Chương 75: Bonus Chapter: Whispers II

Then everything stopped, and the voices cut off mid-syllable. The red code vanished from his overlay, and the headache collapsed into a dull receding throb in less than a second. His temperature stabilized, and his heartbeat slowed down, no longer pounding in his chest. Santi's legs gave out, and he hit the concrete on his hands and knees. His chest heaved with ragged gasps that tasted of copper, and his palms were flat on the cold concrete.

He stayed on the floor for a while, his bare palms pressed flat against the cold concrete, focusing on the rough texture under his skin. His lungs pulled air in ragged breaths as the metallic air gave off a scent of burnt silicon, which hung heavy in the confined room. He kept his head down and waited for his heart rate to stabilize. The door hissed open as Vik finished descending the stairs. He carried a cardboard box of immunosuppressant vials in his left hand and held a bag of hot takeout food in his right hand.

Vik had only taken a step into the clinic when he saw Santi on the ground and stopped dead in his tracks.

"Kid!" The cardboard box in his hand hit the concrete, and the glass vials rattled against the floor as Vik crossed the distance and dropped to one knee beside Santi. He pressed two fingers against the carotid artery on Santi's neck while his other hand worked to unclip the portable medical scanner from his leather belt.

"What happened?" Vik asked.

"Santiago. Talk to me." Santi looked up while trying to recall the recent event, but he couldn't remember anything. He pictured the dark terminal and saw the red lines of code. The variables sat at the edge of his mind, but every attempt to access them caused the memory to dissolve.

"I... I don't know," Santi said.

"I was sitting in the chair. Then..." He scanned his surroundings, noticing that the clinic sat in darkness as the overhead lights had been blown and their plastic housings displayed severe thermal cracking. There were glass shards covering the floor, and everything looked as if it had been part of deliberate destruction.

"What happened in here?" Santi asked. Vik's expression shifted, and his concern was slowly replaced by confusion as he also scanned his clinic. His mouth pressed into a hard line, and his jaw muscles clenched as he shook his head.

"I don't know." He gripped Santi's arm and helped him up as he ran the portable medical scanner across the fresh implant sites. The scanner chimed a positive confirmation along with green text across the small screen. The SRN bonding rate read at fourteen percent, and for all he knew, there was nothing off.

"Everything seems fine," Vik said. The statement was suspicious at best, since the hardware's perfection isolated the problem to an external force having caused the damage to the clinic. Vik retrieved the fallen box and pulled out a bottle of pills. He opened it and handed one to Santi, who promptly swallowed it. He then turned on the clinic's backup lights, which were usually unpowered unless he switched the breaker on, and checked Santi's vitals a second time.

Though he had wanted to keep Santi around much longer, the clinic's current state would force him to close for about a week to replace all the damaged equipment. So he ordered Santi to just go home and rest, and to call if any physical sensation felt wrong. Santi pulled on his boots and grabbed his dark hoodie from the side table, and left after saying his goodbyes. Once Santi had left and the door had sealed shut behind him, Vik stood in the center of the ruined clinic for a moment, taking in the damage.

He then walked to the security terminal in the back corner, which had miraculously not been damaged. The surveillance system used four independent cameras that recorded continuously to a local drive. He sat in the chair and keyed the playback interface, scrolling the timeline back to his departure point. The footage displayed Santi in the operating chair, appearing all normal. He then swung his legs off the chair and started to stand up before the video feed cut to black.

The system showed no static, and the video file showed no corruption. The timestamp read 20: 41: 12. Frame 8404 showed Santi standing beside the chair, with the clinic fully lit. Then the next frame contained a digital void before the timestamp jumped forward, with the recording system failing to flag an error. The local server log showed zero record of the missing event. The total blackout lasted six minutes before the footage abruptly returned, showing Santi kneeling on the floor and the lights blown out.

A few seconds later, Vik walked into the frame. Vik rewound the file, played it, and rewound it again. The transition for the interior cameras was instantaneous, as if an external force had accessed the closed data stream. He checked the other cameras. The supply room feed showed static inventory. The alley stairwell camera captured his departure and subsequent return. And the entrance camera remained active, recording an empty doorway for the entire duration of the gap.

Camera Two had been the only one to experience the failure, and it was the only one pointing directly at the operating area. He minimized the video playback window and accessed the facility's power consumption log. The graph showed a flat curve for the evening with no recorded spikes, and the building showed no electrical anomalies. From Viktor's perspective, whatever had gone down inside the clinic had failed to trip a single breaker. He sat quietly in the clinic, and for some reason, Alejandro Reyes came to mind.

A conversation they had years ago replayed in his mind, and he remembered Alejandro mentioning that the Blackwall was a flimsy film acting as a dam, and that it was going to burst one day. At the time, Vik had rejected the warning, thinking it to have been the ramblings of a paranoid Alejandro who had spent so much time working for Militech and whose sustained neural stress had begun to break him.

He had assumed Alejandro had just been losing his grip on reality, and then bringing Santi to get an unusual Neural Link that he had to manufacture chipped had only worked to confirm that thought. Stolen story; please report. He reconsidered that medical assessment and removed his wire-rimmed glasses to rub his eyes with the heels of his hands. He hooked the frames back over his ears, grabbed a broom, and started sweeping the glass.

Santi stood in the damp alley as he pinged the local Combat Cabb dispatch, specifically requesting for a human operator. Although the memory of what had gone down was extremely hazy, the idea of occupying a fully automated vehicle repulsed him at the moment. The armored cab arrived four minutes later, driven by a heavyset woman. She wore a faded Valentinos jacket over a Saints jersey, and an unlit synth-cig rested behind her right ear.

She kept her silence and did not ask about his condition, ignoring his currently pale skin, and threw the car into gear. Night City's skyline drifted past the armored window in a smear of neon signs as a heavy rainstorm started to pepper the earth. The vehicle crossed the Ringroad overpass and Santi looked out towards the Kabuki Market, which projected a chaotic glow against the low atmospheric clouds.

More and more holographic advertisements flickered in the distance as they entered the industrial corridor of Northside, and the streetlights started to go from a bright white to a soft amber. Santi watched the physical world slide past, his head still faintly hurting, though most of the color of his skin had returned to him. He activated his external data feed and looked at the stock marker. He just needed something to get his mind off things.

However, after-market trading had already finished, so he only saw the frozen stock prices. He felt mentally exhausted. It was 21: 14 (9: 14PM) when the cab pulled up to the concrete curb just by the dataterm. Santi transferred the eddies to the driver's account and exited the vehicle, stopping to look at the distant skyscrapers and megabuildings. He let out a sigh and rubbed his head.

"Looks like I was wrong," he said as he turned to walk towards his building.

"This city is going to be the fucking death of me one way or another." He pressed his thumb to the scanner and punched the code, not even feeling like using his Neural link to input it. Once he made his way to the third floor, he noticed that Julia was in the kitchen, sitting at the wooden table with coffee and her tablet in hand. She took one look at him, and the color drained from her face as she stood up.

"Mijo. What's wrong?" Julia asked.

"Nothing, Ma," Santi said.

"I'm just tired from the anesthesia." She stared at him and analyzed his posture along with his tone of voice. Julia had always been quite perceptive, especially when it came to her one and only child, and she could tell when he was lying from a mile away. But she chose to ignore the deception and stepped forward, pressing her warm palm flat against his forehead to check for a fever.

"Go lay down," she said.

"I'll bring you water." He walked to his bedroom, took off his boots and clothes, leaving only his boxers on, and collapsed onto the mattress. Julia entered a minute later and set a tall glass of cold water on the nightstand, kissing Santi on the temple and tossing the covers over him before leaving his room and closing the door behind her.

For the next 48 hours, Santi felt as if time had slowed down to move at a glacial pace. He had spent the following day after chipping in the new chrome just lying down on his bed and watching shows through his optics. The SRN bonding reached 19% at dawn, 26% by noon, and 34% by nightfall. The microscopic relay fibers bonded cleanly along his spinal column and the surgical sites healed without infection.

By the second day, a residual pressure remained anchored behind his right eye, and the static tingling in his fingertips evolved as the sensation transformed into some form of hyper-tactile awareness and his hands gained a new sensory channel. It was as if he could feel the microscopic texture of his bedsheets. The SRN bond had hit 67% at midday, allowing Santi to register that the operational difference of lag between a conscious thought and a physical movement had vanished.

His body reacted with efficiency, so much so that he almost felt like he was a calibrated machine. He sat at his desk, booted his local terminal, and plugged in his data cable, connecting to it so he could initiate the firmware rewrite. His previous unified firmware relied on an outdated architecture that assumed sequential signal processing and lacked parallel capabilities, with the data moving in a single lane.

The new SRN implant altered the foundation of his central nervous system through the addition of a parallel relay grid that allowed data to travel across multiple simultaneous pathways. In other words, he couldn't use his previous firmware as a base because it was out of date and for an older model of Chrome, and it also didn't account for the MCU and the SRN. The firmware demanded a ground-up reconstruction to prevent critical bottlenecks.

He opened the local development environment, the black screen filling his vision before he began typing the first line of code. He established the primary variables and tested the logic gate against a simulated hardware profile. The compiler identified a critical failure point where the memory allocation exceeded the designated limit. He isolated the failing module and rewrote the specific syntax.

He optimized the resource draw and ran the diagnostic test a second time, which returned green text confirming a successful compile. He repeated this cycle for hours, maintaining his focus. The programming possessed clear rules that he found peaceful. Code obeyed established laws and responded to rigorous logic. His SRN bonding had now reached 89%, and the firmware rewrite had reached 33% completion.

Unlike the first time he had done a rewrite, things felt much easier now because he had more experience and had the help of better chrome to boost his skills. The Paraline Mk. 3 ran on a temporary compatibility layer, the MCU compression executed in the background, and the Ex-Disk Mk. 3 finalized the allocation of eighteen terabytes, indicating the creation of the local index.

His meeting with Dino was in two days, and to his knowledge, the optimized firmware would require another week of intense coding, though the temporary compatibility layer provided enough stability for him to comfortably use it without ever fearing that he would soon start to slip into cyberpsychosis. The Mk. 3 hardware also delivered massive performance gains, and even in an unoptimized form, they still eclipsed his old Mk. 1 configuration, giving him more processing power than he needed.

He leaned back in his desk chair and listened to the heavy traffic rumbling on the Ringroad overpass above the building. His thoughts drifted to the lower floors. To the dedicated server room, the fabrication machines, and the remaining industrial equipment remained powered but idle.

He began to visualize what the Widowmaker would look like and had an internal debate on whether he wanted to truly go all metal for the windows, or maybe he could go for bulletproof glass with metal shutters that could slide into place in case of an emergency, and a holographic display of the exterior of the vehicle. After all, you couldn't have a Mustang and not roar down the streets with your windows down.

You needed to hear the engine and feel the wind against your skin as you ripped it at mach-fuck down the freeway. The chassis and frame had to be heavily modified and widened if he wanted to fit a 9. 4L engine in a car that only had enough room for a 7. 7L. He would also need to make the rear even wider to improve cornering stability. The flared fenders would house massive wheels, and the high-performance tires would be needed to deliver maximum asphalt grip. The suspension geometry was going to be entirely custom.

Then there were the little details he would also need to fabricate, such as the Shelby emblems, but he would think about that once he had the materials in hand. The vehicle represented his future in Night City. He closed his eyes and slipped into sleep while lying back in his chair, one hand scratching the short beard growing on his chin, the other in his pants.