Chapter 38: Whispers (Patreon)

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

- H. P. Lovecraft

---

Santi opened his eyes to the surgical lights above Vik's operating chair, which were dialed to their lowest setting and cast the clinic in a soft amber that was easier on post-anesthesia optics than the full-spectrum whites Vik used during procedures. The cardiac monitor beside the chair was still beeping and the telemetry display on the wall showed a readout of Santi's vitals.

He blinked, and everything felt different. The room felt as if someone had moved things around by an inch, and although everything was where it was supposed to be, the space between things felt off.

"Welcome back to the land of the living, kid," Vik said from somewhere to his left.

Santi turned his head, and the motion sent a rolling wave of nausea through him. Vik was standing at his terminal watching a boxing match. 

"How do you feel?" Vik asked without looking away from the fight.

Santi looked out of it as he felt a headache coming on behind both eyes as the neural tissue was still adjusting to new chrome. His spine felt noticeably warmer than usual as the thermal signature of the SRN relay fibers began its bonding cycle along his vertebral column. His fingers tingled at the tips, as Vik had warned him, a side effect of the relay network establishing new signal pathways to his extremities.

"Like someone rearranged the inside of my head," Santi said.

"No shit?" Vik said, and the faintest smile pulled at his mouth. "Everything went smooth, and now you have a brand new Paraline Mk.3 ready to go to work along with a new Ex-Disk Mk.3. I also made sure that the MCU was integrated into the memory bus and running its first compression cycle, and last I checked, the SRN relay fibers are in position and bonding is at... Eleven percent."

"Eleven percent?" Santi repeated.

"It'll climb to full integration over the next forty-eight hours or so," Vik said. "In the meantime, your body is going to feel like it's running on a half-second delay. Nothing new there since your Neural Link is rebuilding its signal routing table to accommodate the new relay architecture, and until that process completes, your reflexes and sensory processing are all going to be slightly out of whack with what you're used to."

He turned from the display and looked at Santi directly.

"I'm going to keep you here for the next twenty-four hours," Vik said. "I don't do many SRN or MCU ops, so I wanna keep an eye on you so that I can monitor the SRN bonding curve and make sure the relay fibers are integrating evenly along the spinal column. If there's an asymmetry in the bonding rate, I need to catch it early, otherwise..."

"Do I need to spend all of that time on the chair?" Santi asked.

"Nah. You can move around, sit at the workbench, use the bathroom, or whatever you want to do. I'll even do you a solid and put something on one of the screens if you get bored," Vik said as he walked to one of the supply cabinets on the far wall and pulled open the bottom drawer. He stood there for a moment, his hand resting on the drawer's edge as his brows narrowed.

"What's wrong?" Santi asked.

"I'm out of immunosuppressants," Vik said. He checked the shelf above, then the adjacent drawer, moving containers aside. "I've got a box of fresh supply up in my apartment. Give me a minute."

"Take your time," Santi said.

"Don't touch anything," Vik said as he walked toward the door, then stopped and turned to face Santi before leaving. "And don't jack into anything either."

"I know," Santi said.

"I mean it, kid," Vik said.

"I know, Vik," Santi sighed.

The door slid open, and Vik's footsteps climbed the concrete stairs, their rhythm fading as he ascended toward the street level above. The door slid closed behind him, and the clinic settled into a dense quiet.

Santi sat in the operating chair and let the silence sit with him.

The radio on the shelf had been turned off at some point during the procedure, and the only sound accompanying him was the annoying cardiac monitor. The air smelled of isopropyl, surgical adhesive, and the faint ozone of recently powered-down medical equipment.

Santi found himself being unbelievably bored.

He knew he wasn't supposed to jack into anything since the SRN was still integrating and the relay fibers were still bonding and the whole point of the twenty-four hours was to let the hardware settle without interference.

But connecting to the Net to stream a show didn't require him to jack into anything or do anything that would stress his brand-new cyberdeck. It was passive data reception routed through the Neural Link's entertainment subnet, the same thing millions of people did every day without any chrome more advanced than a basic interface plug and cybereyes. The SRN wouldn't even register the activity, and neither would the MCU.

He pulled up a stream of some Japantown animation that Sasha had mentioned a few weeks back, something about a kid with a sword and a robot companion traveling across a wasteland that looked like a scaled-down version of the Badlands. The show loaded onto his Kiroshis with sharper colors than he expected.

He had spent about four minutes enjoying the little show when he heard someone whisper to his close right. It was as if someone were in the room with him and let out a sound at a frequency on the threshold of human auditory perception, like a compressed breath of syllables that carried the shape of language without delivering its content.

Santi's head snapped right, but the clinic was empty, and the wall to the right of the operating chair was blank reinforced concrete painted in a flat grey. The instrument tray sat exactly where Vik had positioned it, its surgical titanium tools arranged in their labeled rows. Santi looked around the room a bit more, staring at the closed supply cabinet with its magnetic latch engaged.

He killed the stream and noticed that the silence that replaced it was not the same silence that had existed before whatever he had just held. It had weight to it now, pressing against both of his ears in a way he could not explain. The cardiac monitor beeped at seventy-four BPM and the sound of the cooling system engaging resounded throughout the clinic, but nothing else made a sound.

"Must've been a glitch," Santi said in a low voice since it was the only rational and medically supported explanation. The SRN was integrating, and the relay fibers were bonding to neural tissue along his spinal column, which had probably sent a phantom auditory input as a side effect. "Maybe a signal ghosting or stray electrical impulses cascading through incompletely bonded relay nodes and being misinterpreted by the auditory processing layer as external sound. Shit's not unheard of, but it sure as fuck is creepy. I should probably run a diagnostic on my systems."

He started a passive self-check protocol that his Neural Link could execute without engaging the Paraline or activating any SRN relay, scanning existing signal pathways for irregularities and logging results against the baseline, when he suddenly heard voices overlapping. They were layered in a compressed harmonic way, emanating from Vik's terminal on the workbench eight feet to his left. They were conversing, trading information in a structured pattern that he identified as communication before his conscious mind could process. However, when he finally tried to process the content, he couldn't, because it wasn't a language.

His bare feet hit the cold concrete as he swung his legs off the chair, and the thermal shock traveled up through his soles and into his calves. 

He walked toward the terminal, noticing that it was no longer on and its screen was dark with the power indicator unlit. He didn't remember Vik shutting it down before leaving.

He stood in front of the dark screen, close enough that his own reflection cleanly materialized in the glass, and suddenly, the whispers he was hearing stopped and his heart skipped a beat.

In the reflection, he saw two figures. To his right was an easily identifiable feminine physique, with a radiance that had nothing to do with photons and everything to do with presence. Her features were indistinct, shifting and reforming like data being rendered by a processor, leaving the impression of warmth that bloomed against the inside of his sternum.

Then he looked to the reflection on his left where there was another figure. It was dark, with an active, consuming corruption of the absence of light that ate the space it occupied. Its edges stuttered like a corrupted video playing at a very low frame rate, and the shape had a vague resemblance to something humanoid and Santi could feel it eminate hatred. Both figures felt like they were old and as if they were being patient while looking at him.

Santi felt his heart rate spike, and he turned around, but once again, the clinic was empty. Neither figure that he had just seen standing behind him was there, and nothing in the room had changed with the exception that the temperature had suddenly dropped from 68 degrees to 46 degrees, a full 22-degree drop from the climate control's set point. He felt his hands involuntarily tremble.

The light headache he had felt a few minutes earlier detonated with a sudden and expanding pressure that spiked his internal temperature up 5 degrees above baseline in the frontal cortex, accompanied by an anomalous data cascade in the primary sensory processing layer that the diagnostic could not identify.

Neural Link thermal alert: +5F frontal cortex.

Anomalous data cascade: Unclassified.

Diagnostic status: INCONCLUSIVE.

His Kiroshi optics glitched and the clinic's ambient lighting fractured across his overlay into stuttering, red-tinged streams of code that painted the walls and ceiling in scrolling patterns bearing no resemblance to cyberdeck syntax. The code was unformatted and old yet advanced, running in sequences that his Paraline attempted to decode only to return null on every pass.

And standing before Santi was the dark figure. In the room. Eight feet away, radiating a hatred so dense and so targeted that it registered as physical pressure against his chest. It was advancing slowly towards him.

Santi's motor functions locked and his legs seized from the hip down, his arms froze at his sides, and his breathing quickened as his nervous system attempted to execute a response. He could feel his heart slamming in his chest and the cold sweat breaking across his forehead. Whatever this thing in front of him was, it was reading him, running its attention along the architecture of his chrome and nervous system, mapping the nodes, learning the shape of what it was touching.

Heart rate: 182 BPM.

SRN thermal anomaly: +10F spinal relay nodes.

Motor function: COMPROMISED.

Four voices spoke at the same time. They came from inside the walls, from the floor, from the ceiling, from inside the terminal, from the door, from inside his own cranial cavity, layered in a frequency that humans had never been designed to receive. His Neural Link's parsing subroutine crashed three times in under a second, restarting each time into the same incomprehensible input. 

He could smell something that smelled like heat without combustion, like the sealed atmosphere of a room that had been holding its breath for a very long time.

And when the dark figure was four feet away, the air between them shimmered with thermal distortion, except the room was actually freezing cold. The figure stepped closer, coming within a foot of Santi, who was being taken over by the sensation of being read by an intelligence using his own hardware as its access point.

Then the overhead light panel blew, its four high-intensity bulbs detonating in sequence from left to right with sharp cracks that scattered glass across the place. The telemetry display flashed a single frame of red code before dying. The ambient LED strips burst in a cascade traveling the full length, each dying with a brief red flash that left afterimages burned into Santi's optics.

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. 

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.