The air in the clinic was always the same, even after a surgery, heavy in a way that settles in your lungs like wet synth-wool, tasting of scorched silicone insulation, hot copper wire, and enough military-grade antiseptic to put down a cyberpsycho's fever. The kitchen upstairs was running the fryers, the ghost scent of synthetic sesame oil leaking through the ceiling joints. A back-alley cocktail, that you could only ever find in one place.
Life was a funny thing.
Perched bext me, on a stand on the workbench I was sitting on, an old CRT monitor flickered, throwing a dirty, phosphor-blue wash over the red lit walls. It was currently playing an old bout from '45 between Peter "The Brick" Hernandez and some corporate-sponsored hotshot out of Atlanta. Hernandez was give-or-take eighty percent organic, fighting a guy with illegal hydraulic boosters in his left hook. The tracking lines on the screen were shot, every few seconds the picture would tear, scrambling their faces into gray static, but I don't need to look at it to know how it ends.
Eighth round. Hernandez takes a liver blow that should've cracked his ribs, steps inside the arc, and lays the Atlanta kid flat on the canvas. Raw flesh over chrome. The sound is turned down to a tinny murmur. A muffled roar from a crowd that's been dead for thirty years. Just the wet, rhythmic thud-thud of gloves hitting flesh on loop.
I roll the calibration tool over in my right hand, meat against metal, the microservos in the Arasaka exoglove give a quiet click, adjusting their grip over my natural fingers automatically as I reconfigured it in preparation for my next appointment.
If you'd told the twenty-three-year-old version of me, Viktor Vektor, starting heavyweight for the Night City Devils, ranked fourth on the Coast and moving up the card, that I'd end up running a rippershop under a noodle bar in Little China? I'd have put you on the canvas.
Wouldn't even have been personal, I'd have hit you because you were insulting my trajectory. Back then, when you're young and your joints don't ache if you stand up to quickly, you think you can dance your way around Night City on your own terms. You think you can out-maneuver the house.
A back-alley clinic. That's the punchline. The house always wins.
I slide the tool along the joint housing of the exoglove, feeling for the problem I had felt in the last few moments of the previous surgery. There, a subtle resistance that could cause the sleeves fluidity a fraction of a degree, nothing that would drop performance yet, but a smart corner-man patches the cut before the fighter blinds themselves with blood. Most rippers swap their meat hands for chrome, but like I always have, I prefer my organic fingers, this external harness itself was a compromise.
My hand performs a thousand times better than any cyberhand ever would. I know its tolerances like I know my own lungs, any deviation registers before any software would ever throw up a warning flag. Third proximal joint on the glove. Tweaked, calibrated and settled.
The Watson Boxing Grand Prix... those were good rounds.
I don't look back with bitterness. Most people in this city view their past through a cracked lens, but I see it clear. The sweat in the gym, the circuit. A strange camaraderie where you hate but respect a man because you're both getting paid to break each other's ribs. The rhythm of the fourth round when you feel the fight tipping your way. The crowd roaring, but it's just white noise because your preparation is paying off.
Good rounds...
They were, and for a moment, I thought I was going to own the world...then came the knockout blow in the tournament finals. A standard Night City finish, sudden, heavy and with lots of collateral. The whole circuit was transforming into a corporate arms race, managers whispering in your ear to swap out your skeletal structure for corporate hydraulics and sub-dermal plating just to survive a left hook.
Then came a promoter with a Zetatech badge in his pocket, betting rings on his speed dial, and a very loose definition of a fair fight. A bout I was supposed to chip up for. Problem was, I valued raw human grit over corporate-sponsored chrome. I never learned how to lose a fight I was winning, so I took second place on my own terms and walked away from the limelight before the suit-and-tie sharks could kill me.
The city educated me real quick after I left the ring. Educational in the Night City sense, meaning it cost me my savings, my relationships and took six years of debt to square the ledger. But when you can't afford high-end trauma care, you learn to adapt. It forced me to learn how to patch up a broken body, how to calibrate faulty tech, and how to rewire a fried nervous system out of sheer survival. Necessity turned into a vocation, one of the few honest ways to earn a living in this city.
Look around this underground space now, no longer a compromise. It's mine. Built on my name, my sweat, and years of not cutting corners. The tech was solid. It isn't corporate-chic. No polished chrome or white lacquer like the clinics downtown where they charge you just to breathe the filtered air. But it's precise. Maintained to the millimeter. The folks who walk through that door don't have corporate trauma insurance, but they deserve gear that won't fry their nervous system.
Most come because they're out of options. Out of eddies, out of time. Some come because they know the name Viktor Vektor.
I prefer the ones who know the name, they have realistic expectations. They know I can patch 'em up, but I can't fix their lives...though I take the desperate ones anyway, most people would turn them away, but I never can, not when the alternative is they go to some scav-run basement in Kabuki, there's always a worse basement in Night City.
Always.
I drop the tool on the workbench. Unclamp the exoglove and set it aside, flexing my actual, organic hand. One, two, three, four five. I clench my fist a bit, and then sigh and let it go, sitting back a bit as I check the internal display.
[14:27]
Three minutes until the last card of the day. I was secretly hoping it's a quick checkup; my knees have been throwing a tantrum since noon. Fifty-three years old and the cartilage is singing. Been putting off my own maintenance for two years because the mechanic is always too busy fixing everyone else's engines...
I pull up the file again on my internal HUD.
Genos Harker. Twenty-five. A...freelance tech contractor out of Watson, I had looked into him a bit, just incase, he had a clean SIN, no active warrants, an NCPD flag, but that's just standard issue for living in this zip code. Street record, but nothing that screams trouble, though he had been vague about what he needed help with.
Misty had taken the call. Came into the clinic afterward with that settled quality she gets when something's caught her attention, 'He seems fine', she said. 'Cognizant, a bit clipped, but no markers that shows anything we should be worried about.'
I've been at this long enough to know that vague consultations go one of two ways. Either the patient doesn't know how to describe what they need and it turns out straightforward once you get them talking, or they know exactly what they need and aren't sure how it's going to land.
Either way the conversation starts the same. You sit across from them, you listen, and you try to help.
I was pulled from my thoughts by the familiar calm cadence of Misty's voice coming from the staircase. "You're in good hands with Vik. Whatever it is you need help with, I know he'll do his best."
Then another voice, echoed off the walls into the room, carrying a subtle mechanical undertone that my ear flagged immediately, not the tinny synthetic quality of a cheap voice modulator or a budget larynx replacement. "You been working with him long?"
"For a bit, yeah." Misty, easy and unhurried the way she always was. "Wasn't sure what to think when an old boxer asked to rent out a space behind my shop. He's a bit sardonic, but we get along. Best decision I ever made, really. It's easy to get along with someone when you both want to help people."
A beat of quiet from the other voice followed that, Misty had a way of saying things that made it hard to have a response to.
The automatic railings at the entrance shifted. Misty came through first and then behind her the the kid stepped in.
I kept my expression neutral at the sight of him.
Eleven years of consultations had given me a face that didn't react on first sight, in this field of work, you learned early that flinching at someone's chrome was the fastest way to lose their trust before the conversation even started. People came in here already braced for judgment, already carrying their weights and traumas flinching or avoiding eye contact, half expecting the world to take another swing at them, and the first thing you had to do was not give them another reason for it.
That being said.
I took a slow breath and let my eyes do their job, he was young that was the first thing that stood out, before the chrome, before any of it.
Young in a way that was obvious, even down here in the clinic's light, away from the street where Night City had a way of aging faces before their time and you stopped noticing. His face was structured, sharp across the jaw and cheekbones, the kind of features that would have read as striking in any other context and in this one read as almost out of place, like something carefully considered sitting above hardware that had been built for an entirely different purpose.
The blond hair was short, slightly displaced by whatever the morning had put him through. And the eyes, gold on black, cybernetic clearly, but the optic model was nothing I could place from this distance, which at this point I was already filing as a data point rather than a surprise.
The way the kid moved was what stuck out to me though. Every step he took was placed with a precision that was either caused by exceptional athletic conditioning or substantial physical augmentation. My mind did what it always did when faced with someone new. Old habit. Stepped back into the boxer's mindset, the one that never fully switched off no matter how many years I spent behind a workbench instead of behind a guard.
Size up, assess, find the threat before it finds you.
I watched him cross the clinic.
His weight distribution was wrong for a baseline, even a heavily augmented one, he was too constant and level. Biological weight shifted, even with chrome bolted on top of it, the body still compensated, still made the thousand small adjustments that came from having soft tissue and cartilage and a nervous system that was still fundamentally organic underneath all the modifications.
You could see it in how people walked if you knew what to look for. The slight unconscious lean. The compensation pattern around a repaired joint. The way a heavy shoulder installation changed the pendulum of the arms.
He had none of that.
His center of gravity held like it had a lock, he didn't shift or compensate, his movements didn't betray any of the small inefficiencies that organic bodies always introduced into movement no matter how much chrome you layered on top of them. That wasn't athletic conditioning. You couldn't train your center of gravity into that kind of stability. That was structural. That was the movement profile of a chassis that had been built to move that way rather than a body that had learned to.
My eyes went to his arms next, they were what the jacket wasn't hiding, the sleeves absent entirely, silver-black plating visible from shoulder to hand in the clinic's light, trying to build a picture.
But I stopped because the picture wasn't making sense.
There were no manufacturer markings I could make out. There was no subtle Arasaka watermark that showed up in the joint housing on their premium lines, no Militech stress-rating stamps that appeared on the underside of the forearm plating, no Kang Tao serial etching, no Zetatech calibration indicators, not even a faint TracOS firmware logo that showed up on the cheaper aftermarket stuff.
Nothing except clean plating from shoulder to fingertip with no corporate fingerprints on it whatsoever.
I had been doing this for eleven years. Before that I had been getting hit, and between the two experiences I had been present for a significant cross-section of what Night City's augmentation market had to offer. I wasn't the world's leading authority on every piece of chrome currently in circulation. But I knew enough to identify a manufacturer by the design language. The way joint housings were structured. The angle of the plating seams. The choice of alloy, which you could read in the light-reflection properties even without a spectrometer if you'd been looking at arms long enough.
I couldn't read these.
The design language didn't belong to anyone I knew. Not a style I recognized, or a derivation of a style I recognized, not even a particularly unusual custom modification of existing hardware. It was something else entirely, built from a design philosophy that I had never come across before.
I was looking at a custom job that much was obvious.
But custom in the Night City sense usually meant a skilled techie had taken existing components and modified them significantly. What I was looking at was not a modification.
I let my eyes move down without making it obvious I was doing a full assessment.
The jacket covered the torso. Most of it. But the way it sat on his shoulders told me something, the specific drape of fabric over a surface that wasn't biological, the slight geometric quality of the shoulder line that came from plating rather than muscle. I noted it and moved on.
His legs were covered but his movement told me everything the fabric didn't. The weight distribution was wrong for a baseline human, even a heavily augmented baseline. Too even. Too precise. The kind of weight distribution you got from structural replacement rather than enhancement, from legs that were load-bearing chrome rather than biological tissue with chrome bolted to the outside.
Full leg conversion both of them, almost certainly.
I looked at his neck, at the small strip of visible chassis between his collar and his jaw.
Upper torso too, maybe the entire torso.
I did the math quickly and didn't enjoy the result.
Custom arms, probably custom legs a visible cybernetic upper chassis, an unknown manufacturer across all visible components. This along with a movement profile consistent with full structural replacement.
The design philosophy, from what I could see, was not the kind of thing you achieved by finding a good ripperdoc and giving them a large budget. What I was hypothesizing required a facility, one that specialized in manufacturing.
The kind of engineering resources that existed in exactly two places in the world, a Tier One corporate black site or a private operation with the funding and expertise to build what the corps built, outside of any corporate structure.
The kid's eyes found mine black sclera and glowing gold pupils. Cybernetic, obviously, but not any optical model I could place, which at this point was consistent with everything else about him.
He looked at me in a way that was difficult to read, there was a stillness to his face that felt almost artificial. Not emotionless. Just controlled. Like every expression had been consciously selected before it reached the surface.
For a moment I found myself wondering whether the face I was looking at was the only natural thing left on him.
"Hey, Vik, your two-thirty is here." Misty stepped beside him with that easy smile she always seemed to have.
"Genos, this is Viktor Vektor. Best ripper you'll find anywhere in Night City. Vik, this is Genos."
To my surprise, the kid immediately stuck out his hand, formal. you didn't see that much anymore, not in Night City.
"Genos Harker," he said. "Thanks for seeing me." I took the offered hand and gave it a shake, his hands were strangely warm.
"Viktor Vektor. No problem." I said as I shook it.
I glanced toward Misty. "Thanks, Misty. I'll take it from here."
"No problem, Vik." She smiled. "I'll be upstairs if you need me." Then she pointed a finger at Genos. "And don't forget your stuff when you're done."
"I won't," he said. "Thanks again, Misty."
She gave a small wave and headed back toward the stairs. The clinic felt quieter after she left.
I settled back onto my stool crossed my arms as I looked at him. "So," I said, "what can I help you with, kid?"
Genos didn't answer immediately, instead his eyes drifted around the room, to the workbench, the cabinets, the monitors, even the walls. It wasn't the nervous look-around of a patient trying to work up courage. It felt more deliberate than that, like he was searching for or confirming something, eventually his gaze returned to me.
"Can I trust you, Viktor?" He asked me suddenly, after either having found or not found whatever he was looking for.
The question caught me off guard.
"I know we just met," he continued, "and this city is this city, but despite all that, can I tell you a secret and count on you to keep it?"
I leaned back slightly. "First off, call me Vik kid. Everybody does."
A faint smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. "And as for trust... despite the ripper part of the job description, I'm still a doctor." I spread my hands.
"Anything you tell me in this room stays in this room." I held his gaze. "You can trust me."
He was quiet for a second, staring at me in such a way that if my ICE didn't inform me otherwise, I would have thought he was scanning me, then he nodded.
"...Alright." Something in his expression shifted with those words. "The easiest way to explain is probably to show you."
Before I could ask what that meant, he was already moving, the jacket came off first, then soon enough the shirt.
And despite eleven years of doing this for a living, despite everything I'd seen walk through that door—
I couldn't hold in my reaction. "Jesus Christ, kid."
The words escaped before I could stop them, the arms had prepared me for something unusual, but not prepared me for this.
His entire torso was chrome, he wasn't reinforced or just augmented, there was no plated steel grafted over flesh.
He was just chrome.
From the base of his jaw all the way down beneath the waistband of his pants, every visible surface was silver-black alloy and impossibly intricate machinery.
The chest plating flowed together seamlessly, layered armor sections overlapping one another with a precision that looked more aerospace than cybernetic. Every component I could make out merged into the next. There were no exposed service ports, no maintenance panels or obvious modular mounting points.
No visible seams.
The entire thing looked manufactured as a single system, that alone should have been impossible.
Every cyberware manufacturer on the planet built around being replaceable, they designed their parts to fail to need replacement.
Nobody built something like this.
Nobody.
My eyes tracked across the framework, guessing at what could be below the armor.
Artificial musculature. Structural supports. Power-transfer conduits. Cooling channels.
Some of what I could make out resembled technology I recognized...
Most of it didn't, again what stood out to me were the lack of any form of manufacturer stamps.
I couldn't even begin to guess who had built it, worse, I couldn't tell what half of it was supposed to do.
"As I'm sure you can tell," Genos said, "I'm a full-body conversion—"
"How much of you is still organic?" I cut him off before I could stop myself.
A mixture of professional and moral concern, and maybe a little anger at what this implied, the kid didn't even look 25.
His expression didn't change at the question, instead he glanced toward the old CRT monitor sitting on my desk. "Is that connected to the Net in any way?" he asked.
I looked over at it, the boxing match was still playing, Hernandez working the body in the sixth.
"No." I frowned. "I just use it to watch old fights." I looked back at him. "Why?"
Without answering, Genos walked over to the desk.
A panel shifted open near the base of his skull. I froze as I stared at the unfamiliar cable ports I could see internal compartment hidden beneath the chassis of his neck.
The motion looked practiced, routine.
He reached down, unplugged the monitor cable, and connected it directly into the port at the back of his neck.
The screen immediately glitches, the fight vanishing as static rolled across the display.
Then the monitor stabilized the data that appeared made my stomach drop.
Schematics, hundreds of them, layered blueprints, I walked up to the monitor and swiped through each of them. Internal systems. Power distribution maps. Weapons architecture. Structural diagrams. Diagnostic reports.
The picture quality on the CRT suddenly looked better than it had in years, as if the machine itself had forgotten how old it was.
I kept swiping.
And then I stopped breathing, the chrome I'd seen with my own eyes was only the beginning, the full conversion extended far beyond anything I had imagined.
Artificial skeletal structure. Artificial musculature. Integrated sensor suites. Multiple redundant processors. Targeting systems, so advanced I could barely tell what they were.
Environmental protection systems. Repair systems.
Flight systems.
Weapons. So many weapons, some sort of incineration systems incorporated throughout the entire chassis, some sort of...high-energy projection weaponry?
Retractable blade systems made so sharp that according to the numbers I was seeing they could cut through steel like it was nickel.
Internal ammunition storage, combat-analysis software so advanced it looked military, no, beyond military.
My eyes kept moving, the numbers stopped making sense, then finally, I scrolled to the power source.
I stopped breathing, and in disbelief I reread it once, twice, three times.
Certain I'd misunderstood, I hadn't.
A central reactor assembly sat where a human heart should have been, its designation occupied an entire section of the schematic.
C.O.R.E.
The specifications read like the fever dream of an engineer who had finally lost his mind.
Output figures that belonged to city districts, containment systems designed around catastrophic failure scenarios.
Radiation shielding, emergency venting protocols, energy reserves measured on a scale no human body should have required.
My eyes slowly lifted from the monitor to the cause of my developing headache, then back down, then up again.
If the information on the screen was real—
If even half of it was real—
I was standing less than two meters away from a walking nuclear reactor wrapped in humanoid armor, the room suddenly felt much smaller. My mouth had gone dry. Eventually I forced myself to look away from the monitor and back at him.
"If this is supposed to be a joke, kid, it's not a very funny one." I heard my own voice come out quieter than intended. Part of me genuinely hoped he'd laugh and tell me it was.
He didn't. "It's not a joke," Genos said calmly. "And it's definitely not a prank."
He glanced at the schematics still covering the screen.
"I'm a full custom job. Every component, system, bolt. Nothing in me was mass-produced."
His expression remained frustratingly composed.
"And before you ask, the man who built me is dead. Dr. Kuseno. So no, there isn't some secret corporation or genius engineer who's about to kick down your door because you've seen something you shouldn't."
I stared at him for a long moment before looking back at the monitor. "Kid, there's no way half this stuff is real."
I jabbed a finger toward the screen. "The power source alone makes no sense. A closed-loop nuclear fusion reactor the size of a human heart? One that somehow doubles as a black box capable of preserving a complete neural backup of the user's consciousness?"
I shook my head.
"No. That's science fiction. That's the kind of thing corpos put in marketing materials to impress shareholders. Even Arasaka doesn't have anything remotely close to this."
He snorted a bit at that, and before I could ask the reason, what he did next made the words die in my throat.
Genos had reached up and placed a hand against the center of his chest, the seamless panels shifted, unlocked and separated.
The armor folded back in layered sections with mechanical precision, and nestled beneath the armored plating sat something that looked less like cyberware and more like an artificial star imprisoned inside a machine.
Rings of metallic containment structures surrounded a brilliant blue-white core that pulsed with impossible amounts of energy. Conduits radiated outward through his body like arteries carrying liquid light.
The glow illuminated the entire room, reflected in the lenses of my glasses, in my eyes, direct physical evidence against every assumption I had ever held about what was technologically possible.
"I'm telling you the truth, Vik." His voice sounded distant.
I couldn't stop staring, the reactor wasn't a made up of story.
It wasn't even a schematic, it was sitting a couple feet away from me, for several seconds neither of us spoke, then several seconds turned into minutes.
Eventually, my curiosity got the best of me and questions poured out of me, and he answered everyone of them
Questions about shielding, about cooling, maintenance cycles, about failure states, questions about literally everything.
By the time I ran out of objections, I found myself in the deeply uncomfortable position of believing him, or at least believing enough of it that arguing felt pointless.
I leaned back against the desk and rubbed a hand over my face. "Alright." The word came out slowly. "Let's assume for a second this is all real."
Genos nodded. "It is."
"Then how the hell are you sane?" I continued on.
For the first time, he actually looked mildly amused. "Because Dr. Kuseno, the bastard, was picky."
"Picky?"
"He chose me because I was extremely compatible with cybernetics." I blinked.
"What, like you were the next Smasher, or something?" I asked sarcastically.
"Minus the sociopathy, and the functional cyberpsychosis, yes in a sense." He shrugged. "The conversion happened when I was young, when I was 15 years old, my brain adapted. Most people would experience severe psychological degradation after replacing this much of themselves, but Kuseno was a genius, and I was an anomaly."
I had questions about that, concerns as well, especially hearing how young he apparently was when he went under a knife, but I had one other main worry, "Son, you're basically a brain hooked up to a walking weapons platform, most people would be vegetables."
"Like I said, I'm built different." He said, like he was quoting something.
Despite myself, I snorted, Genos continued.
"The sensory systems help. I don't experience any degree of sensory deprivation most full conversions suffer from. Touch, balance, temperature approximation, spatial awareness, it's all simulated well enough that my brain still recognizes the feedback as natural, hell I can even eat, I'm even more tuned to human interaction than any Gemini models on the market."
"Natural," I repeated.
"Relatively speaking, I can tune them up too, hear and see things beyond the norm." He said.
I stared at him for another moment. "Even if all of this is true—and I'm starting to believe it is—I still don't see how I can help you."
I gestured vaguely at his entire existence. "I barely understand how you're standing in front of me."
Genos was quiet for a second, then he nodded. "I know, I expected that would be the case even."
For the first time since this conversation started, he sounded genuinely uncertain. "I was designed to be a weapon, Vik."
The statement was delivered with the same matter-of-fact tone someone else might use to describe their hometown.
"Dr. Kuseno built everything from scratch, he lied to me, told me I'd use these weapons for good, to find my parents killer, not knowing the man who engineered their deaths was right in front of me the whole time. Every system inside me was designed around his own technology. None of it was intended to interface with outside hardware."
His eyes shifted toward the monitor. "That wasn't a problem before."
The screen flickered, a new schematic appeared, I immediately recognized the shape, a neural architecture diagram.
Night City standard, a neuroport, an older model, strangely enough.
"My creator is gone," Genos continued. "And now I'm in a world built around technology I can't access."
The diagram zoomed inward, highlighted connection points appeared along his nervous system.
"The reason I came here is because I need a Neuroport."
I stared at the screen, finally being able to understand what it was I was seeing, "A Neuroport."
"A Neuroprocessor, specifically." The display updated again, showing a detailed integration pathway between his existing neural systems and the proposed implant. "The procedure itself isn't particularly complicated."
I looked at the schematic, then at the impossible cyborg sitting in front of me. "Your definition of complicated and mine might be different."
He ignored that. "The difficult part is acquiring functional hardware and modifying it to work with my architecture."
His gaze met mine. "And finding a ripperdoc I trust enough to dig around inside my brain."
The room went quiet, before he continued on, "I need someone capable of performing the installation." His expression remained steady. "And someone dependable enough to keep whatever they find in there to themselves."
I looked at the monitor, at the absurdity of everything I'd learned in the last half hour.
Then I looked back at Genos.
"Kid." I sighed, leaning back against the desk and crossing my arms. "You really don't do things the easy way, do you?"
He didn't answer that. I looked at the schematic on the monitor. The integration pathway he'd laid out was clean, detailed, clearly the work of someone who had spent serious time thinking about exactly this problem before walking through my door. The proposed connection points along the neural architecture made sense, at least in theory. Whether they made sense in practice was a different question, and the answer to that question depended entirely on hardware I hadn't handled yet.
I rubbed the back of my neck.
"A Neuroprocessor," I said again, mostly to hear myself say it out loud. "The older modular kind."
"Yeah."
"Not the standard Neuroport." I looked at him. "The pre-integrated architecture. The kind with the expansion slots."
"The modern port were designed for a standard nervous system," he said. "I'm not standard Vik."
"Yeah," I said flatly with a sigh. "I noticed."
I pushed off the desk and walked back toward the monitor, studying the integration pathway more carefully. He wasn't wrong about the procedure itself. In isolation, installing a Neuroprocessor was well within my wheelhouse, I had done it a dozen times on patients with unusual chrome, people who had come to me precisely because the standard clinics couldn't accommodate whatever they were running. The hardware was older, but modern enough in some cases, functional units still existed if you knew where to look.
The problem wasn't the install.
The problem was that I had never installed anything into a chassis I couldn't cut into.
"Alright," I said. "Walk me through the access question. Because if I can't get to the installation site without power tools, this conversation ends here."
Genos reached up and pointed to the back of his neck. The panel shifted open with the same practiced ease I had watched before, the maintenance port revealing more internal architecture beneath.
"The neck panels open for maintenance," he said. "The installation site sits within that access window. You won't need to cut through anything." He paused. "And if there are moments where you're uncertain about a connection or an integration point, I can guide you through it."
I looked at the open panel. At the exposed architecture inside, at the connection points the schematic had highlighted. Clean lines. and deliberate spacing. Whoever had built this had thought about maintenance access, which told me something about the person who had built it, whatever else Kuseno had been, he had been thorough.
"Where do you want the output?" I asked.
"Back of the neck," he said. "Below the panel housing. The connection cable and the chipslot both. It's the only viable exit point."
"Not the arms?"
His expression didn't change. "The arms run incineration systems through the forearm housing. The thermal output in the surrounding area makes any delicate interface installation impractical."
I stared at him for a moment. "Right the incineration systems, and the... rocket punches probably also wouldn't help." I repeated.
"Among other things."
I decided not to pursue that particular thread right now.
I looked back at the monitor, at the schematic, at the access window, at the proposed connection points. I ran the procedure in my head the way I ran every procedure before committing to it, start to finish, every step, every point where something could go wrong and what the correct response to that would be.
It's doable.
Uncomfortable in some places. Requiring more care than a standard install because the architecture I was working with was foreign enough that I would be navigating partly by the schematic and partly by instinct. But doable.
"The hardware," I said. "I know someone who deals in older modular units. Mostly pre-crash stock, but he seems the type to have one of these." I pulled up my internal contacts, found the name I was looking for. "He's not cheap. The units themselves are increasingly rare and he knows it."
"How much?"
"For a quality unit with viable nanosurgical reserves still active?" I looked at him. "You're looking at five thousand eddies for the hardware alone. Maybe more depending on what he's got in stock."
The kid nodded once, not even an attempt at negotiation.
"The installation itself," I continued. "Given the complexity of what I'm working with, the access constraints, the integration requirements, the fact that I'll essentially be navigating a procedure I've never performed on hardware I've never seen before?" I folded my hands. "Another two thousand. And that's because I want to see how this goes before I name a number on anything else you might need done."
A pause.
"Seven thousand total," he said.
"Seven thousand total."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "When can you do it?"
I looked at him. At the open panel at the back of his neck. At the schematics still covering the CRT monitor. At the impossible core still pulsing faintly through his chest before the panels had closed over it again.
Fifty three years old. Eleven years behind this workbench. I had seen most things.
Most things.
"Give me a few days to source the hardware," I said. "I'll reach out when I have something worth installing." I pulled up my contact and sent it to him. "And kid."
He looked at me, as he pulled back the cable connected to monitor into the monitor, the schematics disappearing like a mirage at the moment the cable disconnected.
"What I've seen in this room tonight." I held his gaze. "Stays in this room."
For the first time since he'd walked through the door, something in his expression loosened.
"I know, Vik" he said as he finished putting on his shirt and jacket. "That's why I'm here."
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Authors Note: That's it for chapter 12: The Knight of Pentacles, I really struggled with Vik's internal dialogue, I feel like I kept jumping all over the place, between the boxer analogies, the technical jargon and the doctor stuff, all that while tying it together with his particular gruff openness was a struggle, but I wanted to switch pov's a bit.
As for the chapter title, the Knight of Pentacles is often associated with diligence, patience, and reliability, but the aspect of the card I was thinking about while writing this chapter was trust.
Unlike the other knights, the Knight of Pentacles is dependable. He does what he says he's going to do. He keeps his word. He's the person you trust with something valuable because you know he'll still be there tomorrow.
Genos walks into Viktor's clinic carrying secrets that could change his life if they ended up in the wrong hands. Viktor, meanwhile, is being asked to believe things that should be impossible and potentially stake his reputation on them.
Neither man knows the other very well, but by the end of the chapter they've both made the same decision: to trust.
As always please leave a like and a review if you enjoyed the chapter, and any criticisms on what you think I could do better.