Chương 30: Kotka I

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - R. Buckminster Fuller With my two-week medical mandate finally expired, I felt relief settling into my bones as if a physical weight had been lifted off my chest. The Kerenzikov's splices had fused with my central nervous system, adapting my body to the invasive synthetic adrenaline pathways. The healing process left me fundamentally transformed.

"I guess this is what having a Sandy is like," I said to myself as I noticed that every micro-movement felt frictionless, and when I accidentally knocked a wrench off the workbench in the garage, my brain processed the gravitational acceleration instantly, allowing my hand to casually snatch it out of the air before it had dropped to the ground. I had my health, and I had my chrome. We also had genuine breathing room for the first time in a while.

The rusted Thorton Galena sat under a tarp in our detached garage, pretty much granting us unrestricted mobility. However, a reliable ride meant very little if the house parked next to it was constantly struggling to keep the lights on, and with me moving up in the world, I needed to improve our living conditions. We had never been on Rancho Coronado's municipal grid due to the fact that we had a solar array on the roof, like most of the homes here.

However, time as well as the wear from the weather had eroded them. Ever since we had moved here, only 3 of the seven archaic, cracked panels on our roof worked. They barely pulled enough ambient UV through the thick smog to keep the refrigerator and the lights running, leaving us sweating in the stifling heat of the late summer without any air conditioning. So I dipped into the scratch I had leftover after clearing my debt with Vik and hit the local runner boards.

I tracked down a mid-tier tech fence operating out of Arroyo who had recently acquired a pallet of high-efficiency PGI (Power Grid Inc) solar arrays from a redirected corporate transport, and bought ten of them. The physical labor of the installation burned off the lingering cabin fever of my recovery, and I spent the good part of three days up on the blistering hot roof of our home, baking under the August sun.

I moved methodically, stripped the old, corroded copper wiring, and launched the useless panels off the side of the house and to the dirt, almost breaking our fence in the process. The hardest part of it all was bringing seven of the new panels up onto the roof of the house, but once I did, angling them perfectly to catch the optimal trajectory of the sun through the hazy sky was quite easy. When I was finished with the ones on the house, I then hauled the remaining three panels over to the detached garage.

The process of installing those was far easier since the slope of the garage was much less than that of our home. Once they were bolted down, I ran thick, insulated subterranean cabling back to the house's main junction box. When I wired everything together, I bypassed the sparking, outdated breakers entirely, using my Neural Link to directly interface with our home's power grid.

Lying flat on the sloped roof with sweat stinging my eyes, I watched the translucent green vectors of my internal HUD overlay the physical wiring and wrote a quick dynamic load-balancing daemon on the fly that would splice a micro-controller into the system.

With that done, the house could now intelligently route its own power, and if the ambient temperature spiked, the daemon would automatically throttle the water heater to dump maximum wattage into the localized air conditioning unit I had done my best to refurbish. Once that was all said and done, I climbed down the aluminum ladder and threw the main breaker, allowing the house to hum to life with a steady surge of energy.

I walked into the kitchen to find my mother staring at the small digital thermostat on the wall. The readout usually flickered and died whenever the fridge compressor kicked on, but now, it glowed a solid blue, and the air in the house slowly lowered to. However, having not run the AC for God knows how many years, the smell that came from it was stale, and we had to open the windows and step out of the house for about an hour.

Once we walked back into the house and closed all of the open windows, the temperature slowly settled to a crisp, yet comfortable sixty-eight degrees. Mom turned to me while holding a towel she had used to wipe off her sweat with relief in her widened eyes.

"Hay, Santi... Those BDs are becoming quite useful. I never knew you could just learn how to fix the house's electrical problems so easily. And look, the lights aren't flickering anymore."

"Ha, you make it sound more simple than it actually was, Ma," I said, grabbing a glass from the cupboard and filling it with water from the tap.

"The BDs sure do help a lot, but part of the process is going at it yourself. The new setup is going to be pulling a massive surplus of energy with all ten panels running at peak efficiency since they're brand new. The three on the garage arrays are also feeding directly into the battery reserves, which means that our house won't fail to run all of our stuff." She walked over and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, making me bow my head so that she could give me a kiss on my temple.

I had recently managed to convince her to quit her job at the CHOOH2 gas station as well, meaning that she no longer had to worry about anything, pump toxic CHOOH2 at a gas station, or sit in the dark, wondering if the food in the fridge was going to spoil. Sure, there were some other things that could be done to fix up the house, but this was good enough for the time being, and with the house secured, I shifted my focus entirely to my own mind.

Having 15 terabytes of processing power humming quietly in the back of your skull proves dangerous if left idle. The Paraline Mk. 1 demanded data, and the Ex-Disk felt like an empty cavern begging to be filled, so I devoured braindances at a rate that would have liquefied a baseline human's frontal cortex, mostly scrolling purely for skill acquisition BDs.

Due to my brain's unique neuroplasticity that came as a side effect of installing my Neural Link at such an early age, watching BDs was more than just receiving visual and auditory data. From what I knew, my experience recalling the physical and cognitive muscle memory of the recorded subjects was much better than most people's on the Net, allowing me to learn skills faster than the average person, though it was still a process that required me to rewatch something twice, sometimes three or four times.

I eventually bought deep-dive BDs from Netrunners that specialized in black-ICE subversion, architectural coding, and polymorphic viral engineering to further expand my own skills. I also acquired recordings of elite corporate mechanics tearing down some of the advanced aerodyne engines and even military-grade weaponry, though those were few in number since the recorder either got quickly zeroed by the corpos or simply because they cost quite the pretty eddie.

Slotting the BD wreath over my eyes and engaging the playback provided with the phantom sensation of a seasoned runner's fingers flying across a haptic keyboard. My nose was soon filled by the distinct smell of ozone from an overloaded cooling rig as I experienced the exact adrenaline spikes of bypassing a corporate firewall. My brain slowly mapped their neural pathways, beginning to adapt years of hard-earned experience into my active memory. You might be reading a pirated copy.

Look for the official release to support the author. However, the physical sensation felt bizarre, especially after switching BDs. I could feel my actual hands twitch as my motor cortex mapped the precise torque required to calibrate a fuel-injection system on a Quadra Turbo-R V-Tech I had never actually touched in the real world.

I was able to learn and integrate complex skills into my subconscious within weeks, maybe a month at most, that would normally demand no less than a year of grueling trial and error to actually learn. But as time went by, the massive influx of data highlighted something unsettling in my mind. Though it remained sharper than ever, I felt a microscopic friction manifesting itself within my own head as I sat on my bed in the dead of night, staring blankly at the dark ceiling.

It was like a digital stutter, presenting itself as a microscopic lag that lasted only a fraction of a millisecond in the way my thoughts translated into operational commands through my chrome. It was something that I was quite sure anyone else would find unnoticeable, but to me, to my brain that had grown to run at zero latency, it felt like a grain of sand stuck inside the gears of a finely tuned watch. Driven by my curiosity, I turned my diagnostic tools inward and initiated a deep dive on my own chrome.

My consciousness projected into a vast, sprawling digital landscape of my own creation, its architecture stretching endlessly, bathed in the cool, neon blue and violet hues of my customized UI. There were towering monoliths of data that represented the ten terabytes of RAM storage inside my cyberdeck, along with the extra six from my Ex-Disk. There was a swirling vortex of pure energy at the center of the construct that represented the raw processing power outputted by my actual brain and the Paraline Mk. 1.

My Self-ICE daemon was like an impassable mountain range of crystalline ice as I drifted down into the valley of my own code, focusing on the specific interfaces where the different pieces of chrome communicated with my central nervous system. I bypassed the standard user-interface layers and dug straight into the machine-code firmware. The Militech Paraline Mk.

1 stood as a masterpiece of engineering, yet its root code was constantly running background subroutines attempting to throttle and re-route data from my Agent, treating the non-Militech hardware as an untrusted peripheral. Meanwhile, the base Kerenzikov, which had been sourced from a gray-market Zetatech supplier, broadcasted constant micro-pings of raw telemetry. My Ex-Disk and the Militech Kerenzikov Boost System struggled to categorize those pings, causing microscopic memory leaks across the board.

There was a chaotic and unoptimized mess living inside my skull. The chrome was operating as a collection of distinct corporate products actively fighting for dominance over my neural bandwidth rather than functioning as a unified system. I, of course, couldn't just ignore the shitshow going on up in my dome, and fixing the architecture demanded extreme patience. I spent the next two weeks meticulously tearing the firmware apart line by line, caught in an endless loop of coding, testing, and compiling.

I basically rewrote the communication protocols between the devices instead of applying superficial patches that would surely fail down the line. Stripping away the proprietary corporate bloatware, the DRM trackers, and the aggressive resource-hogging subroutines was something that took days of constant focus. Eventually, I managed to force the Militech deck and the Boost System to recognize the Zetatech Kerenzikov as a native biological function rather than an external implant.

But man, did those fourteen days test the absolute limits of my new processing power. But once I had smoothened out the digital friction, I noticed that the system started working in tandem, eliminating that stuttering I had previously noticed entirely. However, compiling the final lines of my now custom firmware left a question echoing in the back of my mind. Why in the flying fuck did the friction exist in the first place? These megacorps possessed the greatest engineering minds on the planet.

So that meant that shit like inefficiencies, conflicting subroutines, and digital bloat was far too sloppy to be an accident, which led me to believe that this shit had to be some form of deliberate obstructiveness. Public Data Terms would never hold the answers I needed, which meant that accessing the deep, unindexed layers of the Net became a priority. The encrypted runner boards acted as the true marketplace for the underbelly of Night City.

Projecting my consciousness outward, I slipped past my Self-ICE and dove into the sprawling, infinite neon grid of the Net. I bypassed the municipal layers of Santo Domingo and slipped undetected through the monitored corporate sub-nets of City Center until I reached the dark, fragmented architecture of the Deep Net. My avatar materialized as a faceless, shifting silhouette composed of glitching, dark grey, and violet static that mirrored my moniker.

I stood inside a highly encrypted, invite-only BBS server known as 'The Labyrinth.' The server resembled an endless, Escher-esque library built out of glowing green code. I ran automated search algorithms, scraping the server for technical discussions regarding deliberate firmware friction, cross-brand cyberware degradation, and undocumented corporate subroutines. I spend hours upon hours in searches that yielded nothing but paranoid ramblings and dead ends.

Preparing to sever the connection and return to the meatspace, a direct-comm channel forced its way through my secondary firewall.

"Easy there, killer," an unknown voice transmitted directly into my audio feed.

"I come in peace. Mostly." Analyzing the intrusion revealed sophisticated routing. The signal bounced through a dozen proxy servers across the NUSA before terminating at my node. Whoever sent the message possessed serious skill.

"Who are you?" I demanded, my digital voice tight with suspicion.

"And how did you bypass the Labyrinth's localized ICE to ping me directly?" A small, sleek avatar materialized on the digital balcony next to me. A highly stylized, neon-pink and black cybernetic cat stretched lazily, its digital tail flicking with rhythmic precision.

"I didn't bypass the ICE," the avatar said, its bright tone carrying a surprising amount of genuine warmth.

"I wrote the ICE for this particular sector of the board. The handle is Kotka. Polish for female cat, before you ask. And you... you're him, aren't you? The one moving through Watson. You've got a couple of fixers whispering about you. But I heard that old hag Wakako turned you away from a gig."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I replied, maintaining my static form.

"Please, your signature is unmistakable," she said.

"You have near-zero latency, impossible bandwidth, and a stealth protocol that makes you look like a literal hole in the Net. You're the Ghost." I analyzed her avatar for trace programs or hostile intent, and after finding zero threats, I relaxed my offensive daemons slightly.

"You have five seconds to tell me what you want," I warned, "before I trace this connection back to your rig and melt your optics." The neon cat laughed.

"A little aggressive, but I respect the paranoia. I pinged you because my automated scrapers flagged the search queries you're running. You're looking into cross-brand firmware friction and undocumented subroutines. I must say that is a very specific, very dangerous rabbit hole to dive down, Ghost. Most runners don't even know enough to ask those questions."

"I noticed some inefficiencies in my own hardware," I stated casually.

"I was curious."

"Curiosity killed the... well, you know," Kotka mused.

"But since we're both poking around the same dark corners of the Net, I figured I'd introduce myself. I've been a fan of your work ever since you wiped that ripperdoc's ledger in Kabuki without triggering a single tripwire. That was preem coding." The revelation took me aback. The Kabuki gig carried completely untraceable parameters. So her ability to recognize my specific coding architecture spoke volumes about her capabilities.

"You tracked my gigs?" I asked.

"I'm good at tracking anomalies, and you, my ghostly friend, are a massive anomaly," she said, her avatar flipping over to be belly-up.

"Listen, I have some raw data dumps from a defunct gray-market clinic database operating out of Santo Domingo. It touches on exactly what you're looking for, but the encryption is a polymorphic nightmare. I haven't been able to crack it on my own. You help me break the encryption, and I'm willing to split the data fifty-fifty." Trusting an unknown runner in the Deep Net invited a fried nervous system.

However, I was intrigued by a challenge and the burning question of the deliberate cyberware friction demanded an answer.

"Send the packet," I agreed.

"I'll take a look." That night sparked a partnership that altered my trajectory in Night City. Kotka sent me the encrypted file, and we set up a secure, shared digital workspace in the form of a floating, isolated cube of white light suspended in the endless black of the Net. For six straight hours, we hurled code at the encryption, engaging in a synchronized dance.

I used my sheer processing power to brute-force microscopic cracks in the ICE, hitting the barriers with thousands of simultaneous logic algorithms while Kotka slipped through the fractures with viruses, widening the gaps before the polymorphic code could adapt and seal the breaches.