Chương 46: In the Black with a Polish Cat III

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." - Warren Buffett With the introductions all said and done, and Julia having taken enough photos to fill a data shard, the strange electricity of meeting someone you'd only ever known as text on a screen had mostly burned off, and now it was time for biz. Sasha shrugged off her jacket and hung it on a nail sticking out of the nearest crate.

She pushed her sleeves up past her elbows, exposing her thin, pale arms and the faint blue trace of a vein running past the port on her inner wrist as she put her hands on her hips.

"Alrighty-o," she said.

"I need to scan every piece you've got. Need to get some high-res optical captures and cross-reference them against whatever authentication databases I can pull from the subnet." She was looking at the crates, not at Santi, which meant she was talking herself into this as much as she was briefing him.

"If we're going to pitch this to Regina, we can't just show up with blurry captures and guesswork. Trust me, she'll ghost us before we finish the first sentence." She sounded like someone who had rehearsed the words in the cab on the way over, and the truth was that she had never fenced anything at this scale. Data slates, sure. Stolen corpo schematics, grey-market tech, the occasional piece of hardware that fell off a Kang Tao transport, small jobs like that were right down her lane.

And, clearly, this was not her lane. These were a bunch of pre-Krash antiquities worth more than most apartments in Watson, and she was only seventeen. And if that wasn't enough, her hands were doing a thing she didn't want them to do, so she kept them on her hips. She'd figure it out. That was the deal she'd made with herself a long time ago after her mother died. You figure it out or you don't eat. Santi moved to the first crate and worked the lid free.

The nails screamed against old wood, sending a sound that made Julia flinch from across the room. Inside, cradled in synthetic shock-foam, lay the katana. The steel of the katana caught the fluorescent light wrong, and a thin white line was thrown across the ceiling like a crack in something. As Sasha leaned in to inspect the katana, she felt her breathing suddenly change.

"That hamon line," she said, almost to herself. Her finger traced the air above the wavy pattern along the blade's edge, close enough that Santi could see the heat of her skin fogging the cold steel, but she didn't touch it.

"That's consistent with traditional clay-tempering. If this is genuinely Edo-era..." She trailed off as she ran the numbers in her head before glancing back at Santi.

"We're talking six figures. For the blade alone... I pulled some pre-Krash auction archives on the ride over and studied what I could... Though I'm not an antiquities expert, I can at least cross-reference metallurgical signatures against what's on record." Santi gave her a small nod, a little surprised that the price was actually in the six figures, not the high five he had previously marked it as. It seemed like she'd done her homework in the cab ride and had done a better job preparing than he had.

Julia stood a few feet behind them, arms crossed, her weight shifted on one hip. Though she had worked logistics for Militech, she didn't know anything about pre-Krash art markets or subnet authentication protocols. But it's not like she needed to. After all, she understood people, and the way Sasha carried herself with a careful air, focused, and slightly too aware of her own hands, told Julia what she needed to know. The girl was competent enough, and best of all, she was honest, a rare quality in Night City.

She also noticed that Sasha was operating about ten centimetres outside her comfort zone, which, in Julia's experience, was where the best work happened. Sasha started the cross-referencing, causing her eyes to flicker as the pink-and-blue irises pulsed once, sending a strobe of light rippling outward from the centre as data cascaded across her retinal display. At the sight of that, Santi went still.

The light faded, and her eyes settled back to their normal gradient as she began reading the results, mouth moving slightly as she parsed auction data from 2019, when she noticed him staring.

"What?"

"Nothing... Your eyes just did something weird," Santi said, scratching the back of his neck.

"Something weird, as in what?" Sasha asked.

"Well, your whole iris lit up," he said as he tilted his head.

"Wouldn't that, like, I don't know, fry your retinas?" Sasha deadpanned at him as if he had just asked why the sky is up.

"It's just my Kiroshis," she said slowly, one of her eyebrows rising in mild amusement.

"When the optics process heavy data loads, the internal projector bleeds light through the synthetic lens. Every set does it." She studied his face, noticing that something was off, and the wrongness of it was creeping into her voice without her permission.

"I mean, you've seen this a thousand times. Every runner you've ever worked with..." She trailed off, allowing a silence that felt wrong to settle over them.

"Wait, when I told you my eyes were natural," Sasha said, "did you think I meant the whole thing. Like the entire eye?"

"Well, yeah..." Santi said in a quiet voice.

"There's no way the famed Ghost of Watson can be this gonked. I meant that my eye colors are natural. The Kiroshi replicates them, that's the whole point of the higher-end models, they match your original iris so you don't walk around looking like one of those chromed-out Maelstrom rejects." She said, talking faster with every single sentence.

"But the eye itself is synthetic. Mk. 3. Installed them last year." She paused and swallowed, staring directly into his eyes.

"You do have Kiroshis... Right?"

"No," Santi said.

"I don't have any cybereyes." The "No" sent a silence that, if not for the hum of the warehouse's systems, would've been louder than the screeching nails from when he opened the wooden crate. Sasha opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and closed it one more time. She looked like a fish that had been yanked out of water and was trying to remember how breathing worked.

"You're telling me," she said, and her voice climbing into a register she couldn't pull it back from, "that you've been navigating the Net, pulling gigs, cracking corpo ICE, and running from corpos... For two fucking years. With your bare, meat, un-augmented-""They work fine," Santi said, and even he knew how weak that sounded.

Julia found herself straightening her back as the easy warmth that had been sitting on her face all evening was replaced by the calm of a mother who has just learned something about her child that reorganises every assumption she's been operating on.

"Santiago," she said, her voice level.

"What does she mean?"

"I'm not blind, Mom. Got twenty-twenty on both eyes," Santi defended himself.

"I just don't have the overlays."

"Then how?" Sasha cut in.

"How in the name of all that's cursed and holy are you seeing Net architecture? ICE structures? Data streams? The human brain isn't supposed to process raw Net telemetry without an optical rendering layer. Without optics, the data is just noise full of random electrical impulses with no spatial context. You'd essentially be running the Net with your eyes closed." If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Santi leaned against the open crate and crossed his arms.

He had never had to explain this to anyone. After all, when you're in the Net, nobody could see your chrome. Your code was your face, and your code was all anyone needed.

"I just... picture it," he said, leading to a long, awkward moment of silence.

"You picture it..." Sasha repeated, as though saying it again might make it make sense.

"Well, yeah. Isn't that how everyone is supposed to see it? The Neural Link processes the raw data feed and translates it into spatial information that allows me to build an image inside my head. With that, I can feel the shape of ICE and sense bandwidth density by the way the data flow changes pressure against the Link." As Santi spoke, he was picking his words carefully, and it wasn't because he was ashamed, but because he'd never had to explain the way his brain and his chrome worked in tandem to anyone before.

"When I compile a daemon, I hold the entire structure in my head and assemble it like a puzzle I can see from the inside." The words coming out of Santi's mouth were like blasphemy, and the warehouse fell into an eerie silence. Julia's hand had found her own wrist and started gripping it. She'd always assumed he had the proper chrome since the first time he had visited Vik's clinic. Hell, even she had cybereyes, so she had never thought to ask, because what kind of netrunner didn't have optics?

That was like asking a solo if they owned a gun. It was such a fundamental aspect of being a solo that the question simply didn't exist. Sasha sat down on the edge of a shorter crate slowly and pressed both palms flat against her knees, all the while her eyes tracked their way to the concrete floor.

"That's just... that's not how any of it works," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. The guarded professionalism was gone, and there was nothing between her voice and the thing she was feeling except air.

"I need you to hear me. What you're describing, building a spatial model of Net architecture through pure internal processing, with no external rendering, while maintaining physical awareness and compiling offensive code, is something that no netrunner does. No, it's more like that's simply something they can't do. The bandwidth required would fry a standard Link in thirty seconds, and that is only if the thermal load alone doesn't cook your parietal lobe."

Santi shuffled in his spot, "Well, my Link isn't standard."

"Well, no shit it's not standard." The words came out too loud. Sasha caught herself and pressed her fingertips against her temples, forcing herself to breathe.

"I know. I've known since you cracked that Kang Tao relay in eleven seconds, since your bandwidth started blaring 'here I am.' Nobody standard does that." She dropped her hands.

"But I assumed you had some bleeding-edge Kiroshis. At the very least, some Mil-spec optics with a custom HUD. That was the only explanation that scanned." She looked up at him with awe and fear.

"The idea that you were doing everything I've watched you do for two years, inside your own skull, without a single visual aid, that is something that didn't occur to me because it shouldn't be possible, you gonk." Julia's hand had made its way onto Santi's forearm now, firmly gripping it.

"Mijo. Could this hurt you? Could the way you've been navigating the net cause damage?" The mask of bravado Santi had held slipped, and his jaw shifted slightly, as his eyes softened ever so slightly. But Sasha and Julia saw it, though neither of them said anything about it because they were waiting for an answer.

"I don't know," he said, causing Julia's grip to tighten.

"I've never had any problems, headaches, nosebleeds, or thermal warnings." He paused.

"I mean, ma, you already know my Link isn't standard chrome, let alone something you can just buy from a ripper. From what Vik told me, pa had found the schematics beyond the Blackwall. It was some experimental tech from a defunct R&D lab that got buried decades ago. Supposedly made of some carbon-nanotube mesh that bonded with me at the cellular level, and has been growing with me ever since." The fluorescent light above them buzzed, and one of the tubes flickered.

Julia had known about the Link, especially since it had caused a fight with Alejandro over it. She had screamed, cried, and threatened to take Santi and leave him behind, but in the end, she hadn't left, and the Link had been installed. She had spent every year since then telling herself that it was fine, that her husband was brilliant and wouldn't have risked their son without certainty.

But hearing Santi describe it so casually now, as though having experimental tech woven into his developing brain was as natural as a heartbeat, sent something cold and heavy through her chest that she didn't quite have a name for. Sasha ran both hands through her hair. She was seventeen and had been building her skills for a few years through hard gigs, harder lessons, and the slow accumulation of competence that kept you alive in a city that ate people who faked it.

She wasn't a legend, and she wasn't anywhere near close to being one. But she understood the rules well enough to know when someone was playing a different game entirely. She wasn't jealous of Santi, but this whole conversation was like looking down and realising the floor had been glass the whole time, and underneath it was something she didn't have a framework for. Vertigo. That was the word.

"Okay," she said as she lifted her head. When she spoke again, her voice had a foundation under it that hadn't been there before.

"Let's wrap it up with the cargo. We contact Regina, and tomorrow, first thing in the morning, you will go and get some Kiroshi optics installed. I don't care if it's a Mk. 2 or a Mk. 3. You need to get something in those sockets. If your Link is handling the rendering load that Kiroshis should be handling, you're burning cycles that could go toward offense and defense and essentially, handicapping yourself." She held his gaze.

"You understand me?" Julia didn't wait for him to answer before she spoke.

"She's right. You've got the eddies, so you're getting the eyes. End of discussion, Santiago." He looked between them. His mother's jaw was set, hand still on his arm, and holding the stance of a woman who had decided what would happen. Sasha was sitting on a crate, pale and slightly shaken, but holding his gaze with something that said that this wasn't a request. He recognised that this was a fight that had no winning side.

"Fine, I'll visit Vik tomorrow," Santi said. They then spent the next forty minutes on the inventory. Sasha worked through each piece methodically, her Kiroshis flashing in intermittent pulses of blue-white strobes as the processors captured and catalogued what she saw.

She cross-referenced signatures against historical databases she'd bookmarked during the cab ride, compared brushstroke patterns on the oil paintings against a tutorial she'd downloaded eleven minutes before arriving, and authenticated the ceramic composition of the Ming vases using spectral analysis guides she was reading for the first time. She backtracked twice on the second painting and re-scanned one of the vases from three different angles.

She stopped halfway through a porcelain figure, frowned, pulled up a different reference, and started over. She wasn't afraid to say "I'm not sure," and that, Santi thought, was worth more than someone who was always sure. Julia helped out by unwrapping foam and fabric with the steady hands of someone who had spent thirty years moving things that couldn't be dropped. Santi worked alongside them, prying lids, lifting heavy pieces, and providing descriptions from his initial assessment.

By the seventh or eighth item, Sasha had settled into a rhythm. The hesitations were still there, but they were shorter, and her hands had stopped doing the thing they had been doing earlier. When they finished, Sasha confirmed a new total.

"Nine hundred and forty-seven thousand, roughly. For a private sale through a fixer, that's the realistic ceiling."

"So what's the play?" Santi asked.

"Well, Regina Jones is our pipeline." Sasha tilted her head.

"You want me to introduce you?"

"That'd be nova," Santi nodded. Sasha pulled up Regina's line, and the call connected after two rings.

"Kotka." Regina Jones' voice came through with the noticeably flat and focused tone of someone who was already doing three things and had decided this call had ninety seconds to justify itself.

"This better be worth pulling me out of a data crawl."

"It sure is." Sasha's posture had shifted, and her voice had grown tighter while pitched slightly lower.

"Regina, I've got someone I want you to meet. A runner I've been working with for two years. Operates under the handle Ghost." There was a pause in the call before Regina spoke.

"Ghost... Ghost, Ghost, Ghost. As in the Ghost of Watson?"

"The one and only," Sasha replied. Another pause happened, though it was longer this time.

"I'll be straight with you, Kotka. I'm dealing with this individual solely on your word. You've done solid work for me, so I'll be trusting your judgment." Regina said.

"But I want that on the record."

"Noted," Sasha said.

"That being said," Regina stretched her word, deciding how much to give away.

"I've heard a few things. The runner boards in Kabuki and Little China have been buzzing about someone pulling clean surgical gigs across Watson for a while now, with little to no collateral, trail, or face. Professional enough that my contacts with the badges haven't even opened a file." A beat.

"I respect that kind of work."

"I'll be patching him in now," Sasha said as Santi received a call ping in his agent. The mask of Ghost settled over him like a second skin, and his voice dropped into the register he kept for biz, stripped of warmth and age, leaving only space for function.

"Ms. Jones," he said.

"Appreciate you taking the call."

"What have you got for me, Ghost?" Regina asked. They ran through the inventory, noting their condition grades, and got their numbers and facts delivered in order of value. Regina listened without interrupting, and once he was finished, the line was quiet for a few seconds.

"That's a preem haul," she said.

"Museum-grade merch is a very specific market. The buyers who collect at this tier don't shop on the street."

"Which is why I'm getting in contact with you," Santi said.

"That katana," her voice shifting from evaluating to interested.

"I may have a client. Give me a few. I'll forward the specs to their procurement contact and see if they bite. If they do, they reach out to you directly."

"Sounds good," Santi nodded.

"My standard commission is ten percent of final sale price on any deal I facilitate," Regina stated.

"And that's non-negotiable." Twenty percent to Sasha. Ten to Regina. Thirty percent of every eddie moving through this pipeline would evaporate before reaching his accounts. He ran it against the alternative of having to fence around nine hundred and fifty grand in pieces through back channels, something that would attract attention. The kind of attention that ended with a body in a landfill and a fixer saying, "Shame, he had potential" over drinks.

"Deal," Santi said.

"Good. Sit tight, I'll be in touch," Regina said before the line cut.