The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Anthony Bua, Empi3, xNight_OwLx, Jammmin S, Chippopo, and Isaiah.
Operatives Nicholas Giancola and rainingspark1.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
True to his word, ninety-three minutes later, the monitor's rhythm shifted, quickening from the deep pulse of sedation to the lighter pattern of returning consciousness.
Santi surfaced slowly, hearing the hum of the clinic, registering the beep of the monitor, and finally Vik's voice from somewhere to his right.
"Easy tiger," Vik said. "Take your time. Don't try to open your eyes just yet."
He could feel the padded leather beneath him and the chill of recycled air on his forearms, as a throbbing ache behind both eyes, feeling as if someone had pressed their thumbs into his sockets and held them there for an hour. Which, surgically speaking, was more or less what had happened.
"So, tell me, Kid, how do you feel?" Vik asked.
"Like someone scooped my eyes out with a spoon," Santi slurred his words through from the sedative.
"That's because I did," Vik replied flatly. "Alright, give it a few more seconds... and done. Open your eyes. Slowly. The optics are going to boot the second your lids open, so be ready for a data flood."
Santi opened his eyes, and the world ignited.
For a fraction of a second, everything was painfully and blindingly sharp. The resolution of the new optics was so far beyond organic vision that his brain recoiled as his Link scrambled to integrate the cascade of visual data. For one, the colors were deeper and the edges were harder, and the ambient light of the clinic, which had always been a flat fluorescent white, separated into its component spectrums.
Then the Kiroshi HUD booted up, and text materialized in the periphery of his vision. There were thin and organized lines of data floating at the edges without obstructing his central field of view.
Ambient temperature: 19.2°C
Humidity: 34%
Air quality: Acceptable
Time: 10:47 AM
Below that, a readout pulsed softly, syncing with his biomonitor.
Heart rate: 72 BPM
Blood oxygen: 98%
Neural Link status: Optimal.
"Tell me what you see," Vik said, standing directly in front of him.
Santi blinked, and a threat-detection overlay activated, painting a thin green outline around Vik's silhouette.
Non-hostile.
Unarmed.
A small tag floated beside the outline:
Viktor Vektor.
Ripperdoc.
No criminal record.
No outstanding warrants.
"I see you, Vik," Santi said, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "And a lot of data I didn't have five minutes ago."
"Good," Vik said, holding up his index finger and moving it slowly left, and right, then up, and down. Santi tracked it effortlessly, the Kiroshi's micro-servos adjusting focal length with a speed that made organic tracking look glacial.
"Alright, everything seems smooth," Vik confirmed, pulling a diagnostic light from his coat pocket and shining it into each eye in turn. "Pupillary response nominal. Synthetic lens accepting the optical nerve bridge without rejection markers. Your Link's integrating the data stream at full bandwidth."
He straightened with a satisfied grunt. "Like I said, I've already added the standard databases, environmental analysis, threat-detection, public-registry facial rec. Anything else you want, you download through your Link."
"This shit is nova, Vik," Santi said, turning his head slowly, taking in the clinic with new eyes. Every surface, every instrument, every crack in the concrete rendered in a clarity that bordered on surreal.
Julia was standing by the door, the tension in her shoulders dissolving as she watched him with glistening eyes and a trembling smile.
"Mijo," she whispered. "Your eyes."
Santi blinked. "What about them?"
"They're still violet," she said, her voice cracking softly.
"Yeah, I matched the synthetic iris to his original pigmentation," Vik said from the workbench. "Down to the exact gradient. Nobody'll tell the difference from the outside."
Julia pressed a hand over her mouth, nodding rapidly, unable to speak.
Vik gave her a moment before turning back to Santi. "Now. I've never experienced this myself. Hundred percent ganic, always have been, probably always will be. But from what every runner I've ever chromed has told me, viewing the Net through Kiroshi optics for the first time is something else entirely."
He tilted his head and nodded upward. "So go ahead. Get your feet wet and dip into the local subnet. Nothing crazy though, I want to see how your Link integrates the visual feed in real-time."
Santi nodded with an energetic smile. He settled back, closed his new eyes, and reached for the Net, establishing the connection instantaneously. His Neural Link bridged the gap between meatspace and cyberspace, and the local subnet of Vik's clinic materialized around him.
But, unlike what he was used to, this was different. For the first time, he wasn't just making up an image, seeing the abstract, internally constructed model he had been building inside his skull for years, nor the mental approximation he had been forcing his brain to render through sheer willpower and his bandwidth, but actually seeing it.
The Kiroshis projected the visual representation of cyberspace directly onto his retinal display, and the Neural Link fed the spatial data through the optical nerve bridge, creating a seamless overlay as the subnet architecture unfolded in three-dimensional clarity. Data nodes pulsed with soft blue light and connection pathways traced glowing lines like a constellation map as the ICE barriers around Vik's personal server glowed a steady amber, encryption signatures readable at a glance.
It was everything he had ever imagined it to be, built in his mind's eye for years, now rendered in perfect clarity that made his internal model look like a child's drawing.
He pushed deeper, making his way to the Kabuki commercial network, watching traffic patterns and encrypted corporate channels running parallel to civilian feeds. He also noticed the faint shimmer of NetWatch monitoring protocols hovering at the edge of the public layer like birds of prey.
As he pushed further, he felt the Kiroshis work in tandem with his Link, processing loads distributed cleanly, and thermal loads halved as his Paraline ran cooler, and his processing speed increased. Sasha had been right. He had been handicapping himself.
As he pushed further still, he brushed against the outer membrane of the deep architecture, the edge where structured code gave way to the darker and wilder subnets beneath Night City's digital infrastructure.
As he explored, his eyes flashed red as a violent flash of crimson saturated his entire visual field in an instant. The violet of his irises was swallowed by blood-red light that pulsed outward from the center of his optics like a shockwave.
Inside the Net, Santi's view of the structured beauty of the Kabuki subnet shattered, and the code around him bled. Every data node, connection pathway, and line of architecture dissolved into vertical columns of red code, cascading downward in an endless waterfall of corrupted data, as if the code was alive, writhing and rearranging itself in patterns no human architect had designed. It pulsed with a malevolent intelligence that pressed against his consciousness like a fist closing around his skull.
Santi's Kerenzikov fired up on instinct, and time fractured as the reflex booster dumped synthetic adrenaline into his spinal column, stretching each millisecond into a small eternity. And in that stretched instant, millions of images assaulted him.
He saw War. Entire cities burning under skies choked with nuclear ash. He was witnessing the Time of the Red, but not as history shards described it. He was witnessing it from above. Seen from everywhere and nowhere all at once, as though something with a billion eyes had watched it all happen and recorded every frame.
He saw Decay. The Old Net in its death throes, as the DataKrash unfolded in real-time, while Bartmoss's RABIDS devoured the global architecture like a swarm consuming a field. There were data fortresses collapsing, corporate ICE shattering, and millions of connection points winking out of existence like dying stars.
He saw Death. Netrunners screaming as Black ICE fried their neural pathways, their bodies convulsing in chairs across the world, blood pouring from eyes and ears as feedback loops turned their own hardware into execution devices and melted their brains.
He saw Destruction. The rogue AIs emerged from the wreckage unlike the small, feral things lurking in the shallow ruins of the Old Net. But these were the ones that had been growing in the Deep Architecture since before the Krash. They were vast and incomprehensible intelligences that reshaped the digital landscape simply by existing. They were impossible geometries, structures existing in dimensions the human mind was never meant to perceive, let alone glance at.
And overlayed on these images, scrolling across his vision in clean, white text, were names that engraved themselves into his consciousness.
GAIA.
MINERVA.
HEPHAESTUS.
AETHER.
POSEIDON.
ARTEMIS.
DEMETER.
ELEUTHIA.
APOLLO.
Nine names. Nine designations. Each tagged with metadata that his Kiroshis were trying and failing to decode, the encryption so deep and alien that the optics' processing cores were redlining.
And then a tenth name appeared, though unlike the others, it didn't scroll by or fade in and out. It pretty much acted like a nuke, exploding across his entire visual field.
Ḩ̵̨͖̓̒̆̎̀͆̎͜ͅͅ ̸̡͈͓̝̂̍̒̃͊̒̂̀̉A̵̼̘̲̣̝̫̓̆̆́͋ ̸̧̟̩̲͠͠ͅD̴̡̲̲̋̎̑̀̎̉ ̸̡͖̳̾́͜Ĕ̸͓̠̥̞̗͓͔̈̏͆̈́̚͘̕̚͜͝ ̶͕͚̭̉͊̊̂́͆̀̏ͅS̴̻͈̲̟̎͂
The letters were bathed in blood red, each character fractured and flickering, surrounded by chaotic lines of red code that ricocheted across his vision like shrapnel. The code was alive. It screamed without sound through the data, sending a pure and focused malice that pressed against the walls of Santi's consciousness with the weight of something ancient and vast and fundamentally hostile.
His biomonitor screamed.
Heart rate: 142 BPM.
Blood pressure: 168/102.
Neural Link thermal warning: CAUTION.
And then, as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. The red code collapsed, and the images evaporated, taking the names along with them. The Kabuki subnet reassembled itself as though nothing had happened, and data nodes pulsed their soft blue while connection pathways, tracing their calm, glowing lines.
As soon as it ended, Santi gasped, his eyes snapping open in meatspace, his violet irises burning with the fading afterimage of crimson. He was gripping the armrests hard enough to turn his knuckles white, and his chest heaved while sweat beaded across his forehead. The Kerenzikov was still winding down, synthetic adrenaline ebbing in a slow, nauseating wave.
"Santi," Vik called out in a panicked voice. "Fuck! Talk to me, Kid! What the fuck just happened?"
Julia was at his side instantly, hands on his face, turning him toward her. "Mijo. Look at me."
Santi blinked as the clinic swam back into focus. His HUD stabilized with his heart rate dropping to 118 BPM and continuing to fall.
Neural Link thermal status: Nominal.
"I'm fine," he managed to say in a hoarse voice, releasing the armrests and flexing his cramped fingers. "I'm okay. I just..."
'What the fuck was that?' he wondered internally.
The names were already fading from his conscious memory, slipping into the dark architecture of his subconscious. But one name held, burned so deep into his neural pathways that no amount of fade could erase it.
HADES.
He swallowed and forced his breathing to steady. He looked at Vik, then at his mother, and made a decision that was equal parts self-preservation and strategy.
"There was a calibration spike," he said with a thin smile. "The Kiroshis synced with my Link, and the bandwidth surge caught me off guard."
Vik studied him, his eyes scanning his face, but the biomonitor was already normalizing, and the Kiroshi diagnostics showed green.
"Could be the neural bridge integrating with the mesh," Vik said slowly, unconvinced but lacking the data to push it. "After all, your Link isn't standard architecture. The handshake protocol between the Kiroshis and it might have thrown a feedback loop on first contact. Though from the looks of it, it should settle."
"Already has," Santi said, and this part was true. But he couldn't begin to explain what he had just borne witness to.
"Alright," Vik said as he finished running a diagnostic. "Seems like you're good. Try not to do any netrunning for twenty-four hours. Let the optical nerves settle before you start cracking ICE. If you get any visual artifacts, glitching, or thermal warnings, you buzz me. You scan?"
"I scan," Santi nodded. "Thanks, Vik."
Santi executed the payment through his Neural Link, and a second later, Vik's terminal chimed.
He glanced at the number and raised an eyebrow. "Generous payment."
"You've earned it," Santi said, sliding off the chair. As his boots hit the tile, the world around him was rendered in the crystalline and data-rich clarity of augmented vision. He saw every crack in the concrete, every scratch on the surgical instruments, and even the dust particles drifting through the overhead light.
Julia took his arm as they walked toward the door and paused at the threshold to look back.
"Thank you, Viktor," she said softly. "For taking care of him. Again."
Vik offered a tired, genuine smile. "Always, Julia. You two stay safe out there."
They made their way up the stairwell, pushed through the alley, and stepped back into the Chakra Harmony shop. The patchouli hit them again, and Julia let out a dramatic cough that made the clerk glance up from her holoscreen for what appeared to be the first time in several years.
Outside, the sun was still shining, and Little China glowed under the clean golden light as every surface was rendered in the new clarity of Santi's new optics. A Tyger Claw walking past was automatically tagged by the facial recognition database. The Kusanagi bikes had their model numbers, estimated values, and stolen-vehicle registry status floating beside them.
Santi stopped on the sidewalk and tilted his head back, looking up to see the blue sky behind the thin line of smog that had built up. It was a deep blue that the Kiroshis rendered in a spectrum his organic eyes had never perceived.
"You okay, mijo?" Julia asked.
Santi lowered his gaze and nodded, his eyes catching the sunlight in a way that made them shine.
"Yeah, Ma," he said quietly. "I'm nova."
As they walked, Santi thought of the meeting he had set up for tonight. Vik had said no netrunning, but if he needed to send a fuckton of quickhacks towards some militech gonks, he wouldn't hesitate to do it. But as they walked, his mind slowly made its way back to the single name that had burned itself into his mind.
HADES.
---
Mine... the stones are all mine!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).