Resolved to face any challenge to save his mom, David was instead shoved back onto his bed while Fur Hat went and got a jumpsuit to peel all the bandages off of him and check him over. Another big guy with a wide face, but this one was blond and cheerful looking. Enough to make him feel less pathetic at how easily he went along with it.
He made quick work of ripping off the bandages and wiping away any trace of the weird gunk beneath them. Probably making sure their nano-whatevers didn't get stolen by anyone. With how fast they'd fixed him up David could definitely see why they'd be worried. Other than a few twinges in his joints, he felt good as new. There wasn't even any swelling.
It drove home how bad his mom had to be hurt, cuts and bruises still livid on her skin after being soaked in the same stuff. Then came the memory of how much even a tiny aerosol of Bruise Smasher © had cost in the school store.
If he ran the numbers…
David rolled his shoulders. Settling the less-than-legal implant safely against the small of his back. Then he placed a hand on his mom's cheek, so gentle that he was barely touching her at all, and took one last breath to let himself feel the nerves.
With the same total lack of warning as ever, Fur Hat was standing at the foot of the bed, and it was time to go. David rose from his seat on the bed-
-and his feet came down on concrete. The thunder of waves nearly deafened him after the silence of the gangers hideout. Salt spray and chemical stink washed over him together with the acid sting of unfiltered water.
He was standing on the Wellsprings pier. Him, a handful of equally confused 'patients', and an extremely distracted couple, all standing on the dimly lit viewing platform at the end of the pier.
Their arrival was starting to dawn on the couple, but they were both more concerned with getting their clothes back on than asking where they'd come from. One of the other patients cleared his throat and started trying to get the others attention, a cheap suit and premature worry lines pegged him as a low level corpo from a mile off though, and David wasn't the only one who ignored him.
Might have been the only one who felt like he was seeing his future laid out in the gonk shouting after them as they hustled to get off the pier before Valentinos showed up.
'Don't get distracted.' He'd seen enough street race wipeout XBDs to know the pier wasn't the quiet spot an out of towner like Fur Hat must have assumed. 'Get to Market St. Get on the NCART. Get home.'
Sure enough, David and the two walking beside him -all of them determinedly not making eye contact in case anybody started thinking they were together- had just barely gotten off the pier when a heavily modded Shion MZ1 rolled past them. With their music turned down to merely deafening out of respect for the fancier end of Heywood, David figured they were more likely to be partying than patrolling.
Either way, he was glad not to have encountered them halfway along the pier. Instead he was already blending into the cautious anonymity of the street. Splitting off from the other two patients without a word and walking right past the handful of NCPD keeping an eye on the nighttime tourist traps that were just starting to get busy.
It was only after getting past them that David remembered what he was carrying and how it would have turned out for him if they'd gotten it in their heads to stop the battered punk in an EMT jacket wandering down their nice street.
'Chill gonkbrain. Chill. You are the chillest.'
He kept repeating it to himself all the way to the monorail station. Even after he realised he had no idea how he was meant to get back with the money.
Life was pain.
It had always been true. It just wasn't usually so literal.
Even so, Gloria refused to give in to the siren song lingering in her veins. Blissed out ambivalence had given way to a bone deep sort of weariness, and sleep felt warm and numb and dangerously close.
Flexing her pinky sent a stabbing pain through up her arm and left her fighting not to pant -her ribs were agony even breathing as shallowly as she possibly could- but very much awake.
Awake and alone.
The bed beside her was empty. Sheets turned down as neatly as any hospital she'd worked in. Cleaner than most of them.
No sign of her mijo.
She had to hope that meant he'd escaped. That she was doomed to lie alone and in agony, until they lost patience and dissected her.
The thought reminded her of what had already been done to her, of her entire torso emptied into the air, and without David around to keep her strong Gloria began to weep. Sheer terror coursed down her spine and met disgust and horror coming up from her gut. It was all she could do not to sob at the combination of feelings, bile trickling into her throat but getting no higher.
She could no more afford to vomit with fear than to vocalise her despair. So she lay in the neat little bed, encased in achingly heavy casts, and tried to come to terms with her death.
At least whatever they'd given her stopped her from pissing herself when she heard the surgeon coming. Chatting loudly with one of his gangers like they were out for a stroll and not maybe about to cut someone to pieces.
"Sorry Captain."
"Stop apologising. And don't give me that look. It was fair."
"But we got a third of the treasury too."
"And Strawhat got to be an Emperor. And recruited Kaido's son as well." The door swung open and loud but muffled voices turned to worryingly raised. "What's a few measly fruit compared to that?"
With what little she could see of them, Gloria still couldn't have mistaken the mountain of white fur as anything but a highspec exotic bodysculpt. She also couldn't understand a word that they said, even though the voice was the same one that had been talking to the surgeon in english moments before.
Even though her cyberdeck was running her -also work mandated- translation module just fine.
Jamming shouldn't have mattered. Her language libraries were all chipped in.
The surgeon kept talking, snapping her out of her brief distraction from mind-gnawing terror.
"Nobody cares what Kidd got. He's an asshole. And put your translator back on."
The poser bear replied with more nonsense. It sounded a little like Spanish, or maybe Japanese, except it definitely wasn't either one.
"Nobody likes wearing them, same as nobody likes Kidd. So stop- Hey, Redhead."
Gloria tried not to shake. Tried not to whimper when the surgeon walked right up to her bedside and she found her head gently tipping to the side until she was looking straight up instead of at David's vacant bed. He hadn't needed to touch her to do it.
Lucky her, he was busy flicking through her chart instead of sketching out his dissection schedule. She focused on what she could see of it to try and keep from hyperventilating. Not like she could read it, but the literal paperwork wasn't something she had seen outside of a few major system outages and power cuts. It almost made sense if they had a jammer up at all times, and a good jammer was an essential tool for Scavs.
Distraction wasn't helpful when all her thoughts led back to the same place.
She nearly missed him muttering, "These doses don't make sense." Then he was in her space, so fast she didn't see him move, and tapping at her chemplant with the tip of one finger.
His gaze shifted to look at her, close enough that she could pick out his eye colour and count the hairs in his messy goatee. Strange. "Oi, Redhead, this thing was juicing you, wasn't it?" He sounded absurdly proud of knowing the function of such a basic implant, and juice was such old slang she barely understood him, but Gloria nodded anyway. As much as she could nod.
Then he was gone. Fiddling with her IV in the corner of her eye and telling what she could now see was a full size polar bear in a jumpsuit, "I'll fix this. You grab another nutrient bag. A proper one."
More nonsense spilled from the bear. Naughty bear hadn't put his translator back on. Gloria wondered again about what the language was, while liquid bliss started to flow through her once again. Just a taste of it this time, but it was enough to send her spinning off into memories of a british vid she loved when she was a kid.
"Welsh," She croaked at the world. "That sounds like Welsh, not Spanish."
The surgeon was talking some more, but Gloria was already beyond understanding any of it, even with his translator to help her.
She drifted off. Dimly managing to put a finger on what was so strange about his face.
She hadn't seen a single sign of an implant. Not even…a neck…port…
After cramming himself into a crowded late night NCART, dodging picksockets in the Wollesen St Station, then walking two blocks with his eyes on a swivel, David made it home to Megabuilding H4.
The stench of vomit splattered across the S.C.S.M. by the entry stairs welcomed him back. It was slightly more nauseating than the normal smells of the atrium at night, and not nearly bad enough for maintenance to be sent out with the pressure washers.
Some of the dorphers slumped against the walls glanced up as he shouldered his way to the elevator and rammed enough of a gap to squeeze inside. The other riders ignored him though, and he even managed to get his back safely to a wall. Pressing against it until he felt the hard lines of the implant pressing into his skin.
He still had it. His mom's lifeline hadn't been cut.
Course, he had fucked up enormously by not getting instructions on how to get back to the ganger hospital with the money. Plus he had no idea how he would get the money together in the first place.
"Fucking preem." He muttered to himself. Voice lost in the hum of ads from the screens and the not quite sub-vocal screaming of one of his twitchier fellow bodies in the elevator. They could have been singing along with the latest glittercore or just two steps from cyberpsychosis, either way everyone else in the elevator kept to their own problems and that suited David just fine.
Living in Night City might mean you were never more than a dozen feet from another body, but at least it was never hard to feel alone.
His floor came up and David managed to shove his way into the flow of people exiting the elevator. Then it was just a quick dash up two flights of steps, careful not to step on anyone dossing in the corridor, and-
ACCESS DENIED
RENT PAST DUE
"Fuck!" Swearing and kicking the door made him feel a little better, but it didn't open and the guys playing cards across the hall didn't even look up. The old guy crashed out on the floor did stir enough to scratch himself but that was as close as anyone got to acknowledging his life's latest gut punch.
David didn't bother wasting time thinking how it was probably his fault that his mom hadn't paid rent that morning. He'd seen a trick to getting in without using the door in a very nearly X kind of BD and while that had been scrolled on the other side of the city, Megabuildings were all built the same. Mostly.
Sure enough, he only got a little scraped on a fan while worming his way through the vents. Wiping the resulting trickle of blood out of his eyes as he braced himself and kicked the vent cover off of their apartment wall.
Home sweet home.
The place was a tip. Almost the same as ever, but for the path he could pick out where his mom's morning was laid out like he was watching an NCPD reconstruction.
There was the cushion thrown off the couch when she woke up late and panicked at the time. Then came the trail of wrappers that made up her morning routine. Four instant hygiene, two stims, and a lonely burrito wrapper she'd grabbed from the machine on her way to grab her clothes.
The sheets were still rumpled where she'd gotten dressed. Probably the closest she'd come to sleeping in her bed all week.
"Honestly mijo, you should just take it and I'll crash in the bunk." He mimicked his mom's gentle tone. "I get plenty of sleep between shifts at the hospital."
He'd stopped believing that line when he was six, but she'd kept right on saying it. Just like she kept telling him to stick to the straight and narrow path through life. While she was klepping implants and selling them on the night market. Like always, the lie didn't burn him half so much as that she hadn't felt like she could trust him with the truth. Like he wasn't strong enough to handle it.
David shrugged off her jacket and stripped out the implant. Milspec and looking preem as hell. He'd never have known it had come out of a corpse by the state of it. Mom was good at this.
Lucky him, he didn't have to cut metal out of corpses and clean the blood off it. He just had to find the detes of this 'Maine' gonk and get it sold.
Systematically tearing through the apartment took him longer than he would have thought, but David found the chip where his mom had stashed her contacts. After finding nearly thirty credchips in all the other hiding places he hadn't known their apartment had.
Even as he confirmed the contents of her contact chip -poorly hidden beneath a file partition and a stack of generic porn stills- David was still reeling from how much she'd 'saved'.
€$20,054.19
On the face of it, rent shouldn't have been a problem. Even paying for the damages at the Academy wasn't the impossibility he had thought it was. It was just a huge chunk of his mom's life savings, that she absolutely wouldn't be able to explain how she got. Fuck.
Having the scratch was one thing. Spending it without the NCPD, or worse, CityMed, coming knocking? That was the tricky part.
Still. If he'd known. If he had known. He would have just bought the wreath update and none of this would have happened.
He'd just wanted to help out a bit. Same reason he started slinging XBDs at Arasaka Academy.
€$20,259.57
Looking at the balance after throwing in everything he'd ever made off of dealing for Doc, David felt more pathetic than ever.
Even worse when he considered that she would have had to know how much she had saved up, but Gloria Martinez had still told him to leave her behind. To swap the Sandevistan for his life and gamble that they would be satisfied with cutting her up for spare parts.
'This isn't enough.'
He needed more money to have any hope of buying her life. Even then it would probably come with strings and he could already imagine what they'd pick. A steady supply of implants like this would be too good for them to resist, and that was where he had to pin his hopes.
It'd cost everything they had, and his mom would be in thrall to the gang for the rest of her life, but at least she'd be alive.
Maybe if he threw himself back into Arasaka Academy, and worked a thousand times harder, than maybe, someday, he could buy her freedom.
David allowed himself the daydream for a moment. Him in a fancy corpo suit, Arasaka security busting up Fur Hat and his jumpsuits, his mom in a fancy apartment he'd buy for her, getting to live her life at long last.
He could do it. He would do it.
Starting with calling-
"What the shit?" David saw his missed calls for the first time since the crash and wondered what in the fuck Katsuo thought he was playing at. Dozens of calls and messages from the prick. Didn't he know how to recognise the calls weren't going through? "Whatever." David shrugged and deleted the lot.
He barely caught a glimpse of the lone Arasaka Academy message ID as his inbox vanished into digital destruction.
A decent Netrunner could have recovered it easily. Not being any kind of hacker at all, David could only sigh and resolve to call them in the morning and hope they hadn't sent him a message to say he was expelled or some shit like that.
This time nothing distracted him at the last moment, and his call went through.
And rang out.
"Fuck!"
Shaking, shivering, and craving.
Modern medical stimulants might not have the same withdrawal symptoms as more primitive ones, but Gloria would have almost preferred exhaustion and lethargy to feeling like she was stuck in a blizzard and the only thing that would make her warm again was a refill.
At least they'd given her something to bite down on after her teeth started chattering like the old subway lines.
She wondered what they thought they could get for her teeth, and how much any chipping would knock off the price.
Running through the symptoms of withdrawal from her particular cocktail of stims again, Gloria questioned if paranoia counted when they really were out to get you. Then she ran through the symptoms again and wondered how the hell she was coherent enough to be asking herself that. Or remembering medical information.
As much as she'd been ignoring the dangers of upping her dosage time and again, she'd never been under any illusions as to those dangers. Going cold so suddenly should have put her into shock. Even letting her dose taper down would have been a huge shock to her body, and it wasn't hard to guess that whatever designer anaesthetic they'd klepped and dosed her with, the gangers were too dumb to jack into her chemplant and modify the settings so it didn't dump its entire tank into her bloodstream fighting to keep her awake.
Even if the drugs cancelled out so completely that the stim overdose did nothing, she still should have been suffering withdrawal a hundred times worse than the miserable state she was feeling.
The rest of her injuries were even weirder.
With her newfound clarity Gloria could finally take some stock of the state she was in. Terrifying as it was to recall having her insides floated in front of her, the sight was impressed on her memory so strongly that she might as well have been looking at a scan output. The results of which were, as she had thought immediately after the crash - it couldn't possibly have been just a day ago, could it? - extremely fatal.
Shattered bones and ruined organs. Her heart had looked fine, but nothing else had. It was the kind of damage that would have made Trauma Team a small fortune for the week or two their client would have spent healing after all the surgery.
So she should have been dead twice over. Dying in a hospital bed at best, given the kind of care she could afford and CityMed's absolute lack of medical benefits. Then dead again on top of that from the massive withdrawal.
Instead she was feeling a fraction of the withdrawal she should have been, and a fraction of the pain that her injuries should have meant.
The shakes weren't even doing much to increase the pain. Which made no sense at all.
Even with whatever stolen experimental tech that surgeon had used. Even with the awe-inspiring skill that he'd operated with. Even with the designer meds and surgical nanites they must have given her in her sleep. Even with all that, there was only so fast a person could heal. She should still have been a delicate patchwork of shattered bone and shredded meat. Violent withdrawal shakes should have been reopening every wound and rebreaking every bone.
Instead, she just ached a lot. And itched. And felt an overwhelming urge to move that she had to fight constantly.
But while it was far from pleasant, it wasn't anything close to what it should have been. Not when her internal clock was showing 06:17, barely twenty hours since the flood of errors and alerts that marked the crash. Maybe twelve since she spoke to David, going by when her cyberdeck had flagged her chemplant running dry.
It was impossible. Miraculous. And medical miracles…
Miracles sang to the streetrat that had once stared up at red red skies, searching for any glint of an AV-4 and cheering for the real life heroes who inspired her favourite vid stars.
They whispered to the girl who buried her parents, tore down her TTI-Miami posters, and tuned into Phoenix Redwyne's latest pirate broadcast. Hanging on every word that the Edgerunner clinic's Medias put out into the world.
They roared at the woman who hurled the pregnancy test at her apartment wall and punched the mirror until it was glittering dust in the bloody ruin of her knuckles. Fourteen years old, she turned on the water and washed her dreams away.
Now here those dreams were. Impossible and beautiful things. Closer than her own skin, and…just as far out of her reach as ever.
It was cruel. Even by Night City standards.
But, oh how it made the dreamer buried inside her want to dream again.
None of that matters , said the other part of her. The practical part of her. The part that kept her fed and sheltered and alive, and David along with her. Dreams or no dreams, you're going to die here.
'Who gives a shit?' She thought right back at it, and the cruelty along with it. Crushing the pessimism and the cynicism and the paranoia out of her thoughts with sheer will. 'If I'm gonna die anyway, and I can't do anything else, then what's the harm? Isn't it okay to let go, just a little, in the end?'
She was trapped in a bed, doom hanging over her, and her whole body throbbing in time with her heartbeat. Gloria had nothing left to give. Why not just close her eyes and dream a little? What was the point in dwelling on misery when she could relax into the memory of hope and potential and the moment she looked into her son's eyes for the first time, like she could fall into them forever, like it was all finally worth it.
Like she was…
Worth.
.
.
.
The next time she woke up, Gloria found that she wasn't shaking any more. Or she was shaking a lot less anyway.
Her head felt clearer too. Though she wasn't sure how much of that was pharmacology and how much was that she had, honestly, had more consecutive hours of sleep since the crash than she'd allowed herself in years.
She'd barely remembered what it felt like to be well rested. Now if only she could be awake without being in constant pain and immobilised and terrified.
At least the fear was easier to handle with a clear head.
Instead of spiralling into more thoughts about how crazy it was that she felt as good as she did, Gloria took the time to look around the room properly. She could move her eyes and not much else, but the surgeon had left her head propped up on some pillows. That was enough for her to cast an eye over what could only be a recovery ward.
The lack of windows was nothing new to her, or anyone who worked in the parts of Night City where windows meant a way for bullets to get inside. Nor was metal walls and ceilings a look she was unfamiliar with. The floor though, well she was only able to get a tiny glimpse of it out the corner of her eye, so she was probably just imagining it.
After all, how would some gangers afford wooden floors? It had to be fake.
Now she was lucid enough to notice them, the other patients weren't a surprise. Most of the beds in the room were occupied with forty or so people with injuries ranging from bad to worse to one or two who looked as bad as she felt. Out of the ones she could see well, there were a couple flavours of streetscum and a whole spread of desperate-faced movers, with a few genuine Mx Whos scowling at the walls for not dispensing joytoys and black lace at their slightest whim.
The Arasaka suit was a shock though. She had definitely seen Trauma Team arriving before she passed out and while she could maybe imagine some rich gonks feeling too invincible to pay them or falling for one of their supposed competitors, Arasaka's standing contract with Trauma Team was common knowledge. How much of the Megacorp it covered had been a significant part of her decision to send David to Arasaka Academy.
So how was the suit, and at least one Arasaka-stamped bodyguard that she could see, sitting in some ganger's basement hospital?
They couldn't have actually fought off Trauma Team. That was, well she had known enough Edgerunners to know it wasn't impossible, but the normal method involved jamming the tracker and hiding the patient before they showed up, or just flatlining the poor bastard.
The more she looked around, the more her worries came back to her, and the less sense any of it made.
Gloria rolled her eyes back up to stare at the ceiling, bulky retro lightbulbs blaring back down at her. Then the beeping started. Just a few moments before someone's monitors started to scream and the room exploded into motion.
Gangers ran in so fast that it was only the door swinging against the wall that let her know they hadn't been teleported in. The surgeon was among them faster than she could blink, still holding his absurdly oversized sword, and by the way every one of them immediately followed his lead, Gloria realised that he wasn't just a surgeon. He was a leader.
One leading his gang through emergency procedures with the icey composure of a hardened Medtech. Even as the Arasaka bodyguard sitting wide awake on the bed behind him kept his eyes firmly forward and made absolutely no attempt to escape. Which also said some things.
While she was thinking about that, the swarm of jumpsuits and their leader had gotten the patient stabilised and were making ready to move him. Giving instructions to one another with no regard for whether they were being translated into English, or speaking in the bizarre mish mash of vaguely Japanese sounds that they must have been used to.
Enough made it across the language barrier for Gloria to follow along. The patient, whose chrome was as bright and tacky as he was young, had flickering eyes and an abrupt loss of consciousness, together with plummeting vitals. They'd gotten him stabilised for the moment but he was starting to seize. She didn't have to be a full doc to see the obvious conclusion.
Cyberdeck malfunctions after an impact to the skull -sometimes days or weeks after- weren't an uncommon callout. Ripper jobs especially tended to be crosswired with neurons they shouldn't be and when they broke, those connections would start to short circuit and take whole chunks of someone's brain with them.
Fortunately it was a simple enough fix that even the lowly Emergency MedTechs got trained how to do it. The problem was how little time the patient had, compared to how long their response time was. Not a problem the gangers shared, so at least he'd live another-
"Get him to surgery one. I'm yanking that thing out of him."
-day.
The surgeon's words, his casual declaration of impending murder, chilled Gloria's blood…and then ignited it.
He had skills and tech and resources that she couldn't even dare to dream of. A patient in front of him just like countless others that she had been too late to save. And he was going to vivisect the kid for spare parts, like he was nothing.
Maybe she was more under the sway of the drugs than she thought.
Maybe she was a better person than she'd ever really imagined.
Maybe she was just sick of people like her being treated like dirt.
Whatever the reason, and before she could think twice, Gloria Martinez made the dumbest mistake of all her thirty one years and broke one of the biggest rules of Night City in the process.
She got involved.
"Murderer!" She shouted. Tried to shout. Failed to shout. Failed to do much more than croak angrily. Then her brain caught up to her mouth and the rule reasserted itself. Too late to stop the surgeon's eyes from fixing on her as he was leaving the room, his gangers rolling the kid out the door ahead of him.
He hung back as they kept going, and her blood might have been ice cold in her veins beneath his stare, but she kept going anyway. A thready whisper this time, but recognisable words all the same.
"One busted implant and you're gonna rip him up and sell the scraps? I hope you rot."
He blinked down at her and let a lazy smirk spread across his face. "Good morning Redhead. Feeling better?"
Horrified realisation was spreading through her, so Gloria made sure to spit her words out before it could stop them. "Stuff yourself."
The confused blink she got back was…not the response she expected. It was incongruous enough to snap her out of the suicidal rage that had overtaken her. Far too late.
The practical side of her had been right after all. Sure enough, the smirk fell from the surgeon's face and he reached out with his free hand. One finger pointed up as the world tinted blue, and he intoned, "Takt."
This time her entire body floated up out of the bed, instead of just her insides, but she still agreed with the terrified gasps from the other patients. Then the world blinked into a completely different room, like, like-
"Did we just fucking teleport?!"
Forget advanced technology. Teleportation was something out of cheesy sci-fi vids and games. But the surgeon's gang were more concerned with her floating next to him then with them both appearing in the same surgical suite she dimly remembered waking up in.
The kid was already all set up on the table, with a jumpsuit clad ganger keeping him stable. In between joining in on what was increasingly turning into a shouting match, where nobody had bothered to keep their translators on.
The surgeon cut across it with a sweep of his hand, pointing most of them towards the door. Then he spoke to the three that stayed in the room, over the muttering of those leaving, "Put your translators back on."
In a moment they had done it, and a chorus of "Yes captain." came from the three of them. In English, but barely any less baffling for it. They definitely weren't military. So why 'captain'?
The captain gestured and she soared through the air, every part of her body supported so that she felt, if anything, more comfortable than she had in the bed. Finding herself suspended above the kid on the surgical table, Gloria wondered if he was going to make her watch.
Instead, he said, "Now, why will pulling that implant kill him?"
It was hard to say if she was more caught off guard by the implication of the question, or the stupidity of it. "What do you mean why? It's embedded in his brain, pendejo."
"Hardly, it's tucked under the brainstem." Her glare actually seemed to affect him, somehow, because his eyes softened a fraction and he continued. "It'll be an easy extraction. He won't feel a thing."
"Then you can sell it, huh." She spat, disgusted at the justification. As if butchering someone was fine if they didn't feel the pain of it.
Except it was their turn to be taken aback, all four of them looking at her like she'd installed an extra head.
The one keeping the kid stable spoke up first, "Wait. We can sell these things?"
"Who's buying them?" Another of the gangers asked, head cocked to the side.
"Secondhand organs?" The first one shot back. The two of them chatting about the idea like it was some odd hypothetical and not the reality of walking down the wrong alleyway in Night City.
"Lightly used maybe? How do you check?"
"I wouldn't want someone else's old brain box thing."
"You'd need a brain first."
"Quiet." The captain cut them off. Then he grasped the air and she was pulled towards him like he'd grabbed her collar, suddenly reminded that he was a very dangerous man who could kill her at any time. Who was glaring down at her with fury in his eyes. "You think I want to steal some junk from his head and sell it? You think I'm going to kill him for that?"
"A-aren't you?"
She almost thought she saw hurt in his eyes for a moment. Anger was definitely there though. A whole hell of a lot of it. "That kid is my patient, and he's dying cause of that crap in his head. I thought someone we found with a doctor's gear in their pockets might know something about that, but if you're no use to me-"
'Goodbye David. I love you. So much.'
"-you can go back to your bed."
'The fuck?'
He reached out a hand and Gloria almost blurted out 'You're not going to kill me?!', then the Medtech in her took over from the idiot who had been running things for a hot minute and said, "I can help! I can!"
When he didn't make some weird gesture and teleport her back to bed like a naughty child getting sent to a paediatric cryo pod, she kept going. "His cyberdeck is malfunctioning, and I know how to fix it."
She carefully did not say how insane it was that a surgeon like him did not know how to do it himself.
"...How?"
Finding herself floating over the surgical table once more, Gloria held in the sigh of relief at being out from under his glare. "You just have to hack in and turn it off. I don't have access to CityMed's override programs but it's not like you'll have an issue with his ICE."
After a long pause, the captain said, "So where's the off switch?"
"Huh?"
One of the gangers spoke up for their captain, "You said to turn it off. Captain already looked at all the junk in the kid. No switches."
"Or buttons." Added the other of the talkative pair, while the third just nodded. Like they weren't talking insane nonsense.
"There's, there's no switch. You have to hack, you have to connect to his cyberdeck with yours, and turn it off." 'Is this a language barrier thing?'
"Our cyberdecks?"
"Yes."
The captain said, "We don't have them."
"None of y-?!" Gloria cut off her exclamation very quickly under another glare. "Okay, then it'll have to be the neck ports. Jack in."
"...uh, in front of everyone?"
"Now's not really the time lady."
A beep from the monitors cut off the interplay and had the captain stepping past the rest of them, slinging his sword across his back. His sleeves rolled up by themselves and he beckoned with his fingers to make a fresh pair of surgical gloves fly across the room and slide down over his hands. Then he caught a scalpel out of the air and spun it across his fingers.
"Turning it off isn't an option. I'm cutting it out."
Then, before she could protest any further, he flicked the scalpel and the kid on the table came apart. His head splitting and splitting again, until his brain was exposed in a neat cross section.
Not a drop of blood spilled. The monitors didn't show a single blip in his vitals.
Seeing it happen to herself had been horrifying, but seeing it like this? It was awesome.
It also scared the hell out of her for an entirely different reason then before. One that had her rushing to speak up as the captain made another weird gesture and the exposed pieces of the patient's cyberdeck appeared in one of his hands. Already joined back together without a trace they'd been cut apart.
"Don't destroy it!" Gloria babbled, expecting him to throw it into an incinerator with the same absurd speed he did everything else. She resisted the urge to make a face when he cocked an eyebrow at her like she was the one being unreasonable. "It's probably still linked to his neural plugs."
"It's not linked to anything. I severed it completely once it was out of his head."
"So, it's not physically connected any more? Not like my, my lungs were?"
He shook his head and she tried to banish the image from her mind to focus on the problem at hand. Which had started out feeling like she was talking to a european doctor who lived under a rock, and was starting to feel more like a time travel vid.
"The connection is wireless. It doesn't matter if you cut it out. If you destroy it while his neural plugs are still receiving constant input then there's a chance for a catastrophic short." Inducing exactly that outcome on purpose was one of the trickier ways Netrunners liked to kill their targets, or so she had been told in the past. All Gloria knew was that taking risks like that was a good way to lose the rare patients her team got to in time.
The gangers on the other hand, didn't know anything.
"Wireless? Like a transponder snail?" said one of them, in the most baffling sentence she had ever heard in her life. Was that some kind of modified animal? Who would stick implants in a snail?
"Radio waves then." said the captain. Looking to her for a nod, which she gave, he stretched out a hand and the faint blue colour to everything redoubled in a sphere around the patient's head. "R-Room." said the captain as it appeared.
Then, with a deeply satisfied smirk, he clenched his other fist and crushed the cyberdeck to powder. With his bare hand.
Their patient didn't make a sound. His vitals settled down from stable to normal, and Gloria found herself breathing a sigh of relief in sync with the three gangers. The captain just waved a hand and put the kid's head back together. Then he stripped off the surgical gloves and walked away without another word, leaving the other three to tidy up and get the patient back to wherever the recovery ward was.
As for Gloria, she found herself floating helplessly behind him once again, with far less sense of her impending death.
Impending debt, certainly, but at least he didn't seem likely to cut her up and sell the pieces. Probably.
Still…
"My name is Gloria." She spoke up, louder than she expected in the quiet of the oversized hallway. "And I have some questions."
The captain smiled. "I'm Law. You'll answer mine first."
