Never Fade Away: A Thing of Beauty (ch. 1) (Patreon)

My blood felt like it was boiling in my veins, cooking me from the inside out, and the gallons of sweat that dripped from me did nothing to cool me down. It only managed to make the gown that I wore soaked, plastering it to my chest, as I worked on soaking through the hospital bed that I was strapped to. I grit my teeth, shifting my arms and legs, trying to find a position that would offer some kind of relief, but I only chaffed my wrist and ankles where the restraints were.

“Stop moving, subject L-15,” I distantly heard someone instruct next to me, but it sounded like they were talking underwater. Or maybe I was the one underwater. I couldn’t tell at this point. It felt like I was drowning. My gaze shifted upwards towards the one that had spoken and through blurry eyes, I recognized the silhouette of Dr. K. Her form was mostly a glassy blur, but she had long brown hair that was done up in a bun, and she wore a white labcoat. I don’t think it was her name, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t either.

I think I might have had a name at some point, but I couldn’t remember it. It was like the memories had been burned right out of my skull.

“Ho- how much longer?” I rasped, gripping the handlebars of the gurney with white knuckles. I was used to pain. I couldn't have made it this long without being used to it, but this was different. My blood was filled with a searing heat and the pain didn't fade or lessen. It started the moment a whitish blue liquid was injected into me and in the time since, the heat only spread throughout my body.

“You’re closing on the end, L-15. Keep still for the remainder,” Dr. K said, her voice firm, but not unkind. Of all the doctors that we worked with, she was probably the kindest, but it was hard to like her sometimes. When it came time to work, you never knew what you were in for. Sometimes you were stuck taking mindless quizzes on tastes in music for sixteen hours straight, and other times you ended up on the operating table, unsure if you’ll be coming back.

I heard a familiar beeping sound next to me and, for a moment, I wondered if it was my own heart monitor that started to flatline. Next to me, I heard Dr. K curse before she rounded onto the other side of me, her white lab coat fluttering in the wind behind her as she went to the bed next to me. I blinked a few times to clear up my vision, but things were still glassy. “He’s coding,” Dr. K informed, grabbing a needle filled with a purple serum.

My eyebrows drew together as I tried to think who had been brought in with me this time. Thinking was hard. My memories were fuzzy. It was like my brain was filled with ants and they were crawling inside my skull, trying to find an exit. Beyond Dr. K and the medical team, I saw the outline of a bright red buzzcut and stark white skin.

Ah. Z.

We were in the same age bracket. I’ve known Z for my entire life -- since we first woke up here in the orphanage in age bracket five. So, for ten years, I’ve known Z. A hollow feeling started to enter my chest as I watched the medical team struggle to get his heart working again. “It’s a reaction,” I heard Dr. K announce, sounding certain about it. Z and I often worked together since we were some of the last ones in our bracket, but he did a solo test last workday.

I looked away from the scene, a single tear dripping from the corner of my eye. Or it could have been sweat. “Goodbye, Z,” I muttered, closing my eyes and listening to his heart monitor flatline.

…

When I opened my eyes, I didn’t feel any pain. My blood didn’t feel like it was filled with fire, but it was itchy. My arms and legs weren’t bound anymore, letting me rub the chaffed skin that happened because of my initial thrashing. Looking up at a familiar ceiling, I took a moment and waited for sounds of snoring coming from across the room and a little to the left. Instead, I only heard silence.

A sigh escaped me before I pushed myself up in a sitting position, finding myself in the dorm. Everything was white and sterile -- the walls were white, as was the floor, and the ceiling. The only thing that changed was the shade of white. The shape of the dorm was a long rectangle that, at one point, had been very crowded. Twenty-six beds for twenty-six kids in our bracket. However, as the years went by, the room became a little more open as beds were removed because the one sleeping in them didn’t make it back.

My gaze was drawn to where Z’s bed should be, only to find an empty space. His bed had been wheeled out like everyone elses, leaving the room a bit emptier. Now? Now, there were only four beds left. Mine, M’s, A’s, and R’s.

Another sigh escaped me when I forced myself to get out of bed and tucking the covers back in place, I crouched down to the cubby underneath the bed to grab another set of clothing. There was only ever one set down there at a time, and only when I wasn’t already wearing a set of scrubs. I had been sterilized going into the operating room and when I left it, so I didn’t need to worry about a shower. Getting dressed in a pair of grayish white pants and shirt, and slid my feet in a pair of gray loafers.

As I got dressed, I took a measure of the pressure in the back of my head. The only method of telling time any of us possessed. I liked to call them charges. They only started appearing some time ago -- I’m not exactly sure when. Time was hard to measure in the small strokes. We all shared a birthday that marked us moving up in a bracket and a year passing. Thanks to the charges, I knew that it was generally two work days between each charge appearing. The rest of the days were filled with recovery time and mental tasks.

Based on the pressure in the back of my skull, I knew I had been out long enough to be at the start of a new cycle. Meaning that I had been out for quite a while -- probably to filter the stuff out of my blood and kept in holding to ensure that I didn’t suffer any side effects. That meant that I was due for another work day soon enough without any filler to recover mentally from the ordeal.

Stepping out of our dorm, I entered a hallway that I knew made a large circle. At regular intervals, there were doors that led to the dorms for the other brackets. The youngest was bracket five, which was filled with kids. The oldest bracket was meant to be bracket eighteen, but no one managed to work that long to my memory. The closest anyone came had been V-17, who had died way back when I was still L-9.

In the gap between dorm eighteen and dorm five, there was a bulkhead door. No one had ever seen the other side of it. It was theorized that beyond it was the workrooms, but we were knocked unconscious before being transported to them, so it was anyone's guess.

Stepping through a door that was across the hall from my dorm, I entered the rec room to see that it was as busy as ever. It was divided into five floors with an elevator and a staircase to connect them. The ground floor was meant for the younger brackets, and naturally, it was the base floor. As the doors opened, I was immediately assaulted by noise as brackets five and six all played with each other. Block and logic puzzles, math equations, and science projects.

“L!” I heard a familiar voice call out, drawing my attention to T-6, who made L-5 and L-6 do the same. T-6 ran up to me, earning a soft smile as I scooped him up in my arms. Like everyone else in this place, his hair was cut short in a buzz cut. Unlike most, already, he was sporting surgical lines in the back of his skull where an implant was put in. A long-term job. Good. It meant he would have lighter loads. “You’re up!”

“Yeah, the last job was a rough one,” I admitted, holding T-6 as I made my way to the elevators. The rest of the kids went back to playing their games or with each other. “Looks like you’re rocking some iron. What's that?”

“It’s an Arasaka spine!” T-6 answered, hanging off of me while he wiggled around, nearly making me drop him, so he could show off the biotic spine that protruded from his back from the base of his skull to his hips. “I dunno what it does yet.”

“Arasaka, huh? Looks like we worked together,” I remarked, making my way up the stairs. “We were testing a thermal drug. Seems like people want to walk in space without the mods,” I remarked, earning an ear-to-ear smile. The doctors never really hid what they were giving us. Most of the time, the mods, vials, or pastes were labeled -- Militech, Arasaka, and so on and so on. I didn’t really understand what they were. Only that they were entities beyond the walls I grew up in.

“Awesome,” T-6 breathed, practically vibrating in my arms. “And I’ve been studying! Like you told me to,” he added, clearly expecting to be praised for his efforts.

“Good,” I responded, my tone a little more intense than I intended. Studying could determine life and death. If you tested well, you could qualify for different jobs. Mental jobs. They were boring, I could admit as much. But doing math, puzzles, or science equations for eighteen hours straight was still infinitely better than testing products. “Keep at it. And soon enough, you can come up with us to the gym to start exercising.” Physical tests were a double edged sword, because they could qualify you for jobs that you would want just as easily as they would for ones that you wouldn’t.

It was worth the risk. Sometimes you would be included in a test that you weren’t physically able to handle, and having some extra pounds of muscle could be what decided your fate.

Heading up the floors, I saw a variety of rooms and the other brackets. Each floor was keyed to a bracket -- the base floor was 5-7, the second floor was 8-10, the third floor was 11-13 with the fourth floor was meant for 14-16. The fifth and final floor was reserved for brackets 17 and 18, but they were currently unoccupied and we weren’t allowed to head up. T-6 was only allowed because he was with me.

The fourth floor was mostly geared to high-end physical activities or mental exercises -- chairs to run combat simulations in preparation to handle combat stims or implants. A lot of gym equipment. A table where we could eat nutrient paste that projected a hologram for strategy simulations. The room itself was probably the most colorful that I had seemed with dark blacks and lines on the ground to mark safety distance.

“L,” I was greeted by one of the handful of others that were on the floor. We shared it with brackets 14 and 16… but there were still only six others in the room despite being reserved for three brackets. Some could be on individual jobs, but I knew that even with them here, the room would still be empty. M-15 sat at the table along with A-15 and R-15 -- their heads shaved, but none of us exactly looked similar anymore.

R was more muscle than man at this point. A side effect of a drug meant to aid in natural regeneration and whoever designed it forgot to factor in that muscle fibers naturally tore all the time, leaving R with a mass of three hundred and thirty pounds of pure muscle. A was missing his jaw entirely, and it was replaced with a metallic port that claimed his nose and one of his eyes. M and I looked the most natural, but M had an extended skull that was marked with surgical lines and implants.

“Z didn’t make it,” I told the last members of my bracket, approaching the table with T-6 in arm. He went silent at the sight of them. The older kids always scared the younger ones because they didn’t understand what awaited them. “Compound complication,” I added, taking a seat, explaining why another one of us had died but there really wasn’t a need.

You could only handle so many physical jobs before you ran into a conflict. The damage stacked. An experiment you underwent as a bracket five could conflict with an experiment as a bracket ten, and it’d kill you. The younger kids were occasionally brought back -- especially if they had a long-term job they were working on. Not always, but it happened before. Generally speaking, you were fine until bracket ten. You may die from the experiments themselves, but you only ran into compound issues later on.

We were in bracket fifteen -- the four of us.

There was no one in bracket sixteen.

There were nine members in bracket fourteen.

“Another bites the dust,” A remarked, shrugging his shoulders in a dismissive way that didn’t match the sadness in his eyes. We were used to friends dying. Family. It was only a matter of time, really. It was also part of the reason why I was the only one that bothered to make a connection to anyone in a younger bracket -- we were running out of time. At our age, each job was a gamble when it came to compounding issues. We couldn’t bounce back like we could even a few years ago.

We were old men.

“If another one of you dies before the next birthday, then I win our bet,” R remarked, his voice deep like brass. It was something of a tradition -- betting on how many of us would make it to the next bracket. I already lost because I bet that six of us would have made it. R bet three, A bet two, and M bet one. He even doubled up and bet that he would be the one that made it. We didn’t have anything to actually bet. We just heard about it from a Biotechnica doctor who half-explained it to us before Dr. K shut him up.

We all put our hands on the table, including T-6, with a giggle. A tapped his finger on the table while he spoke, “What do you think will happen? If we make it all the way up to bracket 18? What do you put our Chances?” As he spoke, his finger tapped down on the table, spelling out a message. A subtle code that we developed over the past dozen workdays. When my charges appeared.

“You don’t want me to answer that,” I answered the unspoken question. “Time’s not our friend here.” I tapped down on the table at the word time, marking it as important. “I’d give it another eight workdays before we’re all gone.” The translation? Four-cycle timeframe.

“I think that’s a bit much,” M spoke up, pursing his lips. “My bet is four. I flatlined today for a full thirty seconds,” he admitted, making my finger pause. Meaning that it had nearly been three of us.

“You should have stayed dead. I would have won our bet,” R remarked, his gaze going to me. “I flatlined last work day. Ten seconds.” He added, and I felt a terrible weight on my shoulders. A weight that had appeared a month ago for a reason I wasn’t entirely certain of. I don’t know if it was a compounding issue, or if it was an experiment that was working as intended, or what.

I had been keeping a mental list, of sorts, that marked what the charges had been spent on and how many I had.

Unspent Charges: 3

Electrical Engineering -- 1

Cyberpunk 2077: Netrunning -- 2

Cybperpunk 2077: Implants -- 1

Before a charge had been used for the first time, I nearly reported it as a symptom. I had no idea what it was beyond a vague pressure in the back of my head. A pressure that vanished during a puzzle test that I was doing to qualify for more mental tasks to give my body a break. For years, I had no idea what the puzzle was meant to represent, but as the pressure in the back of my mind vanished, something clicked into place and I realized what I was puzzling out.

Electrical Engineering.

My brain made snappish connections, jumping to conclusions and theorizing about how to utilize electricity that vastly increased my usual marks on tests now that I realized what I was working on.

How the charges worked was beyond me, but it was almost like it was a burst of understanding, in a weird way. I didn’t have any control over it beyond the fact that I could feel the charges in the back of my head. I tried to force them to be spent in some capacity, but whatever triggered them to be used was something that was entirely beyond my hands. What I did know about the charges was mostly guesswork.

Each charge deepened my understanding of a subject. If rank one was a generalist, then rank three was someone that was familiar with a subject. What the ranks beyond that offered, I wasn’t entirely certain. I didn’t know if there was a cap to the amount of charges that I could invest into a subject, or if there was a limit in what I could learn. I hoped to discover it one day, but for now, I had a far more important goal in mind.

Escaping.

We couldn’t make the materials. We weren’t allowed to have personal items and nothing could come in or out of the rec room. We were under observation at all hours of the day -- I didn’t know to what level, but I had to assume that we were under constant watch and even our bodies could betray our location and intentions. Meaning that the only way we had a chance to escape was to have the necessary skills to escape whenever we finally made the attempt.

Netrunning to get rid of the tracking software in our bodies and disable any safety measures they installed into us. Hacking to disable doors, and possibly people. Programing to instantly identify what software obstacles I was dealing with. Handling and creating explosives if we encountered hardware obstacles. Escaping was half the battle. It would mean nothing if they caught us after we managed to get out.

Meaning that I needed to have the skills necessary to ensure that we weren’t recaptured the moment that we left. I needed to be able to protect everyone -- most of us had some degree of combat training because of mil-sims, so that would help. But, we would be escaping with about three hundred kids, a good portion of which were… kids. I couldn’t make it up as we went. I needed to be prepared in advance for whatever problem we might encounter, without ever actually knowing what problem we might encounter because I had no idea what awaited us.

“I Don’t Think any of us are going to be checking Out this Early,” A remarked, tapping his finger. Don’t think out early.

“I’d rather check out later over sooner, but if we don’t have a choice then we don’t have a choice,” I responded, meeting eyes with the last of my bracket. We were the last ones left. The oldest in the workplace. All we had were our skills. We would only get one chance at escaping this place. If we blew it? We wouldn’t get another.

M looked at me, the edges of his lips tugging into a frown. “That's not the attitude that we need, L. It's time to check out when it's time to check out. No point in rushing things,” he voiced, telling me he was aware of that fact himself.

“Our birthday seems like as good of a time as any,” A pitched, sticking to the timeline. All of us were keenly aware that eight more work days might as well be an eternity. However, it would give me another two charges to work with. In addition to the two that I already possessed. Chemistry. Stealth and Espionage skills.

Those charges could be what determined if we died or succeeded. Hell, I would take dying in the escape. At least then, I wouldn’t die on some table.

“I don’t want any of you to die,” T-6 spoke up, breaking the silence, his voice thick with emotion and his starting to blur up with tears. He clung to my side, sniffling before he buried his face in the nook of my shoulder, bunching up my scrubs with his hands. “I don’t want you to die, L.”

I let out a breath, patting him on the back while thinking that T-6 needed to toughen up. Death walked with all of us here. We were one bad reaction away from it. You had to learn to live with it and learn how to say goodbye. “I’ll do my best, T,” I responded to him as he silently cried on my shoulder at the mere thought of me dying. I was touched. I wasn’t sure if anyone would shed a tear at my death.

The others looked a bit guilty at driving T-6 to tears and decided to change the subject away from our impending escape. Or deaths. I'm not sure those things were so different when you came right down to it. R spoke up, providing a new subject, "I never really thought about it before, what happens to us after we hit bracket eighteen?"

No one managed to live and find out to my knowledge, but M offered an answer, "Maybe we become doctors. Like Dr. K or D."

I tilted my head as if I were considering it. "So, like a promotion? That sounds nice," I admitted. I imagine it was a lot better overseeing an experiment than participating in it. Far less painful and a lot lower chance to die. "Do you think that's what the Arasaka scientist meant about a white-collar worker?"

Arasaka, Militech, Biotech, and so on. We encountered all of them and worked for most of them. I just knew them as entities that worked beyond these walls, but what shape or purpose they had was beyond me. However, each had a personality.

Arasaka and Militech hated each other. You were either exclusively Miltech or Arasaka, but you could never be both with them. Frequently, we encountered similar jobs, like they were both racing to a finish line to release a product. Biotech was the most dangerous out of all the companies I encountered. I've worked for them three times, and they killed me for a bit twice.

We used to make up stories about them. I'm not really sure why, to be honest. They were something that was… other, and they were the cause of what we went through. The pain, death, and loss. They were the only things we knew about beyond these walls so we used them to try to envision what the world looked like. A world that we would one day see.

"Maybe," A responded with a shrug. "Being a white-collar worker sure sounds better than being a blue one. What kind of doctor would you be?" A asked me, and that was an easy one.

"Quizzes. All the time. Exclusively," I decided, earning a few muttered agreements from the others as the conversation fell into familiar banter. The tension never really left any of us. All of us were so very aware that the odds weren't in our favor. However, certain death awaited us here. Meaning that we had to grasp for whatever chance that we could.

I brought up a familiar puzzle before me -- everyone thought it was my favorite one, but in the confines of my own mind, I was practicing. I had an idea of what kind of ICE we would be encountering, and even as I completed the puzzle, in my head, I was writing out the code. A program that would breach the ICE and give us a chance to escape. The puzzle was completed in thirteen seconds.

Not fast enough.

Nowhere near fast enough.

“Z-15 said that we could be other things,” T-6 spoke up, his voice clearing up as the conversation shifted away from a heavy topic. “He said that there were all kinds of jobs.” I managed a sad smile at that -- Z did use to say that. A lot, actually. He heard it from one of the older kids growing up, an offhand thing, but he took it to heart. It made sense, sorta.

We went through military sims and tested military tech. Stuff that was supposed to make people fight better against other people. So, maybe we could become soldiers. People produced music… so musicians, maybe?

“He also said that the ceiling outside was blue, and there are two lights in it. One’s called the sun, and the other is the moon. And you can only have one on at a time,” M pitched in. Z really had been too gullible for his own good.

“Really?!” T-6 blurted, instantly believing it. He was pretty gullible too, but he had the excuse of being a child. Z didn’t. “I want to see it! I want to see the moon!”

A looked down at the table for a moment, his one organic eye softening when he looked at T-6. “So do I, T-6,” M spoke up, his gaze sliding to R, who leaned back in his seat, stretching out his arms as a muscle cramp made the flesh writhe, but he bore the pain silently.

“A rollercoaster. I tested one out in a sim way back when I was in bracket six. I always wanted to ride on a real one,” R voiced.

A was quiet for a moment before he broke down, “Space. Everything beyond the Big Room of the outside. I want to reach it. See what it's all about. Maybe what's beyond it.” A confessed, and I hadn’t known that. I had no idea what beyond the Big Room beyond our small little world would look like. I knew enough to know that there was more, but not enough to actually know anything at all. What did it look like? Smell like? Taste like?

What was Arasaka? Miltech? Biotech? How did it all fit together?

What laid beyond that door?

“Z,” I spoke up, “wanted to be remembered.” The one great fear that we all possessed. Because, one day, we would die. We would exist only in the memories of those that were left behind and… one day, all those that remembered us would be dead to. Then, by any measure… we would cease to exist.

“And you, L?” R questioned, all eyes turning to me. I opened my mouth to respond, the truth nearly spilling from my lips. However, I had to swallow the truth down because I didn’t dare speak it.

My dream? To get them out. To get them out so they could live out their dreams.

“I think… I’ll be satisfied just making it to eighteen.”

...

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!