Trace touched the back of his neck as he rolled out of bed the next morning. The incision Sevorah had made for the device was already healed, but he still found himself thinking about it.

  “You awake Deckard?” He called out hoarsely, his mouth uncomfortably dry that morning. Stumbling over to the fridge, he fetched a bottle of cold water and a couple of titanium marbles. The marvel of clean water, with no scum at the end, was something he hoped he would never take for granted.

  The avatar screen flashed to life, showing the digital representation of the day of Deckard yawning. He had a habit of switching up what his avatar looked like in different ways from day to day. Since he didn’t remember his actual body, there was nothing tying him to any one look. Hair, and eye color, even skin would run the gamut from Caucasian, to black, to chrome, to more exotic colors. He did seem to have a propensity toward a certain facial structure, but that was really it.

  “I’m up, I’m up,” The man repeated in a mumble. “What do you need?”

  “Are you feeling alright? I think this is the first time I’ve actually heard you sound tired.” Trace asked, putting his own question to the side for the moment. He walked into the closet to check on the level of the nutrient mix in the braincase, which was dangerously low for some reason.

  Deckard shook his head again, shaking the proverbial cobwebs out of his mind. “Thanks for filling me back up, but that wasn’t the issue. I got into the learning program deep last night, and I think it had some unintended consequences on me, is all. When I first created it and the time dilation effect, it was created around the interaction of the NetConnect and the user’s mind. Which is inherently different for me than it is for everyone else.”

  Trace sat down and scooted over to his desk computer. “I don’t understand. Why would it be different for you than for other people?”

  “I doubt anyone is aware of this these days, but nearly all of the methods used to interact and communicate with your NetConnect originated from me. There were ways to do it before I came around, obviously, however, they were inefficiently coded and poorly done. People were still just beginning to learn what the technology was capable of. Then I came along and was stuck in this braincase. My brain melded with the NetConnect connections that I had been given as a baby, and the rest is history.”

  “Right… So, putting that whole thing aside for the moment, what do you mean it had some unintended consequences? How?”

  “I, uh, forgot to run the program with the proper limiters in place. Instead, I accidentally ran it through my primary channels, the ones that are practically a part of my brain at this point, at full available bandwidth. The time dilation effect went from four times -which is what I have it set to in the program for safety reasons- to as fast as the hardware could handle at any given time.”

  “Wait-” Trace shook his head in disbelief. “You’re telling me you still have hardware inside your brain after all this time? Why haven’t the nanites removed it?”

  “Because I asked them not to,” Deckard replied simply. “Just because it is hardware doesn’t mean it isn’t a part of me. The original connections had become intertwined with my brain stem and nerves as I grew older, an oversight on everyone’s part. By the time they became aware of it, it was too late and there was little reason to actually do anything. It had become a part of me, and I had started to talk to and interact with it in increasingly unknown ways.

  “The connection literally is a part of my mind. In the past, I have even upgraded it with the nanites, further fusing my brain stem, nerves, and it together. These days, they try to separate the two, and there is a blocker put in place. During my research, it seems as though that blocker is one of the things that spark addicts tend to get removed first.”

  “That’s a lot,” Trace muttered, hanging his head over the back of the chair. “But it sounds like you accidentally almost fried your brain, is all.”

  The avatar rolled its eyes. “Sure, we can go with that. Ignore everything else I said while you’re at it.”

  “I’ll do that, thanks. Did you learn anything while you were sending your brain into overdrive?”

  “Yeah, it requires a lot of mental energy to enter that state. In the future, every time you use the enhanced learning modules, make sure you eat something before and after.”

  Trace waited for more, only to be disappointed. “Wait, that’s all you have for me? Eat something?”

  “Hey, I already told you before that it worked differently on me than it does for you. Give me a break.”

  Trace growled and hung his head. “Fine, whatever, just be careful not to cook your brain because you’re running everything in a massive fifty-times time-dilation environment while programming or something stupid like that.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  “I wasn’t going to go that high,” The other man muttered.

  He threw up his arms and stomped out of the apartment. There were people from the black market coming to pick up some of the equipment later that day. Which meant that he needed to go through and put easily visible tape marks on each piece that was getting retrieved.

  While he was doing that, he went through the news for the last couple of days, checking up on what he had missed. A lot. The answer was that he had missed a lot. The blood-dogs were gone, erased from the city. While the team had been busy unloading their loot. The rest of the city had banded together and burned everything to the ground.

  ‘You all work fast!’

  That was the simple message he sent off to Revlock after he had finished reading one of the articles. A few seconds later, he had a call from the man.

  “Hey Revlock, how’s it going?” Trace slapped another tape mark down as he moved down the line.

  “Hey, I wanted to let you know that it’s a very good thing you didn’t show up yesterday. The gangs were inspecting every edger there and passing around flyers with that bounty notice. There still isn’t a photo or anything, just a few general descriptions that we haven’t been able to determine the source of yet. The point is, if you leave home, make sure you have your face covered and are wearing body armor.”

  After finishing his call with Revlock a few minutes later, Trace quickly finished marking the rest of the equipment and then ran into the apartment. He needed to think of something. If he put a cooling system in the stealth suit, then he could wear that more or less all the time.

  What he wanted to do would take a few days to implement properly. He would need to reroute things and then reform the padding. So that wasn’t really an option, not right away at least.

  He needed a mask that he could wear. More than that, it needed to be something that wouldn’t raise eyebrows and make it obvious that he was trying to hide his identity. That left him with three options. A gang mask, a corpo security force mask, or something that blended in with his own face but changed it in some significant way. The third option sounded like the best, but was actually the hardest of them to pull off.

  Giving yourself a fully molded mask with an authentic-looking cyberware jaw and metal teeth, all while keeping everything close enough to hide the real stuff, was hard.

  That left him with the other two options, both of which could get him killed in a heartbeat.

  If he couldn’t go quite that low-key, what was the next best thing? Going in the complete opposite direction with high-visibility or something mundane but possibly medical?

  That could work. It actually made him wish that he had kept a couple more of the rebreather masks instead of selling them all. Those would have been perfect right then. That said, there was nothing stopping him from printing out something that at least looked like one. He did have a few extra filters he could stick in it to help complete the look.

  With a few extra modifications, and a voice-changer set to a gravelly voice to really sell the need for the rebreather, it might just work. Maybe if he was lucky.

  Trace would reserve judgement until after he had actually worked on it.

  Since he had used his original one in the helmet for the stealth suit, it was nearby for all his scanning needs. It was easy enough for him to temporarily remove it and take photos from every angle. He carefully took it apart, and took even more photos, before finally putting it all back together.

  There was no way he would be able to make a functioning model, not with what he had lying around the warehouse. Printing out a shell, however, was very doable. The voice-changer was easy enough to manage as well. As long as there was a good enough seal around his mouth that his original voice couldn’t leak through, then it would be fine.

  The mask would need to be tight against his face for this to work.

  Still, if he wanted to leave the warehouse in the next few days, it was the best option that he could think of. He sent everything to his computer and put it into the design program for the 3D printer. He spent a few minutes cleaning it up and changing some important details before sending it off to the printer. All the other changes would happen after it was finished with this stage.

  While he was doing all of that, Monroe had arrived with a couple of the others. Together, they were directing the people from the black market to which items they were allowed to load.

  Trace really wanted to go outside and do… something. Only he couldn’t, or rather he shouldn’t, and it was beyond aggravating. He hadn’t felt like this since he was a kid being chased by the corpo squads.

  He scratched at the back of his neck in frustration and turned to look at the stealth suit. The items for the cooling system still needed to be purchased. However, there was nothing stopping him from designing it on the computer. He also needed to put together a system for extra ammunition, which he had already been thinking about.

  The design was going to be rather simple and built into the waist of the suit. Off to either side of the knife by a few inches, there would be three angled holders for extended magazines of his pistols. Then closer to his actual hips would be two holders for revolver ammunition, each containing between three and four. He would have to measure and test to see which felt right. Each of these holders would have magnetic lids and be fully integrated into the suit and covered in the paint so they would be hidden from view.

  By having the magazines sit at an angle though, he would retain mobility and still be able to partially bend over backward.

  Monroe knocked on the door of the apartment a while later and peeked inside. “They’re gone now. How are you holding up? I heard from Revlock about the gangs passing the bounty around to pretty much everyone.”

  “I’m putting together a mask that I can wear where I’m not in the stealth suit,” Trace told him without looking up, his eyes darting across the screen as he worked. “Do you mind picking up a few items for me? I don’t really want to leave here at the moment for obvious reasons, and I would rather not ask Ko to do it if possible.”

  “Uh, sure, just send me the list.” Monroe let out a low whistle as he received a message with a long list of items before he had even finished speaking.

  “The cooling system for the suit needs to be hardened against impacts so it doesn’t fail. I also can’t use the normal liquid solutions as that would freeze my skin.” Gel was the answer, but it was also harder to work with as it needed to be thinned first. Trace blinked and looked over at him. “Actually, if you can find some pre-thinned cooling gel solution at the black market, that would be perfect.”

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