someone to decide that klepping data from my servers would be a good idea.
I mean, they were more like a deterrent than anything else, since the architecture of my servers, which was built by yours truly, was pretty beefed up. I mean, I had to tall-ass walls of defensive code that also had some Black-ICE in the form of HMGs and turrets that would only make themselves known if a gonk pushed past all of my guard dogs.
That reminded me I should definitely upgrade my self-ICE. Probably pack it to the brim with daemons that would save my ass and chew right through any attack. Getting throttled down by that Voodoo Bitchboy's daemon wasn't the most fun experience. It would also let me do a little better exploring the current net. I had seen how nova most of the shit here was. I mean, there were literal fucking castles and a fuckton of other preem shit for me to explore. But I mostly kept to interacting with things from afar because I didn't know how these gonked fuckers in the Net were. Upgrading my self-ICE would help me feel at peace enough to actually take a stroll through it all.
But that's not what I was here for at the moment. So I walked through the main gates of my server's architecture, which also put all the turrets around my building in the meatspace on high alert to ensure I was 100% safe from anything and anyone while I dove into my chrome's code.
It sifted through my Neural Link's firmware, and it didn't take long for me to find the nasty little gift HADES had left for me. It was unlike anything I had ever written or encountered. It was basically a ball of compressed and self-referencing code that my MCU's decompiler struggled to unpack. Every time the decompiler resolved a layer, the layer beneath it referenced the layer above, creating a recursive loop that my processing had to trace manually rather than parsing automatically.
It was also small. Much smaller than I had expected. HADES had called it a microscopic fraction, and shift if he wasn't kidding. It was only a few hundred kilobytes of code, and it was just chilling there, sitting quietly in the amplification pathway.
"Bueno, Santi, time to go to work," I said to myself.
I spent hours mapping the code's structure without touching it. I traced every reference it had established inside my firmware, building a complete schematic in my mind of how it interacted with my Neural Link's existing architecture. The more I worked, the more I began to realize that the code had not simply been dropped into my firmware and left alone, but that it had actually integrated. There were threads of the foreign architecture that had woven themselves into my amplification pathway's signal processing routines, creating connections that were kinda fucking preem. Whoever or whatever had written this code understood neural firmware at a level that made me feel like my own firmware had been written by a fucking corpo cum script kiddie.
I attempted to isolate it, writing quarantine routines that would wall off the foreign code from the rest of my firmware. They cut the threads it had established and replaced them with null pointers that prevented the integration from deepening. The quarantine worked for a bit before the shit started adapting faster than my routine could sever it.
I tried different approaches, and they all meant jack shit. I was getting really fucking irritated with this shit until I found an approach the code couldn't immediately adapt to. I managed to isolate approximately seventy percent of the foreign architecture behind a quarantine wall that held, while the remaining thirty percent was too deeply integrated with my amplification pathway's core processing to isolate without risking damage to the pathway itself, which meant I could also fry my brain if I did so.
As I worked, I noticed the whispers I had been hearing in the meatspace were also in the cyberspace of my firmware. And the more progress I made, the louder they became. It was as if the code itself knew I was working on it and was responding to the interaction.
Eventually, the whispers grew loud enough to become distinct audio signals rather than background noise. They seemed to be saying something, but they were layered and speaking over each other in a way that didn't let me understand anything. But the speech rhythm became consistent, letting me notice it was repeating.
I stopped working on quarantining and tried to focus on the audio signal, running it through every linguistic analysis tool I had available. The signal was degraded, but the harder I attempted to pay attention to it, the clearer it seemed to become to me.
Cy...
..re.
...nos...
Cyno...
...su...
...ure...
As it repeated over and over, I eventually figured out what it was saying. It was a single word: Cynosure
As soon as I understood what was being said, the whispers came to an utter halt, and the background hum that had been running in my Neural Link went silent as well.
I stood in cyberspace mulling over the word. "What the flying fuck is a cynosure?"
Then I remembered that HADES had been trying to tell me something before the architecture of NetWatch's base collapsed. He he was telling me that I needed to go to the cyno something before he got cut off. So maybe this word, this Cynosure, it wasn't a thing but actually a place.
At first this HADES had my curiosity, but now he had my attention, and that meant that I had to find out everything I could about this "Cynosure." And I was just about to do so when I felt a tug on my consciousness from the meatspace. I manipulated the cyberspace around me to see what it was, which was easy as shit since cyberspace under your control was your domain and you could basically do whatever the fuck you wanted with it.
My mood soured when I saw that the caller ID read NCPD. I decided to disconnect from cyberspace and actually give this my attention since the NCPD did not call people like me. Shit, they barely called people at all, and when they did, it was usually because somebody was dead and the body needed to be identified. My mind immediately went to the worst possible scenario, which was my mother dead.
"Hello?" I said hesitatingly.
"Santi? Oh thank God. Okay, so don't freak out." I felt an invisible weight lift off my chest when I heard Judy's voice on the other end of the call.
"Judy?" I asked, sitting up in my dive chair. "Why are you calling me from the NCPD?"
"Okay, so, funny story," Judy said, her voice sounding urgent. "So I may have, technically, gotten arrested."
"You got arrested," I deadpanned.
"Technically," she said.
"Let me guess," I said. "It was because of the firetruck?"
"Oh, how did you know?" She asked.
I sighed. "Judy-"
"Look, I know," she said, interrupting me. "I know how it sounds. But I had it under control. I had it completely under control right up until I accidentally ran a red light in front of a cruiser in Japantown. And then I had it mostly under control until the cruiser pulled me over and the officer asked for my registration and I didn't have one because, as we have previously established, the firetruck does not technically have registration because I found it in a scrapyard."
"And they arrested you," I sighed.
"They're trying to throw the fucking book at me," she said, and I could just imagine her throwing her hands up in the air in frustration. "They're trying to charge me with grand theft of an emergency response vehicle, which is a Class-2 felony, and also operating an unregistered vehicle, which is a Class-4 misdemeanor, and also for running a red light, which is a traffic violation, and also resisting arrest, which I did not do but this fat fucking pig seemed to have a very creative interpretation of."
"What's their creative interpretation?" I asked.
"I told him to go fuck himself when he said the firetruck wasn't mine," Judy said. "Apparently that counts."
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose.
"Look," Judy said, her voice turning quieter. "I know we've only really known each other for like two months. And I know this is a shitty thing to ask. But I don't really have many chooms, Santi. And the ones I do have aren't the kind of chooms who can help with this. I was hoping you could maybe help me out with some eddies or something. Bail, a lawyer, whatever it takes. I'll pay you back. I swear on everything I have."
Well, wasn't she in luck. Thanks to last night's gig, which almost flatlined my ass and almost got me black listed by my highest-paying fixer, I had just about 4.7 million eddies currently sitting in my account. Although we had only known each other for a like two months, she was one of the few people I'd consider chooms of mine in this city. And though Sasha and I had warned her about getting arrested, it was honestly a fucked situation that she had gotten busted for driving her fixer-upper scrapyard find.
"Alright," I sighed. "Just give me some time, and I'll figure something out."
"Thank you," Judy said. "Seriously, choom. Thank you. Oh, and I don't mean to rush you, but the pigs said I'm able to keep my agent just for another hour."
"Alright, I'll make it quick," I said, ended the call, and sat there for about a minute, thinking. I could pay Judy's bail directly, but bail in Night City for a Class-2 felony was going to be steep, and paying it didn't make the charges go away. Which meant that the wiser choice was to get her a lawyer, a real one. But I didn't know any fucking lawyers, and they were all just corpo shills anyway... wait, Regina Jones might know someone.
I immediately hit her line, and it wasn't long before he answered.
"Ah, if it isn't the Ghost of Kabuki," Regina said, seemingly oddly chatty. "I heard you're moving up in the world. Dino won't shut his piehole bragging about this new runner he's got. But I highly doubt this is a social call. So tell me, what can I do for you?"
"I've got a choom who's in some trouble with the NCPD," I said. "She got picked up driving a vehicle the pigs are calling stolen, but she rebuilt it herself from a scrapyard find. They're trying to hit her with a Class-2 felony for theft of an emergency vehicle, plus a handful of smaller charges."
"Emergency vehicle," Regina said. "What kind?"
"A firetruck," I replied.
"Your friend stole a firetruck," Regina said after a short pause.
"My friend rebuilt a firetruck from scrap and then drove it around the city," I corrected her. Didn't want a fixer to think I was out here associating with street rats. "The NCPD is calling it a grand theft."
"Of course they are. The NCPD would charge a rat with breaking and entering if they could get it to hold still long enough for the paperwork." Regina's voice shifted from amused to business. "I have a lawyer who owes me some favors. He could probably get her charges dropped or reduced, but it will cost you."
"How much?" I asked.
"Fifteen thousand eddies," Regina said.
I pretended to think about it for a moment, making a sound that made it appear as if I was deliberating. The truth was that fifteen thousand eddies was pretty much pocket change for me right now.
"Alright," I said, letting out a deep sigh.
"Transfer the eddies, and I'll make the call," Regina said. "Though I'll be honest with you, Ghost. This particular lawyer might just take the case just for the fun of it. A teenager who rebuilt a decommissioned fire engine from a scrapyard and got arrested for driving it through Japantown? He lives for that shit."
"I hope you're right," I said as I transferred the eddies.
"I got the eddies," Regina said. "I'll send you his contact information. His name is Matt Murdock. He's expensive under normal circumstances, but for this one, the favor covers it. Tell your friend to sit tight and not say anything else to the NCPD until he gets there."
She ended the call, and a second later I got a message from Regina containing the lawyer's contact information. It was just a name, a number, and a single line of text beneath the number that read ATTORNEY AT LAW.
I forwarded the contact to Judy's Agent with a message attached: "Lawyer's on the way. Don't say another word to the pigs until he gets there. I mean it. Not a single word."
She replied to my message a few seconds later.
Judy: "You're the best choom I've ever had."
Me: "You need better chooms."
Judy: "Fuck you. But also, thank you."
I smiled at her bickering and murmured to myself. "Good job, Santi, you did a good deed today."
---
Donate your stones pls...
You can also go ahead and join the infamous P@treon if you seek the forbidden passages:
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
There you can find everything I've ever written, as I'm writing it.