Chapter 7 - Chapter Seven

David read the message twice when it came through his slate, the line from Aperture Science telling him their own Sandevistan variant was finished and ready for subject fit, and even though he had agreed to this two weeks ago his throat still tightened when he saw the date and the prep notes because this wasn't just talk anymore, this was surgery, chrome under the skin, his body opened and altered in ways you couldn't take back once it was done, and he thought about his mother lying upstairs in her bed, monitors steady, her hand twitching once in a while when he talked, and he told himself he was doing this for both of them, to be stronger, faster, safer, not to play soldier but because Night City didn't forgive the weak, and he couldn't keep living like someone waiting for the next blow to land. The morning of the appointment he showed up early in his delivery jacket, still smelling faintly of the van's recycled air, and the clerk at the counter just scanned his badge and told him to sit, no questions, no drama, just routine like this was the same as a blood test, and after ten minutes an aide came to walk him back to the prep wing, neutral tone, efficient pace, all business, and when he stepped into the surgical room it looked nothing like the backroom rippers he had heard about, no rust, no bloodstains, no folding chairs, just clean white panels, anchored lights, polished trays of instruments sealed in clear covers, and three techs already gloved and masked moving like a team that had done this a hundred times, which they probably had. They checked his ID, confirmed the unit type, confirmed he understood the procedure, asked him to sign one more set of digital forms about liability, and then handed him a gown and told him to change while they sterilized the table. He lay down with his chest tight and tried to breathe steady while one of the techs inserted the anesthetic IV, explaining that he would feel warm first and then heavy, and within a minute the ceiling was sliding away from him like someone dimmed the city noise and then shut it off entirely. When he woke again it was slow, like climbing out of water, the lights above him fuzzy until they sharpened, and the first thing he felt was the weight in his spine, not pain but presence, a new structure grafted onto his nerves, fused into muscle, the same way you notice a scar if you run your fingers over it even if you've stopped thinking about it, and his chest ached in small waves where they had reinforced his lungs and heart, though no one had told him that part because they didn't need his consent for safety upgrades, they just did it, and he flexed his fingers and saw the faint glow of symmetrical lines under the skin of his back reflected in the glass to his right, circuitry patterned like veins, subtle enough to pass for design until you stared too long. The nurse told him to stay still another hour, to sip water, to let the system calibrate, and she ran a set of checks on the monitors, nodding when his vitals stayed smooth, no spikes, no crashes, no arrhythmia, and she told him his nervous system had taken the graft well, the reinforcements holding, no rejection detected, which meant he was cleared for light testing once the sedation wore off. Later they walked him outside to a controlled yard behind the clinic, a flat space with painted lines and a cluster of drones hovering overhead to record, and told him to activate on his own count; he took a breath, thought the command, and the world folded into stillness, sound dropping into syrup, the hum of a drone stretching like tape slowed down, the hand of the tech with the stopwatch frozen mid-raise, and David laughed because it felt like falling forward into silence and speed, his limbs light, his mind sharper than it had ever been, the whole space stretched like someone had given him the cheat code to life, and he moved, sprinting across the painted lines, stopping, turning, sliding, every step like he had stolen seconds from the city itself. He burned the run too long the first time and when he cut it off his chest heaved, sweat already running, but the tech told him to check again, and the second run lasted longer, smoother, his vision less blurred at the edges, the reinforcements working exactly as promised, extending his limits without tearing him apart. After an hour of guided drills they shut him down for the day, logged the data, and told him to rest, avoid strain, let the system mesh fully before pushing it hard, and he nodded even though he already knew he would test it again on his own the first chance he got, because once you taste that kind of speed you don't forget it. Back inside, lying on the bed again with a cold drink bottle sweating in his hand, he thought about what the Aperture tech had said before he left: "Our version blends with you, not on you, that's the difference," and he believed it because the whole time he hadn't felt like a machine grafted onto flesh, he had felt like himself but more, like his body had been tuned to the life he had been forced to live anyway. Meanwhile in the base below, Kevin stood with Angela in the hydro room, hands still smelling faintly of the plants they had harvested, talking about the state of the project with the same casual tone someone else might use about weather, and Angela asked what he would do if the corpos traced the sudden environmental shift back to him, and he told her that they wouldn't, not yet, because they were too busy pointing fingers at Biotechnica, and that gave him time to plan the next step: cleaner oceans, wider green, stronger synth lines to hold it all in place. He admitted he was tired but he smiled anyway, because for the first time in weeks he wasn't alone in carrying the weight of all of it, Angela listening, occasionally teasing him about overbuilding, sometimes suggesting refinements, her presence making the lab feel less like a bunker and more like a place where people lived. They shared a meal from the vending machine that wasn't special but was warm, sitting across from each other at the steel table, and Kevin told her about the first Angela, the one he had built to share his work, and the current Angela nodded like she understood, because she did, and the two of them sat there talking until the lights dimmed to signal rest cycle, the sound of water trickling through the trays filling the silence, both of them knowing they were building something bigger than either of them could explain.