What Is Death? A Place?

  Or Is Death The Outside of Time and Space?

  000

  I arrived at Kiwi’s hideout with my interface plugs and the new cybermodem I had bought just in case she didn’t have a way to accommodate me.

  Kiwi opened the door to her house, naked as the day she was born. She had spider-web tattoos all over her body and some weird body-mods—purple nipples and areola, and pubic hair the same color—and the only thing she wore was her mask. “Good, you’re here,” she said as she turned around and walked further into the room where three bath tubs were arranged side-by-side, with Lucy standing next to one, also naked.

  I looked away instantly and just walked in.

  “First thing first,” Kiwi began. “We’ll take a data bridge to Asimov Cafe to see if any of my contacts know something.”

  “Uh,” I said. “I have a lead.”

  “Talk.”

  I took off my jacket, looking for a hanger. I saw that the girls had just dumped the clothes on the floor. I found a chair and slung the jacket over it. “Uhm, I fought a Tyger Claw with a Sandy. Real fucking fast, too. But he’s a flatline now, so yeah. Maybe the Tygers have it.”

  “Good,” she said. “We’ll start with that then when we get to Asimov’s.”

  I nodded. I heard the sound of submersion and turned to see that Lucy was already in the tub, several cables connected to her body. Kiwi followed after.

  I sighed. I was gonna have to get down and dirty the Netrunner way, wasn’t I? I started taking off my shirt, pants, and soon enough, I was entirely naked.

  It used to be that I spent plenty of time before and after showering in front of the mirror naked, flexing my muscles and generally admiring the result of my work. Soon enough, that admiration turned into a slight feeling of worry and disgust—was I maybe too big, too Animal-like?

  The only person I had been naked around was Fei-Fei, and she still hadn’t really seen the result of my recent efforts yet, as well as my newfound height. I was a cool five foot ten and a half inches now, not exactly tall, but certainly not short either. I was way taller than Lucy at least.

  Turns out I didn’t need the interface plugs, either. Kiwi had everything. I just jacked in, slowly sunk myself into the ice-bath and closed my eyes, feeling the machine prompt me about entering the Net.

  When I opened them, I was in.

  We were in an environment that was predominantly in deep, dark colors, occasionally interrupted by glowing lines arranged in wireframe patterns that gave our surroundings—buildings and roads—structure.

  The first thing I saw was Kiwi’s ICON. She was still as tall as usual, and her hair was the same, only now it was pure white, and so were the white of her eyes, formerly yellow. Her pupils were blue, same as her mask, and had lines of code running down them. Like a cat’s, they were able to narrow as well. Her clothes were the same as well, only blue instead of red, and seemed to sparkle and glisten like a particularly eye-catching neokitsch piece.

  “Are you cosplaying your evil twin or something?” I joked.

  She looked at me up and down. “You don’t have a leg to stand on, Ghost Rider. When’s your skull gonna catch fire?”

  “I’m hailing a Delamain search,” Lucy said. I turned to her and she looked dressed like a thief from a fantasy RPG: a white cowl covering most of her head, and a white facemask covering her lower-face. The white jacket that she usually wore in real life had far more fabric, and covered most of her torso, and her white hotpants had similarly expanded, too, turning into shorts that went all the way down to her knees. Her boots were the same as in real life.

  Weird that she’d dress more modestly while in the Net. I had no idea how that worked.

  “Delamain has a search engine?” I asked. That was weird. I usually used a Zetatech search engine to get around the net.

  “Delamain supports full dive searches,” Kiwi replied. The ground ahead of us opened up, and out from it, a car rose in the same graphics as was around us—dark with glowing wireframes. Lucy hopped in, Kiwi followed, and I did as well. The inside of the cab’s windows weren’t functional at all, and it was like we were packed like sardines in a box. “Asimov Cafe,” Kiwi said.

  “Loading!” the Delamain cab slash search engine said, and then a jingle played and Lucy stepped out, with Kiwi following her. I trailed behind.

  “What, it didn’t work?” I asked.

  “No. We’re here,” Kiwi said, gesturing at the data fortress of Asimov Cafe. Data fortress was right, this place looked like a large box the size of a mall.

  “This feels awful,” Lucy said, looking over herself. “This latency always makes me seasick. Fucking data bridges. Fucking DataKrash.”

  I moved my hand in front of my face a couple of times, wondering what she was on about, and then I felt it. A gap between my actions and me. Slow.

  And now that I noticed it, it was all I could think about.

  “Follow me,” Kiwi said as she waked away.

  The data fortress was a tall and wide building with a glowing wireframe structure, but otherwise didn’t have many frills. The gate we were walking to was guarded by two massive monsters, sword in one hand, and another hand made of glowing, fiery tentacles. Holy shit. Those were… Balrons, right? A class of guardian AIs that usually protected data fortresses, the strongest of their type.

  “Also,” Kiwi said. “If anyone tries to scan you, just report them. You try to pick a fight in there and you might get banned at best, and flatlined at worst. This ain’t your granny’s AOL. And the Sandy won’t save you either.”

  I nodded. “Got it. Thanks for the warning.” But it was true, wasn’t it? The Sandy wouldn’t work here. My speed was limited by the signal, and having used a regular old data bridge to get here I was running at… five hundred milliseconds of latency. I would be half a second slower than anyone with a perfect signal.

  A trickle of fear creeped up my spine, a fear that I hadn’t felt while edgerunning since the time those scavs kidnapped me. Between my healing factor and my Sandevistan speed, I’ve had no reason to be afraid of anything while on the job. Even while I was fighting that Tyger Claw bastard, I was too focused on the fight to actually feel scared.

  Well. Whatever. I had my programs and Kiwi and Lucy were here. I was new at this, sure, but I wasn’t any gonk rookie off the street. Far from.

  RIP to that gonk, but I’m different.

  “Halt!” both Balrons rumbled when we got close enough. “Speak the sacred word, or leave our presence!”

  A speech-bubble popped up above Kiwi containing the key to the localnet. Hastily, I thought out the same letters rather than speak them out loud, manifesting the same speech bubble above my head. From my angle, the bubble looked like it was facing me, and that was the same for Kiwi’s, even though they should be facing the Balrons. Fun.

  She walked past them along with Lucy, a speech bubble trailing along her as well, and I hastily followed.

  Inside, I was expecting an array of shopfronts akin to an actual mall, but instead, what I got was a nightclub. There was a raised floor where an ICON of an octopus wearing a headset was scratching several vinyl plates with its eight arms while a Japanese electronic song played in the background.

  I heard Kiwi’s voice cut through all the music like it wasn’t even there. “I’ll hit up my usuals. Make sure D doesn’t get into any trouble.”

  Then she split off from us. I looked at Lucy. “Music is shitty.”

  She snorted. “Yeah.”

  Then I felt something scan me. It didn’t get very far at all, stopping at just my usertag. I turned to the source of the scan, a half-bear-half-woman creature with a mohawk. “You’re DayOTDead, aren’t you?”

  “Who’s asking?” I said as I sent my own scan. She didn’t shut it down. She was named 8ug8ear. That was a little famiiar.

  “So you’re the gonk with the nerve to scan my little brother?” she asked. “Who the fuck even are you?”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re that Blubber kid’s older sister? Never occurred to you to teach the little shit some manners?”

  Lucy grabbed me by the shoulder. “What’s going on?” she asked the hulking bear woman.

  “Your boy fucked with family.”

  I snorted. “Your family tried to scan me for no reason. What the hell was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t give a shit what your reasons were.”

  “Bla bla,” Lucy said. “Let’s skip the grandstanding and cut to the chase. What are you going to do about this?” she asked the large woman.

  “Depends,” she said as she nodded at me. “What are you gonna do with the data?”

  I frowned. “What data? You think I cared enough to hold onto it?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You talk pretty confident cuz you got Luna backing you up, but she won’t always be around, you know.”

  “Ignore her,” Lucy said, or I guess, Luna in the Net. I gave her a scan to confirm that yes, her Net handle was Luna.

  “Do you wanna zero me, Bug?” I took a step forward and looked up at her. “Alls I’m hearing is yap yap yap, and I’m not sure where to slot you just yet. Are you just a yappy little dog, or a real threat? Tell me right now, and we can take this outside.”

  “Who the fuck are you anyway?” she scoffed.

  “The last thing you see if you drag this out any longer.”

  Lucy pulled me back by the shoulder. “I’m on a gig with him right now. Just let it go.”

  “He scanned my bro,” she rumbled. “And now he threatened me.”

  I laughed harshly. “Zero accountability runs in the family, I see.”

  “Fine,” she shrugged. “Let’s settle this like Runners another time. You weasel yourself out of this and I’ll let everyone know how chickenshit you are.”

  “Just say the time,” I said.

  Little did she know, I wasn’t planning on meeting her head-to-head at all. I still had her bro’s information. The scan I pulled used so little data, just a couple of bits, that I could just store them in my Kiroshi memory indefinitely and would probably never need to delete them. From him, I’d find her data, and then I’d meet her in meatspace where her puny little cyberdeck wouldn’t be able to do shit against me.

  I was confident in my coding skills, but I was still new at Netrunning. It wouldn’t make sense for me to try and fight in an arena I wasn’t skilled at.

  “Bug, don’t get in a fight with him,” Lucy said. “I’m pulling a favor right now, let the fucking matter go. Walk away.”

  She huffed. “Fine. Fuck it. Count your blessings, Day. I’d have made your name a reality.”

  Then she walked away. I turned to Lucy with a frown. “I had her. I’d just have zeroed her in the real.”

  Her eyes were half-lidded. “I know. That’s why I stopped this. Bug’s a Netrunner for a fixer. And not just any fixer, either. Beefing with her isn’t advisable if you value your standing with the other fixers.”

  “Fuck that!” I shouted. “She fucked with me first! First it was that shithead younger bro, and now her as well! I get enough shit in school to be dealing with the same while edgerunning!” This was so fucking unfair. So what if she was a fixer’s little pet? What did that have to do with me?

  “It’s a self-preservation thing, you dumb corpo,” she sighed. “You fuck with the Lady of Westbrook estate, you’ll have entire groups of edgerunners and Tygers gunning for you. It’s about not poking a sleeping dragon.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Just pissed is all. Maybe I can just fry some of her chrome or something, teach her a non-permanent lesson.” I glanced towards where Bugbear was, at the far end of the club. I could see her looking at me from above the heads of the dancers. She glared. I glared right back.

  Then Kiwi appeared. “Let’s go,” she said, and I followed her. “I saw the trouble with Bugbear. I won’t even ask. But she knows better than to start shit around me.”

  “I think I’m hexed or something,” I muttered. “People wanna start shit with me the instant they see me.”

  “Don’t pretend like you just arrived at Night City,” Kiwi said. “People wanna start shit as a general rule. Then you break their arms and legs, cut off their balls and feed it to the gonk stupid enough to try, and then most people will look at that and say, ‘yeah, let’s not fuck with that one’.”

  I snorted. “I’ve got way too many scenes that run on rep to worry about right now.” Edgerunning, the Academy, and now Netrunning, too. Hell, I hadn’t forgotten about the grief that that Spring Roberts dickwad put me through. Sure, he paid for it in the end, but it would have been avoided if I had a better rep. At Arasaka, my rep would always be tied to my affluence and network. I could take care of the former now, doubly so now that I had a legitimate income stream from Mexico, if grandma’s mercenary operation paid off.

  And as for my Netrunning rep? Today would take care of that.

  I felt something touch the back of my neck, and an alert blared from my mind.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  [Detecting minor intrusion.]

  I slapped the back of my neck and looked at my hand. There was a corpse of a blue fly on my palm bleeding bytes. Soon, it dispersed in a shower of blue voxels. Was that a tracker? I turned to look at the entrance to the data fortress, seeing only the two Balrons guarding it, and glared at the door. That was a cheap shot, but I wouldn’t go down like that.

  “Tyger Claw lead was solid,” Kiwi said. “Turns out you and Rebecca zeroed a bigshot Tyger Claw called Kaze Oni. He wore an Apogee Sandy, and they spared no expenses scavving it off of him and keeping it safe and sound. We’re hitting a Tyger Claw data fort to klep the info and see where it leads us. Ideally, we do this quietly, ninja style. This comes back to us and even if we end up klepping the Sandy, the Tygers will know what crew of Edgerunners to go after and you know the rest. Edgerunners get away with zeroing gangoons because the organization is huge enough that they can take the hit. On that level, only individual grievances matter. But the Apogee is good fucking chrome. It’s something the oyabuns would want to retaliate over. So either we ninja this shit or we go full massacre. Or this comes back to bite us in the ass.”

  Lucy hummed. “You think it’s worth it, Ki? Could we maybe find an Apogee somewhere else?”

  “The other known Apogee holders are either Militech assets, working for Lazarus, or is apparently Adam Smasher himself. The Tyger Apogee is our best bet.”

  “Who is Adam Smasher?” I asked.

  Lucy snorted. “Surprised you haven’t heard of him yet. He’s the edgerunner. Old as hell, too. He was a Grim Reaper for Arasaka during the Fourth Corpo War, a walking nightmare. Only time you ever see him and live to tell the tale is if you’re a suit commissioning him or an egghead working on his full borg body.”

  “Full borg?” I asked, shocked. “Is that even possible?”

  “For a mil-spec full-conversion model like his? It’s not. Not unless they dose your brain with enough drugs that you physically can’t go cyberpsycho. According to rumor, Smasher is totally lucid—no drug cocktail necessary. He’s just that special.”

  I hummed. Special, huh? Well, I doubted he had what I had. Guy gave up his entire body to a megacorp, he was property. That wasn’t anything to look up to. If anything, it was pathetic.

  Another glowing wireframe car rose from the ground and we got in. Kiwi inputed the destination, and after a brief wait, the jingle rung and we had ostensibly arrived at our destination.

  Kiwi was facing a data fortress even bigger than the one we had just been in, Asimov’s Cafe. “This is Netopia, a Korean-style PC bang in Little China. Running this place is a cruel angel called T3nsh1.” Strangely enough, I could hear her l33t-sp34k. Also…!

  “Fuck, Kiwi, was that a goddamn anime reference?” I asked.

  Kiwi didn’t grace that with a reply. Instead, she continued. “She runs full-time with the Tyger Claws. In real life, she’s a non-entity, meaning her specialty is guarding data fortresses. In short, she’s an admin main. In the Net, she’s something of a fixer of sorts—deals in data brokering and has her own network of Netrunners she can call on to set up a crack team for whatever purpose she has. With all the riches she’s amassed from doing this, you could say she’s probably the best guardian Netrunner in the Tyger Claws.”

  I was starting to feel a little unsure about this mission. “Right,” I said.

  “I also fucking hate that bitch,” Kiwi said. “For making me do… this.”

  All three of us exploded with blue light that quickly disappeared.

  “Finally!” Lucy exclaimed, looking over herself. I did the same, wondering what she was on about. Then I noticed it—the latency was gone. I checked my ping and it was averaging out at 5ms. Preem. This was the data highway then.

  “Let’s get going quickly,” Kiwi said as she took off on a run. Lucy followed and so did I. They turned invisible a moment later, and I spent a moment wondering where the fuck they had gone when I remembered the Invisibility program. I activated mine—summoning a flickering, iridescent sheet which I threw over myself, becoming invisible once I did—, and followed after them, going right past the hulking Balron guarding the outside and into the data fort.

  I heard Kiwi’s voice in my mind. “Here’s my tag so you can see me.” And then I saw her tall outline colored a glowing blue. “I already tagged you both before we got in. I’m linking you both now.” And just like that, I could see Lucy’s outline, this one white. She was poking around at a wall. It opened up, revealing a computer terminal, which she started typing away at. The computer melted into the ground. “This floor should be straightforward,” Kiwi said as she walked down the nondescript hallway. “I’m pinging some watchdogs in the area, but our Invis should hold. Surprisingly, yours too, David. How much you spend on that piece?”

  I found the option to ‘whisper’ to Kiwi, then I included Lucy too just so I could brag a bit. “Three hundred. Then I worked on it myself.”

  “How long did you work on it?”

  “About three subjective hours,” I said. “I used the Sandy to get it done fast while I was plugged in. It was preem getting so much work done.”

  “Hmm,” Kiwi said. We took a couple of turns in the hallway, several times waiting for Lucy to stop whatever she was doing. I tried looking over her shoulder to see what was happening, but whenever I did, it was something weird and impressionistic. She played Pong on the wall one time. Another, her hands phased into the ground and she pulled out an egg which she broke on a wall. The wall opened up to reveal a safe which she then proceeded to crack into manually, head pressed to the safe ostensibly to hear the internal mechanics of it.

  “What the fuck is she doing?” I asked Kiwi.

  “It’s her secret,” Kiwi said. “She can decipher Ihara-Grubb Transformation algorithms with the best of them, do the most random shit that somehow translates into code breaking. It’s almost uncanny.”

  I frowned. What bullshit was this? Could this even be called hacking?

  That Ihara-Grubb stuff was so annoying. It was bad enough that I could wave around a lethal program that would disable a person’s central nervous system in the shape of a sword, but this?

  Lucy opened the safe, retrieving a glowing cube which she pocketed. And then we moved on.

  Finally, we found a door larger than all the others we had seen so far. “This one goes to level 2.” Kiwi said. “We need to find a way to breach it.”

  Lucy pulled the glowing cube out from her pocket, let it float above her hand, and pulled out a bunch of items and knick knacks that she had klepped on our way here, letting them all float over her hands, spinning in a lazy orbit that sped up. The orbit tightened until all the little things compressed into one super thing, which she then threw at the door.

  The door absorbed the super thing. Then, it slammed open no-problem.

  Kiwi gave an appreciative whistle.

  What the fuck was that? What was that supposed to be? Was this Netrunning? I thought it was about programming know-how! Actual real skill! It was supposed to be about optimization, ingenuity and inspiration, of creating thinking minds in machines! Not this meaningless fucking circus!

  I had to admit, though—it was impressive.

  “Ping’s picking up a lot of hostiles,” Kiwi said. “Engagements will be inevitable. Thankfully, the alarm doggies are pretty few and far between. What weapons you got, kid?”

  “Sword,” I said.

  “There’s a technique to Sword,” she said. “Hellbolt is more straightforward, but Sword lets you exploit momentary split-second vulnerabilities. If you know when and where to hit, you’ll deal critical damage.”

  “How do I know when to hit?” I asked.

  “Don’t think in terms of code,” she said. “The Ihara-Grubb transformation renders everything as symbolic representations. You hit the thing where it looks like it hurts, and you’ll hurt it. Pretty much just do what you already do with a sword in meatspace, got it?”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Good, now let’s go.”

  We walked into the next tier together.

  This time, our surroundings gained graphics. We were in a cave network and the ceiling had to be around five meters above us or so. Kiwi disabled her Invisibility and I followed suit. White threads began to exit from her fingertips, and I heard Lucy unsheathe two daggers from nowhere. I pulled out my Sword program, finally getting a look at its ICON. It was a pretty standard-looking katana, steel gray blade, similarly colored tsuba and a grip covered in black leather, comfy enough to hold.

  “Above!”

  Spiders began to jump down from the ceiling. Kiwi lashed her finger threads at them. Instead of slicing through them like monowire, they stuck to them. She smashed five of them on the wall so hard that their carapaces broke and they stopped moving.

  Lucy threw both her daggers up at the ceiling, hitting one large spider in the abdomen. It roared and fell from the ceiling, on all eight legs, facing her down with both daggers still on its back. They dispersed and reappered on her hand.

  I ran up to cut it. It tried to block with its leg, but my sword cleaved through it like a warm knife through butter, managing to land a deep gash on its abdomen. Its pixelated innards spilled out from the wound as it turned to face the new threat, only for Lucy to capitalize on its sudden distraction and stick both her knifes in its skull—or really its head.

  “Heads up!” Kiwi alerted us, tossing five spiders our way. I cut three of them down before they could land, and Lucy took care of the remaining two. “Cover me!” Kiwi cried.

  I heard a distant thwing and turned to the source of the noise, narrowly dodging an arrow in the nick of time, fired by some sort of skeleton. I ran towards it, easily dodging past the arrows it fired before cutting it down in one swipe. Following behind it were five sword-wielding skeletal warriors running up to me.

  Time to employ what I had learned from those BDs.

  I kept an awareness of my distance as I quickly darted into a skeleton’s space, severed its spine underneath its ribcage, and darted back before it could hit me with its sword. All the while, I readied for a swipe at its choom next to it, cutting off its head. The third skeleton tried to react to the death of its companions by slowing down, but I used that indecision against it, ramping up my intensity and managing to score a clean hit before it could even process a counterattack.

  Two daggers flew around me, hitting the last two skeletons again, revealing a sixth one standing behind them all, this one armored up in black, spiky armor, wearing an open helmet of a metallic dragon’s skull. On its breastplate were black diamonds that shone with a malevolent light of death and decay, and its skeletal grin was menacing to the core. I went for an experimental slice just to have it parry and counter. I reacted quickly enough to deflect the sword entirely and cut its head off.

  That was… easy. I looked at the rapidly disintegrating corpse of the program, waiting for maybe a second phase or something. Instead, Kiwi just headed forward. “I stuck around long enough to find a straightforward path to the third floor. We should get there pretty quickly now. Put your Invis coats on.”

  “This feels too easy,” I said as I donned the Invisibility program. “Didn’t you say that, uh, T3nsh1 was the best guardian Netrunner the Tyger Claws had?”

  “When she’s jacked in, yeah. She’s got good anti-personnel programs, but the Black ICE programs we’ve been killing en-masse are just market junk. I suspect the preem shit will be kept near to the Control Node. Anyway, it’s the reason why we’re hitting the fort right now: she’s not online. And won’t be for another hour if the data is right.”

  Lucy tapped me on the shoulder. “Nice work zeroing that skeleton knight, but try not to jump ahead again. You got lucky hitting the weakspot.”

  “Really?” I asked. Well, to be fair, the skeleton knight seemed suspiciously weak. “You mean when I cut the gap in the armor on the neck when it turned its head?”

  “Right,” she said. “Don’t get fancy. It’s your first time delving a data fortress. For the big ones, it’s best you let others get their shots.”

  I nodded. Guess I just got lucky, then.

  Kiwi led us through the cave network and we didn’t encounter a single other Black ICE program for several more minutes.

  Then the walls opened its thousands of eyes, black pupils going from narrow to wide like a cat’s.

  Kiwi froze, as did Lucy and I. They didn’t say a word, didn’t even whisper. The cat eyes narrowed, and the stone eyelids began to close until they weren’t there anymore.

  For several seconds more, no one moved, until finally, Kiwi started walking. Lucy and I followed.

  Soon enough, we arrived at another wide gate. We removed our Invisibility coats and both girls got to work Breaching.

  I let them work, trying my best to absorb what I was seeing, not that any of it meant anything. Kiwi was doing some old-school safe cracking while Lucy hammered away at the door with a pickaxe. Kiwi kept indicating spots for Lucy to hit with her fingers, and after about five minutes of this, the door cracked open.

  We went in.

  Inside was a labyrinth.

  “No watchdogs here,” Kiwi said. “This level is about pure lethality. T3nsh1 packed it to the brim with Black ICE. No use for Invis here.”

  “Can we hack it?” Lucy asked. “This level still doesn’t have info on the Sandy. Maybe we should hit another data fortress?”

  I didn’t weigh in. I didn’t have the experience to, even if I did want to keep going.

  “Normally, I would say yes,” Kiwi said. “But I helped design this labyrinth. Give me a minute, and I’ll have a map of the safest route. That should minimize the risk, and get us far enough inside and give me enough data clearance to make some eddies on the side even if the Sandy hunt falls through. What do you think, Luce?”

  “Go for it,” Lucy said.

  “Great,” Kiwi said. “And you, kid? Cold feet?”

  “I’m nova,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”

  “Fine,” Kiwi said. She poked a brick on the wall, and the maze’s walls went from uniformly dark gray to having some sections replaced with obsidian. “That right there,” she pointed at the obsidian sections. “Black ICE, the concentrated shit. Instant Death Colliders. Do not touch it, or you will fucking die.” She started tapping randomly at different bricks on the wall. A section of the wall opened up, revealing a paper scroll. She took it out from the hole in the wall and opened it. It dissolved into blue light which fell on the ground and started spreading forward, into the labyrinth. “This should be the lowest risk route.”

  We followed. My sword hand was ready for anything as I followed the tall Netrunner through the winding maze of dark stone and black ICE until we arrived at a wide, circular room.

  Where a group of ten skeleton knights stood about, surrounding a slightly taller skeleton knight with a spiky black crown over his helmet.

  “Fuck,” Kiwi said. “This is least risk?”

  The skeletons had already spotted us. “Should we run?” I asked.

  “Escape has a more long winded route,” Kiwi said with a sigh. “Harder to get out than in. And all the while, these fucks will have every opportunity to strategize and take us out on their terms. But—”

  The skeleton knights charged at us. I charged right after.

  I ducked beneath a slice, spotting an opening on the knee joint of its armor and cut through it. Then I cut through its head and backed away from an attacking skeleton knight that had left its neck unprotected in the brief moment it tried to attack me. I sliced through its neck, decapitating it easily.

  Then I rushed into their midst, a place where I was vulnerable from every direction, but the skeleton knights also had to make sure not to attack too widely lest they hit their allies.

  Their hesitation worked to my favor, and I struck wildly wherever I could. Some blows were killing, others just crippling, and I didn’t wait to finish the job on each of my targets, just working to soften them up.

  Then I had to parry the strike of the bigger skeleton knight’s blade falling on top of me. I looked around for an escape route through the walking corpses, blindspots and places they couldn’t easily reach and slid past them smoothly before going on the attack against the bigger skeleton knight. It turned just in time to take the hit on its sword, deflecting it towards its armor. I pulled back and sent some probing strikes. It had a quick reaction speed, was strong and fast as well, but the more I traded blows with it, the more I was certain—it had the skill of a rudimentary combat AI. It wasn’t a master by any stretch of the imagination, it was just jacked.

  I had to split off from it as its minions were about to bog me down. Swiftly, I cut two of them down, buying me enough time to mount a strategic effort against the knight. Three more exchanges of blows, and I believed I had it down; three strikes on each side, juking it to reveal a crack in its armor right around its neck.

  I cleaved through the weakness, cutting the program’s head off.

  I looked up to find Kiwi and Lucy both trying to kill the last skeleton knight still standing. I watched with narrowed eyes as they repeatedly had to dodge its clumsy and slow blows while Lucy’s daggers glanced ineffectually against its armor. The skeleton sliced Kiwi’s webbing as well every time she slung it, preventing her from getting a hold on it.

  I ran up to help them, waiting for a chance to reveal itself, a crack in its armor. It came fairly quickly and I cut through it instantly, causing it to die. That was easy. Way too easy. This was just another skeleton knight, like the others.

  “You guys okay?” I asked. “What happened? Why are you guys so slow? Did you get hit with a program or something?”

  Kiwi and Lucy stared at me. Then behind me. I turned around to take in the charnel house of rapidly pixelating skeleton knights in black armor.

  Lucy tossed a knife at me and I deflected it instantly. “What the fuck?!”

  “There’s your answer, dipshit,” Lucy said. “You’re fucking fast.”

  I frowned. “What the hell?”

  “Wait a fucking—” Kiwi said. “You just blocked that… with your sword.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “What of it?”

  “The sword is an offensive program,” she said. “You can’t use it to defend yourself.” She said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Uh,” I said. “Why does that matter? The ICON is a sword, isn’t it? Shouldn’t that be it?”

  “The ICON is a visualization, the sword isn’t really a sword,” Kiwi said. “Are you stupid or something?”

  “The fuck? What about Lucy? She’s been doing weird shit with ICONs all day.”

  “Yeah,” Kiwi said. “Weird shit like what you’re currently doing.” She sighed and turned to Lucy. “Luce, hold your knives up in a block.” She rolled her eyes, but obeyed. Then Kiwi slug webbing at her. They clipped through Lucy’s upraised knives and stuck to her body. “See that? The ICON is only active when you try to cut with it, and even then, it’s only active for a fraction of a second. You used your sword to protect yourself from a projectile by activating it. Meaning, you attacked Lucy’s program before it could hit you. The timing you need to do that is—”

  “Fucking perfect,” Lucy said. “Alright, spit it out, what the hell was that? You mowed down those skeleton knights, and a king, like it was nothing.”

  “Because it was,” I said with a shrug. “They’re slow as shit.”

  “Sandy,” Kiwi sighed. “Gotta be. I’d almost say you’re on some Kerenzikov reaction speed, but you’d notice if your perception was always that fast. You somehow have near-perfect reaction speed but without the constant bullet time perception.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s the Sandy. It overhauled my nervous system.” That wasn’t the full truth, but I didn’t owe them that either.

  Kiwi nodded. “And it’s not every day you see a Netrunner running a Sandevistan, either. Most people wouldn’t be able to deal with splitting their nervous system across so much neuralware. I guess this is why.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a grin, though it wouldn’t show on my constantly grinning skull face. “I’m just that special. Should we get going or should we pull back? Since this is getting kinda hard for you two.”

  I wasn’t above a little gloating, especially since they’ve been treating me like a non-entity all this time. It felt good to be useful.

  Kiwi snorted. “You kidding? You’re gonna make me some eddies, kid. Full speed ahead.”

  “It’s D,” I said. “Not kid.”

  “Getting a little cocky there, D,” she said. Was cockiness just asking for due respect? If so, I’d be as cocky as I wanted.

  “Ugh,” Lucy groaned. “Shouldn’t have opened my dumb mouth. Could have just gone with the debuff excuse so your head wouldn’t get so big.”

  “Too late to regret that now,” Kiwi said as she walked up ahead. “Look alive, kiddies. We’ve got a data fortress to conquer.”