Trace felt like he was making great progress in the intermediate courses he had just started. The two knowledge upgrade packs had done a lot to firm up his foundational knowledge and then add some new information. Doing the courses was still vital, and always would be, but the knowledge downloads had done exactly what Deckard had originally wanted them to do. They had shored up the gaps in his knowledge and introduced plenty of new items as well.

  The enhanced intermediate teaching modules were definitely getting a workout as he ran through them and his stealth steps more than the others.

  Deckard was waiting for him when he stirred the next morning. The avatar was looking suitably chagrined as he apologized to Trace. “I’m sorry. I got really excited after finding those android bodies and sort of lost my head for a bit.”

  “What did Ko say to you?” He asked, peaking out toward the semi where she had apparently chosen to sleep.

  The braincase-trapped man chuckled mirthlessly and shook his head. “Let’s just say she sent me to a few news sites that opened my eyes. I knew this world was more dangerous than the one I had grown up in, but it hadn’t fully sunk in, I guess. Going through all those articles helped to truly drive that point home. I still want to get one or two of those bodies, make no mistake.

  “However, I now understand better why you were being so hesitant before. Everything I do will be done with the utmost caution, and with the knowledge that this is something that won’t be done anytime soon. I’ll continue to gather information and infiltrate their systems, but I’ll place a greater emphasis on doing so slowly and with as much stealth as possible than I would have before.”

  “I appreciate that. Make no mistake, I will help you, Deckard. I just need to believe that it isn’t a death mission first. Getting my equipment in order is definitely going to help with that, but the suit is only a matter of time.” Trace rubbed a hand over his face. “I need access to real wraith teaching modules, cyberware add-on modules, and tech. At this point, I’m so far behind I don’t even know what I don’t know.”

  “Well, I am continuing to look into my other items. I can add those to the list,” Deckard said after a moment. “Though, I doubt corporate entities will be the best source of information for most things’ edger-related. I assume there would be better locations to try, but due to my unfamiliarity with everything, I don’t know what those would be. Perhaps in time that will change as I continue to explore the net and learn. This experience with Ko last night has revealed much to me. I found a few projects to occupy my time and immediately narrowed my vision. I stopped learning about how the world had changed.”

  ***

  Outside in the main part of the warehouse, he found Ko standing outside of the semi, doing some early morning stretches.

  “How did you sleep?” He asked, stopping a few feet away from her.

  She twisted at the hips, cracking her back with a sigh of relief. “Not bad. The bed in there is actually fairly nice. The problem is when I wake up. The nanites are in the process of fixing existing problems with my bones and muscles. The two together is a fun combination.”

  “Ah, yeah, good times. I’m glad I’m mostly done with that now. My muscles are still being worked on, but my bones finally finished a while ago. When did the process start for you?”

  “When I became a full-user, instead of just a sub-user like what I started out as,” She explained, finishing up the last of her stretches.

  “Interesting. I guess that is one more thing that is exclusive to people with full-user accounts and above. I wasn’t sure if that was the case before or if it was because of how bad the initial condition of my body was.” He tossed her a bottle of cold water. “Anyway, thanks for talking to Deckard last night. He knows that he needs to take things a lot slower now. Sending him to those news sites was a good call.”

  She took several gulps of the chilled water, a small smile gracing her lips as she didn’t have to clean the scum from her mouth. “It’s fine. After talking with him for a while, I figured out that he didn’t quite understand just how dangerous corporations truly were for us. He knew they held power, but he was still operating off of logic from years ago. I just helped him reorient himself, is all.”

  “Still, thanks. This gives me more time to prepare my equipment, train, and learn everything that I can.”

  A while later, Trace accompanied her back to the clinic so he could go through all the latest cyberware they had gotten in stock. Continuing to build up the database for future nanite upgrades would be immensely helpful, as he had already seen.

  Once he was finished with that, he stopped by the back area to chat with Monroe, only to find him gathering up his belongings.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “What are you doing? I thought you were going to be stuck here for another couple of days.”

  “Nah, I was just waiting for Sevorah to finish checking over everything. Which she has,” Monroe rubbed his chest. “She gave me a few jet-shots and then said I was good to go. I was actually just about to give you a call.”

  “Is Black Betty done getting repaired? I can swing you by the glass shop if you want instead of the warehouse.” Trace asked as they walked out of the clinic, waving to the people sitting in the front who were waiting for Sevorah or Ko to take a look at them.

  The large man laughed. “Yeah, it’s been done for a few days now. Might as well stop by there before heading to the warehouse.”

  The lifted fastback car sped away from the clinic, a brief but calm silence enveloping the space before Monroe twisted in his seat to look at him. “Alright, tell me about this idea of yours that will make the trailer on the semi useful for more than collecting air.”

  Trace chuckled and sped around a car that was going too slow for his taste. “A while ago I did a job at a scav den, the same one where I picked up these actually,” He patted the CD-10, and the revolver strapped to his thighs. “I barely walked out of the joint, bad intel and all that. None of them survived.” He took a breath. “Anyway, one of the items I found there was a server that contained a list of other scav den locations.”

  “Reapers will pay a decent credit for that information,” Monroe muttered.

  “So, I’ve discovered. I knew they paid for it, just not how well. Anyway, I know which locations they have paid for, and which ones they say have been previously wiped out.” He ended there and looked at his partner through the corner of his eye, wondering if he would understand what he was hinting at.

  He did.

  “Ah, reapers are killers. They aren’t the sort to scavenge everything from those sites.”

  Trace nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking, yeah. One or two of the teams might hire it out to people for a little extra profit, but from what I understand, among higher-tier edgers, it’s considered as beneath them. They’ll pick up ammo, a good knife, gun, and, of course, the crypto-vaults, but that’s it.”

  “No, you’re right,” Monroe agreed with a nod. “After a certain point, edgers start making enough that they no longer need to scrape and scrimp for every credit.” He let a couple of miles pass in silence before speaking up again. “How many dens have they hit?”

  “Eight, plus three that were already hit,” Trace grinned madly as he floored the accelerator, feeling the car surge forward, throwing them back into their seats as the electric motors instantly went to work.

  Behind him, the lights of a Denver PD car came to life, as the bagel-munching officer inside tried to keep up with the powerful modified car. The corpo security team that accompanied the officer kept pace with the officer but did nothing more. They were there for reasons that didn’t involve catching people going over the speed limit.

  Trace dodged the slower-moving traffic, the car with the flashing lights falling ever farther behind him by the second. With a smooth twist of the steering wheel, the car slid into a drift as he took the exit they needed.

  “I think that might be one of the few times I have actually seen you let go like that,” Monroe commented as Trace parked the aggressive-looking car behind the shop.

  “It’s a fun car, combined with the promise of more money, not to mention I’m making progress on a couple of projects. I don’t know, it just felt right.” Trace grinned, the smile slowly leaving his face as he saw the patched street and remembered what had happened the last time he had been there.

  The gangs were causing all this destruction because they were supposedly looking for him. At least, that was the part of the excuse they were using. The sooner he could finish the stealth suit and helmet, the better. Then he could start striking back at some of the gangs. Doing something to the one who had started all of this, the mysterious android-controlling man in RyZyx, was still a pipe dream.

  If only he could find that other woman again and talk to her some more. Unfortunately, he had no way to contact her, and neither did Revlock.

  His previous happy mood destroyed, he followed Monroe into the shop and waved to Frank, the owner of the place. He got a nod in return, but the man was busy working at the moment, which was fine. He didn’t come expecting to interrupt the man.

  A short while later, Trace was back at the warehouse working on the suit, while Monroe had headed home.

  He had begun printing out the pieces that would go in between the armor plates. Each one was being printed from a carbon fiber weave, that was being directly formed to spec. They weren’t going to be bulletproof, but they would be lightweight, and blend in with everything else, especially after he painted them.

  While those were being printed one by one, he was busy working on the control boards for the microdot cameras. Each one needed to have its location identified and then get plugged into the board, which would be situated at the back, near his neck. The control board for the cameras and the camouflage paint would be physically plugged into his neck. That way, there would be zero latency and no connection issues. If he was taking hits to the back in that area, then he had bigger problems to worry about.

  After he finished putting the control board together, he placed it in position on the suit and began covering all the wires.

  “You look tense,” Deckard said, as Trace was hiding the last of the wires with a piece of padded cloth and cloth bonding agent.

  “I kind of am,” Trace admitted, sitting back on his elbows while rolling his neck. “This is my first time making a control board from scratch. I’ve taken apart hundreds of them, but this is different. At least with the cameras, I didn’t need to do any control module programming. That’s not going to be the case with the one for the camouflage paint.” The module was there to translate and regulate all the commands from the application Deckard would be creating to control the stealth function.

  Deckard had offered to do it all for him, but he had refused. This was his project, and he needed to learn how to do this. He was going to program it as best he could, and then Deckard was going to check over his work for him. Then rinse and repeat as needed until he got it right.

  “You better get working on it, then. Unless I miss my guess, getting the programming right on that control module is going to take you a couple of days.”

  Trace flicked a piece of dirt at his avatar screen and sat back up with a groan, knowing his odd friend was right.

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