Mind & Machine C.38

Chapter — 38

It was the day after her call with River, also known as the first of July, meaning she'd just gotten her monthly UBI. It was another 500 credits into her SolBank cVault, but it didn't make the stab of her upcoming loss of credits hurt any less. She'd counted on those additional credits when purchasing her cyberware but hadn't considered the cost of installing it all.

Rei walked into the clinic, having gotten a message from River that morning saying that every item he'd ordered had been delivered. It was surprisingly fast, but Rei supposed it made sense with all the delivery drones and so many corporate warehouses across Tokyo.

The things she'd picked out with his help were older cyberware, but it wasn't lousy, meaning there were bound to be warehouses all over Earth still having a stock of it lying around.

The turret didn't eject from the ceiling this time; scanning the mesh, she couldn't even pick up its node.

So, it's usually shielded, but it wasn't when he tested me. That makes sense, as having automated defenses so easily breached wouldn't be worth much.

Rei could still disable it if she spliced into his local mesh and went at it from that direction as long as it wasn't completely cut off from that angle as well, but she doubted it. He'd been able to control it remotely, so there should be some connection between him and it.

Perhaps I'd have to splice him to get access to the defenses? It's possible that his neural link or some other transmitter in his body is the only thing communicating wirelessly with it.

It was all idle thoughts, however, as she didn't think she was in danger. It was just one of those things her split stream of consciousness pondered as her primary mind looked around for any trace of the man.

"River?" Rei asked, not raising her voice overly much.

He has to know I'm here anyway.

A few seconds later, the door in the back opened, and River walked out, smiling convincingly with his non-organic face.

"Little panda! Good, you're here. Are you ready to strip some of that flesh for some 'ware?"

"Fuck yes I am!" Rei said enthusiastically as she skipped forward, following him into his clinic.

It looked the same as the last time she'd been there, with machines and holo monitors scattered haphazardly throughout. It was still clean, though, so the place felt more lived-in than hospital-sterilized.

On one of the tables sat two packages, one smaller and one larger. Each package had a logo: a stylized open eye with a galaxy within — white letters outlined in black beneath reading 'Cosmec Corporation' — on the smaller white box, while the larger black one had a white constellation in the shape of the letter 'A' with nothing else.

Rei walked over and studied each package curiously, with River stepping up beside her.

Without fuss, River split the tape that marked the smaller box as sealed and opened it, displaying hair in all the shades of the rainbow attached to a flap of synthetic skin.

"The Hue Strands V2, by Cosmec Corporation. Slightly wavy, as per your request," River said, lifting the flap of skin and hair out to show her.

Rei saw a net of silvery metal and tiny circuits as he showed her the underside of the synthetic skin.

"And the rainbow... effect is only temporary, right?"

"Of course," River said, almost sounding offended. "It's only for show. You'll be able to adjust it to your liking whenever you want. I could have only ordered the synthetic scalp with the hair roots and let you grow it out in the color of your choice, but that would take a few days until it reached your current length."

"Thanks. Yeah, I like my hair long."

River shrugged and placed the cyberware back into the box, moving to unseal the larger black one.

As he did, Rei got a great view of her new legs.

"Gazelle Steps v3, by Augur Augments Inc., matte-black coloring like you wanted and sized to fit you nearly perfectly."

The size of cyberware limbs could be an issue on older models that weren't produced anymore or only produced in smaller numbers, as it meant that the buyer had to find something that fits them. One could still buy legs and arms that were much shorter, longer, slimmer, or bulkier if one wanted to, but the dissonance between mind and body grew worse in that case, increasing the risk of cyberpsychosis.

Most people didn't have the option to get a perfect fit when buying older cyberware, though, and hence rarely did so. Cyberware still in production would be sized according to the buyer's desires or measurements, meaning that most went for new models even if the quality-to-credit ratio became much worse.

Rei wanted quality, however, and had no other recourse than to use something that had gone out of production. River had gotten her measurements and found something that was nearly a perfect fit — a stroke of luck — but they were still about four centimeters longer, even if everything else mirrored her athletic lower half.

Rei didn't suppress the broad grin blossoming on her face as she took them in.

"They're beautiful."

River snorted — an odd sound coming from his metallic nose. "You say that now, but I have a feeling you'll come to see them as inadequate soon enough."

Well, he's not wrong. It's still my first piece of overt cyberware, so I won't suppress my excitement.

"How do we do this?" Rei asked.

"Well, it's customary to pay your ripper doc before the work is started."

Rei rolled her eyes but did as he said, her eyes flashing gold as she deposited the requested 6990 credits to the vault address he'd sent her. She saw the logic in it as doing the work only to find out the client didn't have the credits to pay for it wouldn't be fun.

Especially if the cyberware they just chipped in makes them highly dangerous.

"Good, then please go to the next room and remove your clothing. Once you've done that, take a seat, and we can begin," River said as he went over to one of his monitors, swiping through the blue and white hologram while looking through things.

"Just one, no two, questions if you don't mind."

"Yes?" River asked, turning halfway to raise an eyebrow at her.

"How long have you been a ripper, and did you do," she gestured broadly to his figure, "all this on your own?"

River looked her over closely for a couple of seconds, seemingly in thought, before he shrugged and went back to whatever he was doing, answering with his face turned away.

"I've been a ripper for a very long time, little panda. Longer than you'd believe; at least you didn't believe me before you lost your memories. Regarding your other question, both yes and no, as what you see before you is wholly of my own design and implementation, but it wasn't always like this."

The answer sparked Rei's curiosity, and she almost asked for a more accurate answer to the timespan, but she decided against it in the end as his tone had been rather flat.

I can ask another time. If all goes well, I'm sure I'll continue being a customer here.

Rei walked out of the operating room and through the door opposite, which had opened without her input, showing her where he'd meant.

It was a smaller room with a few armchairs and a closet that unlocked before sliding silently open. Blue illumination within showed racks and shelves where Rei could hang and store her outfit and weapons.

Rei stripped out of all her clothes and placed her weapons on the shelves before looking for a patient's gown but found nothing.

Oh, well. It's not like it matters.

With the work he would do on her lower half, he'd see everything anyway, so there was really no point in being shy. Rei left the room before walking back to where River did his work.

She went to the operating table and lay down on it, looking over expectantly at River as he inspected one of her new legs.

"No issues, I hope?" Rei asked, somewhat nervous that he'd found something faulty with the cyberware.

River, though, shook his head. "No, I was just making sure. Better safe than sorry."

With a quiet whirring, the ceiling above her suddenly split, an opening slowly widening as white lights flickered on in the now visible space. It was filled with gleaming metal that unfurled like multiple spiders, making Rei shudder.

No, don't think of the drone. Don't think of it.

Rei took a deep breath, letting [Merciless] subtly affect her state of mind. She'd grown better at utilizing the perk with the many fights she'd had in the arena and could now somewhat influence how strong a grip it held over her.

It wasn't precise control at all, and Rei had trouble keeping the perk at a low simmer. It seemed to want to engulf her emotions in a crypt of cold detachment if she didn't constantly keep a watch on it. Still, she needed it, as no matter how trustworthy River might be, Rei would still demand to be awake during the procedure.

"You will not put me to sleep, but anesthesia would be welcome," Rei said, her tone emotionless even if her eyes — fixed on the dozens of limbs with all manner of surgical implements attached to their ends — weren't as soulless and dead-looking as they'd been in the past when [Merciless] was on full blast.

River looked around, taking her in before slowly nodding. "As you say. I would have refused to work on you without anesthesia as you don't have any cyberware to regulate pain, but putting you to sleep isn't a requirement."

He went back to fiddling with one of his monitors as the limbs above Rei lowered before stilling. He then walked over to her.

"I have your word that you won't put me to sleep?" Rei asked, even though she doubted the answer was needed.

"You have my word, little panda."

"Good," Rei said, leaning her head back on the operating table as the clamps engaged around her head, wrists, midriff, and legs.

"I'll do the Hue Strands first, and then we'll do the legs; how does that sound?"

"Either order is fine."

River must have given some mental command to the surgical limbs, as upon Rei's acquiescence, one of the back-lit limbs above with a needle attached lowered before inserting itself into her neck, a cool liquid flowing into her flesh before spreading through her blood.

It worked as swiftly as whatever Franklin had used, and after only a couple seconds, Rei couldn't feel a thing.

Rei's back was raised as the operating table whirred silently, the top of her head aligning better with the white lights coming from the ceiling and the sharp implements suspended above.

"Do you mind if I put on some music?" River asked as his square eyes raked her hairline, his white-bar pupils dilating and contracting as he focused on different parts. "I can just play it in my auditory implants if you object."

"I don't care." Rei really didn't with the perk active.

Wobbly bass, hard kicks, snare percussion, and growling synth music began to play from seemingly all around. Rei couldn't feel the bass reverberate due to the drugs blocking her sensitivity, but the ripper seemed to enjoy it as he bobbed his head lightly to the beat of the track.

River plugged a cable into her neural link through one of the data ports, and his terminal came alive with data that Rei had allowed through her ICE.

He's not getting access to everything, but my health and cyberware integrity data should be fine. Oh, right, I should probably stop [Self-Repair].

Rei willed the perk into an inactive state.

That could've become awkward if my flesh started slowly knitting itself back together as he cut it up.

After reading through some of the data, he inserted a red tube into her forearm near the elbow. It was seemingly clear plastic but appeared red from the blood within.

"Shouldn't need this as I'll be blocking your blood flow, but just in case..." River said absently.

River looked her over carefully before nodding. One of the thin metal limbs above moved to Rei's head before the smell of burnt hair reached her nose. Great tufts of her black and violet hair fell off to the sides and down at her front, a blast of air from another limb blowing it away from her face before she could breathe a few strands in.

"I'm bald, aren't I?" Rei asked, somewhat curious.

"For now." That was all the response she got.

More limbs joined the fray as River only stood there, his eyes moving back and forth like a stuttering video as his mind spun and the machine worked. Rei's now bald scalp was carefully sliced, and the organic skin peeled away like the skin on a grape. Then, River went to grab her new synthetic scalp as tiny trickles of blood from torn vessels ran down her face and the sides of her head.

Coming back with it, he sprayed the inside of the synthetic scalp with something before doing the same to the top of her head. Then he gently placed it on top, all the rainbow hair held together with a strap not to get beneath.

Rei couldn't see what the limbs did next but assumed they were sealing her new synthetic skin to the top of her head. It didn't take more than half a minute before River stepped back, letting go of the hair. He didn't untie it from its bundle, though.

"How does it look?" Rei asked.

His eyes flicked to her cold ones for a second before he returned to looking over his work. "There were no issues. The skin tone is a perfect match already, so give it half an hour, and it will be done. There will be some minor swelling and bruising to the skin around for a day or so, but it should pass swiftly."

He then began looking over the rest of her body, his eyes scanning her over critically. Rei didn't think she'd feel uncomfortable beneath that gaze even if she was naked without [Merciless] softly influencing her, as there was only clinical detachment to the inspection.

There's also the strange feeling I have that he's trustworthy. He wouldn't violate me, I'm sure of it.

Perhaps from remnant memories or just Rei growing more adept at reading cues from [Ego], it didn't matter which, as he was her ripper, and he would work on making her into something better.

As he's primarily relying on his surgeon robot in the ceiling to actually cut me up, perhaps I could eventually perform operations such as this on myself...

Those were thoughts for the far future, however, as learning all the intricacies of surgery and ripper craft wasn't high on her priority list.

As the surgeon's table lowered Rei back into a horizontal position, River proceeded to move toward her legs, his hands prodding her musculature and joints before nodding and going over to a wall that opened a locker where he retrieved a syringe. There was no text on it, and it was black and red plasteel from what Rei could see out of the corner of her eye.

He moved back to her legs before jabbing it into her hip, a coldness seeping into her even through the anesthesia. "It's for blocking the blood flow. It would kill your legs if not removed in due time, but since you're getting rid of them, well."

"I can't see what you're doing from here," Rei said.

River called her through her agent, and Rei answered. She saw his face for a second before he switched the perspective to his point of view, making it easy for her to see where he was looking and what he was doing.

Rei watched on, coldly fascinated as the surgical limbs above lowered and the soft humm of oscillating blades reached her ears.

It was bizarre seeing the scalpels and knives cut her flesh apart with ease as the surgical table rotated periodically as it opened up beneath her and gave access from the back. It didn't take long before everything up to her hip and parts of that area, too, had been removed.

Rei no longer had legs, and her glutes and hip bone had been removed, but due to whatever blood flow blocker he'd administered, she wasn't bleeding out — mere trickles escaping. What remained were the fleshy parts making up the center of her lower stomach, and Rei knew she would have puked at the sight had it not been for her perks.

Next came the installation of the cyberware itself, as River placed her cut-off legs dripping with blood in a plastic bag before retrieving her new ones, aligning them on each side before going to work putting everything together.

It was a puzzle of both organics and cybernetics, as the replacements for her hip bone, which was now plasteel, and all the musculature, which now consisted of servos, were connected to the organic spine and flesh around it.

There was also the minor thing of connecting her digestive tract to a new... destination. It was made of silicone and wouldn't feel any different from what Rei had read, but it was still somewhat awkward seeing him work on it.

"This will be your biggest weakness with your new legs," River said absently as he worked, pointing at her spine as one of the surgical limbs lifted some muscle to give a good view of it. "Your hips may have been replaced as there are no muscles to attach to them, but even if your new hips are sturdy, your spine connecting to them isn't.

"It's quite common to tear or break the organic parts connected to the cyberware either in an accident or if one overestimates one's durability and pushes their cyberware too far."

River looked up from his work to peer down at her face, Rei meeting her own eyes through the video call as he continued, "Your new legs will be much stronger than what your organics were designed to support. Some of the bone has been replaced, which will somewhat mitigate the stress, but your spine is still an issue. Don't go breaking it by jumping too hard, you understand?"

Rei responded affirmatively, the video in her call bobbing as she saw River nod from his perspective and through her own eyes. She continued to watch as he looked back at his work, which hadn't truly stopped, even with his eyes elsewhere.

It will be important to be careful at the start. Well, if I do end up going overboard, I'll just have to sleep it off or eat and wait.

This is probably a reason why my actual [Body] won't increase from this, as I need to make the cyberware work seamlessly with the rest of my body before it can increase.

Rei continued to watch as River labored for a couple of hours, his surgical spider limbs doing most of the work of connecting tissues and bones with her new legs, but he sometimes used his own metallic hands to hold tools as he fiddled with nerves and blood vessels.

It was all very informative to Rei, even if it was disturbing.

I can't wait to have the rest of this disgusting flesh removed.

He proceeded to explain what he was doing as he worked, perhaps understanding that the finer points were stuff Rei had forgotten due to her amnesia. "All cyberware is connected to the neural link via mesh nodes. Some of it is also connected to the public mesh — like these legs — as corporations love collecting data on their ware's performance.

"More expensive cyberware or military-grade stuff isn't connected to the public mesh, as you may already know. It helps to shield against Meshmagi as only their neural link is then a vulnerability that can be protected with incredible ICE.

"Sometimes even their neural link goes off the local or public mesh, however, and then the Magi is out of luck if they don't have any other way to get in."

Rei had noticed this with Wilma, as the only thing open to her back then was the neural link. Whatever The Pistons' had installed was not military-grade or particularly expensive, it seemed, as they had all been open to her infiltration.

River continued, "Even though they're connected to the neural link, if the NL were to be destroyed, it would be real inconvenient to be locked out of the rest of your cyberware; hence it's also connected to your nervous system," he indicated the parts he was working on, meticulously connecting nerves and flesh to the cyberware. "If that happens, you'll still be able to move your legs, but it will be through your nervous system alone, meaning that it may be somewhat strange unless you've practiced it beforehand."

I should probably disconnect my legs from my neural link and practice some to avoid being left in that situation. It might even help with increasing [Body].

When Rei's legs were fully connected, River proceeded to turn her around to get access to her back, where Rei saw through his eyes as he cut into the flesh along her spine up to where her fusion core was placed, laying down a power cable.

"How long do you think my core will last with the additional load from my new legs?" Rei asked, morbidly fascinated by how her lungs moved as she breathed.

"You haven't even used 10% of the available power yet, so with it now requiring to power your legs... I'd say about ten to eleven years if you didn't chip in anything else and used your cyberware a lot during that time."

That's plenty of time. When replacing it, though, I'll need to upgrade it to something more powerful, as I'll no doubt have even more cyberware then — perhaps only cyberware if things go as I hope.

River administered injections now and then, which he said were localized reconstruction nanites, on parts he'd successfully connected and hence needed healing. Then, according to her agent, Rei was finally put back together after two hours and thirty-four minutes.

Her skin was stretched back into place, and multiple additional injections with nutrients, drugs, and nanites were administered in the area before River seemed satisfied.

As the tube that had supplied some minimum amounts of blood was disconnected, he replaced it with a drop of nutrient fluids to keep her topped up while the nanites he'd administered did their work.

"All done," he said, wiping away some blood and bits of flesh on his shirt, "Now we just have to let it heal for half a day or so, and then I can connect your legs to your neural link."

Half a day? That long?

"Are you sure it's going to take that long?"

River looked a little funnily at her. "Yes, I'm sure. You do realize that your old legs are currently lying in a bag over there while fully cybernetic ones are now attached to your slowly recuperating flesh and bone?"

Well, when he puts it like that...

Rei was sure that as long as she took a nap, she'd be completely healed after six to eight hours or so — not only to a bare minimum degree. Activating [Self-Repair] would eliminate the need for sleep but make it even faster while she slept as the nanites...

The nanites?

Through the video in the call, River still hadn't closed; Rei saw the bag with her legs — her legs that had been filled with System nanites and the structure for [Thermal Venting].

If my nanites are over there, doesn't that mean I just lost a massive amount of them?

It wasn't an inconsequential amount of body mass she'd just discarded. She didn't panic, though, but only felt herself sink deeper into [Merciless] to keep her calm.

River went out of the room, and Rei saw through the video call how he grabbed a thin sheet of opaque plastic before coming back and draping it over her naked form. It didn't look comfortable, but she wasn't fussed about it as she couldn't feel anything anyway.

"Are you sure you don't want to be put to sleep now?" River asked.

"No, I'll just stay awake. Oh, and I'll want to keep my old legs if that isn't an issue with you."

He seemed baffled by the request but nodded. "Alright, suit yourself. I'm still connected to your neural link, so I'll be able to monitor your health. I'll be back in my office. No one else will come here today unless it's an emergency, as you're my only patient until you're healthy enough to be on your way."

"Thanks," Rei said, doing her best to smile and succeeding somewhat thanks to [Deception] even though she wasn't feeling any happiness at the moment.

River nodded and departed, disappearing further into his clinic.

Now I'll just have to wait...

It would have been convenient if I could just let my perks take care of healing me, but even though I trust him somewhat, I'm not going to be able to answer the inevitable questions arising from taking that path.

It would be a long wait, but Rei had things she could work on in the meantime. She needed to rewrite the software for her eyes and investigate if the System had anything to say about her discarded flesh.