Chương 8: Burned Bridges I

"Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul." - François Rabelais The heavy hydraulic hiss of the clinic door sealing shut echoed through the subterranean space, locking the rest of Night City out. Viktor descended the narrow metal staircase from his apartment above the shop, his broad shoulders filling the cramped space. His hair was damp from a quick, scalding shower, and he had changed into a clean, short-sleeved surgical scrub top and dark cargo pants.

The smell of cheap synthetic soap briefly masked the permanent odors of medical-grade alcohol and old blood that clung to the basement's concrete walls. Viktor walked over to the primary surgical station, his face an unreadable mask of professional focus. He ignored Alejandro and Julia for the moment, his eyes fixed entirely on the small boy standing awkwardly in the center of the room.

Santi had taken the oversized beanie off, his mop of naturally curly white hair catching the harsh fluorescent lights of the clinic. He looked small. Too small for the heavy chrome chair dominating the center of the room.

"Alright, kid," Viktor said, his voice low and gentle. He patted the synthetic leather of the operational chair.

"Hop up here. Let's get you comfortable." Santi walked over, his eyes darting around the room, analyzing the biometric monitors and the heavy restraints built into the armrests. He scrambled up into the chair, his feet dangling a good foot and a half above the footrests. Viktor pulled up a rolling stool, sitting down so he was eye-level with the boy. He grabbed a sterile wipe and began cleaning the skin behind Santi's right ear, right where the mastoid bone met the skull.

"So," Viktor started, keeping his tone light and conversational. He needed the boy's heart rate down.

"Your old man tells me you're a bit of a whiz kid. What do you do for fun, Santi? You play any of those braindance games? Elflines Online?"

"No," Santi replied politely, his violet eyes tracking Viktor's movements.

"I find the algorithmic progression of commercial gaming to be highly predictable. I prefer optimizing heuristic loops and building polymorphic daemons in my sandbox." Viktor paused, the sterile wipe hovering in the air. He let out a soft, incredulous breath while shaking his head.

"Right. Polymorphic daemons. Because building a digital puzzle box is way better than shooting virtual dragons."

"Exactly," Santi nodded earnestly.

"Though I do enjoy cooking with my mother. We were calculating the optimal spice ratios for synth-tacos last week." A genuine, warm chuckle rumbled in Viktor's chest. Tacos. Finally, a shred of an actual eight-year-old boy beneath the corpo-tech vocabulary.

"Synth-tacos, huh? Hard to beat a good taco. You'll have to give me the recipe sometime."

"I can construct a data packet for you," Santi offered.

"Sure, I'd like that, kid," Viktor smiled, his eyes softening. He reached over to a silver tray, his steady hands deftly preparing a pneumatic hypo-syringe. He loaded a clear vial into the chamber, the first stage of the Kjellberg cocktail, a heavy sedative designed to bypass the blood-brain barrier without triggering a histamine response.

"Just a little pinch, Santi," Viktor murmured, pressing the pneumatic tip against the boy's neck. A soft hiss sounded as the pressurized sedative was injected directly into the bloodstream. Viktor stayed on his stool, maintaining eye contact.

"So, what's your favorite part about cooking with your Ma?"

"I like..." Santi started, blinking rapidly. His perfectly articulated speech suddenly slowed down, the syllables stretching out.

"I like it when she... when she smiles. The... the data output of her... happiness is... a positive variable."

"Yeah, I bet it is," Viktor said softly, watching the boy's pupils dilate.

"Vik...?" Santi mumbled, his head lolling slightly against the padded headrest. His violet eyes fluttered, fighting the heavy weight of the sedative.

"My... my foundational variables are... they're my Ma and Pa."

"That's right, kid," Viktor whispered, brushing a curly lock of white hair from the boy's forehead.

"Just close your eyes. When you wake up, the latency will be gone."

"Okay..." Santi slurred, his chin dropping to his chest. A second later, the biometric monitor above the chair chimed with a slow, steady beep. He was completely under. Viktor's warm smile vanished the exact second the boy lost consciousness. He stood up, his massive frame turning to face the parents standing near the door. Alejandro was tense, his hazel eyes locked on his son, while Julia looked like she was about to be physically sick, her hands trembling as she clutched her fleece jacket.

"He's under," Viktor said, his voice flat. He pointed a finger at the heavy steel door.

"Both of you. Out. Now." Julia opened her mouth to protest, a desperate maternal instinct overriding her logic, but Alejandro placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. He knew better than to argue with a ripperdoc who was about to cut open a skull.

"Let's go, Jules," Alejandro murmured. He guided her toward the door. As Julia stepped out into the stairwell, Alejandro paused in the threshold. He looked back at Viktor, who was already turning away to calibrate the surgical lasers.

"Vik," Alejandro said, his voice thick with a raw weight.

"Thanks. And... I'm sorry for placing you in this position. I know what I asked you to do." Viktor didn't look back. He kept his eyes on the monitor, adjusting the synthetic cortisol drip.

"Save it, Ale. Just get out of my clinic." Alejandro swallowed hard, nodded once, and pulled the heavy door shut. The hydraulic seals engaged with a solid thud, leaving Viktor entirely alone with the sleeping boy and the terrifying weight of forty-seven-year-old experimental technology. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. Viktor exhaled a long, shaky breath. He walked over to his central terminal and pulled up his audio suite.

He filtered out anything with a heavy bass drop, stripping away the chaotic pop synths that usually fueled Night City, and selected a track of deep, ambient soundscapes. It was just a slow, synthesized hum that vibrated at a low frequency, mimicking the steady rhythm of a sleeping heartbeat. It helped him lock into a rhythm of calm precision, and the low-frequency audio waves actually helped stabilize the patient's ambient heart rate during deep-dive neurosurgery.

For the first forty-five minutes, Viktor didn't even pick up a scalpel. He prepped the field. He ran the Kjellberg cocktail through a micro-centrifuge, ensuring the synthetic neuro-inhibitors were perfectly balanced to suppress Santi's microglia. If the boy's immune system woke up and identified the carbon-nanotubes as a foreign threat during the integration, his brain would cook itself in a matter of minutes. It was the terrifying, razor-thin tightrope of biochemistry.

Once the cocktail was flowing steadily through the IV, Viktor picked up the auto-scalpel. What followed was a grueling marathon. A standard copper-wired neural link installation on a ten-year-old took Viktor roughly four hours. He could practically do it blindfolded. This took him six. He didn't use the automated robotic arms for the delicate work since he didn't trust the machine algorithms to handle the highly adaptive, rapidly developing grey matter of an eight-year-old boy.

He used his own flesh-and-blood hands, his fingers working with millimeter-perfect precision. He carefully pulled back the scalp, bored through the mastoid bone, and exposed the parietal lobe. Integrating the microscopic mesh of carbon-nanotube threads was like trying to weave a spiderweb into a bowl of gelatin without breaking the surface tension. Viktor's chest was drenched in sweat, and his shoulders burned with the agonizing tension of holding his hands perfectly still for hours on end.

He had to manually guide the synthetic webbing, aligning it perfectly with the boy's neural pathways while praying to a God he wasn't sure he believed in that the astrocyte cells would accept the foreign body. Three hours passed. Then four. And the ambient music still hummed while the biometric monitor beeped steadily. By the time the sixth hour rolled around, Viktor's hands were physically trembling from the sheer stress of the surgery.

He sealed the final incision, applying a fast-acting dermal polymer to the skin behind Santi's ear. Where a bulky, ugly chrome socket usually sat on a street merc, Santi had only a sleek, matte-black neural port perfectly flush with the bone.

"It's finally over," Viktor said to himself as he stepped back, dropping his bloodied surgical tools onto the metal tray with a loud clatter. He stripped his surgical gloves off and stared at the monitor. There were no spikes or localized hemorrhaging. Santi's Neural Link had been built. Viktor walked over to the small sink in the corner, splashing freezing cold water onto his face and neck. He grabbed a towel, wiping himself down, feeling the adrenaline crash that was starting to assault his body.

He walked over to his desk and dropped heavily into his chair. He needed to destress, or his own heart was going to give out. He booted up his secondary terminal, pulling up a saved file from the 2020s. It was a heavyweight boxing match, stripped of the neon ads and staged violence of modern cyber-brawls. Just two ganic men testing the limits of their meat. Viktor reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, pulling out a glass and a bottle of cheap synthetic whiskey.

He tossed a single, cloudy cube of ice into the glass, poured three fingers of the whiskey, and set the bottle aside. He didn't drink it immediately. He just sat there, watching the ice crack and pop in the cheap liquor, listening to the ambient hum of the clinic. He sat there for a full ten minutes, letting the adrenaline rush of the surgery bleed out of his system. Finally, he stood up, walked to the heavy steel door, and hit the release valve.

Alejandro and Julia were standing in the stairwell, looking like they had aged ten years in the span of six hours. Julia's face was ashen, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow. Alejandro stood rigid, his jaw clenched so tight it looked like the cybernetics in his neck might snap.

"Come in," Viktor said, his voice exhausted. They didn't need to be told twice. Julia rushed past him, practically sprinting to the surgical chair. Alejandro followed close behind, his eyes immediately locking onto the steady green line of the biometric monitor.

"How did it go?" Alejandro demanded, his voice tight, his eyes scanning the sleek, matte-black port behind his sleeping son's ear.

"Did the astrocytes bind? Did the cocktail hold?" Viktor walked slowly back to his desk, picking up his glass of whiskey. He took a slow sip, wincing slightly at the harsh bite of the cheap alcohol.

"Everything went as expected, Ale," Viktor said, his tone incredibly guarded.

"The mesh is integrated, and his vitals are strong. Any localized bleeding was minimal." He swirled the whiskey in his glass, refusing to look at his friend.

"But we are in uncharted waters here. The Kjellberg data you showed me is almost fifty years old. Only time will tell if his brain fully accepts the lobe without fracturing." An awkward silence descended over the clinic. Julia stood by the chair, gently holding Santi's small, limp hand while Alejandro stood rigidly in the center of the room, the adrenaline of the wait leaving him restless. Viktor sat down at his desk, his eyes locked onto the boxing match playing on his terminal. Jab, cross.

"Vik, the telemetry data I have-" Alejandro started, trying to fill the suffocating silence, needing to talk, needing to justify the last six hours.

"Shut up, Alejandro," Viktor interrupted, his voice low and tired. He didn't take his eyes off the screen.

"Just... shut the fuck up and let me watch the fight." Alejandro snapped his mouth shut and nodded slowly, accepting the hostility. He knew he deserved it. They sat in the tense quiet for another ten minutes. The only sounds in the room were the muffled thuds of the boxing match on the terminal and the steady, rhythmic breathing of the boy in the chair. Then, a soft groan broke the silence. Santi's head shifted on the padded headrest.

His brow furrowing as his violet eyes slowly fluttered open, blinking against the harsh fluorescent lights. All three adults moved instantly. Julia gasped, leaning over him, and Alejandro stepped up to the opposite side of the chair, his hands hovering, afraid to touch him. Meanwhile, Viktor set his whiskey down and rolled his stool over, shining a small, localized penlight into Santi's eyes to check for pupillary response.

"Hey there, kid," Viktor said gently, clicking the light off.

"Welcome back to the land of the living. How are you feeling?" Santi blinked sluggishly, his eyes darting between his mother's tear-streaked face and his father's tense posture. He frowned, taking a slow inventory of his own physical form.

"I feel..." Santi started, his voice a little raspy from the dry air. He tilted his head, processing the new Chrome that had just been installed in his head.

"I feel tired. But... the same. I just feel the same." Viktor let out a genuine chuckle, a massive wave of relief washing over him.

"That's good, kid. Feeling the same is exactly what we want right now. It means the meat is holding together."

"Let's hook him up," Alejandro said immediately, reaching into his jacket for a silver personal link cable.

"Let's patch him into the local clinic subnet. I need to test the latency threshold-" Viktor's hand snapped out with terrifying speed, his fingers wrapping around Alejandro's wrist with enough force to make the chrome joints underneath groan.

"You touch that port right now, Ale, and I will break your fucking arm," Viktor snarled, his eyes blazing with absolute fury. Alejandro froze, the silver cable dangling from his fingers. He looked at Viktor's face and slowly put the cable back into his pocket.