Chapter 37: Upgrades, People, Upgrades II (Patreon)

"The more you know, the more you realize you don't know."

- Aristotle (attribution debated)

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"Ghost," Dino said as he answered Santi's call. "I've been waiting for you to hit my line."

"Mr. Dinovic," Santi said with an edge of respect.

"A growing fixer by the name of Regina Jones called me," Dino said. "I don't really know her too well, but her rep as a fixer has been going off as of late, so I'm taking this call as a courtesy to her rather than an introduction to you. No offense."

"None taken," Santi answered.

"Good. Because here's how this works on my end," Dino said as the sound of a lighter clicking open was heard in the background, followed by an inhale. "I don't take walk-ins, and I don't take recommendations at face value. I kind of like to look into people before I decide to have a sit-down with them. So , in this moment of bluntness, I'm letting you know that I'll be looking into your handle, board presence, and work history, including the jobs you've touched and the ones you've turned down. The shape of the trail matters more than the size of it. You follow?"

"I follow," Santi said.

"Good. Give me fourteen days, after that, if I like what I see, we'll sit down and I'll tell you what I need. If I don't, I buy you a drink, and we pretend this never happened," Dino said, coming to another pause as the lighter clicked again, and Santi heard the faint hiss of smoke being exhaled through teeth. "And before you ask, yes, fourteen days is longer than most fixers would take. Most fixers are also dead or in prison, which I think validates my process."

"I wasn't going to ask," Santi said.

"Smart kid," Dino said with the faintest edge of amusement in his voice. "If I like what I see, I'll hit your line to set up a sit-down. Show up on time and don't bring anyone or any iron unless you feel unsafe without it, in which case bring it but keep it where I can't see it, because I find visible weapons during a first meeting to be... Unimaginative."

"Understood," Santi said.

"Oh, and one more thing," Dino said. "Regina says you're young. I don't really give much of a fuck about that as long as you're good since young and sloppy gets people killed, and I don't mean just you. I mean the people I send you to work with, and the people who are counting on what you bring back. So if there's any part of you that's unsure whether you can operate at the level I'm going to need, now's the time to say so and save us both the trouble."

"No need to worry," Santi said almost immediately. "I'll be there."

"Alright," Dino said before abruptly ending the line.

Santi sat in the dive chair for a moment, his hands resting on the armrests as the smell of recycled air and warm processor casings filled the space. 

Dino had given him a fourteen-day grace period to get his shit in order before possibly calling him in for a sit-down. He cracked his knuckles, pulled up Regina's contracts, and dove in to work.

The first gig from Regina's queue was a competitive intelligence pull targeting a mid-tier biotech firm headquartered in a leased office tower in City Center. The client wanted the R&D division's current project pipeline, including budget allocations, timeline projections, and the names of the lead researchers on their three most advanced programs.

The firm's subnet was running on a Kang Tao enterprise security platform, which was a step up from the Militech municipal hardware he had been used to cracking, though not all too different. It was honestly the same shit wrapped in different branding. The outer ICE was a layered authentication system with rotating biometric certificates, and the internal architecture was segmented into departmental partitions, each one walled behind its own encryption layer. The R&D partition was buried deepest, sitting behind a dedicated firewall that cycled its challenge-response protocol every thirty-one minutes.

Santi spoofed a maintenance access credential from an IT contractor who had performed a routine service call three weeks prior, sliding through the outer ICE on the dead technician's digital fingerprint. He hit the departmental partitions one by one, bypassing each encryption layer with a modified brute-force daemon that his Paraline processed in parallel threads, burning through the challenge-response cycles faster than the system could regenerate them.

The R&D firewall put up a good fight, as it was genuinely a well-constructed piece of corporate security that required him to synchronize his decryption timing with the thirty-one-minute cycle and inject his extraction payload into the four-second window between key rotations. But at the end of the day, he was in and out with the copied data in less than twenty minutes, earning the first 8,200 eddies of the day.

He swiftly moved on to the second contract, which was a data verification job for a legal firm in Charter Hill that needed confirmation of whether a specific set of financial records stored on a Biotechnica subsidiary's internal server had been altered within the past ninety days. The work required a comparative analysis of the live server data and a cached backup obtained by the client's own forensic team.

This one was more surgical than the previous pull, since the Biotechnica subsidiary's server infrastructure was hosted on an air-gapped internal network, which required Santi to route his access through a compromised IoT device in the building's climate control system. In other words, he used a smart thermostat that had been installed during a renovation in 2067 and that nobody had bothered to update since, exploiting its known vulnerability in its wireless handshake protocol to bridge to the internal network, tunneling through the HVAC subnet and into the financial server's root directory through a lateral pathway that bypassed the primary ICE entirely.

The comparative analysis took longer than the breach itself, since he had to pull the live data, map it against the cached backup the client had provided, identify fourteen separate instances of record alteration, timestamp each one, attribute them to a specific user credential, and document them in deep detail.

After about four hours, Santi had completed another contract and netted himself an additional 11,500 eddies. 

Santi was a man on a mission as he immediately went to do the third contract Regina had given him. This one was a pair of corporate subnet breaches that came as a package deal. There were two competing pharmaceutical companies, both operating out of leased facilities in Westbrook and wanting to know what the other was developing.

Santi ran them back to back, cracking the first subnet through a phishing vector that exploited a newly onboarded employee's unsecured personal device, and the second in the afternoon through a direct attack on their external-facing API gateway, which had been configured with default authentication credentials that nobody in the company's IT department had thought to change.

The irony of two competing pharmaceutical companies both hiring the same fixer and runner to steal each other's secrets was not lost on Santi, and he charged them both accordingly, netting a combined payout of 14,800 eddies.

The days blurred together after that. Santi ran two more independent contracts that came through the runner boards, both data extractions with pay in the seven- to nine-thousand range.

The first targeted a logistics company in Arroyo that was suspected of running unregistered weapons shipments through their commercial freight network, and the client, who Santi suspected was a competing logistics firm rather than any kind of law enforcement, wanted the shipping manifests and routing schedules for the past six months. The subnet was laughably undersecured, running a consumer-grade firewall that Santi treated like a suggestion, and the whole job took under twelve minutes.

The second was more interesting because it was a private investigator operating out of Japantown needed access to the internal communications archive of a family law firm in City Center, specifically the encrypted correspondence between one of the firm's senior partners and an undisclosed third party regarding a trust fund dispute that involved, based on the fragments Santi glimpsed during the extraction, enough eddies to buy a city block and enough family dysfunction to fill a braindance series.

The law firm's security was considerably better than the logistics outfit, running a dedicated Netwatch-certified ICE suite that required Santi to spoof a firmware update to the firm's internal messaging server, inject a passive monitoring daemon during the update cycle's authentication gap, and then extract the archived correspondence through a side-channel that piggybacked on the server's own automated backup routine. It was elegant work, and it left him with an additional 9,200 eddies.

He also picked up a rush job from Wakako Okada, who reached out. A Tyger Claw-affiliated data broker in Kabuki had been skimming transaction records from Wakako's own network of fences, copying the buy-sell logs and reselling them to competing fixers in Westbrook. Wakako wanted the data broker's complete client list, and a daemon planted in his personal terminal that would corrupt his local storage the next time he attempted to access it, erasing everything he had stolen without giving him the chance to notice the deletion until it was too late.

Though the breach itself was standard, the creative part was the corruption daemon, which Santi designed from scratch over the course of an afternoon, building a time-delayed worm that would sit dormant in the broker's terminal until his next login, at which point it would systematically overwrite every file in his local storage with garbage data while simultaneously spoofing the directory structure to make it appear, for approximately thirty-six hours, as though everything was still intact. By the time the broker realized his files were gone, the corrupted data would have propagated through his backup system, destroying the redundant copies along with the originals.

Wakako paid 12,000 for the client list and an additional 5,000 for the daemon, netting Santi an additional 17,000 eddies.

And between the contracts, the Aiden Protocol V2 maintained its steady trickle. Santi rode the NCART twice during the ten-day stretch, tagging corporate expense accounts during the commute with the casual, practiced ease of a pickpocket who had refined his craft into an automated process. The delayed triggers activated across the following twenty-four hours, depositing three hundred eddies per skim into his distributed account network in fragments too small to flag and too dispersed to trace.

The SCSM skim also added its own quiet contribution, though the number of operational machines continued to decline as the city's vending infrastructure slowly deteriorated under neglect.

By the end of the tenth day, the cumulative balance in Santi's accounts resolved across his Kiroshi overlay as 98,789 eddies.

He stared at the number for a moment while in thought. The materials needed eighty-two thousand, and he now had more than enough for that. But with an additional twenty days of holding time according to Orsen, and it only being four or so days until he was given the go-ahead to meet up, Sanri knew it was time to address the thing he'd been avoiding.

Santi's current chrome was good. Good enough for baseline contracts and some of Padre's gigs. But unfortunately, "good enough" was not what Dino Dinovic dealt in, and Santi knew that. His hardware had a ceiling, and though he could overclock his Paraline Mk.1, he could feel it was approaching the limits of what his custom firmware could squeeze out of it.

The Ex-Disk's six terabytes were adequate for his current daemon library but would be catastrophically insufficient if he needed to carry the kind of expanded toolkit that high-profile corporate espionage demanded. And his implants, capable as they were individually, still communicated through sequential signal pathways that introduced latency he could definitely feel.

He needed to get sharper before he walked into that meeting, so he spent the next two days in the server room on research.

The chrome he was running had been state of the art for a sixteen-year-old, which was a qualification that aged about as well as milk in Night City. His Paraline Mk.1 was still a capable deck, but the Mk.1 designation meant it was two full iterations behind the current production model, and the firmware he had written to optimize its performance could only compensate for so much when the underlying hardware was running on processing architecture that had already improved twice over.

The Ex-Disk was the same story. The Mk.1 he currently had served him well, but the Mk.3 offered eighteen terabytes, triple the capacity, with a data transfer rate that would let him load, deploy, and rotate daemon libraries in real time rather than pre-staging them before a breach.

Those were upgrades. Swapping out the old for the new. But the two pieces of chrome that Santi had been reading were something different entirely. They were additions.

The first was a Memory Compression Unit.

The MCU was a specialized co-processor that integrated directly into the cyberdeck's memory architecture, and its function was elegant in its simplicity. It took the thousands of daemon routines, quickhack templates, ICE-cracking algorithms, and operational subroutines that a high-level netrunner accumulated over years of work. Essentially, it was a sprawling library of code that normally consumed terabytes of storage and required careful manual management, and it compressed them into a fraction of their original footprint using a proprietary encoding scheme that preserved full operational fidelity while reducing the memory load by a factor of eight.

What that meant in practice was that Santi could carry his entire operational library, every daemon, every quickhack variant, every custom exploit he had ever written, loaded and ready to deploy, without having to choose which tools to bring on a given gig. It would eliminate the need for pre-staging, and deciding whether to load the Synapse Burnout or the Short Circuit before a breach. All of it would be compressed, indexed, and accessible in real time.

The second addition was a Synaptic Relay Network.

The SRN was a neural-interface upgrade that replaced the standard communication pathways between implants with a dedicated, high-bandwidth relay system that operated at near-instantaneous signal speed. In a standard chrome loadout, each implant communicated with the Neural Link through individual signal pathways that operated sequentially, processing commands in the order they were received. However, the SRN collapsed that sequential architecture into a parallel processing grid, allowing every piece of chrome in Santi's body to communicate simultaneously.

The practical implication was deep enough, and thinking about how his Kerenzikov could fire at the exact same instant his Kiroshis tagged a threat, instead of the current setup where the optics detected the threat, transmitted the data to the Neural Link, which then sent the activation signal to the Kerenzikov, which then engaged, it was basically a no-brainer for Santi.

The delay between those steps was measured in fractions of a second, imperceptible to most people. The SRN would make his entire chrome loadout operate as a single, unified system rather than a collection of separate implants communicating through a switchboard.

Combined with his custom unified firmware, which had already eliminated the corporate bloatware and communication conflicts between his existing chrome, the SRN would give him a hardware-level integration that no other runner in Night City was running. The firmware handled software while the SRN would handle hardware. Together, they would turn his body into a machine that processed input and output at speeds that the original manufacturers of his individual implants had never designed for. Though he would need to rewrite the firmware again once he got things installed.

He spent the second day running simulations and modeling the projected performance gains of each upgrade against his current operational baselines. The Paraline Mk.3 alone would increase his breach speed by roughly forty percent, and the Ex-Disk Mk.3 would eliminate the storage constraints that occasionally forced him to pre-stage his loadout. The MCU would turn his daemon library from a curated selection into a complete arsenal while the SRN would tie it all together into a response architecture that would make his current setup feel like it had been running on lag.

The total cost, sourced across three different vendors and one very specific ripperdoc who was the only person on the planet Santi trusted to open his skull, came to about 130,000 eddies.

It was a lot of money, but it was also the difference between walking into Dino Dinovic's world as a runner who could handle the work and walking in as a runner who was going to get himself flagged by a corporate ICE division because his hardware couldn't keep pace with his ambition.

Once he had his mind set on things, he brought up Vik's contact and called him to ask if he could drop by, to which Vik obviously said yes, and just a few hours later, Santi was descending the stairs from the alley entrance. The hydraulic door at the bottom slid open smoothly with a  pressurized hiss.

The interior was a clean, ordered, and bathed in the cool, clinical light of surgical-grade overhead panels, with Vik's operating chair positioned in the center of the room and the walls lined with the precise, organized array of tools, implants, and medical hardware that defined the workspace of a man who had been cutting chrome into people for longer than Santi had been alive.

Vik was at his workbench when Santi walked in, his back turned, his hands working precisely on a small component that Santi scanned, and his Kiroshis tagged it as a disassembled neural interface housing. He didn't look up immediately, finishing what he was doing before acknowledging a visitor, a habit that conveyed respect for both his own work and the work of whoever was about to ask him to perform it.

"Kid," Vik said, setting the component down and turning on his stool to face Santi with a warm expression. "Been a while. And see, I told you that you would keep on growing."

"I think I should've stopped by now," Santi said.

"You better hope so," Vik replied. "I've fitted your spinal chrome twice already. A third adjustment is going to require me to have a conversation with your vertebrae that I don't want to have."

Santi pulled up a stool and sat down across from the ripperdoc, his elbows on his knees, and he laid out the upgrade plan.

Vik listened without interrupting, his eyes tracking Santi's face as he spoke, the expression behind the glasses shifting through the diagnostic spectrum of a doctor evaluating not just the request but the patient making it. When Santi finished, Vik turned back to his workbench, set down the neural interface housing he had been working on, and removed his magnification loupe before facing Santi again with his full attention.

"I'm guessing you've been thinking about this for a while," Vik said matter-of-factly.

"A few weeks of planning," Santi lied. "I've got a meeting with a new fixer in four days, and the work that's coming through his pipeline is going to be a step up from what I've been handling. So I need the hardware to match."

"Which fixer?" Vik asked.

"Dino Dinovic," Santi replied.

Vik's eyebrows rose a fraction. "I think I've heard of the guy, and I can only say that he plays in deep water, kid. Corporate targets and hardened vaults, and Most runners who work for him are ten years older than you and carrying twice the chrome."

"Which is why I'm sitting here," Santi said as Vik studied him for a moment, then nodded slowly with resigned acceptance.

"The Paraline and the Ex-Disk are swaps," Vik said, pulling a notepad toward him and sketching a quick diagram of the cranial access points. "Same slot, better hardware. I pull the old ones, prep the interface sites, install the new units, run calibration, and you walk out the same day. Trust me when I say this, but the Mk.3 Paraline alone is going to feel like someone dropped a second brain into your skull. The processing architecture is three generations ahead of what you're running now, and with your custom firmware ported over, the performance gains are going to be... Significant. Very significant."

"What about the MCU and the SRN?" Santi asked.

"Since they're new installations," Vik said. "The MCU integrates into the deck's memory bus, which means I'm opening up the same cranial access point I use for the Paraline and routing an additional co-processor into the existing architecture. It's clean, minimally invasive work, with negligible recovery time. Your Neural Link is already running a carbon-nanotube mesh that integrates with new hardware better than anything else I've ever worked with. The MCU will slot in like it was always supposed to be there... though the SRN is a different conversation."

"How different?" Santi asked.

"The Synaptic Relay Network replaces the signal pathways between every implant in your body," Vik said while leaning forward with his hands clasped between his knees. "That means I'm running new relay conduits along your spinal column, branching out to the Kerenzikov, the Kiroshis, and the Neural Link junction points. It's not all that dangerous, but it's not a quick install either. The relay fibers need to bond with the existing neural tissue, and that bonding process takes time. You'll be under for a few hours while I do the physical installation, and then you'll need twenty-four to forty-eight hours for the relays to fully integrate before you stress-test them."

"What does full integration feel like?" Santi asked.

"Like someone turned down the lag on your whole body," Vik said. "Right now, when your Kiroshis tag a threat, the data goes to your Neural Link, your Neural Link sends an activation signal to your Kerenzikov, and the Kerenzikov engages. That chain happens faster than almost anyone can perceive, but the SRN makes it happen simultaneously. When the Kiroshis tag the threat and the Kerenzikov fires at the same instant, because the relay network allows parallel signal processing instead of sequential, and your body stops being a collection of parts talking to each other and becomes one system. With that unified firmware of yours running on top, I honestly don't know what the upper limit of your response time will be. I've never installed an SRN on a rig that was already as tightly integrated as yours."

"But it can all be done in one sitting?" Santi asked as Vik studied him for a moment.

"Yes," Vik said finally. "Two swaps and two new installs can actually be done in one sitting, one anesthesia cycle. I'd rather do it that way than have you come back four separate times and put you under four separate rounds, and since your body's young. It recovers fast. The chrome is compatible with your existing architecture, especially with that custom firmware you've built, which, by the way, is still the most impressive piece of software I've ever seen come out of a teenager's head."

"You've said that before," Santi said.

"I'll keep saying it until it stops being true," Vik said. "Now, the cost. Four pieces total. The Paraline Mk.3 runs sixty thousand. The Ex-Disk Mk.3 is twenty. The MCU is thirty. And the SRN is twenty. That's one-thirty all in, parts and labor, and I'm not charging you my standard rate on the labor because, frankly, kid, you've been keeping me in business since you were fourteen and I consider that a standing discount."

"I've got eighty right now," Santi said. "The rest I can quickly source."

Vik waved his hand in dismissal. "Pay me eighty now; the rest comes when it comes. In this city, that makes you my favorite patient by a considerable margin."

He set the cases on the operating table beside the chair, opening each one in sequence. The Paraline Mk.3 sat in its cradle, sleek and compact and carrying the dense, precision-machined weight of hardware that cost sixty thousand eddies for a reason. The Ex-Disk Mk.3 was smaller, a dark rectangular module with contact pins that gleamed under the surgical lights. The MCU was a flat and circular co-processor no larger than a coin, its surface etched with microscopic circuit traces that caught the light in iridescent patterns. And the SRN was a kit rather than a single component, a collection of relay fibers, junction nodes, and bonding agents packed into a case with the careful, labeled organization of a surgical instrument set.

Santi looked at the four cases, then at Vik, and transferred 80,000 eddies to Vik's account through his Neural Link.

Transfer authenticated: 80,000 eddies.

Remaining balance: 18,789 eddies"

"Let's do it," Santi said.

Vik gestured to the operating chair. "Sit down. I'm going to run a full diagnostic before we start, check your current implant health, verify the interface sites, and make sure there aren't any surprises hiding in your neural architecture that I don't know about." He reached for a pair of surgical gloves. "The procedure will take approximately four hours. When you wake up, you're going to feel like someone rewired your brain, which is because I will have literally rewired your brain. I'm telling you this now before you do something stupid when you wake up. The SRN integration needs forty-eight hours before you push it. No diving, no quickhacks, no Kerenzikov activation for two days. After that, you run a calibration cycle through your firmware, and everything should come online clean."

"So two days of downtime," Santi said as he settled into the chair and felt the cushioned surface adjust to him.

"Two days," Vik confirmed. "I know that's an eternity for someone like you, but your Neural Link needs time to recognize the new relay architecture and establish stable signal pathways. If you push it before the integration is complete, you risk signal ghosting, phantom inputs, or in the worst case, a feedback loop that could fry the SRN before it's even online. And I am not installing a second one because you decided to test your Kerenzikov twelve hours after surgery."

"Understood," Santi said.

"I mean it, kid," Vik said, pointing a gloved finger at him. "Two days without any action. I've had runners on my table who said 'understood' and then jacked into the Net in the cab ride home. Two of them are dead. One of them was in a long-term care facility in the Pacifica project, with a Neuralink that occasionally tells him he's a vending machine. Don't be any of those people."

"I said understood, Vik," Santi said. "I mean it."

"Good," Vik said, his tone softening. He attached the diagnostic leads to Santi's temples, the Neural Link junction at the base of his skull, and the monitoring pads along his forearms and chest. The clinic's medical telemetry system hummed to life, projecting Santi's vitals, neural activity, and implant status across a wall-mounted display.

"Everything looks good," Vik said, reviewing the readouts. "Your existing chrome is in excellent condition. The Kerenzikov's running clean, the Kiroshis are nominal, and your Neural Link's throughput is... Still absurd. Every time I look at your numbers, I have to remind myself that you're sixteen and not a mil-spec combat netrunner with twenty years of experience."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Santi said.

"It is one," Vik said as he prepared the anesthesia injector, "Last chance to change your mind."

"No chance," Santi said.

Vik placed the injector against the port at the base of Santi's skull. "Count back from ten."

"Ten," Santi said. "Nine. Eigh..."