2078: Highriders - Chapter 19 (Patreon)

Hacking my way through Elysium’s cyberspace was giving me some very uncomfortable reminders.

The worst of which was when I literally had to play cat-and-mouse in the Cynosure facility under NC with a fucking enhanced Militech Cerberus robot hunting my ass down.

Now here I had to thread my way through a veritable army of hostile daemons and two elite netrunners - who were perma-dwellers - their bodies unable to be removed from their life support pods without killing them. These were the worst possible opponents to fight because their entire life and experience had become cyberspace.

My only advantages in these circumstances were being Post-Human and my Gemini carrying enough supplementary compact computing capacity to count as if I was walking around with a relatively modern server rack. In opposition, was at least five year old hardware that the local dwellers were working with. Sure, they had made upgrades here and there, especially on the software level, but I wasn’t dealing with the bleeding military edge.

All this meant, it still took me nearly three meatspace hours of hacking and digital sneaking to just make a proper map of Elysium’s cyberspace and internal architecture layout.

The former was a real headache.

The dwellers had constructed it to be so far from any notion of standard norms, because both of them had been given the freedom to literally make it their own ‘Elysium’. Kane’s only limitation being that it still did its job in regulating the meatspace systems, otherwise it was complete freedom for them.

What I was confronted with navigating was the psychedelic, messy fever dream of two elite dwellers who had started thinking themselves as the ‘gods’ of this station’s cyberspace. Fair, for all practical purposes, they were, with the only limitations being Kane’s edicts and each other.

Both dwellers had their portions of cyberspace hard coded as belonging to them on a hardware level and Kane clearly wanted no ego measuring contests or conflicts erupting between the duo. They were there for a job and to keep Elysium secure from the outside. There was only one pathway that the station kept open to Earth cyberspace, which was only for passively receiving news broadcasts and Kane’s own discretionary use.

Getting any intel on the runners was another delicate process, but I eventually found them.

The male of the duo was called Orion ‘Ghostwire’ Bray.

He was chiefly responsible for the security nets, which by itself was a labyrinth of Black ICE, daemons and armed drones that could deploy into space around Elysium. An ex-Militech black ops who ended up frying parts of his nervous system in 2072 during a raid on an Araska facility. Kane recruited him shortly afterwards, getting new artificial nerves grafted in, but the residual damage still meant he was confined to a life support pod. His six years in Elysium had turned him into an even worse case of a paranoid perfectionist than was indicated on his Militech file.

I had spotted him during my recon, existing as a ghostly avatar of green floating code shards - shaped as an extremely muscular human male - enough to make even an Animal ganger envious.

Just looking at his code, I could see an entire library of predictive surveillance algorithms running in the background and he used them to watch over every move the residents made. Refining digital models of them with every cycle, adding new data and watching for potential rebellion against Kane.

Standing opposite him was Liora ‘Siren’ Porter.

She was sovereign of Elysium’s central hub systems that was mostly dedicated to servicing the residents and creating a Pleasure Net - a seductive dreamscape of augmented reality and braindancing hedonism. Every elite was practically captured into a simulspace of custom BDs, dopamine floods and a fair bit of loyalty inducing software that was steadily brainwashing them.

Most of the residents of Elysium didn’t even think of wanting to do something as pedestrian as ‘escaping’. For them, the loyalty implant was hardly even necessary.

Liora herself was a former Crystal Palace joytoy who only did net diving as a side hustle.

That changed in 2073 when she OD’d on an experimental narcotic, leaving her partially paralyzed. Kane snapped her up for Elysium and since then she ruled her part of cyberspace like a god-queen of pleasure. She kept the residents addicted to an array of narcotics she theoretically cooked up in cyberspace, then let her ‘minions’, a select hierarchy of joytoys actually do the the work in meatspace of producing it. Her avatars were a mix of classical Greek sirens, mermaids or impossibly perfect females with voluptuous assets that occasionally went hermaphroditic.

Her predictable weakness, which allowed me to slip beneath her notice entirely, was that she was also addicted to her own highs. Her side of cyberspace tended to get glitches in its security when she went through a withdrawal phase and let me sneak through her Black ICE labyrinth. Her daemons were also purposely coded to look as distractingly erotic as possible.

It was almost a mimetic level danger and left me feeling distinctly turned on, right down to my own base code. One memorable daemon was literally shaped like a copulating threesome, complete with audio, flesh slapping against flesh, moans and groans. The effect quickly turned from titillating into leaving me rather disturbed.

It was only now that I could carefully begin my search for Aria on Liora’s side of cyberspace.

I looked through salons where the elite were trying their best to reenact something that might’ve been done by the ancient Romans - eating the best food, smoking and fucking, all at the same time. There was also the familiar sight of BD addicts that was all too common in NC - it was just so strange to see one percenters in that role.

My attention was drawn to the actual gladiator arena.

It was in the zero-g core section of the station, a long cylinder of 46 meters in length and eight in radius, with rooms and viewing booths along the core perimeter of the arena.

Inside this space were two older model Gemini proxies with limited small RCS thrusters in their legs and arms, bouncing around and beating the hell out of each other.

The two elites who were jacked into the proxies were ensconced in a booth at the base of the arena.

I could see traces of skill chipping in the base combat styles, but there was also clear hard won experience shining through. Fighting close quarters with only fists and feet in zero-g was not something that came naturally at all, but these two were making it look brutally artistic. There was no Sandy usage, making sure that the audience could fully appreciate every moment and impact.

The Geminis were also realistically injured, but only in a superficial manner; blood splattered, faces, arms and legs bruised and the minimal clothing they wore getting torn. 

I was very tempted to sneak in and see if I couldn’t download enough data to form a BD for myself afterward, effectively making a zero-g combat skill chip for myself.

No, V. Stay the course, I thought hard to myself.

Moving firmly past the arena’s systems, I next found myself in the lower decks of the torus station’s main wheel.

The place that held the physical machinery that made Elysium livable.

Here I found maintenance borgs that barely had 20% of their original meat left and looking at their identities in the database system, could only feel a grim amusement. It seemed that spacing was not the only punishment that Kane doled out for any dissent. In addition, he borg’d people into grinding involuntary maintenance work and all of them had been one percenters.

It made me worried that I’d find Aria among them, but after double checking, found that she was definitely not turned into a ‘serf’ as Kane had dubbed them.

I finally got a hit on her name as I snuck through a system that was controlling two dozen life support pods on a central level of the torus wheel.

Here were seventeen elites from various parts of Earth, who were not only being mined for information on their companies and very rich families, but were also being ‘re-educated’.

All of them were in BD virtuspaces, being subjected to programmed realities that were trying to break them in various ways; drowning them in the dopamine rush of non-stop sex, torturing them and getting virtually killed in XBDs. Some of those I straight up recognized from the black market catalogue that was available in Night City.

It really tempted me to throw caution out the airlock and re-enact Arasaka Tower on the entire space station.

Finally, I looked through the listed monitor cam and found Aria.

She was in a central pod and hooked up into a pleasure BD.

Even with a feeding tube stuck down her throat, BD wreathe on her brow, a catheter in the plumbing downstairs and having last seen a proper shower for three weeks according to the logs, she still looked stunning in meatspace. Voluptuously full, brown smart hair that styled themselves, not a single blemish on her skin and artistically placed freckles all attached to a body that looked like it belonged on a classical joytoy. It was the best sculpted body that money could buy, with added bio and cyberware that allowed a corpo heiress to function in the high stakes world of those upper echelons. A female face artfully spun from her father’s visage that you could get lost in, delicate pointed jaw, with cheeks that could cut glass.

She was utterly hot and I couldn’t help but imagine her in one of those impossibly expensive Jinguji corpo dresses that would show off that figure, only for me to strip her out of it.

Down V.

I set about mapping a route that would get me from the docking lounge as efficiently as possible to the reeducation pod bay.

A simulation showed that I wouldn’t manage it in one cycle of my thermoptics, so I needed a middle point to hide.

I played it safe and decided to break up the journey into three thermoptic camo cycles, finding a maintenance crawl way, an empty salon and a toilet to wait out the cooldowns.

My hand carefully unplugged the link from my neck and increasing the gain on every sensor the Gemini had, I carefully maneuvered out from behind the reception desk.

I floated towards the leftmost door that would lead me out into the core station and a spoke corridor.

“Two and one…”

My thermoptics engaged and it was barely an effort to hack the door, override the lock and camouflage everything in the system.

I pulled on the railing in the corridor beyond, giving me as much speed as I could safely handle, keeping my attention on a range of cams along my route.

Every door system I had to hack through became a significant challenge in itself. There was no brute forcing anything if I wanted to remain unseen in this cyberspace.

Two corridors and three doors later, I was at a main bulkhead door to the spoke that would take me down into the wheel section of the station and had my first encounter with a station resident, along with two borg security, standing guard with magsoles clamped onto the decking.

It was like looking at two Adam Smashers with more meat on them, lacking on-board projectile weaponry and partially extended mantis blades protruding from their arms. Their armor plates were coated with a mix of artistic gold and platinum, shaped in a way that made them look both intimidating and classical. The inspiration definitely came from an ancient Roman lorica segmentata armor. Their helmets were open, leaving their ‘ganic faces open to glare menacingly at the passing resident.

The resident, for his part, didn’t react bar showing a suitable amount of deference, keeping his head down and pulling his way through the zero-g. His outfit was an asymmetrical smart jacket of synthleather, with projected holographic shoulders that actually gave a visible indicator for his state of health - a solid green currently. Legs covered in slim joggers with reinforced knees and a bunch of holsters that held stim-pens that allowed instant use of designer narcotics.

I had to quickly push myself away in a z-positive direction to avoid him in a potential mid-air collision.

His brows contorted in confusion as I was now stuck to the relative ‘ceiling’ above him and the borgs.    

For all that I was invisible, I couldn’t hide the fact that I displaced air with my movement and it was entirely possible he had picked up on the slightest of breezes that had resulted.

Eventually the elite shrugged it off and pulled himself away down the corridor.

Now I was left with a conundrum, hacking the door with stealth in cyberspace, didn’t mean shit when these two borgs would see the bulkhead door cycle for no apparent reason.

That sort of event, given what I could see of the system log data, would instantly be flagged and draw the attention of Orion.

My simulation hadn’t accounted for their presence, as the security borgs had a randomized presence throughout the station, these two coming to their post just a few minutes ago.

Fuck, this asshole is a paranoid gonk.

With my thermoptic timer ticking, I carefully plunged into the security borg’s systems.

Jack Morris and Blaze Conrad, two former Arasaka security from San Diego. I waved away their history profiles as irrelevant data and focused on their optics and ear cyberware. Orion had also a clear hand in designing their firewalls and it took me nearly 90 seconds to ghost through it, setting up a custom Camouflage hack that overlaid their senses with just enough manipulation that would disguise the door opening. Then to add in more bullshit difficulty, I had to time and coordinate the hack queues to land on the door and borgs to create no discontinuity.

Now.

The bulkhead motors engaged, pulling apart the door and I held my non-existent breath.

Nothing.

Not a twitch, in meatspace or cyber.

I pushed off immediately, threading myself quietly right between the 16 inches of space between the borg’s heads.

Now that I was in the spoke and speeding my way down it, I had to quickly find a new spot for a cooldown. The original movement plan was shot to shit. The other complication being that now I’d have to account for a denser population in these sections.

The moment I got into the first corridor of the wheel’s upper deck, I was immediately confronted by nearly thirty people moving in just one direction, coming and going about their day on Elysium, living under the benighted rule of Kane.

The gravity was at .8G, and there was no way I could get through this amount of traffic without bumping into someone.

With the clock ticking, I took the only route available and climbed the side wall, grabbing onto the emergency railings at the ceiling level. The one advantage of space architecture was that they had to design even the wheel sections for possible zero-g conditions.

Now I was carefully grabbing on, fighting against the spin gravity with every handhold and step, moving right over the heads of every passing resident like a spider.

I reached my first cooldown point with just twenty seconds left.

Hacking my way through a door and five passing residents to land a Camouflage quickhack on their eyes and ears.

The instant it was unlocked and after a quick scan of the interior room - a currently unused party lounge, I sprinted into the blind spot of the local cam behind a couch and reappeared.

I ended up spreading my body out against the back of the couch, letting as much heat radiate into it. There was just too much chance letting it out completely into the air would cause an anomalous local heat spike in the room that would get flagged.

Then, because my luck just had to be that way on this occasion, the room got visitors.

Leading the way was a woman wearing only a flowing purely holographic gown, that radiated out from internal cyberware with shifting nebula patterns. It moved dramatically, as if she was in a constant mild wind. Her eyes were rose-tinted Kiroshis and her skin was covered with starfield tattoos that seemed to pulse and shift with her mood. The gown also shifted contrast smartly in the air, giving tantalizing constant hints of the lush body beneath, but never enough detail.

Walking in behind was a male elite resident, with attire that was minimalist to say the least; a harness belt to hold a few gadgets, artful body paint and exotic holo-tats rippled on skin that was stretched with sculpted, perfect musculature beneath, that actually looked ‘modestly human’, instead of grotesque. He was walking with a hard-on with no apparent embarrassment and it took me a moment to realize from his bland face and body language that it was a constant feature of his appearance, not something that only happened with arousal. A rather interesting modification of the Mr. Studd, not to mention an internal blood supply rework to support it. It was like walking around with a Sir John Phallustiff between your legs and left me feeling intrigued - it was a very pretty example that this guy was sporting as well.

She quickly served herself some champagne, whilst he stood with folded arms in a pose that was at once elegant and slightly predatory. He looked as ready to kill as he looked ready to fuck.

“So what did you find, Celeste?” he asked flatly.

“Serf trying to smuggle a data shard out of the hub,” she said, her voice dripping both honey and menace in equal measure. It felt like you could listen to her talk for hours about watching paint dry and you’d gladly do it. “He thought the maintenance vents would allow him to hide. Liora’s weave caught the anomalous spike in his heart rate before he even reached the spoke.”

“You would think that they’d have learned by now. Spacing or re-education?”

Celeste traced a glowing fingernail along the rim of the glass before taking a long, savored sip, “My dear Damien, do you even need to ask? The serf has outlived his usefulness to Kane. The family groundside has declared him dead; so a nice public spacing. We have new arrivals and they need a pointed lesson about what happens when you forget your place in Elysium.”

“It’s only been a few weeks since the last spacing. We do this too often, it's going to be noticed and interpreted as internal turmoil. This station is being watched by quite a few satellites, remember.”

“Which is entirely the point. Let them watch, there’s nothing they can do.”

Damien shook his head, “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A few years ago, the first pirates managed to attack the Crystal Palace and got away. This year, the first edgerunner is operating and advertising services in LEO and Luna. I think the days of the void being an isolating wild west is coming to an end.”

She scoffed and rolled her eyes, “Don’t be ridiculous, Damien. Your boss’ habits are clearly rubbing off on you. No edgerunner has access to the tech that would be required to approach this station without us knowing about it.”

“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen, Celeste. Harlan Hensley is getting impatient to see proof of life. We don’t produce his daughter soon, he might be pushed into cutting off-”

“He does that, people up here will die and Kane will make sure that it’s those who will be missed by some very powerful people. You’re fretting over nothing. Let’s play devil’s advocate. Let’s say it's possible that someone can infiltrate through every outer protection this station has, do you think they could possibly evade Orion or Liora?”

Damien narrowed his neon-green optics at his interlocutor. “I suppose not.”

“See. We catch them and feed them to the games, slowly. Even put it on broadcast so the rest of the system knows that Elysium is here to stay.”

I finally found a match in the station database on these two. They were members of Kane’s Courtiers, a select inner-circle of ultra-elite residents who served as both social ornaments and functional tools in Magnus Kane’s personal kingdom.

They were not mere groupies; they were hand-picked, heavily augmented to the bounds of what they could tolerate and bound to Kane through a mix of loyalty implants, pleasure addiction and the promise of perpetual privilege on Elysium. Most were former high-society figures, corpo heirs or captured rockerboys who chose ascension into the ranks of Courtiers. Aria had in fact, been on track to join the Courtiers, which was when she had gotten cold feet.

They enforced Kane’s whims, hosted his events, spied on lesser residents and participated in the darker elements of station life. They all wore a holo tattoo on their neck or wrist in the form of an infinity symbol - which was actually a signal from their loyalty implant that could immediately change and show their favor in Kane’s eyes.

“By the way,” she stepped closer to him. “I noticed your code on the latest patch to the implant. Are you trying to hog some of my favorites?”

“Not as such, Celeste,” he admitted. “You let those in the lower ranks enjoy themselves too much. They’ll start to think they deserve it.”

It was moderately difficult for me to parse the context, but some data crawlers quickly came back with the answer. Even on Elysium, Kane had instilled a hierarchy and Damien was technically part of a general security staff, falling under the aegis of Orion.

She stepped even closer, the edges of her holographic clothing brushing through his legs, “They do deserve it, until they don’t, Damien. You’re falling into old habits, treating them like they’re Militech grunts. This isn’t a barracks, it’s a kingdom.”

“If we don’t mix things up, this kingdom will quickly get stale. Kane will get bored and we both know the last time that happened we had to space over 200. It’s just too bad this idea came too late to stop Kane’s latest whim.”

“You mean where he wants us Courtiers to fight in the arena? Don’t tell me you’re getting soft, Damien.”

“Of course not,” he smiled coldly. “Kane wants to see if we still remember how to bleed. You in?”

“What kind of question is that? He might have said it was voluntary, but we both know it’s just another test of loyalty.”

Damien looked off towards the suite’s projected window, showing a constantly shifting view of Earth seemingly spinning below the station. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re still people or just walking, talking decorations for this place.”

She finished the last of her champagne and casually tossed the glass onto the couch I was hiding behind. “We stopped being people the moment we let Liora into our skulls. Now we’re art, Kane’s art.”

“And art doesn’t leave the gallery.”

“So we might as well be the best art on this station, for Kane.”

“For Kane,” he affirmed.

She closed the last distance between them and they melted into an embrace, lips locking on each other and tongues dueling.

He pulled her in even closer, squeezing her bosom tight against his chest. His member now pushed up, trapped between their stomachs and she enthusiastically rubbed her belly against it.

I waited an extra minute to make sure these two were properly distracted with each other before engaging thermoptics and getting out of there.

The Camouflage hack fell on both courtiers, the interior and exterior cams and five others who were passing by the door. 

I put the internal politics of Elysium and the impromptu show I was given behind me and focused.

Jumping onto the upper corridor railing; one hand and foot in front of the other, step by step I moved to my next cooldown point.

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Thankfully, I reached the reeducation bay without being delayed at my cooldown points or any further hiccups.

There was no borg security outside or inside and this part of the station’s torus wheel seemed very thin on general resident traffic. Not too surprising, since this was essentially Elysium’s prison, which didn’t need something so old fashioned as guards, when the prisoners were trapped in their own minds. Each reeducation pod was effectively a robotic doctor that could handle almost any complication or medical requirement for the occupant. There was a single human overseer for the bay, an actual medical doctor, but he was currently in the middle of a party on the other side of the station.

A quick review of surveillance told me he’d been in this party for two days already and the average party on Elysium could last for five or six.

Using the last three minutes of my thermoptic cycle, I stopped behind Aria’s pod and checked the angles of the local cams and sensors, then began copying their data feeds.

I found a tiny blind spot behind the neighboring pod and quickly squeezed myself in there before letting my thermoptics lapse.

For a full hour, I sat scrunched up there, recording and carefully preparing and seeding local systems and cyberspace. That extended to the pods as well, and I drank in the data. Creating an algorithm that bordered on the level of a mini-AI, which would take over and mask any disturbance I made on Aria’s pod.

When I was ready, my Camouflage hack fell and effectively created my own invisible bubble of cyberspace around the pod bay that would give me the freedom to work.

I rose to my feet, stepped in front of my target pod and unwound my link from the back of my neck, directly interfacing with the hidden port under a panel on the side. The visible port was a neat little trap that would instantly throw Black ICE at anyone trying to interface with it.

My backpack dropped to the floor next to me and we began the next major hurdle to this entire gig.

I took out the first gadget, walked over to the small armaglass window that directly looked out into space and gently fastened the fist-sized directional com relay directly onto it.

“Butcher?”

“I’ve already moved the Wraith into position. Direct link to highrider sat in LEO established, ping to NC is 64ms. Only waiting on you to bridge the gap.”

With a careful flick of a button on the relay, I gritted my teeth as I produced the first EM emission that could possibly fuck everything up.

The tiny communication laser speared through the void beyond and sure enough, directly hit the receiver on the Wraith. Butcher had been perfect in his navigation.

“Data uplink established.”

I double checked my commandeered bubble of the station and other sensors beyond it, even going so far as the core.

No passive blips, spikes or anything that I could see, at least not within the resolution that the sensors on Elysium had.

“All right, we’re ready, sending the call.”

It took a few extra moments before I saw Vic’s generic default holocall image that only had two bog-standard letter V’s in my vision.

It rang three times before he picked up.

“V? You’re late,” said the image of my favorite ripperdoc, subtly glaring at me from behind his ever present dark glasses.

“Sorry Vic, complications. Are you ready?”

“I’ve been hooked up to this awful thing for hours, sitting in my own ripper chair-”

“No he hasn’t,” Misty piped up mischievously. For her to be picked up into the call by Vic’s Agent, she’d have to basically be almost shouting into his ear. “He’s been watching boxing all morning!”

“Argh, Misty!” he complained in a betrayed tone.

I giggled, “I’ll let you get the rig on, Vic. Things aren’t too desperate for time here, but we don’t want to push our luck.”

“All right, one sec.”

About eight seconds later I felt Vic opening up a dedicated port in his personal firewall. I peeked through only enough to confirm everything was okay with the interface rig.

“Everything looks fine so far, pings are stable, data throughput is sufficient. Vic, I’m ready, you can hit the switch from your side anytime.”

I heard the ripper take a deep breath, “On the count of… one, two… three.”

Suddenly the connection was strained by the full throughput of Vic’s sensory neural stream pouring into the channel I had prepared for it within my Gemini.

I took a purposeful step back into my datafortress, ceding primary control of it to Vic.

He blinked and immediately had a sense of vertigo, struggling to keep balance.

From his perspective, one moment he had been seated on his ripper chair in his clinic, the next he was standing in the reeducation bay of Elysium in high earth orbit.

He instinctively took a step back, spreading his new legs slightly and swayed, shooting out his arms as if he was on a tight rope. Thankfully, I had thought ahead and put governors in the Gemini so it wouldn’t react too extremely to Vic inexperienced impulses. Otherwise he could’ve probably put my hands through the hull accidentally.

“Whoa,” he said, his own voice coming from my mouth.

“Easy Vic, baby steps first,” I warned.

He nodded, flexing his new hands and looked down. I felt his shudder as a slight case of body dysmorphia hit him as he regarded my looming breasts in his view below. His focus was actually beyond, on my legs as he took another two steps, slowly turning around and I felt him trying to compensate for the differing female gait.

With careful movements he began something that could be likened to a stretching routine, but was more about him just getting a beyond military grade, custom Gemini under control. Most importantly, he worked on the precision of his hands and fingers.

I was also tuning the governors and learning what would work best for him.

It took us nearly nine minutes before we were moderately happy that it was as good as it was going to get.

“This will certainly go a long way for me being ready to be your ripper again,” he commented idly as he gazed into Aria’s pod. “It’s almost too much information…” He winced.

I adjusted the sensory flow again, “Better?”

“Much, I can’t be distracted too much by all that tech babble,” he grumbled, taking a look at the pod’s systems. “Huh, these are modified Trauma Team Autodocs, labeling ripped off. Can you give me a full vitals readout from our patient?”

I streamed the data to the Gemini’s HUD in a format he’d be familiar with.

“Ah, perfect. Hmmm, should be safe to open.”

A quick command and the pod’s outer shell blossomed open into two pieces, the cool air and slightly differing pressures rapidly equalizing.

Vic began a manual inspection of the patient, feeling her neck with his/my hands, before testing her muscle responsiveness, rigidity, taking her pulse and eventually using the Gemini’s own scanners.

“Going old school, Vic?”

“Can never be too careful. You know how viruses can screw with biomons to give false data.”

He reached down and opened the very expensive thermoptic backpack, quickly doing an inventory of the surgical tools I had brought and… “This is the vacuum skin weave?” he pointed to the folded weave in its sterile storage casing.

“That’s it. Doc Njeri said it’s no different than installing any ballistic subdermal.”

“We’ll see about that,” he gently pushed Aria’s head to expose the thankfully standard and unaltered neuroports behind her ear, all of which was occupied with plugs and cabling to interface with the autodoc. “Can you give me the full body readout?”

I rendered that into the Gemini HUD and he took a few minutes to study that from top to bottom.

“That’s the loyalty implant,” he tapped her neck. “Nasty piece of work, right in front of the C3 vertebrae, with direct input-output into the spinal column, wireless access ports, decent enough computing capacity for something that size. Doesn’t really look like something mass manufactured, custom job. Are you seeing what I’m not seeing?”

“The lack of anything like tamper proofing or fail safes? Yeah, there’s nothing. It seems like Kane thinks that no one would ever be in a position to do what we’re doing and for 99% of cases, he’d be right.”

“Lucky us. All right, I can do this, V.”

“How long?”

“Work along the neck is always delicate, so at least an hour, just for that one. If there’s no complication, we can move on to installing the vac weave and the blood pump. Three hours give or take. Can you buy us that?”

“You focus on the surgery, doc. I’ll keep us invisible.”

He picked up the sterilization field unit, monoscalpel and autosuture, leaning forward and awkwardly perched the Gemini’s knees on either side of Aria’s right leg.

“At least I don’t have to worry about getting cramps or even tired… making the first incision…”

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As much as I had seen blood, guts and internal cyberware in my profession, there was something profoundly disturbing about watching a ripperdoc work.

Perhaps it was the fact that Aria was still alive and seeing her neck opened up to expose the spine, along with blood shunts keeping the bleeding to almost negligible levels, the neck muscles teased open and pushed aside…

I firmly kept that data as partitioned as I could, manifesting an avatar in the Relic fortress and burying myself in the job of keeping us undetected.

Barely minutes passed after my resolution, when a roaming two man patrol of security borgs approached our usurped part of the station.

I threw myself into ghosting through their personal firewalls.

Only to find that they had been rotated with an entirely new cipher.

I didn’t even need to ask, as Butcher and I attacked the problem simultaneously.

The borgs were mere feet away from the outer doors of the reeducation bay when we managed to breach through.

My Memory Wipe landed on both like a meteor.

They stopped and one looked to the other in confusion. Their minds virtually hiccupped and rationalized the occurrence away.

Their feet thumped with armored boots on deck, as they turned around on the spot and promptly began guarding the main bulkhead door to the bay.

“Nicely done, Butcher,” I smirked to my AI partner. He had slipped in a seamless alteration to their default patrol mission planning. Now we had effectively usurped two security guards for ourselves.

He simply tilted his avatar’s head in acknowledgement.

“V, what are we doing about the loyalty implant uplink signal?” Vic asked, his hands steadily working to release the implant’s micro clamps from the cervical bone.

“You’ll find a spoofer in the backpack, spherical, marked clearly, you’ll need to adapt the interface…”

“Got it,” Vic held up the coin sized device.

“I’ve also already uploaded her typical biometric feedback patterns. It’ll fool Elysium’s Pleasure Net long enough for our escape.”

“Just how are you going to manage that by the way? You’re clearly planning on a space jump, but how are you getting to an airlock with her in tow?”

“Well, first you’re going to have to tweak her face and hair just enough that she doesn’t get flagged by cams. I’m now working on inserting a new ID for her in the system, much easier to do now. I already have my own. At that point it’s just a matter of playing a suitable role that lets us blend in, which I’ll leave to your imagination.”

Vic began working with the autosolder tool, adjusting the interface of the spoofer before carefully attaching it to every microport of the implant.

“Good to go on my end.”

With a single thought, the data feeds switched, “The spoofer is in control, you can begin full removal.”

It didn’t take long after that and Vic held out the entire implant and spoofer assembly, scowling at it in disgust, “You know, I’ve seen a lot of shit that cyberware could do in my day. This easily ranks in the top five worst uses I’ve seen, especially considering it's a custom kit job.”

“What’s worse than this?” I asked curiously.

“You’d need to feed me quite a bit of tequila before I’d even consider telling you kid, and especially not something I need to think about while I’ve got a patient open in front of me. Now I need to figure out if this vac weave will even fit in with her ballistic subdermal, off you go, back into the corner.”

I took the big hint and pushed the primary window of my Gemini to the side.

“Butcher, get me a line to Nix and Yoko.”

A quick check to see what Orion and Liora were up to.

Managing Elysium to Kane’s specs took most of their time, especially the loyalty implant monitoring and working on new virtuspaces that would keep the residents entertained, busy and content with their addiction. That was Liora’s primary job and it was as I was reviewing some of her latest braindances out of interest that I spotted something…

The primary tool that the netrunner was using to create the BDs; it was entirely custom, programmed by the joytoy herself and was pulling from a library of base emotional data that she was weaving together.

I watched invisibly in her cyberspace as her avatar sat in a huge spherical dome - she was currently in mermaid form - a curtain of red hair behind her head, full breasts and rosy nipples on display leading to an eight pack abdomen before becoming the classical fishtail - her hands playing with a multi-spherical tool as an element of her BD came to life in front of her.

It was a woman, one of the Elysium residents, manifested into a scene that any corpo worth their eddies would know how to navigate, the ‘office party’.

A simple name for an event that could make or break a career in a heartbeat. One wrong word, glance, gesture or even your bloody body language could see you shunted into a dead-end position or in the worst case, even fired the next day. In Araska, the office party was even a signal of intent from the higher ups that there would be restructuring or redundancies in the works. The bosses were looking for any excuse to trim the fat.

Why Liora would choose this to base an erotic BD on was revealed as she weaved a narrative that saw the Elysium resident in question, Isabella Atkinson, make that critical mistake. It led to a humiliation and exhibitionism fetish.

I saw the raw data being weaved and was utterly astonished.

The holy grail of BDs was right in front of me.

Here, on Elysium, somehow, a former joytoy and netrunner, had disposed of the need for having a BD actor with a rec implant.

The fuck? 

“V? I have Nix and Yoko waiting,” Butcher prompted.

I carefully pulled my way out of Liora’s BD programming sphere. “Sorry about that. I just-”

“No need to explain, V,” Butcher’s many arms folded. “It is a remarkable discovery. That it was done on Elysium is not too surprising, given the lack of any moral scruples here. The data I’m seeing in her BD library indicates that the majority of it was derived from BD users that… expired while wearing it.”

“So she gives them a BD that induces the emotions she wants, to the point they die from it? Then records that?”

“Correct, the novel application here is the recording process. It is deleterious to the subject.”

“A destructive scan,” I nodded, feeling my anger spike and my virtual teeth wanted to gnash each other into digital oblivion. The temptation to throw my most destructive Synapse Burnout straight into Liora’s skull sponge was very great. “Wait a minute, take a look at the date on most of the library data.”

“It correlates to the time just before the 200 residents were spaced at once. Clearly, Liora got her use out of them before it happened.”

I rubbed my face wearily and brought up the data lines to my former netrunner mentors.

Nix’s avatar appeared, mirroring his meatspace self down to the last blemish on his face, round shades, dark skin, yellow netrunner suit with a dark sleeveless jacket over it. He wasn’t one to bother with fancy elaborate avatars with those closest to him.

“Yo, V,” he waved non-chalantly. 

Yoko Tsuru appeared next and her avatar was her typical spin on a Japanese nekomata, or a humanoid cat spirit, with an elaborate kimono that was blowing dramatically behind her in a non-existent wind.

“V,” greeted Yoko with perfect neutrality, yet I could see in her dark cat eyes give a particularly unfriendly glint towards Nix. It was hard to restrain myself from invasively interpreting their data with my Post-Human eyes.

“Thank you for taking the time for this.”

Nix shrugged, “Not a problem. Figured that this would be more of a team effort after what I dug up on this place.”

“You have certainly come far,” Yoko said as she looked around at the invisible redoubt I had created out of Elysium cyberspace.

Nix snorted with derision, “Say it like it is, Yoko. Neither of us could do this, not unless we had a few years of prep time with full access. That AI of yours is still friendly, V?”

“My status is as it always has been, Nix,” declared Butcher, suddenly appearing to their perceptions beside me.

Nix jerked and winced, “Yeah, just checkin’, you know.”

I gave my former mentors a nod, “We have had a delay, but you are clear to begin your distraction on my mark, which should be within the next three hours. I’m uploading a full profile of the two dwellers running things here.” My hands held the virtual files and I flung copies straight to them. “Yoko, I suggest you take on Liora, whilst Nix can take on Orion. I’m paying you for a distraction, not a fight to the death, so please…”

“You sure about this V?” Nix grimaced. “If there’s anyone that deserves my best Burnout, then it's this crazy joytoy.”

“I’d like nothing more than to place a few hundred pounds of C-6 in this place my friends,” I shook my head. “But it’d be the last thing we do as we’re hunted down by a world of the worst scum that the elites can finance.”

“Then it is done,” declared Yoko. “Nix, do be sure to be appropriately dressed for the fight.”

“Yeah, yeah, stop being short-circed already. I beat ya fair and square.”

Their avatars vanished as they disconnected.

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“Last connection… and… done,” Vic lifted the autosuture, pulled out the catheter, feeding tubes and gave his patient one last scan. Nodding to himself he reached down and unplugged the cables from Aria’s neuroports. “I suppose it’s out of the question that you at least give her four hours of recovery?”

“Yes, our ride can only stay hidden for so long.”

He lifted a hypo injection, “Give her this exact dose. It’ll juice her to wake up nearly instantly. Be ready for a bad reaction.”

“Thanks Vic, excellent work as usual.”

“Get her out of here, V. Good luck.”

I felt him disconnect and for a brief moment my body almost tipped over.

Surging forward into control I caught myself on the rim of the pod.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” I reached forward and jabbed the injector straight into Aria’s neck, pushing the button. The injector hissed as it did its job.

I took a few measured steps back to give her space.

“Aaaaaaa!”

The ear splitting scream shattered the pod bay’s mild silence and she impressively surged towards me with a flat handed spade strike directly towards my neck.

She didn’t have a Sandy, but did have a tuned Kerenzikov that enhanced reflexes, but nowhere near military grade.

I caught her strike at the wrist, stopping it flat.

She tried to pull it back, but found breaking my grip utterly impossible.

She tried to unbalance me with a low sweeping kick, straight out of the Kenpo martial arts skill chip she had implanted.

A lifted right leg at the precise moment intercepted it and I engaged my Sandy.

The next thing a frantically struggling Aria Hensley knew, her limbs were effectively immobilized, her back against the pod as I had both her arms tangled and pushed against her abdominal core, with my superior weight not letting her get any leverage.

“LET ME GO! No! Let me…!”

“Alcohol! Sermon! Breathe! Effort, 43, Undertake, Convulsion, Soviet.”

Her frantic efforts to escape stopped halfway through the code phrase her father had given me.

Heart still racing a mile a minute, breathing hard she stared at me in honest, baffled confusion and amazement. “You… You're working for daddy? How? No, this is impossible. I’m probably in another sick escape fantasy that Liora generated. It’s not going to work, Liora! You won’t-”

My light backhanded slap across her left cheek stopped that. “You are not in a BD.”

She snorted with an incredulous laugh, “Yeah right. I really don’t know why you’re trying this tack again, Liora-”

I slapped her again and again.

“Ouch! No! Stop that!”

I lowered my hand immediately.

Aria blinked in surprise. “Wha-”

“Alcohol, sermon, breathe, effort, 43, undertake, convulsion, soviet. This code phrase is something that not even you were aware of until I used it appropriately. It’s buried inside a disguised biochip hidden under your left eardrum. Modern corpo security for the top one percent, where even your memories might not be secure. It should’ve released the memory where this chip was implanted and the code phrase.”

Her eyes now glared at me with suspicion, but the tiniest spark of hope as well. “I- I can’t be sure that it wasn’t compromised as well. Kane’s rippers might’ve found it.”

“Yes, you’ve gone through a whole pile of shit, Aria. Unsure now of what is real and what isn’t. That isn’t going to go away for a long time without extensive therapy and psychosurgery, but right now we don’t have time for me to play shrink. My name is V, merc, and I’ve infiltrated Elysium to get you out of here. There is a military SSTO waiting for us, but the clock is ticking on it remaining hidden in the void out there.”

I let her arms go, settling her feet back on the deck.

She winced, rubbing her wrists and cheek, fully taking me in and scanned the rest of the reeducation bay, “I’ve… my Agent is back…”

“I’ve got a few safeguards on it, so you don’t accidentally radiate something that gives us away.” I held up the loyalty implant and it’s spoofer.

Her eyes instantly scanned it, her Agent giving her the confirmation.

Her hand flew to her neck, feeling the freshly knitted skin there. I felt her Agent also giving a general diagnostic report on her condition and changes Vic had made. “You did this? What? You’re a ripper too?”

“No, but my own ripper did a proxy consult through me,” I gestured to the open backpack and all its surgical tools laid out on the surface.

Aria shook her head, “This… is too crazy even for Liora. A proxy ripper, you’ve given me a weave that’ll let me go into space in just my skin and a breathing mask…”

“Don’t judge yet, you haven’t heard how we’re going to get to the nearest airlock without being caught.”

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A/N: Poor corpo princess :-) V's brand of crazy is gonna be a whole new level.

Have a great weekend, chooms. Stay awesome.