Never Fade Away: There's A Canvas With Two Faces (ch. 4) (Patreon)

I slammed my head into the dash, my ears filled with nothing but the sound of screeching metal while I was tossed around the interior of the flying car. My back hit something, then my side, but it was next to impossible to tell what I was hitting because I could only see red or glitches from my optics. After a second that felt like forever, the interior stopped spinning, leaving me rested in the… ceiling from the looks of it. "Hnngh…" I grunted, a hand going to my side because it sure felt like that fractured rib just gave out.

My Meditech informed me that I had a whole host of problems -- a lot of bruising, a bust rib, some bleeding, and… elevated temperature. Still, nothing to keep me down. I did smell something absolutely awful, though. With my vision spazzing out only a little bit now, I saw that the door to the car had been bent inward enough that air managed to slip through. Shifting around and ignoring the pain in my side, I kicked out at the bust door.

For my efforts, I just about puked from the flash of white hot agony in my side. My vision seemed to go dark for a moment, but it snapped back in place when I saw a hand grip the edge of the warped door. A second later, the door screeched as it was pulled out, the bent seam popping out of place to let whoever was prodding rip the entire door off the side.

"You better have some insurance-" I heard someone say, poking their head inside of the car. Light brown skin, black hair, and dark eyes. Cyberlines on his face and arms from what I could see. Bright yellow jacket with a high collar that glowed blue in the low light. He didn't look like a guard -- certainly wasn't dressed like one -- but none of that mattered. Not when I heard another voice ring out.

"Step away from the vehicle," a loud projected voice rang out, making the man look up at it. I took the opportunity, knowing deep in my gut that I had to move. I shoved past the man, scrambling out of the wreckage. The first thing that I noticed was that there was some kind of car that was flipped over and the ground was all torn up from where we crashed. I don't think my car had hit them head-on, but it certainly took a knock.

There was a group of odd-looking people standing around it. I didn't have the time to give them anything more than a bare glance before I took stock of everything else. Such as the thing that flew in the sky overlooking the crash -- a drone, I knew it was called. About half the size of the flying car I had been in with two auto cannons on the propulsion jets. It shifted the moment that I took off running, going nowhere in particular so long as it wasn't here. "Halt! Do not attempt to escape!"

I almost couldn't hear the words, I realized as I took off running and leaped over a divider. My vision was filled with cars. I had never seen them before. Much less so many as they raced down the road, organized by lanes. They were fast too, I thought, nearly getting sideswiped by a car going about a hundred and fifty miles an hour. I felt the air brush against me, the sound of roaring engines and wind battering at me hard enough that I was nearly pushed into the path of another car, all of it so loud that I could barely hear the drone.

Desperation made me fearless as I crossed the road filled with speeding cars and careful timing made sure that I survived the experience. Reaching the other divider, I saw that there was a good fifteen foot drop down to another road. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that the group from before unloaded on the drone, bullets ripping through like it was made out of cloth. A good reason to throw myself over the ledge and take the fall.

This time, when I landed on my feet, I did puke from the pain as my rib shifted. I could feel the two ends grinding against one another. The bile burned in my throat and mouth, but I swallowed the taste down all the same and forced myself to run. Taking off, I simply ran away, breaking off to sprint through an alley, thinking that being on a road would be bad. And it would be good for me.

My eyes hurt, but not because of the knock my head took that pumped blood freely down my face. The open spaces. They hurt to look at. I had completely underestimated how big this room would be. Or how badly it would smell. My nose wrinkled when I passed by a pile of plastic bags that absolutely reeked. I've never smelled anything like it. I thought I would puke again.

And everything was so loud. There was noise everywhere. It was overwhelming. I felt vibrations travel through my feet as music played off in the distance -- it was a song that I recognized too. Pon Pon Shit, if memory served. Hated that song, it had no right being as catchy as it was.

Everything was too much, I thought, looking around. The walls were painted with overlapping art and markings. Bright neon lights flashed while holographic images and text scrolled almost everywhere I looked. I stumbled into the street, struck dumb by just how much I was seeing, slack-jawed at the sight of it all. Right up until there was a harsh beep that nearly made me jump out of my skin. A car was stopped in front of me and a person leaned out.

Bright blue hair, three sets of eyes with each set directly on top of the other, and an iron jaw. "If you want to kill yourself, use a fucking gun, asshole!" The guy snarled at me, speeding off when I stumbled out of the way. I crossed to the other side of the street, my heart pounding so hard at my ribs, my busted one throbbed with pain. Swallowing thickly, I turned to keep running and I saw that the people were just as overwhelming as everything else.

A group of people chatted at the edge of a corner -- one had legs without feet in favor of being impeccably balanced on two points with a spiked mohawk that gave him an extra foot of height. Walking by them was a woman that was completely naked except for the holographic clothing that she wore. As I jogged, I caught sight of a man wearing what seemed to be every single color in existence and my eyes ached just looking at him. I stumbled into another alley, feeling completely out of my depth. I had hoped to find temporary refuge there, but I instead nearly walked face-first into someone.

"Where do you think you're going?" I heard a split second before I found something pressed underneath my chin. I looked down for a moment as my back was pressed into a wall. A man was holding the gun, having been hiding behind a container that was overflowing with plastic bags. "Ah, crap -- choom, did you get mugged already? Be honest now or I'm going to pop your fucking cap right off."

What? "No?" I tried, not really sure what he was asking. He wore rough-looking clothing and he had hair growing out of his face. A beard. I saw one once on a biotech doctor.

The man seemed idly surprised by my answer, "Honest one, huh? Spine go limp at staring down the barrel of a gun? What the fuck are you even wearing?" He asked me, his eyes going down to the neural suit that I still had on. At that moment, I acted. Grabbing the gun by the slider, I ripped it back before elbowing the man in the throat, making him stumble back. Shoulder checking him forced him back more, letting me rip the gun from his grasp and aim it at him. "Woah- Woah, alright, I'm sorry-"

"My outfit," I snarled at him, cutting him off. "How does it look?"

The guy looked very perplexed. "Are you making me rate your outfit at gunpoint? With my gun?" He asked himself more than me as he frowned. I responded by curling my finger around the trigger instead of pointing it straight. "Ah, shit, it's a… look, that shits a three. Don't care if you shoot me for that answer either. You can kill me and my only regret would be getting flatlined by a guy looking like that."

What? "Does it stand out?" I pressed, wondering what was going on. How could I understand what he was saying without having a single clue what he said?

"In a bad way, yeah. Looks like you're about to go swimming in the ocean or some shit," the guy answered and I looked down at his clothes. The scrubs were unlike anything I had seen, and it even seemed very different from the suits and lab coats that I saw on doctors. White shirt with no sleeves, blue pants that had a bunch of holes and tears in them, and slippers that seemed thick and unwieldy since they came up to about his shin. Looking at him, we were about the same size.

"Give me your clothes," I demanded. If the neural suit stood out, then I needed to get rid of it.

The guy frowned, "You're robbing me of my outfit." It wasn't a question.

Robbing? "I'm taking your outfit," I agreed. "Give it to me. Now. You can have the neural suit." It could have traceable tech in it and he'd be good for misleading whoever came after me.

The guy's lips thinned as if he were thinking about it. "Can I get my gun back?"

"No." I would need it. Soon, probably. The guy looked into my eyes, almost as if he were searching for something. I'm not sure what. But, whatever it was, he seemed to have found it because he made a scoffing sound.

"'Course I'd rob a guy willing to zero me for fucking clothes," he cursed, taking off his shirt and kicking off his shoes. Unzipped the neural suit and started to shrug it off, only to find that the implants that Dr. D put in me were connected to it. Fumbling, I reached back and managed to disconnect them, leaving the implants in. For now. A danger, but I couldn't do anything about it. I didn't have the equipment to take them out. "And you were naked. And kinda fucked up. Fucking wildin' out. Alright."

Keeping a gun pointed at him at all times, I put the clothes on and felt very uncomfortable. They didn't at all feel like scrubs. Keeping my gun pointed at him as I backed away, leaving him in nothing but a pair of underwear, I kept my eye on him until I fled around a corner.

"Okay," I breathed, my heart still hammering at my ribs. My feet felt heavy with the thick and unwieldy shoes, but I ran all the same. I needed to think. No- I needed to code. The strangle grip the orphanage had on me was loosened, but I had no idea if they still had a grip on me at all. My tech was likely based and connected onto their subnet and while I managed to cut their access to my implants temporarily, all I did was close a door. It wouldn't prevent someone from figuring out how to open it back up. It would be easy for them when it came right down to it.

To that end, I had no idea what was in my body. What kind of implants that I have? I always assumed that they were linked into my optics, but given how far I managed to get away, they either didn’t or they were luring me into a false sense of security. They were certainly connected to my Meditech -- had to be for work. The tech in me could be traceable, meaning that I needed to see if I was outputting any kind of signal or sporting a connection to any network.

From there, I would need to see if I needed to rip something out of me or if it could be covered up to mask the signal. To know if I was broadcasting anything, I brought up my OS to start writing out a code. It wasn't one that I practiced as much, but I knew it by heart. Ping. A command that bounced between tech, marking what was connected to the same subnet or broadcasted an open signal. All the while, I ran. My side was killing me, sweat and blood dripped down my face, and this place was beyond daunting. Overwhelming.

It took five minutes to write up the code for Ping -- it was a simple code when it came right down to it, but it wasn’t a piece of code that I had refined down to the barest components to do what I needed it to do. The pain certainly didn’t help speed things along. As soon as it was done, though, I looked around for a reflective surface.

I found one in what looked like a garage. A large door was open, revealing a handful of men that were working on a car that was lifted into the air by a set of magnetic clamps. I nearly walked by it until I saw one of them men standing in front of the mirror before the reflection faded when he walked away. Stumbling by them, my gaze landed on the mirror while one of them shouted, “Kid, what in the hell do you think you're doing?”

I ignored him and instead focused on my reflection. I’ve never actually gotten a good look at myself before. There weren’t any mirrors back in the orphanage. I’ve had what I look like described to me, but I’ve never actually seen myself outside the odd warped reflection. The shaved-down hair at my head was black, my eyes were dark green, high cheekbones, and a strong jawline.

According to my Meditech, only two-thirds of my face was actually my face, though. That last third was artificial. Implants. Not sure when they were put in, but they didn’t possess any cybernetic component.

“Kid-” the man started, roughly grabbing me by the shoulder, whipping me around, only to put his hands up when I shoved a gun at him. “Okay. Cool. Easy now…”

I looked back at my reflection and used Ping on myself, searching for an open connection to anything beyond myself. And, to my despair, I saw that I had one open signal. It wasn’t in any implants, however. Not even my eyes. It was in my mouth. Opening it up and looking back, I saw a molar was highlighted in red, confirming that it was emitting a signal. Fuck. “You,” I half snarled at the man, “A pair of pliers. Give me a pair of pliers.”

“Whatever you say, man,” the man responded, going to a toolbox. I tensed until he revealed that he did just pull a pair of pliers. He passed them to me and I wasted no time. Putting them into my mouth, I tasted iron on my tongue even before I clamped down on the molar in question and started to pull. My hands shook with exertion, tears gathering in my eyes, and more than the broken rib, pulling on my molar hurt. It wasn’t the worst pain that I’ve ever felt, but just because some things hurt a lot more didn’t mean that it hurt any less.

The tooth came free with a sudden heave and the entire side of my face hurt. “Fuck!” I shouted, spitting out a mouth full of blood into the sink and I soon found that it was replaced with another mouthful. The tooth clattered in the sink before I picked it up -- the enamel was fake, leaving the guts of the tooth to act as a tracker. And something else. I was bleeding a lot, I realized, spitting out another mouthful of blood. Meditech… My temperature was elevated. A full hundred degrees. I was getting sick? The implant in my back?

“Wow,” I heard a voice speak up, making me turn around to see that it was a woman. Unnaturally pale skin, Light turquoise colored hair that drifted down longer than I had ever seen it on anyone before. Her optics were colored green in a pool of pinkish red. She barely came up to my chest, practically drowning in a black coat that barely contained the large mechanic red and blue arms that were attached to her. They were large enough to act as legs for her. “You did that without a pain editor?”

“Who are you?” I questioned, my grip tightening around the gun in my palm. Blood built up in my mouth, and even as I turned to spit it on the ground, my eyes didn’t leave her. She was the one that shot that drone to pieces. Didn’t see the guns on her at the moment, but that coat left a lot of room to hide them.

“The names Rebecca! But, you can call me Becca! And you look like you’re in a spot of trouble,” Becca responded. Her name was long. Why did it have so many letters? Where were the numbers? It was the same for Dr. D and Dr. K. And Allen. “Someone really wants you. They’re putting Japantown in lockdown.”

I could guess what that meant. “And?” I stressed, looking for a point.

“And you totally wrecked our car by using the highway as a landing strip. I figure if someone wants you back bad enough to lock down Japantown, then they’d be willing to pay a preem amount of eddies to get you-” Becca continued, her tone chipper, but I heard enough. My gun snapped up and with no hesitation, it curled around the trigger. The gun bucked in my hand, but I was prepared for it. Even if it was the first one I fired that wasn’t in VR.

The bullet sparked against her forehead, as did the other two against her chest. Her eyes widened as I started to sprint away, firing all the while, much to the panic of the men in the garage. “I’m not going back!” I snarled at her, pulling the trigger once more, even if it was pointless. Subdermal plating. I wasn’t going to get threw it with a gun like this.

“Don’t make me chase you!” Becca warned, not moving from where she was until I rounded the corner outside. She sounded confident that she could catch me. I had to prove her wrong about that. “And you’re making me chase you.”

Spitting out another mouthful of blood, I felt my veins fill with adrenaline. The chase had begun to take me back and I wasn’t doing so great already with a busted rib and they could follow me with the blood trail.

My only real advantage was the fact that they were trying to take me back alive. If only for the orphanage to have the pleasure of killing me themselves. That wasn’t a disadvantage that I had. I popped the magazine out of the Liberty pistol to find that it had six bullets left.

Wasted too many on Becca, I reflected, breaking into a dead sprint to put as much distance between her and me as possible. Running out into the street, I joined a sidewalk that was full of people. Joining the flow of them for a moment, my tooth felt like a lead weight.

A charge has been spent!

Pickpocket: Rank 1

An idea struck me when I saw an open pocket and as I brushed by, I deposited the tooth in the pocket of an odd looking man. Leaving it with him to take wherever I broke off from the crowd to enter a road that seemed designed for people to walk down. The music vibrated the streets that I walked down, countless powerful beats merging together to make a confusing symphony. Out of everyone I had seen, it was the brightest place while being the dirtiest.

“We have a little something for everyone!” I heard an announcer say as a naked woman and man swayed to a beat in front of a building. Neon signs flashed of women opening their legs or a man thrusting his hips. “BDS, real guys and girls, and toys that’ll leave your neurons quivering!” The announcement continued, fading into the background as I moved on.

I spat out another mouthful of blood on the ground, the taste of copper heavy on my tongue. The spot where my tooth used to be ached, radiating pain in pulses. My gaze darted around, the odd glitch making things a little difficult to see, searching for any hint of who was following me. Becca was nowhere to be found as I walked over a small bridge over a trench that smelled absolutely rancid.

What I did see was an alert from my OS that popped open when I reached the other side, my blood going cold as I realized that someone was hacking into my systems. The red text box showed me that someone was breaching the ICE around my OS -- ICE that was put on me by the orphanage. Even with a passing glance, I could tell that it was good. Not something that you could hack into on a whim.

Yet, whereas I spent a month refining a single piece of code to perfection, whoever was hacking into my OS was doing it on the fly and they were getting through. I continued walking, my heartbeat thundering in my ears, my gaze darting around for who was hacking into me. If they were nearby, then they weren’t revealing themselves. Not in a way that I could see.

I had to do something. I made a snap decision -- diving into my OS, I pulled up the files on my implants. It wasn’t enough to disable them. Whoever got inside my OS, they would be able to undo toggling them on and off with enough time. ICE had layers. Generally, the deeper the program, the more important it was. You didn’t need to cut through all of it, however. You could still interact with programs on higher levels -- introduce glitches, cause cascading failures, and force uploads that could give root access without cutting through all of the ICE.

I had to assume that the hacker intended to get into my core systems. My OS. Meaning that they could trigger my implants.

With a thought, I gathered the data from my implants and I trashed them. My Meditech glitched out, suffering a hard crash, but that was fine. My implants were already off, so none of them were vital enough that I needed them to survive. I just made sure that they couldn’t be turned on again. The only one that I couldn’t was my optics, but it was a single avenue of attack. With the data junked, I prepared for my ICE to be breached and placed down a welcome mat for whoever got in.

Not a second later, the forced connection was established and the ICE was breached. I hit the signal with my own rendition of Breach, sending it right back at them. The ICE on their end was thick and, more than that, it was responsive. Meaning that the netrunner that was hacking into my systems was simultaneously defending their own to kill the Breach command that I was sending.

They were better than me. I realized it in a fraction of a second. Even as I was drawing up code to kill the commands that they were inputting, closing doors as fast as I could on my systems to keep them out for a second longer. The Breach command was a silver bullet, but it lacked stopping power. Too simple. It took her seconds to kill the command.

Just not before I bounced Ping through the connection between our systems. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a camera highlight itself in red. Surveillance camera on the corner of a building. The netrunner was piggybacking off of it. I sent Breach through the camera, encountering the ICE for the building itself. Chipping through it was a rush job; before it was over, the netrunner breached through a deeper layer of ICE.

My vision became static. Not entirely switched off, but junk data was injected into the stream of information that neither my OS nor my brain knew how to process. Stumbling a step and bumping into someone, I remained still and focused on the net. I was through the store's ICE, and I found the piggyback signal. Casting breach on the signal again, even though I couldn’t see the board, I wrote up code to attack her systems. All the while, I forced a hard reboot on my optics through my OS to get rid of the junk data.

It was then that I felt the barrel of a gun get pressed into the base of my spine from behind. “You’re lucky Kiwi got to you before I did,” Becca informed. “I was gonna take your kneecaps.”

My OS rebooted and my optics flashed back online, even if things were hazy and glitchy. My attempts at hacking Kiwi were pretty stilted and ineffectual, but now that I was making a more active attempt, she was focusing more on defense than offense. Okay. The gun to the spine was an issue, but it was one I could do something about. The organs in danger of being shot were the intestines -- dangerous, but less deadly than getting shot in the heart, lungs, or liver. Gut wounds were slow.

“You don’t seem dumb to me, so don’t do what you’re thinking about. My reflexes are faster than yours. You won’t be running anywhere as a paraplegic,” Becca informed me, making my jaw clench. She saw through me. “And I’d stop counter-hacking Kiwi. That counts as doing something stupid. You got a name? You know mine.”

I could still get out of this. A single charge… I couldn’t use it here. Nothing came to mind on how I could use it. “L. L-15,” I answered, pausing my counter-offensive against Kiwi.

Becca made a noise of surprise behind me, “That ain’t a name.”

“If I had a name, then they took that from me too,” I answered, considering my options. None of them were particularly good. “They’ll want me alive. Pump me for information on how I managed to escape. Can’t do that if I’m dead,” I continued, knowing exactly what I needed to do. I didn’t whip around to level my gun at her. Instead, I shifted my arm thirty degrees.

Pointing my gun at my head. Becca made a sputtering noise behind me and I slowly turned around to see that she was staring at me with a slack jaw, her expression dumbfounded. “They’re the kind of assholes that’d kill you for me dying,” I spoke, not entirely sure if I was telling the truth or not. But, with the barrel of a gun pressed underneath my chin, I backed away from Becca, who watched me with an expression that I couldn’t identify. “So, it’s in your best interest to get away from me. Sorry about your car.” I added, continuing to back away.

My mouth felt dry. Was that from the nerves? But my mouth felt like it was filling with blood again. Was this a side effect of crashing my Meditech? Did Kiwi infect me with some kind of malware? My stomach was churning and my body felt so hot. Burning.

“Ugghhh… Fine. Fine!” Becca groaned, lowering her guns. Pink and black submachine guns. “David, you were right. Something real weird is goin’ on.” David?

Almost as if to answer my unspoken question, I bumped into someone behind me. Pivoting on my heel, I took aim with my gun just as I saw it was the man before. My finger curled around the trigger… only to curl around empty air before a bullet fired out. The gun wasn’t in my hand anymore. Stumbling a step back, I saw that it was in the man’s hand.

“He fell from the sky in a top-of-the-line aircar, they shut down Kabuki to scour it for him. And he’s desperate enough to rip a tooth out of his head and run around with a busted rib. Course I’m right,” he responded, giving me a lopsided smile that reminded me too much of R. Easy-going and friendly. “Where were you coming from, L?”

How did he get the gun? An implant was the obvious answer, but when I Pinged his systems, I got scrambled text. Even the most superficial level of his ICE was thick. I couldn’t get anything off of him. “Does it matter?” I questioned, my guard all the way up, cycling through my options but it was getting harder. Much harder. My thoughts were getting hazy. My focus was slipping. Something was wrong.

“Might. Might not. How about you tell me and I’ll decide?” He pressed and I hear Becca sigh behind me as I spat out another mouthful of blood. How many was that now? I ripped a molar out of my mouth. I expected it to bleed a fair bit, but this felt excessive. Was there an issue with my clotting?

Did I have anything to lose by playing along? Did I have anything to gain? “I’m told it was Night City’s Home for Wayward Boys,” I answered after a moment. I heard a loud wailing off in the distance that reminded me of the alarm back at the orphanage. I just about jumped out of my skin when I heard it, and in doing so, I swayed dangerously and collapsed to a knee. Sweat dripped off of me and despite the painful heat that swept through me, I felt cold. So very cold.

“Kiwi? What's going on with him?” The man said, approaching me and dropping down to a knee next to me. I smacked away a hand that went to touch me, my limb feeling weak. Though, I did feel the unmistakable sturdiness of metal. His arms were augments. It seemed a lot of him was metal at this close. “What do you mean his Meditech is scrambled?”

“David, we have to get out of here. Cops are coming,” Becca spoke up and I swallowed thickly.

“David Martinez,” David introduced himself, seemingly ignoring Becca to focus on me. “That’s my name. You can give me all the detes about what’s going on with you later, L… but do you think you can trust me not to hand you over to the corps?” Corps?

No, I didn’t.

Only everything went dark before the words managed to spill from my lips.

...

Here is Never Fade Away. For those that missed the announcement, I recommend you go check it out, but the TLDR is that Gone Native will be on pause for a few weeks before resuming as a biweekly story. What does that mean?

Basically, every Monday that Gone Native doesn't update, Never Fade Away will. When Gone Native returns to normal weekly updates, Never Fade Away will either be given its own day to update or it'll take over Thursday when From the Ashes when it reaches a stopping point.

Now, onto another important question - the Inspired Inventor has undergone some alterations for this story. Here is a Link to the original for reference. The rules in question are pretty simple all things considered.

A charge is gained every 2 chapters written and every two weeks that pass in story. The cap on skills or tech has no theoretical limit, but past 10 sees diminishing returns. For reference -- 1-3 would be considered a hobbyist/prototype, 4-6 is skilled/standard to high-end, 7-9 is expert/top of the line, 10 and beyond is a foremost expert/bleeding edge. Additionally, L has no control over what tech or skill is picked. That's me from behind the DM screen, essentially. That change is mostly to prevent metagaming on L's behalf -- he doesn't know of other settings, and he can't just pick post-scarcity tech for an instant steamroll. How it would work in practice is L will go 'damn, I wish I had some FTL technology' and I would spend a charge on an FTL that seemed interesting like Concentrated Dark Matter Fuel from Rick and Morty.

And that's it. I hope you all enjoy!