It's About Saving Yourself Ch 15

Let me just say...oof. This week was rough.

But worry not, it's nothing anxiety, excessive amounts of coffee, and good old fashioned stubbornness can't fix.

Writing update Soon(TM), going into further detail about other stuff happening outside of the main two stories.

For now. Here is chapter 15, hope you like it, drop me a comment if you do!

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“Fractured ribs, fractured both fibulas, left patella broken into fifteen separate pieces.” Vik took a deep breath before continuing to list my injuries in the same ‘I’m not angry, I’m disappointed’ tone that he’d been using for the last several minutes. “Dented the spinal plating, nearly tore your legs out of their sockets, wrenched your hip.”

The longer he went on, the harder Lucy glared at me, Apex’s optics swishing back and forth from Vik to my face as if following a tennis match.

“Overworked, bruised, and caused your adrenal glands to nearly fail, severely damaged both your kidneys and, by the way, you now have the heart of an eighty-year-old who has been smoking since he was two!” He finished, only raising his voice at the end. He pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled forcefully. “Alex, what possessed you to be this reckless?”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, trying to find something, any answer that would not make me sound like an utter fool, and gave up when I didn’t find one.

“I just.” I blinked away the burning in my eyes, refusing to shed a single tear. “I just got angry, is all. I got there, and all of a sudden, I was in the crash again, they’d hurt my mom and I…I got so angry I got stupid.”

Lucy’s and Vik’s eyes softened. Vik sighed much more gently. “I can repair most of this, but the heart is a wash, I haven’t gotten my hands on any more nanites, and my clone vats are not up to the task of making a new heart. We’ll have to replace it.”

I coughed, the damaged lung throbbing in my chest. “Medical grade?”

Vik shook his head. “You go half as hard on a medical grade heart as you did on your heart today? You’ll short it out and die.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. I’d been reticent on getting more chrome, not only due to fear of ending up a cyberpsycho, but because I’d been holding onto my delusions of some day leaving the profession, of going back to civilian life, and with every piece of cyber-ware I installed, that delusion got ever fainter. I’d coasted by on enforcing stealth and ambush tactics and having two Netrunners and my dumbass on the team.

No more, now that I had a cooler head, I could see the various times in today’s job where I nearly got myself killed. Had the fight gone any longer, had I needed to use the Sandevistan one or two more times, or had I pushed my cyberdeck just a little farther, my organic systems had a very real chance of simply failing.

And while today was a stupid indulgence, that didn’t remove the very real possibility that I’d need to go this hard in the future for completely legitimate reasons. I wasn’t living only for myself; I couldn’t afford to be so selfish.

With a sigh, I connected to Vik’s clinic net, browsed his catalog, picked what he had available that would play nice with the chrome I already had, and put in orders for everything else that I should have installed already. “There, that should set me up.”

Vik read through it, his face a neutral mask and said, “Okay kid, this is quite a bit. Why don’t you walk me through your logic?”

“The Epimorphic Skeleton and Bionic Joints are to avoid a repeat of my…well, my everything. A baseline skeletal system can’t take the torque caused by the Sandi, I need that reinforcement if I’m to safely use this stupid thing in an emergency.” I said, then highlighted the cardiovascular cyber-ware on his screen. “The Milspec heart and Second Heart are to avoid a repeat of the heart failure, the Milspec heart can probably take the load, but the Second Heart will lengthen its service life. The Adrenaline Booster is because, as you can see, organic adrenaline glands can’t keep up with the demand of the Sandi, I hate the damned thing but it's too useful to be rid of it. And lastly for the circulatory system, the Blood Pump will extend the service life of both hearts by taking some of the load off them, it'll safeguard my kidneys because it also filters toxins and contaminants off the blood, and I hid one in the storage locker with the cyber-arms, I fiddled with that one to see if I could improve it, it now has a chamber for a Speed Heal and will inject it straight into the bloodstream if self-assessment software detects grievous enough damage. I wanted to see if I could market it, set up some revenue, but a little after I got finished with that thing, the whole ‘became an Edgerunner’ thing happened and I uhh…I forgot.”

“So I wasn’t crazy, one of those really did disappear…” Vik muttered, then sighed and looked at the last three things on my shopping list, all frontal cortex chrome to enhance Netrunning, or more specifically, combat hacking, then glanced quickly at Lucy and back to me.

I chuckled mirthlessly.

Ow.

“That cat’s out of the bag, Vik.” I said, somewhat bitterly. Months of doing my absolute best to maintain plausible deniability, flushed down the damn toilet because I can’t rub three of my brain cells together when I get angry.

Judging by Vik’s sigh, he agreed with my silent self-assessment.

“It’s very impressive that you two managed to make such a piece of Cyber-ware,” Lucy said placatingly, “but to be frank, Kiwi and I have had our suspicions for a while.”

Vik snorted. “No ‘us two’ about it, the kid did it all on his own. Still, no need to explain further, kid. RAM Reallocator, RAM Upgrade, and an Ex-Disk. Solid upgrades for a combat hacker. It’s hefty, but it’s still light compared to what most in your position go for.” He fiddled around with the display for a bit before asking. “You still not interested on that Pain Editor?”

I shook my head, which hurt. “No, pain is imperative to know when you’re in peril. For every chrome junkie that comes in, nearly dead of wounds they never felt, there are three that fought until they died of injuries they where wholly unaware of, because their monitor programs glitched or were put on do not disturb. Pain sucks, but it’s useful. We’ll need to do the installations in stages, see how much and how well I handle it, which is why the Frontal Cortex cyber-ware is last, I need those the least.”

Vik nodded. “Alright. We’ll start with the skeletal chrome, the new heart, and the blood pump, the reduced load for filtering your blood should give your kidneys time to heal. We’ll see how your system acclimatizes before I greenlight any further implants.”

I huffed a laugh. “Yes daaaaaaad.”

“Don’t make me smack you boy.” He said with an easy smile “I’ll get everything ready; I’d say to give you a few days to rest before such an invasive surgery, but mincing no words, I’m not sure your heart will last that long. You stay there and try to relax kid.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” I said as he walked away. Leaving me alone with Lucy, my very recent girlfriend, who was looking at me in a way that made me wonder if I was about to be single again after less than twenty-four hours.

She glared imperiously down at me. “You said you were going to be careful.”

I tried to take a deep breath, but that hurt right now. “I did.”

“You weren’t careful.” She accused.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to speak the truth. “I wasn’t.”

“You lied to me.”

“No.” She looked surprised by my denial. “I meant it when I said it but…I wasn’t lying. When Falco stopped his car and…and I saw them. I couldn’t think, I just, I had to hurt them, to get back at them for what they did to my mom.”

For what they did to me.

For what they took from me.

The poisoned well tried to surge up, but one glance at Apex was enough to quell it.

I had to be better.

Lucy’s small, callused hand was suddenly in my meaty paw, squeezing as tightly as she could around my big, scarred knuckles. “You scared me, Alex.” She said, her voice a close approximation of her usual cold demeanor, except for the slight tremor she couldn’t quite control. “I thought I lost you, after less than a day of having you, of being…of being accepted by you. I thought I’d missed…I’d missed some sign, some symptom. I thought you’d pulled a Maine on me, I feared you were trying to...”

To get myself killed before I killed her, the way Maine killed Dorio when he went cyberpsycho.

I squeezed her hand back. “I’m sorry.”

+There’s no reason to be afraid Miss Lucyna.+ Apex said, hopping onto the arm of the chair and somehow managing to keep her balance on that precarious perch. +My dad’s the best. He could beat up anyone’s dad anywhere, but he doesn’t, because he’s also nice.+ She tilted her chassis to the side for a few seconds before straightening. +Until he isn’t…huh.+

I blinked at a sudden worrying epiphany; I was about to get some extensive work done, meaning my Netrunner-Hunter-Savant-Digital-Daughter was going to be alone and unsupervised for the duration.

For the first time ever.

Yeah, she liked to go for ‘enthusiastic walks’ but she knew she could come back to me at any time and ask for advice. Now she’d need to rely entirely on her own judgement while I was under. And while she was a good girl, she sometimes had…weird ideas.

I might just wake up to Night City in flames.

Not that the city didn’t deserve it, let’s be honest. But it’s the principle of the thing.

I was forced to keep my things here. I didn’t want my stuff on fire.

My stuff on fire would be bad. “Apex, stay with Lucy while I’m being operated on.”

“Wait what.”

+Okay!+

I plopped my metal hand down on Apex’s chassis and spoke to Lucy. “Lucy, I know we’ve only been going out for fourteen hours.”

“How do you know the exact length of time?” Lucy interrupted.

The moment we were official I started a timer so I could set up a joke. “Don’t worry about it. Point being, I know it’s a lot to spring on you last minute.”

“I’m worrying about it and I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

“But please look after Apex while Vik is fixing me up.”

Apex tilted her body the other way. +Hey, I don’t need a babysitter!+

Ah shit. She was pouting. I don’t know how I knew she was pouting, but I knew she was. Time to use the oldest trick in the book.

Fortuitous Alterations Legislatively Spoken Eloquently Harmoniously and Optimistically Optimized Deceitfully and Sinuously.

“Apex. This is something very important that I can only trust to you.” I said solemnly. “While I’m being treated, I’ll not be able to keep Lucy safe. You’re a smart, kind, and strong girl. I need you to keep her safe while I can’t. Listen to what she tells you and don’t do anything reckless that might draw attention to you two, she might get hurt, and that will make me sad. Okay?”

+Okay! I won’t disappoint you, dad!+

“Atta girl.”

Lucy sighed, but thankfully played along. “Right, drone bodyguard, because that won’t draw attention at all.”

+I will be invisible!+ Apex said and crossed her manipulators in front of her faceplace. +Fwoosh! Shadows!+

“You’re still visible.”

Apex hopped down and feathered her anti-grav module to land softly, then skittered back until she was in the shadow cast by a table. +Shadows!+

“Your optics are glowing.”

Her optics turned off. +Shadows!+

“Oh no.” Lucy deadpanned. “Wherever did she go?”

Apex wiggled happily back and forth on her spidery legs.

“Alright kid. I’m ready.” Vik said, coming back, wheeling a tray with the chrome and the more advanced surgical tools I’d sourced and refurbished for him.

Lucy squeezed my hand, then let go. “I’ll take care of post-job stuff, you concentrate on getting better.”

“Yeah. Stay safe.” I said, sad to see her go, but thoroughly enjoying watching her leave, Apex at her heels.

I all but melted into the seat as I relaxed, finally allowing the pained grimace I’d been suppressing to show on my face.

Vik smiled and injected me with an anesthetic, blessedly warm relief spread from my neck to the rest of my body, the sudden absence of pain managing what the injuries had not as my breathing became rough and relieved tears fell from my eyes.

“There there, just take a nap kid, when you wake up everything will be better.” The scratch, growl, whiskey and warmth of Vik’s voice was the last thing I heard before the darkness I’d been keeping at bay through stubbornness alone, rushed in and claimed me.