AN: I'll be extending the hiatus for another week due to personal circumstances. You lot reached another 400 stones last night. So here is a bonus chapter as per our agreement.
The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Mango, Destructor Destructor, and Victor.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Dino didn't wait for me to reply and started heading back to the stage. He took his bass back from the roadie, and the crowd shifted in anticipation of the next set. I watched him strap the bass guitar over his shoulder, adjust the mic stand, and lean in.
"This one's for a friend I just made," Dino said into the mic, and I did not need to see the crowd's response to know that half of them were looking at me now. "The tall gonk in the back who broke my test in under four minutes. Buy him a drink or don't, but don't fuck with him. He's clearly better at his job than you are at yours."
The band kicked in, and I slid out of the booth and walked to the bar. I grabbed the glass of RealWater that had been waiting for me, and quickly drank it. That was a mistake.
What I drank made my throat burn, and I quickly realized I had just downed some real strong liquor.
"Vodka, kid," Mojo said with a shit-eating grin. "If you're working with Dino, then you should be able to handle your drink as well."
"Yeah, no shit," the words barely managed to escape my lips as my throat burned and my eyes watered. "Make sure to reduce the dosage next time."
I sent her a hundred eddies, shook my head, and walked back up the amber-lit staircase with the bass line vibrating the concrete beneath my boots and my chest burning.
---
The next five days were the quietest stretch of my life since we had moved to Watson. I spent them rewriting the unified firmware for the new chrome.
The SRN had completed its integration cycle while I was meeting with Dino, and the performance difference was something I could feel in my bones. My thoughts arrived faster, and my body responded with a synchronicity that made the old sequential processing feel like I'd been operating underwater without realizing there was a surface. The gap between perception and reaction, once measurable in fractions of a second, was now effectively zero.
My Paraline Mk.3 was another order of magnitude. My old firmware, which I had just placed over this one and was now editing, ran on the Mk.3's temporary compatibility layer, but was visibly constrained. The rewrite I was building would unlock everything the new silicon could do.
I wrote the code and tested it in simulated environments. Then I rewrote it and tested it again. The MCU compressed my daemon library in the background, eating through the routines and quickhack templates I'd accumulated and packing them into a fraction of their original footprint, and by the fourth day I could access my entire operational toolkit simultaneously.
By the fifth day, I was done rewriting the firmware.
I ran the final calibration cycle at three in the afternoon, sitting in the dive chair with my link cable connected to the hardline terminal, and I watched the numbers resolve across my overlay as the new firmware handshook with every piece of chrome in my body for the first time as a unified, optimized system.
Neural Link throughput: 22.4 TB/s
Paraline Mk.3 Overclock Potential: 87.3%
Ex-Disk Mk.3: 18 TB allocated and Indexed
MCU: Compression ratio 8.2:1
SRN: All relay nodes active. Parallel processing confirmed.
Kerenzikov + Boost System: Response time 0.003s.
Kiroshi Mk.3: Full spectrum. Nominal.
Unified firmware v2.0: Active.
I disconnected the cable and sat there for a moment, taking in what I had accomplished. Then I got dressed and headed to The Silo.
I arrived at 6:51 and found Dino already in his corner booth, wearing similar, if not the same, clothes to the ones he had on five days ago. He also held the same drink and looked towards three people sitting at the bar, their backs to the entrance.
As soon as he saw me, Dino raised two fingers, and the three of them turned around.
The first was a man who looked like he'd been assembled from spare parts that had seen combat in at least two wars. He looked like he was in his mid-forties, broad across the shoulders, with a jaw that appeared to have been broken and reset at least once. He also had what could only be described as a network of thin, silvery scars running along the left side of his neck, most likely the result of shrapnel, and wore a dark tactical jacket over a ballistic vest. His eyes were grey and unemotional, and he had a mil-spec Sandy along his spinal ridge that reminded me a lot of a mil-spec unit that I had seen once before in a Militech promotional feed my father had brought home from work when I was six years old.
He also had a projectile launch system integrated into his left arm and Mantis blade housings along his right arm. I kept analyzing the man, noticing the subtle mil-spec cyberlegs evident in his weight distribution and the way he stood, his balance calibrated to an almost imperceptible register. And if he had this much chrome, then he most definitely had subdermal armor, which was quickly confirmed by the exposed skin of his hands and neck, which had a faint surface texture.
Everything about this guy screamed career soldier. And based on the specific mil-spec origins my optics were flagging, the loadout of a career soldier who had never officially been discharged. But Night City was full of people whose backstories didn't match their current employment situations, and asking questions would probably get me killed.
He went by Torque and only offered me a small nod.
"Ghost," Torque said, his voice low. "Dino says you're good."
"It seems that way," I said.
"Yeah, well, we'll see." He turned his attention to Mojo behind the bar and ordered whiskey on the rocks, and left the conversation at that.
The second was a woman in her late twenties with cropped red hair and a face that carried the expression of someone who was impatient. She was wearing a tech harness over a long-sleeved shirt, the harness loaded with tools, diagnostic modules, and three different types of electronic countermeasure devices hanging from clips like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
"Patch," she said, extending one hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong. "I handle hardware, bypass, and make sure shit doesn't explode when it doesn't need to."
"Ghost," I said.
"I know who you are," Patch said. "Dino showed us your test results. You're a record breaker and apparent overachiever."
She tilted her head. "You're taller than I expected."
"I get that a lot," I said.
The third member of the crew was harder to read. They were sitting at the end of the bar with a glass of vodka, wearing dark, fitted clothes that seemed designed to absorb light. Their face was narrow, sharp-featured, and almost forgettable. Shit, I was sure that if I looked at their face for ten minutes, I still wouldn't be able to describe them. So I ran a quick scan and noticed that they were running optical camo implants, reinforced tendons, and a subdermal sound-dampening system that reduced their physical noise signature.
"It's not nice to scan unprompted," they said. "The name's Moth."
"Moth's been on four jobs with me," Dino said from his booth. "Never been found once."
He set his glass down and stood. "You four are the crew for this gig. Ghost will be handling the network, and Patch will take care of the hardware while Moth handles the entry and Torque handles anything that goes wrong."
We moved to a booth where Dino laid out the operational overview on a datapad.
After fifteen minutes of briefing and going over entry vectors, exit protocols, communication frequencies, and contingency procedures, we were ready to go. The facility was located in an industrial complex near the eastern edge of the Northside Watson. It was a three-story building above ground with loading docks and administrative offices.
When the briefing was done, we left The Silo through a rear exit that opened onto a service alley, where a Villefort Columbus V340-F Freight van was waiting, its engine running and its cargo compartment configured with everything we would need.
Torque drove, and Patch rode shotgun while Moth and I took the cargo compartment, sitting on opposite benches with our backs to the walls.
Torque drove without much hurry, never exceeding the speed limit or making random lane changes out of impatience. His hands stayed on the steering wheel the entire time, signaling before every turn and checking his mirrors often.
"First time with Dino?" Torque asked, his voice carrying from the cab through the open partition.
"Yup," I confirmed.
"He's solid, pays good, has clean plans, and doesn't send you into a building unless he's already figured out how to get you out." His eyes stayed on the road as he spoke. "I've worked with fixers who treated runners like ammunition, just throwing cattle to the slaughter. But Dino is different. He treats us like investments."
"Investments appreciate in value," Patch said from the passenger seat. "Ammunition just gets spent."
"Just like soldiers," Torque said.
Moth said nothing. They were sitting with their back against the van's wall, their eyes closed, their breathing steady, either meditating, sleeping, or running through the infiltration route in their head.
"How old are you, Ghost?" Patch asked with a hint of curiosity as she turned in her seat to look through the partition.
"I'm old enough," I said.
"That's reassuring," Patch said. "Usually, gonks who say they are old enough say so because the real answer would make everyone uncomfortable."
She turned back to face the windshield. "For what it's worth, I don't really care. Dino vouched, and your test numbers are better than anyone who's worked for him I've worked with. Age is just a number, choom. Chrome and competence aren't."
"Age is data," Torque said from the cab.
"Data?" Patch asked in a very confused tone as she turned to look at him.
"It tells you how long someone has had to learn from their mistakes." His eyes flicked to me in the rearview mirror, and I felt something weigh on me. "The younger the operator, the smaller the sample size of survived errors. Doesn't mean he's not good. Just means we don't know yet what kind of good he is."
"You're a real fun ride in a van, Torque," Patch said. "The life of the motherfucking party."
"I'm sorry for being a realist," Torque said.
"Yeah, fuck off," Patch said. "We all know you're not."
Torque did not respond to that, preferring to maintain his focus on the road.
The van rolled through Northside and into the industrial zone, where the buildings grew lower, and the streetlights grew farther apart. The city's neon glow faded behind us, replaced by the amber haze of sodium lights and the silhouettes of warehouses and manufacturing facilities that lined the eastern corridor.
Torque killed the headlights two blocks from the target and continued driving forward at exactly the same speed, keeping his eyes on the road.
Patch checked her ECM suite one final time and Moth finally opened their eyes.
The facility appeared a few seconds later. Three stories of grey concrete, with loading docks on the south face and a parking lot on the east side that held six Militech-branded vehicles, and a security checkpoint at the main gate.
My new firmware pulsed quietly behind my eyes as I got ready to go to work.
"We're here," Torque said as he put the van in park and killed the engine. He turned to look at each of us in sequence, his gaze pausing on me half a second longer than it paused on Moth or Patch, as if he was making one final assessment of me.
"Ghost," he said. "Keep us alive on the network. Do that, and I'll keep you alive in the room."
"You got it," I said.
---
AN: For those who didn't catch it, Torque is James Norris.
If you want more bonus chappies, then send stones, or go onto the infamous P@treon if you want to continue reading ahead during this hiatus.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around long-form chapters (4-6k words each)