"What do you want, David?" Lucy's tired voice buzzed in his ears as she answered the call. The neon blue sound waves danced in his peripheral vision as she spoke.
"Hey, sorry for the late call," he apologized, rifling through file folders on an outdated office computer. "I got a job for you. Need your expertise."
"Is this about Kiwi's Valentino gig? 'Cause that doesn't involve me, and I'm not touchin' anything that has the VDB involved," she muttered blearily. He could practically hear the yawn she was holding back.
"Word's out about that already, huh?" he muttered to himself, closing and opening another folder, all the while cursing this stupid system's lack of a coherent search function. "Nah, this is personal business. Trying to dig up some personal info, but I'm not having any luck. Figured you might be able to find something."
The line was silent for a moment, then a loud sigh echoed across the line. "Fine. I want ten thousand—nah, make it twelve."
"Raising the price on me already? What the hell'd I do to you?" he joked.
"You called me while I was sleeping."
David pursed his lips. Yeah, he supposed he could have waited to call her until tomorrow, but he was already here, and it was on his mind. Besides, the faster he got what he was looking for, the better. He wasn't sure how long the doctor would be out, and he planned to be long gone before he got back. Getting caught snooping through hospital records was still pretty illegal, last he checked, and he didn't want to have to flatline a physician just to cover his tracks.
"Fine, twelve. You in?"
"Sure. What do you want?"
"I'm looking for my mom's public records. Maybe her private ones as well. Employment, address, hospital records, schooling, warrants, anything you can find," he listed off, still trying to find out which folder contained the records of his most recent visit. Whatever labeling system they used obviously wasn't sorted by date.
"Don't you already have all that?" she asked incredulously.
"I do, but I'm starting to think what I have doesn't match what's on public record," he admitted, his voice creaking a bit.
"Mm. What're you gonna do if it's not?"
David opened and skimmed through the contents of another folder, once again finding nothing useful. "I'll figure that out when I get there."
The line was quiet for a moment. If he had to guess, Lucy was deliberating whether or not the job was actually worthwhile. He could practically hear her mulling it over from the other end of the line.
"Alright, sure. I'll have the info for you by tomorrow night. Be sure to have my eddies ready by then," she informed him.
"For sure," he agreed. "Sorry for waking you up."
"It's whatever," she yawned. "I'm goin' back to bed now. I'll let you know what I find."
"Alright. Goodnight, Lucy," he told her.
She hung up without responding.
Rude.
After a few more minutes of sifting through files, he finally found a file labeled "Martinez," buried deep in some completely unrelated folder. David sagged his shoulders, extraordinarily relieved that he didn't have to sift through any more mind-numbingly boring medical records. It had taken him nearly half an hour, but his perseverance had paid off.
Fucking finally.
However, the file was only labeled as "David Martinez." A quick CTRL+F revealed that there was no mention of Gloria Martinez at all, not even to confirm her as missing or presumed deceased—which meant that his mother's death had likely gone unrecorded.
An all-too-common occurrence in Night City.
He began to read through his file, and was immediately disappointed at how little information they had on file. They'd managed to pull his name from his neural link, but no address was listed—or any other personal information, for that matter, except for his status as an Arasaka Academy student, which was already outdated.
He supposed that their lack of personal info was still a blessing in disguise, though. Despite giving him no new leads, having no address on his public record made it a lot harder to track him down. Blackwatch wouldn't be able to find him through the intranet, so his apartment was safe as long as no one followed him home.
His medical records were far more worrying.
David's blood type was listed as "undefinable." The doctor had typed up a few notes stating that his "blood" was not blood at all. It also postulated that his flesh was completely inhuman, and was unlike any other living creature he had ever heard of. Preliminary examinations showed that the sample they'd taken of his flesh was still alive and active long after it had been separated from his body, and managed to continue to reproduce new cells on its own. Whoever wrote the report said that they had never seen anything like it. They planned to run it through a few tests, believing it could be a huge breakthrough if they managed to replicate it, but they wanted to keep it hidden from any corporate probing while they examined it, so they planned to transfer the sample to a private laboratory for further experimentation and study with the hopes of utilizing it as a base for a new treatment that could be sold to one of the corporations for massive profit.
And the file was last updated twenty-nine hours ago.
Fuck.
His stomach dropped. The doctors not only knew about his condition, but were now actively messing around with a substance that they knew nothing about—a substance that was specially engineered to be some crazy designer bioweapon. He wasn't sure which would be worse: if the experiments failed and the piece of flesh somehow escaped or infected something it wasn't supposed to, or if they succeeded, and they managed to sell it off to a megacorp that would undoubtedly weaponize it, just as Blackwatch's scientists originally planned to.
He had no intention of letting either outcome happen.
After erasing his file from the system, David burst out the door and began stalking the halls, searching the hospital room-by-room for the doctor. His mutated flesh twisted and warped just under his skin, itching for blood. A sharp pressure slowly built behind his eyes, growing more intense with every step. His head throbbed. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, steadily becoming louder and louder until he started seeing red—literally.
The pressure behind his eyes collapsed inward, and his vision suddenly changed. Everything in sight had suddenly been doused in blue and orange hues. His hands glowed bright as the sun, while the cold hospital floor was now as dark as the night sky, rather than the pristine white it had been a few seconds ago.
The walls were also very thin, apparently; David could just make out a faint orange hue bleeding through a few of the patient rooms.
Thermal vision.
He'd forgotten. He'd seen it used in one of the dreams he'd had—in the memories of one of the Blackwatch agents he'd consumed. He could still see them now, clear as day.
Oddly enough, though, those were the only memories he'd seen from that squad, whereas when he consumed Joseph, he immediately knew everything that Joseph did. Was that because he was still transforming when he'd consumed the other agents? Or was the mutation itself incomplete at the time?
Something to think about later. He still had a doctor to find.
He stole through the halls, silently investigating every room that had any sort of heat signature bleeding through. Almost all of them were injured patients, unconscious or asleep, many of them fitted with cannulas or strapped to IV machines. One of them had just died, if his rapidly falling body temperature was any indication.
Unfortunately, the doctor wasn't making any late-night rounds, as David hoped he might be. It was possible he'd left for the night and would be back tomorrow, rendering his search pointless.
Still, might as well check out the rest of the building while I'm here.
He'd already examined the patients' rooms, but there were still a few doors he hadn't checked. Blinking away his thermal vision, David quickly made a second set of rounds, this time specifically paying attention to the doors he'd missed or ignored on his initial scouting, inspecting the rooms one by one. Most of them were pretty mundane—break rooms, bathrooms, secondary office rooms, small storage closets—but at the very end of the hall on the ground floor, there was a single unlabeled door, with no other doors or windows next to it, sealed shut by an electronic fingerprint scanner.
If the doctors kept anything even remotely confidential in this building, it was probably behind this door.
Probably should've checked here first. Might've saved me a lot of time.
David tried to rattle the door, but it didn't budge. The door was locked tight with a sturdy reinforced metal bolt, and the door and frame seemed to have much tighter tolerances compared to the rest of the facility—likely to keep anyone from slipping a blade or tool into the doorframe and manually pulling the bolt out of the frame.
It wasn't tight enough to keep out a monowire, though.
With careful precision, David slid his monowire into the seam between the door and the frame and cut through the metal bolt like butter. The door silently swung open, no longer held in place by the lock bar. He stepped inside, surveying the room, and was immediately struck by how different it looked in comparison to the rest of the building. Whereas the hospital was almost stiflingly clean, with polished floors and white walls and long, fluorescent lamp lights, this room was shockingly grungy. Bare, uneven concrete covered the floor. Faded, buzzing yellow lights dimly illuminated the room, washing everything in its sickly hue, illuminating the dust particles that hung in the air and covered every surface. The air itself was stagnant, almost constricting, and the faint scent of death had seeped into the room.
The left side of the room was sparsely furnished, with only a couple of gurneys parked against the wall, as well as a few different clipboards. The right wall, however, was lined with large, metal drawers, each of them shut and locked, except for one that was hanging open, its padlock hanging loosely from the latch.
Guess this is where they keep the fuckups.
He tried not to think about how he probably would have been locked in one of those drawers if not for his current condition.
David pulled out the cadaver tray and gave the dead body inside a quick once-over. The corpse looked to have been killed by some kind of impact that had crushed his ribcage—probably a car crash, if he had to guess. Necrotic tissue dotted around the area just above his heart, and the swelling indicated some pretty significant internal bleeding. The man's right arm, right leg and eyes were all removed, leaving the connecting fixtures exposed while the chrome sat on a separate, smaller tray, just above the man's head, with tags hanging off of each part.
On all the tags were both a listed price and a name, which he assumed were their buyers. If so, then it made sense how they kept the place running with so little funding: remove the cyberware off the ones that didn't survive treatment, sell it to the highest bidder on the black market, then use that money to fund the hospital, on top of whatever they might charge patients for their treatment. Seemed like an effective scheme, if a bit unethical, in his opinion. Especially if they decided to stop treating people with more chrome as effectively so they could rake in more profit under the table when they inevitably died here.
He didn't necessarily think that was what the doctors were doing, but if it was, then he probably wouldn't feel too bad about having to eat them if it came to that.
David slid the cadaver back into the cubby and gently closed the door. He was getting off track. Whatever they were doing with the corpses wasn't important. His first priority was finding out where they were keeping his DNA samples. The longer he took, the more research they could conduct, and the higher chance it had of going disastrously wrong somehow.
Walking purposefully to the back of the hall, he threw open the door, revealing another office, though less polished than the one in the main building. The walls were barren, save for a couple of monitors, a relatively large safe, and an old landline phone installed into the wall. The only other piece of furniture in the room was the desk that sat in the center of the room, with a single computer sitting atop it, and an old man hunched over in his chair, staring at the monitor.
The old man sitting at the desk jumped out of his chair in shock as the door slammed open. Even without the filtration mask on, David could immediately tell that this was the doctor who had talked to him when he first awoke, and the past couple weeks had not been kind to him. The stoic, professional air he gave off was gone, replaced instead by the shifty-eyed paranoia of a cornered rat. His beard was matted and tangled, and his cheekbones had become more noticeably gaunt. He looked far more wired than before: the dark circles under his eyes accentuated his now-sunken facial features and the slouch in his back told him that the guy hadn't had any sleep in a while. He had probably been running off nothing but caffeine and desperation for at least a few days now.
Maybe this'll be easier than I thought.
"Hey, doc. Got a few questions for ya."
"Who—Mister Martinez! How'd you get in here?!" The doctor stuttered, his chair clanging loudly against the floor. He took a step back, reaching behind his back for what was presumably a weapon, but David was faster. With a powerful leap, he launched himself over the desk, immediately closing the distance between them before crushing the man's solar plexus with a powerful palm strike, launching the doctor into the chair he had just knocked over and sending him tumbling over onto the floor. His pistol hit the floor with an echoing clatter, landing just out of reach.
Before the man could regain his bearings, David planted a foot on his chest and pressed down, pinning him to the floor. The doctor choked and sputtered, limbs flailing. David could feel his ribs start to give way under his foot.
"Heard you harvested some of my skin without telling me. Sent it off to some lab to run a few tests," he began, leaning down to look the doctor in the eye. "Where is it?"
The doctor visibly swallowed, wide-eyed. "I don't—I don't know what you're talking about!"
David's eyes narrowed. He began to reach towards the older man's eyes, fingers splayed, the veins in his arm and hand visibly blackening.
"Wrong answer."
The doctor caved.
"Wait, wait, wait!" he warbled, holding his hands up in surrender. "I can tell you! I can tell you!"
David paused, scrutinizing the man. The doctor was probably on the verge of going into shock, and more than a little off-balance. His hands were shaking heavily, his breathing was labored, and his pupils were especially dilated. He had most likely gotten a concussion.
David gave it fifty-fifty odds on whether he'd try and lie.
"Uh huh," he scoffed, but ultimately stepped off of him, allowing the dark veins to withdraw back into his arm. "Fine. Where is it?"
The doctor tried to scramble to his feet, but was immediately overcome by a dizzy spell and fell back down. He nearly hit his head again, but David managed to grab his arm just before his head impacted the floor and potentially flatlined. The man wheezed in pain, but managed to right himself using David as a support and slowly stood up, legs trembling.
"It's…uh…it's in Watson…up in—y'know, uh…what's its name…" the doctor rubbed his temple with his free hand, eyes clenched shut and gasping for breath between nearly every word. David might have broken one or two of the man's ribs without realizing it. "North Oaks! Yeah, that's it…"
The man sounded genuine (and genuinely in pain), but something in David's gut was telling him the guy couldn't be trusted. He'd already hid the fact that he had harvested David's skin without his knowledge and tried to deny it to his face, so why should he take the guy at face value?
David moved the man back towards his computer, pulled up his chair and sat him down, gesturing towards the monitor with his head.
"Show me."
"What?" the doctor asked, voice still quivering slightly.
"You've got records of your other lab, right?" he asked. "Pull up the address."
The doctor swallowed again, his eyes flicking over to the monitor. "Well—well, you see…we, uh…we didn't keep the address on, uh—y'know, on record. Security reasons, and all that, y'understand?"
David did understand, but he highly doubted that the old man didn't know the address off the top of his head. The doctor was stalling, and he was losing his patience. "Then pull up a map and point it out to me."
"I—I can't—"
"Quit bullshittin' me, doc. We both know you know where your lab is. If you don't have the address on the drive, then just show me where it is," David ordered, giving the physician a hard stare in hopes of imparting the direness of their situation.
"They'll…I can't—" the old man coughed violently, "he'll flatline me if I spill."
"I'll flatline you if you don't," David explained. "And he isn't here right now. I am."
The doctor took a shuddering breath. "You'll kill me anyway…even if I tell you. I know…I know how this works."
David paused for a second. The doc had a point. He hadn't planned on killing the guy as long as he got the answers he needed, but what reason did the doctor have to trust him? If he were anyone else, he might've done exactly what the doctor said. However, the doctor had presumably been the one to take care of him while he was recovering in the hospital, and the guy didn't know what his flesh was actually capable of, so despite some of his more predatory business practices, he wasn't some out-and-out monster. He was at least better than most of the gangoons plaguing the city.
Maybe I can reason with the guy.
"Listen, doc," David tried to level with him, "I'd rather not zero you. I'm sorry about hittin' you, but you were pulling iron, so you didn't leave me much of a choice. But that sample you took is fuckin' dangerous, and I gotta get it back before someone gets hurt. It could infect or flatline the guys experimenting on it, and if that happens and it gets out into the city, then we're really fucked. So, just tell me where the sample is, and I'll try not to flatline anyone at your lab when I go get it back. Nova?"
The doctor's eyes shifted back and forth between David and the screen, clearly weighing his options, but as soon as David raised an eyebrow at him, he conceded.
"…Nova," he sagged in his chair, forced to admit defeat. A good sign, David hoped.
The doctor pulled up a map of the city, zooming in on Northside and flipping through a few different street images before eventually stopping on one in particular and pointing to a small, nondescript warehouse that was peeking out from behind a larger building that took up most of the picture. It didn't look run-down, but it was plausible that it hadn't seen use in a while. "There, that building."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
David turned and stared him in the eyes. "You sure?"
The doctor met his stare, but his eyes still flicked away a couple times, unable to hold his gaze evenly. "Yeah."
His perception slowed.
The first two fingers on his left hand are twitching. Neck muscles are flexed. Voice is thinner, more stretched. Shallow breath. Heart rate and pulse speeding up as he responds. Not looking me in the eyes.
A shame. The doctor was lying.
David slammed his hand through the man's chest, shattering his sternum and crushing his bronchial tubes. The doctor sputtered, eyes widening in shock for the barest instant before David unleashed his feeder tendrils and began tearing into the old man, ripping him apart, dissolving and devouring him.
It was over quickly. Every last trace of the doctor had been totally consumed within twenty seconds. David couldn't find so much as a drop of blood anywhere. Even the man's clothes hadn't been spared; they'd been devoured right alongside the rest of him.
The man's life played through in the back of his mind like an Arasaka Documentary Braindance on fast-forward, covering entire decades in the span of a few seconds. Most of it was irrelevant to him at the moment, so he shoved it to the back of his mind, but once the man's memories were completely subsumed, he carefully rummaged through the last couple weeks of the doctor's life, starting at the day David was admitted to the hospital.
He'd initially tried to draw a sample of blood, but when he instead drew out a black, amorphous liquid that attempted to pull itself back through the needle and close up the hole in his skin, the doctor then cut off a piece of his flesh with a scalpel and stored it in a vial before calling up an old associate named John Parsons, informing him of an unknown substance he found and asking him if he could possibly procure some test subjects to experiment on. Parsons agreed, and told him to bring the sample to a small shop in Kabuki.
In the shop, embedded into the floor was a hidden trapdoor that led to a surprisingly spacious basement, reminiscent of a reinforced concrete bunker, with two separate rooms joined by a single metal door and a large pane of glass to act as a window—primarily to observe the ongoings of the second room from a safe distance. Whether Parsons had built or funded this basement, the doctor wasn't sure, but the airtight door, separate ventilation systems for each room and numerous bodyguards suggested that the basement was designed with the intent to run some very secretive experiments within—ones that he probably didn't want to know about.
Parsons had only contacted the doctor once after the initial deal, and had sent a file containing multiple videos of his experiments thus far. He had placed half a dozen chickens in the room, all caged, and given bits of David's flesh to three of them. He and Parsons watched as two of the chickens died almost immediately upon consuming the flesh, while the third became violently sick. Another recording showed him that the third chicken had indeed survived, but was acting very strangely, attempting nothing except trying to get out of its cage and get at the rest of the chickens in the room. It had apparently managed to dent its cage in its escape attempts, but Parsons had assured him he had placed the subject within a reinforced caged soon after, and that the chicken couldn't possibly escape without outside help.
That call had been nearly a week ago, and he hadn't heard anything since.
David frowned. As he had thought, the doctor had indeed been lying, so his death had been necessary to find out the truth, but despite that, David didn't think the guy had done anything that had been worth flatlining him over. He wasn't a monster or anything; he was just a man who didn't know what the hell he'd been messing with. The guy had spent his life going to medical school to help people, just so Night City would have fewer casualties due to negligence and medical malpractice. He ended up having to sell off some corpses to some shady people to continue to fund his nice apartment for himself and his output, but that wasn't exactly anything new in Night City. His own mother did the same thing. David couldn't blame him for that. And even at the very end, with his life on the line, he'd lied to protect his colleagues, in hopes that Parsons' experiments could revolutionize the medical field, making modern medical treatments more affordable while the wealthy became obsessed with the new miracle drug.
He was a good guy—at least, by Night City standards—and David had killed him. The doctor would never help anyone again.
I had to. If I hadn't, the sample he stole would've gone unchecked until it was too late. The corpos would have it or it would be infecting everyone in the city. I'm saving lives here.
He wondered how many more innocents he would have to kill to keep the people he cared about safe.
David swallowed down any remorse. He would mourn the man tomorrow, but the night wasn't over yet. He still had a sample to retrieve.
David dropped down from the roof, landing silently just in front of the run-down Dot-mp3 store. The cracked neon sign on the building flickered faintly, lighting up the dented metal doorframe just under it. The door itself wasn't much better—the hinges were so rusted over that he was confident they wouldn't budge unless he forced them open.
The rest of the buildings on this street weren't all that different. Despite how heavily populated Kabuki normally was, this area looked to be entirely abandoned. Large, spiderwebbing cracks spanned the entire street, with some of them traveling up the decrepit, cramped concrete buildings that Night City had shoved so close together they were practically stacked on top of each other. It was honestly a miracle the entire street hadn't collapsed in on itself yet.
David kicked in the door, knocking a chunk out of the decrepit frame as it slammed open, and took a look inside. The store's interior was nearly pitch-black. What little light shone through the entrance he'd just broken into revealed a few run-down shelves overflowing with shards, discs, and other old, outdated physical formats that he only vaguely recognized. The labels were all either covered with bizarre and provocative imagery or were completely blank—probably third-party rips and live recordings of small-time gig bands that never made it to the big leagues.
Not much had changed over the years, according to the good doctor's memories. He was grateful for that, considering he could barely see five feet in front of him, and the shelves were arranged incredibly strangely, almost like a maze, which made it annoyingly difficult to navigate through.
He stumbled through the dark, making his way to the back of the shop mostly by feel, cross-referencing the positions of certain shelves with the doctor's memories to make sure he was still going the right way. Thermal vision had no effect inside the building, and despite how his normal vision had improved, the shop was dark enough for it not to matter.
Should've bought a fuckin' flashlight, gonk.
After nearly running into a couple bookshelves, David made it to the employees-only room, broke the door down, and hit the light switch, which did nothing beyond revealing that the fluorescent bulbs had burnt out. From what the doctor remembered, though, the lab was supposed to still be in use. So, unless his partner had relocated without informing him, then the lack of light in this building was probably intentional—and done without the doctor's knowledge. It wouldn't have surprised him if they had installed some sort of extra security without him knowing as well. He sincerely hoped they hadn't; he was still relying on the man's memories to navigate through the place, and any changes made only made finding his way around that much more annoying.
He quickly located the heavy desk near the middle of the room and shoved it aside, uncovering the carpeted trapdoor entrance to the underground laboratory. After tamping his foot around the floor for a few seconds to determine exactly where the trapdoor sat, he lifted his foot into the air and stomped down with all his weight, pulverizing the trapdoor in an instant and sending him crashing through the floor and down the underground shaft, smashing into the ground shoulder-first about twenty feet down.
Brushing off the excess dust and gravel, he pushed himself up to his feet and stepped out of the chunks of shattered concrete, surprisingly none the worse for wear. The landing wasn't exactly comfortable, but it hadn't broken half his bones or turned him into eazybeef, so he considered it a success. He'd just need to work on reorienting himself more quickly if he wanted the trick to be actually useful down the line.
The underground had working power, separate from the store above, if the fluorescent lights running along the ceiling were any indication. They might've diverted the power from the building above so that they didn't have to set up their own power system. If that was the case, the power was primarily being directed elsewhere, because the lights in the entrance hallway were barely bright enough to illuminate the rough concrete walls.
The grated metal floor underfoot was equally shabby. Every step David took; a rattling clang rang out from the walkway, echoing down the hallway as he made his way through and rounded the corner. He supposed it made for a decent security system, if nothing else.
He kept his guard up as he rounded the first corner, ready to be fired upon at any moment by whatever security was lying in wait.
Surprisingly, though, there was nothing of the sort. Around the corner was a larger, more well-lit corridor, reminiscent of the hospital he'd infiltrated not too long ago, except it was almost completely barren. The walls were unvarnished, smooth concrete, reflecting the reverberations of every step he took and sending them echoing down the hallway. A total of ten doors lined the hall: four on the left, five on the right, and one at the very end of the corridor, all of them looming and ominous. The faint hum of the lights was the only thing that he could hear aside from his own footsteps, which told him that either the other rooms were heavily soundproofed, and he was about to walk in on some very dangerous people running some very dangerous experiments, or that there was no one else in the building.
Given that the doctor's old associate supposedly worked some very late hours, neither possibility was particularly reassuring.
So, where's the main lab most likely to be?
The door at the end of the hall stared him down, grimly beckoning him.
Gotta start somewhere, I guess.
David sighed, double-checking his neural link to make sure the underground facility hadn't cut his connection before stepping up to the door.
He made short work of the reinforced metal door with his monowire, weaving it through the frame and quickly cutting the deadbolt in two, just like at the hospital. The door swung open, revealing a room that reminded him of the hospital's storehouse, though only about half the size. Medical supplies and machinery lined the shelves and cupboards, all seemingly either freshly stocked or recently used, along with some very specialized chemistry equipment that the doctor had only vaguely understood the workings of. Parsons was the researcher between the two of them.
A few spots on the shelves were also conspicuously empty. What normally occupied those spots, he wasn't sure, but he hoped they were related to the tests they were running on his DNA. If they were, it was still here, so he still had a shot at getting it back before they sold it off to someone.
The room was still ultimately a bust, though, so David turned and went back to the corridor, intent on breaking into every room one by one until he found what he was looking for.
Each of the doors were labeled with a 100-something or a 00-something number, aside from the storage room, arranged in an alternating pattern. Figuring he'd start at the beginning and just start checking rooms in order, he cut the deadbolt on room 001 and pushed his way inside.
Room 001 was an office, if the large desks, computers and shard cabinets were any indication. The room was very neatly kept; the only evidence it saw any use at all was the trash bin in the corner filled with meal bar wrappers and empty water bottles. No dust on the desks, either. Parsons must've been a hell of a neat freak.
The most interesting part of the room, however, was the massive window on the wall, giving him a full view of the neighboring room: a large, sophisticated chemistry lab full of massive machines that he only barely understood the purpose of thanks to the good doctor's memories, each extracting, filtering and analyzing vials of liquid that he presumed to be his own blood (or whatever it actually was). An extra monitor was propped up on a table next to the window, hooked up to the microscope in the near corner of the lab, displaying an enlarged view of his cells.
David watched for a few minutes, fascinated by how his own flesh writhed and twisted under the microscope, forming a network of squirming threads that continuously sought out an escape to the glass filament they were trapped in. They repeatedly collapsed in on themselves, reforming themselves into new shapes and formations to try and find a structure that would facilitate their escape. They were operating on pretty limited memory, given how they kept banding back to the same five or six formations, but the process was still fascinating. He hesitated to say his cells were sentient, but they clearly possessed some sort of operative functions and goals beyond normal human cells.
David quickly broke into the lab and began digging around in the drawers, looking for a lighter, or something of the sort. He wasn't sure if fire would work, given his biology, but he figured if burning a body destroyed its DNA, then torching his own cells should do the same.
Pulling a Bunsen burner out of one of the drawers and hooking it up to the gas line—he had no clue how they managed to redirect a gas line, of all things—David used a small spark lighter to ignite the burner, then went about the room, pulling every bit of testing material he could find out of each machine and mixing it all into a single vial before blasting it directly with the flame. The black fluid rippled and writhed as he held it to the fire, desperately trying to escape the glass vial, but it couldn't gather itself long enough to try and reform itself into something that could pierce through the glass, and the only way out was through the flames. With nowhere to go, it had soon burned away completely; not a single speck of liquid remained.
David had considered trying to induct the biomass back into his system, but he wasn't sure what the researchers could have done to the samples, so it wasn't worth the risk. It was safer to just destroy it all.
He exited the lab, deciding to hit room 002 next. Given the way the rooms were numbered, he assumed all of the other rooms were set up exactly as 001 and 101 were, so it was safer to first check the offices and see what was going on in the labs through the windows so he wouldn't get caught off guard by any nasty surprises that happened to be going through any sort of testing.
David forced his way into the next office, still half-expecting to walk into an ambush, but the office was identical to the last one: clean, organized and basically empty. The only real difference was the viewing window, which had unsettlingly large cracks spiderwebbing across the pane. But upon peering through the intact pieces, he found that the scene beyond it was far more disturbing.
The interior of laboratory 102 looked more like the aftermath of a gang war than a research facility. Blood stained every surface of the room, running down the walls and dripping off the smashed countertops. Torn clothing, broken firearms and spent casings littered the floor. The equipment was mangled beyond recognition. Bullet holes and long gashes covered every surface. Nothing had been spared from whatever had taken place here. The only things still intact were two animal cages in the center of the room, each of which housed a single animal: a dog inside one, and a chicken in the other.
Both sat perfectly still, heedless of the carnage that surrounded them.
David stepped closer to the window, peering through the cracked glass to try and get a better look at them. He'd never seen an animal in person before, but he was pretty sure they didn't act like that. The old datashards back in the academy said that animals were always restless, constantly trying to run around, explore and escape their confines, but these two had no apparent desire to explore the room, even though their cages were wide open. They just sat in the middle of their pens, neither moving a muscle. Neither even seemed to be breathing.
Are they synthetic?
A small movement caught his eye. The dog had apparently noticed him through the window and was now staring unblinkingly right at him. David was about to start backing away to determine how well it could actually see him, but only a second or two after, the chicken's head started to slowly, almost mechanically rotate until its beady black eye was fixated on him.
He had a sinking feeling that he could guess why there weren't any bodies in the room, despite the blood everywhere.
Fuck.
He forced himself to think. They'd already seen him, but they weren't attacking him on sight. Both of them seemed to be willing to wait and see what he'd do first, which bought him a little time to strategize. What did he know, and what could he deduce?
They've definitely been injected with my DNA. They've almost definitely eaten people. Which means they should be able to figure out how to unlock the doors, because they unlock from the inside, unless they either don't absorb memories like I do, or they're still only operating with animal-level intelligence or instincts or something. Maybe they're trying to blend in by sitting where the animals used to. Either way, the door's probably already unlocked, and they'll probably attack me as soon as I'm in there. If they haven't figured out how to unlock the doors, they'll just claw their way out once they figure out that no one else is coming here anytime soon. They probably can mutate to make new weapons and regenerate, just like me. I don't think they've eaten any chrome junkies, though. Don't see any molten metal anywhere.
Maybe they just haven't spewed it up yet, though.
God, this sucked. Outnumbered, possibly outgunned, and definitely out of position. The only real advantage he had was that the animals probably didn't know he was onto them. He'd have one good shot at them, and if that failed, then he'd be in for a hell of a fight.
He prayed they weren't smarter than him.
David contemplated breaking in through the window and immediately attacking, but ultimately decided to just go through the door. If they knew he was there and weren't attacking, they probably planned to wait and ambush him when he got too close. They'd probably done the same to whoever else they'd eaten, so they likely thought that if it worked once, it'd work again. But he was onto them now, and an ambush wasn't nearly as effective against an informed enemy.
He had the upper hand—he needed to make it count.
Stepping through the door to the laboratory and carefully closing the door behind him, David approached the mutated animals with caution, doing his best to act like they were just a couple of strange animals that he'd never seen before. They both sat stock-still, only following him with their eyes as he came nearer. He managed to position himself between the two cages, crouching down right in front of the dog as he stared into its blank, lifeless eyes. If he had any doubts about them having been physiologically altered, they were gone now.
They were more patient than he thought. Neither of them attacked as he crouched down to meet them at eye level. Only when he reached into the cage to pet the dog did it spring its trap. As soon as his hand touched its nose, it opened its jaws wide, revealing multiple rows of unnaturally sharp teeth, before snapping them shut on his hand.
Or rather, the massive set of talons his hand had just turned into.
Filleting the mutated creature's lower jaw, David ripped his hand out of the beast's jaw as its teeth scraped across his claws, then immediately threw himself out of the way as the chicken flung itself at him from behind. Its beak ended up taking a chunk out of the dog's nose, but both of them managed to reorient themselves just in time to react to his assault.
The dog stepped just outside of his first swipe, and the chicken launched itself at him as he attempted another, forcing him to abandon his attack to avoid it. He desperately contorted his body to evade it and raked his claws across the bird's chest as it passed, spilling inky blood across the floor.
Before he could move to strike another blow against it, though, the dog was in his face again, jaws already healed and poised to bite his head off.
Shit!
David ducked, managed to avoid the worst of the bite, but a few of its teeth managed to catch the side of his head as it flew past, carving bloody lines across his temple. Thin tendrils of pain wound around his skull as blood splashed into his eye. He forced himself to ignore it as he turned with the blow, bringing his other arm around and severing the creature's legs with his monowire while it was still airborne. It crashed to the ground gracelessly, blackened blood gushing out of its wounds and discoloring that which already saturated the floor.
Both animals were down. David turned to face the chicken, planning to finish it off first, but just as he took a step towards it, something began to writhe underneath its half-healed skin, like another lifeform had been controlling the animal from within the entire time and was now desperately trying to get out.
At once, both animals' skins were torn open, revealing that their muscle tissue had transformed into black and crimson strands that whipped around wildly before pulling back and binding around the animals' flesh, continuously coiling more and more black tendrils around skin and muscle as they transformed, steadily growing until they each towered over him.
If they hadn't been monstrous before, they certainly were now. Both of them had at least quadrupled in mass, and now towered above him as veritable mountains of shifting muscle and sinew. Their coats had become like steel mesh, and every strand of fur and every feather looked sharp enough to run him through. The talons and teeth they sported had elongated, becoming sinister and serrated, designed to viciously shred anything they touched into pieces.
The hound growled at him, its distorted vocal chords shaking the room.
I fuckin' hate scientists.
David lunged forward, sliding under the dog's massive claw, using his own to split its tendon as he passed. It snapped at him with its terrifying jaws, but he rolled just out of range and responded with powerful uppercut to its chin, shattering its jawbone and many of its teeth. But right as he landed the blow, the chicken took the opportunity to drag its vicious talons across his back, tearing open jagged lines in his flesh, spilling his blood and severing his spine in three different places.
He collapsed, no longer able to support his own weight, but he quickly redirected his excess biomass to converge along his spine and repair his broken back, wrapping tendrils of blackened sinew around his vertebrae and binding them together while his body regenerated the mangled tissue.
He reconnected his spine just as the demented chicken attempted a lethal blow. Twisting, he lashed out with a lightning-fast kick while still on the ground, using his forearms for leverage. His foot connected solidly with the bird's beak, knocking it aside and causing it to end up embedded deep into the concrete floor instead of inside his chest. Seizing the opportunity, David shifted his other arm back into his monowire and cleanly decapitated the monster with a quick flourish.
One down—shit!
Black tendrils exploded out of the now-headless chicken's neck, frantically lashing out at him from multiple angles, attempting to hook him with their barbed tips so they could drag him in and devour him. He danced just out of their reach, slicing through swathes of the sinewy threads with precise strokes of his wire, cutting them down like a machete carving a path through dense foliage.
The distinct sound of claws scraping against the floor coming from behind told him that the dog had just recovered as well. David purposely kept his back to it, instead pressing his advantage against the beheaded monster in front of him, weaving through its flailing whips and deflecting its sharp talons as he inched closer, still keeping an ear out for the mutt's next attack. He made sure to stay light on his feet as he wove his way through the seemingly never-ending storm of mutated biomass, using his claws and monowire to continuously shave down the regenerating monstrosity's tendrils, robbing it of its biomass bit by bit. If they were anything like him, they probably could only heal so much before they needed to consume more people, and given their size, that reserve was now probably a lot smaller.
The fact that it hadn't even attempted to start regenerating its head only reinforced the idea.
The room suddenly shook—the hound had taken the bait. David disengaged, leaping into the air as the dog passed just under him, jaws wide and ready to pulverize him. He contorted in midair like a professional gymnast, and with a sweep of his arm, severed the dog's head from its body. The dog's torso stumbled, crashing to the ground with a thunderous boom, but the head still managed to sink its jaws into the bird's body before it hit the floor.
Still airborne, David whipped his monowire at the dog's head, hoping to sever its jaw so that it couldn't use the chicken's flesh to regenerate itself, but he was interrupted by the dog's own tendrils, which burst out of the headless body with surprising speed. Catching him in midair, off guard and without leverage, the appendages wrapped around him like a cocoon, binding his outstretched arm to his side before gathering and twisting the ends together to form a drill, and punched it straight through his chest.
The air was driven from his lungs, and his vision went white. He forced himself to fight back regardless, muscling out of the tendrils' grip with his free hand. David raked his claws up his own body to cut away the ones that had just put a hole in him, splitting open his skin as he sliced them apart. Before he could free his other arm, though, the monster cracked its mutated appendages like a whip, flinging him across the room, the inertia tearing his arm out of its socket. He crashed through the wall with a thunderous boom, shaking the entire bunker, and landed in a heap of concrete rubble.
Fuck, that hurts.
It was hard to think clearly. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. His chest was caved in, his arm was missing, and his back was broken. Again. He needed to stay still and heal himself, but every second he spent healing was also time that the abominations could do the same. But on the other hand, he doubted he could kill these things even in the state they were in if he wasn't at a hundred percent. The best course of action, as much as he hated it, was to sit tight and heal as much as he could until they attacked again, at which point he could try and retake the offensive.
Maybe I could lead them down the entrance hallway and bottleneck them?
No, probably not. They had artificially enlarged themselves, so it stood to reason that they could also shrink themselves down to fit through the hallway, and there was less room for him to dodge in such a small corridor. He was better off fighting out in the open.
David closed his eyes, focusing his attention inward. He concentrated on the gaping wound in his chest, forcing his biomass to reconstruct his shattered ribcage and reform his spine, allowing the capillaries and muscle tissue to weave themselves together around them. Most of his organs were still ruptured, but they weren't a priority for him at the moment—only his heart and lungs were needed to keep fighting.
Once his chest was stable, he forced his biomass to regenerate his missing arm, summoning his own black tentacles from his empty shoulder socket and interlacing them at a progressively smaller scale until they had reshaped themselves into a perfect replica of the one he'd just lost. David flexed his fingers, meticulously examining the new arm for any flaws or differences, but didn't notice anything. It was as if his body had perfectly reconstructed it from some kind of internal CAD file it had saved somewhere in his head.
For all he knew, it did.
Analysis later, leadhead. You've still got shit tryin' to flatline you.
He forced himself to stand, ignoring the pain lingering in his chest, and stepped back into the room, ready for round two.
The mutt had reattached its head, unsurprisingly, but it had also grafted the chicken's head onto its neck as well, attached awkwardly on one side. Both heads were in the process of devouring the chicken's old body, tearing into its flesh, unconcerned by the sword-sharp feathers that struck deep lacerations into the insides of their mouths with every bite. He assumed that the amount of mass they were ingesting was more than enough to offset the fairly clean cuts the feathers were making, or they would have been more careful about it.
Fortunately, they were so focused on feeding on the chicken's body that they hadn't noticed him walk in yet.
David transmuted his arm again, switching to his monowire, but then let it revert back to normal, having decided against it. Clean cuts were too easy to regenerate, and the tendrils they could shape out of their biomass made it child's play to reattach any severed body parts. He needed to cause as much internal damage as possible to force them to burn through as much of their biomass as possible.
He reshaped his arm into the gorilla arm he'd copied from Cooper, gathered some spare biomass into his legs, and launched himself at the monster.
The hound's ribcage caved in on itself as he hammered his fist into its side. David could see the force of the impact ripple throughout its entire body, tearing through muscles and arteries and rupturing skin, blowing massive chunks of its innards out its other side as he sent it crashing into the far wall.
The collision sounded like thunder in his ears.
Seizing the opportunity, David turned and unleashed his own feeder tendrils upon the remains of the chicken's carcass, dissolving and assimilating as much mass as he could while the mutt was still out. He managed to absorb over half of the corpse's remaining flesh before the massive dog finally dug itself out of the rubble, its form stretching and compressing as it began to reshape and rebuild its torn musculature.
David rushed it again, not planning on giving it the opportunity. The dog turned to face him, taking a swipe at him with its claw as he approached. He vaulted over it, but the chicken's head was ready for him, beak outstretched and ready to bite him in half. With no way to evade, he calculated his trajectory in an instant, twisted in midair and landed a nasty hook on the tip of the chicken's beak and sent the head reeling to the side, letting him land safely.
He pressed the advantage, leaping over the grafted head, planning to break its spine with another punch, but just as he reached the apex of his jump, the flesh underneath the back of the mutant dog's neck rippled and bulged, before another head suddenly burst out of its back, revealing rows upon rows of gleaming, needle-sharp teeth as it snapped it jaws shut on him. He desperately transformed both of his hands into long claws as the dog bit down, catching a tooth from each jaw, and pushed back against its enclosing jaws with all his might, arms shaking as he muscled its jaws open wide enough to deliver a devastating stomp right on the hinge. Its lower jaw was torn free with a sickening crunch, and David fell with it, only barely managing to avoid skewering himself on its wickedly sharp teeth as it landed.
The dog didn't even bother to turn and face him, instead fashioning a fourth head from the side of its neck to bite him—an attack that was quickly becoming very predictable. David sidestepped it easily, socking the new head in the side and blasting it to pieces. He followed up with a punch to the monster's bloody stump, blasting its half-healed muscles apart yet again and throwing it halfway across the room, where it tumbled across the floor, eventually skidding to a stop on its side. It tried to stand, but David switched to his monowire and mercilessly cut the monster into pieces. No longer able to hold itself together, the monster fell apart into large, fleshy chunks and splattered onto the ground with a wet squelch.
The room was silent once more.
David sighed in relief. It was finally fucking over. The large hunks of mutated flesh were still writhing around, admittedly, but they weren't making any sort of concentrated effort to stitch themselves back together. It was basically just a pile of parasites blindly wiggling on the floor. The thing was basically dead already, he just needed to do some cleanup and make sure it didn't eventually reform.
He took a few minutes to recover, integrating the new biomass he'd consumed and regenerating what organs he still hadn't healed yet. The mutated chicken's DNA had a much different…texture to it than the human genes he was familiar with, which made it a little more awkward to adapt it to his needs, but he managed to figure it out after a bit of internal analysis.
Once all of his internal organs were whole again, he approached the dying remains of the dog and stabbed his feeder tendrils into the mutated flesh piles.
He didn't expect them to stab him back.
All at once, the hunks of wriggling mass exploded into masses of barbed tendrils that bound his limbs and sunk themselves into his flesh, tearing him apart piece by piece. He tried to pull himself away, but the appendages were too numerous, and he lacked the leverage. He couldn't transform, either: they had entrenched themselves too deeply under his skin, and trying anyway only made his nerves scream in agony. They dragged him down, bringing him to his knees as they slowly ripped bite-sized hunks out of his body. It took nearly every bit of strength from his body just to keep himself from collapsing to the floor.
What burned more than the pain was the fact that this was all his fault. He fucked up; he let his guard down. He'd assumed that he'd forced the monster to burn through enough biomass that it wouldn't be able to do anything after he cut it apart. He hadn't bothered to make sure—hell, he had barely checked at all—and now he was facing the consequences.
David could feel his biomass being devoured from within. The tendrils buried beneath his skin were feeding on him, consuming his cells and drinking his blood. Some of the barbs had refashioned themselves into fangs to better anchor him in place while the rest of the tendrils feasted on his flesh, and there was nothing he could do about it. He was trapped. His strength was failing. His vision was steadily darkening, and his nerves were dying one by one. He choked out a shuddering breath, cursing his own stupidity as a bloody cough racked his system. Hopefully, his mother wouldn't be too disappointed in him for not avenging her.
Sorry, mom. I guess I wasn't….
His vision went black as his body crumpled to the floor, lifeless.
And something deep within rebelled.
No.
After everything he'd survived, after everything he'd fought and overcame, he was supposed to lay down and die to this? The dismembered corpse of a failed experiment based on his own body? One that he had already proven victorious over, at that?
No. He refused to be subsumed; to be food; to submit to this inferior being. It was nothing but a blood sample haphazardly stuck into some dumb animals by some clueless hacks. It was barely aware of its own existence. Operating purely on instinct. Less evolved.
It would learn its place.
David took control, dismantling and restructuring the tendrils that pierced him, reorganizing the sequences of their DNA to make them his own, wielding them against the worthless hunks of flesh that they came from. He used their tendrils to force himself into the heart of their network and spread himself throughout, infecting and corrupting every last bit of living tissue until it all was bent to his will; remade in his image. The miserable creature fought back, thrashing about as it desperately tried to escape his grasp, but it stood in his domain now, where he reigned absolute, and he would brook no dissent.
The wretched thing was consumed, and then there was only David.
…What the fuck was that.
He slowly pushed himself to his feet, absently recognizing that he was naked. Spotless, too, despite the copious amount of blood staining the floor. The remains of the monster's corpse had all but disappeared, along with what was left of the bird's body. He might've consumed it without noticing—he'd been a little preoccupied.
David frowned, examining his now-nude body. His clothes had apparently been devoured alongside everything else, somehow. Not much of a loss, considering they'd been torn to hell during the fight, but having to walk home naked was bound to attract some unwanted attention—all the more if he was caught scaling buildings in the buff. His camo could get him home, but that wasn't a long-term solution. If his clothes got this fucked up every other fight, he'd be out of clothes real fuckin' quick, and then he wouldn't be able to go out at all without his camo. And even then, thermal vision wasn't exactly uncommon in Night City.
Maybe I could use the tentacles as clothing?
He concentrated, manifesting multiple tendrils that slowly curled around his body, enclosing him in a thick, black one-piece bodysuit that vaguely resembled a cocoon of gnarled tree roots. A few basic tests proved he could move in it relatively fine, though certain movements were kind of restrictive, and the tendrils visibly shifted every time he moved, coiling and uncoiling with every step he took. Wouldn't work; they'd attract too much attention, even if he managed to work out the mobility issues. He needed them to look like clothes. Maybe if he made the tendrils smaller? Wove them together like thread?
All of a sudden, his tendrils melted back into his skin, and his very flesh unraveled and stitched itself back together in the span of a second, taking on a completely new form. Before he'd even recognized what his body was doing, he was suddenly fully dressed again, in the exact same clothes he was wearing before—though in complete grayscale, and without all the tears and bullet holes.
Fuckin' nova.
His outfit probably wasn't winning any fashion awards anytime soon, but the fact that his body could literally make clothes for him was pretty damn useful.
As he was fiddling with his new clothes, attempting to figure out where they ended and he began, an alert blinked into existence in his peripheral vision. An incoming call from Lucy—strange, considering his neural link was almost certainly destroyed by now. He'd probably consumed it by accident, but even so, how did it broadcast and receive signals? He didn't know how they worked, so how was it able to operate without his knowledge?
Then again, he didn't really know how his monowires operated, either, and they still worked just fine. It could even do stuff that the standard chrome versions couldn't. Maybe his neural link had mutated in the same way.
Something to test out later.
"Yo," he greeted, answering the call. "What's got you up so late?"
"Couldn't sleep. Decided to get started on your little request," she prefaced. "Turns out you were right. Your mom had two different legal identities on registry: Gloria Martinez and Isabella Ramirez. Kept 'em pretty separate, too. Was a pain in the ass diggin' up enough dirt to link 'em together."
"Well, fuck," he muttered under his breath. A different name meant a different life, and that usually meant trouble. No one had a second identity for shits and giggles.
"Yeah. Gloria's data trail's practically nonexistent. Just a birth certificate, an out-of-date address and an old neural ID," she elaborated.
David frowned. Sounded like a fake ID if he'd ever heard it. "So, what, Gloria Martinez didn't actually exist?"
"I didn't say that. Her parents have enough legit documentation to prove they're real, so a Gloria Martinez certainly existed, but Ramirez has a lot more traceable dirt in her file. Can't say who's the shoe for who yet," Lucy explained, taking a long drag of her cig. "In the meantime, I got an address for you if you wanna check it out."
"Listed under Ramirez?"
"Mm."
He'd take that as a yes. "Yeah, flick it over. I'll go and do some diggin' myself."
"Alright. Lemme know what you find."
The call abruptly cut out, and a small ping accompanied her text. The address looked to be on the north end of Little China, nestled away near a large complex. Not too far, as long as he took the rooftops.
David sighed. Every new clue he found seemed to leave him with more questions than answers. He felt like he had a tiny piece of a massive puzzle, one he was only just beginning to understand the scope of, and it was impossible to tell what was important and what was unrelated. He had almost nothing to work with.
But all he could do was continue picking up the pieces and hope he'd eventually see the bigger picture.