NOVEL WEB Blood and Steel C38: The Devil’s Lair
Chapter 38: The Devil’s Lair
Personal findings from NeoCore Founder, Michelle Silva, on the 2449 New California Earthquake.
Officially, seismographs indicating the possibility of the earthquake had been going off for multiple centuries in Western America. But ever since the MALswarm attacked the Yellowstone District in 2407, they’d noticed a spike in the amount of daily earthquakes in the region. Most were imperceptible.
This one wasn’t. At a magnitude of 9.7, an Earthquake hit January 24th 2449, it tore through three of the five Districts of New California. Yellowstone, Westbrook and New Washington all suffered damage worth trillions save for minimal damage in the New Angeles District.
Westbrook suffered the worst out of all of them.
Without energy from the Yellowstone volcanic reactor, the District of Westbrook was left in the dark for months unless Warp Shards were converted into electricity. The rich stayed warm that winter with their Silver Shards, the poor could only gain so much from Iron.
Not to mention, the civil war that had been going on. Westbrook was the main entry point for refugees from the destroyed Free City of the Floridian Gulf, and many citizens came to see their entry as a burden over the limited resources available at that time which eventually led to a war between the civilians and the corporations. I wished to say that NeoCore did more for them, but Mazhyr… She knew the Free Cities best, her aid was limited considering the other conflict between the European Free Cities.
Millions died across New California, from the earthquake itself. From the cold of that winter. From MAL attacks. From homicide. It should be no surprise that criminal activity blossomed during this period, scavenging from both the residents of both New California and The Floridian Gulf. If there was truly a winner in this case, it would be the underworld of New California.
By the time power had come back on, it was the criminals who controlled Westbrook. Making it the centralized location of underworld activity in The Free City.
Thus, came the name Westcrook.
6:24 AM
July 5th
Ripley
[No need to come in. Diamante has a job for you.]
Anderson’s message was right on Twilight’s money. I had a mission, an operation? A job… no, a gig? I had a gig today. The thought hit me proudly, the first opportunity to show off my learning. I’d been doing more than just theory over the last week.
The gym was the perfect place to learn how to fight. I’d practiced with the basic drills provided by the Combat Protocol I’d gotten from Skeleton ages ago, simulated holograms I sparred with, and always lost to, Daylight and Twilight — even some shooting training was available. The rough muscle memory inserted through my subconscious training gave me the confidence to try out the shooting range connected to the gym. I uh… wasn’t the best at it. Officially, I ranked 1034 out of the 1178 people that had tried their hands at it over the last year.
While in close-combat I was actually doing pretty good for a beginner, ranking 873 in boxing spars and 821 in the simulated fights. Missy had even commented that I was beginning to put on proper muscle mass, something I could truly appreciate in both of my arms now. The limbs each had a general range of motion modified up to my deltoids, but working out my back and chest had pretty marginal increases on the speeds at which I could lumber around the cybernetics as a whole. Turns out steroids were the answer.
And one day, a fully cybernetic muscular system would be an even better answer. Though that might be a ways off, until I got my Capacity higher… the statistics of my Implant were now measured and capable growing since I’d finished Converging. As far as I knew, they improved by digesting Warpcode off Shards.
As for what they did… while I was studying from a holographic textbook during my pacing and cleaning of the gym’s equipment, Missy had been kind enough to quiz me on them for preparation of Anderson’s exams.
Integrity: Iron IV
Energy: Iron V
Capacity: Iron VII
Grade: Gold I
Tendency: NA
“Grade’s the simplest,” I said to her question within a recording of her lifting one-ton dumbells as she squatted. “It’s how strong your actual Warp Energy is. That’s dependent on your Implant’s Grade as I’m sure you’ve figured. It acts as a multiplier for your other parameters, as a Gold I’d have them increased to be maybe 8-times more potent than an Iron’s — while Titanium would be twice as efficient as Gold. It’s why even at Convergence I could outperform most Tier Ones.”
She finished up her squats, nodding warmly before quizzing me about Integrity…
“Integrity’s a bit misleading based on the name,” I had answered, “it’s how much you can keep yourself running with Warp Energy before the mental — or in SIMs, physical — toll breaks you down. If you’re thinking it reflects your actual durability… that’s wrong, only Shardware or Mutations are the answer for that — maybe some good Dermachrome. Think of Integrity as a gauge of the overall stress your nerves can take at once while running Warp Energy through it.”
In my recording of her, she clicked her tongue. “Ah, but what happens when you do go over the limit of your Integrity?”
I had answered with a shrug. “Textbook calls the phenomena Warp Burns, but that’s not covered until later.”
“You’ll probably experience it before you read about it, better to learn that way I’d say.” She said cheerfully as she curled steel with her biceps. “Energy?”
“Energy is exactly what you think it is. It’s how much the quantity of your Warp Energy actually is. The more Energy you have, the more you can do.” Pretty self explanatory, it also dictated your Warp Energy recovery, but it was influenced by proper resting time and diet. Later on, I would need to buy some pretty expensive pills to keep myself fueled up but some Shard Adapters could convert other forms of energy into Warp Energy.
Then came the difficult question.
“Capacity is the threshold that determines how much your body can be modified. However, it’s a bit different. I’m sure you’ve seen as a Shard Op’ that Shardware themselves have all the same parameters listed down as your Implant, and they reflect pretty similarly in terms of Energy, Grade and Integrity. Except Capacity, which in the case of Shardware is a measure of how much of a load the individual piece takes on your body and mind.” I said the easy part.
Then came the reason why full body mods were looked down upon. “But that calculation’s a bit… fucked. Essentially, whatever tier your own Capacity is at, it can only take one piece of Shardware at the same tier, or two below it, or three below that. So at Iron V, you could have one unit at the same grade, two Iron IVs, three Iron IIIs and all the way down to five Iron Is. Grade comes into play as well but it doesn’t actually multiply you overall Capacity by a factor of 8, in my case the Gold improves my Capacity to act three Tiers above it’s actual rating.”
So in summary, you could either have a whole load of weak Shardware or concentrate it into key pieces. As for how that worked with my own modifications…
Linked Shardware Capacity Statistics:-
Neuroframe: Neural Matrix; [Iron II Capacity]
(Pseudo-Silver)] Right Shard-Op Claw (AG design): Procedure Repetition; Warp Strands; Breakdown; [Iron IX Capacity]
Left Shard-Op Claw (RD Design): [Iron V Capacity]
Custom Left Leg: [Iron II Capacity]
Lens: [Iron 0 Capacity]
With the +3 Tier benefit of my Gold Grade to my Iron VII Capacity, I was effectively having an Iron X Capacity, just at the cusp of wielding true Bronze-capacitance Shardware. My right arm which was at Iron IX took 50% of my Capacitance, whereas anything of Standard Grade would only take a flat 1%. My artificial skin, however, was so miniscule it didn’t even equate in the overall calculations.
A quick algorithm I cooked up helped visualize it, there were modules dedicated to this I could get installed later on but for now it was enough…
Capacitance Overview:
Adapter Capacity: Iron VII [Effective: Iron X]
Neuroframe: Iron II [1/9 = 11.1%]
Right Shard-Op Claw: Iron IX [1/2 = 50%]
Left Shard-Op Claw: Iron V [1/6 = 18.6%]
Shardware Leg: Iron II [1/9 = 11.1%]
Liver: Iron II [1/9 = 11.1%]
Lens: Standard [1/100 = 1%]
Overall Capacitance: 102.9%
I was slightly over the limit, and asking Missy about that left her brushing it off. She said it’s okay to go just about 10… maybe 20% over your limit, but never to exceed that without an Accommodation Feature.
While the textbooks still had heaps of informations, the real nitty gritty of Stats and the science behind them was locked up even deeper within secure Netvaults owned by corporations, or the closest secrets of criminal organizations.
It bugged me to no end, no pun intended, just how much information about the Implants couldn’t be accessed without paying a healthy sum for. Just how much more were they hiding?
Were there secrets about these Implants I could find out on my own? Maybe?
For now, I rehearsed my lessons for anything useful as I cooked and ate up breakfast, when at 9 in the morning, Diamante messaged me.
[Sending you a location… be there in an hour.]
Seeing the location, I got ready and left, giving a quick goodbye to my mother. She didn’t look all too happy once I said what for, but accepted it. She had been the deciding vote after all.
Where I ended up was not a place I’d frequented. It was an abandoned construction site on the edge of an area in the First Precinct colloquially called the Ruststreets. A largely poor neighborhood consisting of houses that seemed to be constructed out of used containers and other scrap from a junkyard.
This place in particular was in ruins, and if I was right, hadn’t been touched in over half a century. At the very centre was a large half-finished construction for an old shopping center that had fallen through the ground into a fissure probably caused by the earthquake some fifty years ago.
Diamante appeared by my right as I was trying to clear the dust off an old sign. His metallic visage reflecting brightly in the morning light did little to ward off the sense that he… didn’t like me being here. “At least you’re on time.”
I scoffed at the audacity. “I’ve been waiting here for 30 minutes.”
“You disrespecting your senior?” Diamante’s robotic eyes narrowed.
“We aren’t a part of the police, how can you talk like that without feeling disgusted?”
He seemed stumped on what to say, just instead waving an arm for me to follow him. I hated it, his steel-weighted body casually leaped from one area of stone to the next, ignoring the chiasmatic cracks between them. I had to be more careful in my approach, taking careful steps along metallic beams or hopeful leaps from one area of crumbling stone to another. Without the Preservation Matrix, I’d have never even had the courage for this in the first place.
Penetrating deeper into the old destroyed mall, I couldn’t help but feel that this place should be more… infested. “Why don’t any gangs set up store here? I thought they were like cockroaches, finding any nook and cranny and making their dens.”
“Because I own the fucking place.” Diamante hissed, and now I sort of understood why he was peeved about me being here.
“You live here?”
“Sometimes…” He grunted, there was definitely a reason he was pissed off. It wasn’t until I traversed through one of the longer corridors that I spotted something odd, discarded bottles piled up too numerously for one person to drink… unless they were really going through something. Or a group, a group made more sense.
“People stay here?” I tried to make friendly conversation with the grumpy robot-man.
He didn’t turn towards me, just continued walking. “Scrappers… have to kick them out.”
“How’d you come to own this place anyway? Don’t think the city just sold it to you.” I pressed on.
“Metal Heavens. Place used to belong to them…”
“Until…”
“Until a devil appeared in front of their Bishops.” Diamante kicked open a door, he was definitely angry. Now I was starting to think it wasn’t because of me…
“This place has meaning to you… thought you weren’t a part of Metal Heavens?” I came from a place out of curiosity…
So there was no reason for him to raise his voice at me. “I never was. Now shut up and follow!”
My lips sealed, I did just that. Twilight gave some background commentary in my head. “Yeah… he doesn’t really like them.”
‘I can tell.’
“All you need to know is that this place used to be run by the old Archbishop until the 2460s. New one wants nothing to do with this place. The fear of the gang still running in this place is enough to ward off most people, they don’t know Diamante set up shop here.”
Finally, we reached a depression that led to an inner sub-layer of the center’s labyrinthine core. I knew big malls like this had some sort of underground floor for their workers to sleep in but I didn’t imagine most looked like this…
Covered in faded bloodstains.
I passed through hallways and corridors of various rooms which grew increasingly more sinister, some looked to be prisons with chained manacles stuck to the walls, others had claws and hooks strapped to machinery, the dry blood especially apparent there.
“Now I see why everyone hates Metal Heavens…” I’d expected an angry retort from Diamante but instead got a much more mellowed response.
“You have no idea.” A sadness seemed to drench his voice, and it didn’t take two-and-two to figure out that Diamante had some connection to the gang, this place in particular. Only when he stopped for a moment to stare at a specific room, labeled cell-block 41, that I thought the pieces were starting to come together.
Had he once been a prisoner here? I didn’t have the courage to say it aloud, but it would make perfect sense.
Then, we got to a specific chamber. A storage room from the looks of it, Diamante plugged wires from his arm into the door’s panel and it opened up, dust coughing out.
Room was a gross understatement. It was a wide, expansive series of carefully aranged lockers and cubicles each with unique labels and identifiers. But I saw a common thread in their naming…
IronXB2; BronzeLR5; Iron LR8; Bronze YJ21; Silver HM7
“Are all of these… Shardware?” Excitement fluttered up at the last word.
“Corpses too.” Diamante knocked one door in passing. Bronze PR71. Inside it was the skeletal remains of someone with a unique Endoskeleton, but the decomposed flesh stenched up both the rooms and my nausea. “Used to be the mall’s storage for all their products, SynTec never got to use it.”
Walking past it, he started a statement without me needing to ask something first. “Don’t think about coming back here without me, this place still has security.”
“Okay.” I nodded, not that he could see it with how much he walked ahead of me.
Finally, we stopped at one of the walls with hundreds of small cabinets and lockers heading up the ceiling. Diamante hooked himself up to a terminal, giving me a simple question. “Features?”
“Huh?”
“What Features do you want to mimic? Three of them.” He sounded more impatient this time.
I swallowed down the excitement threatening to swallow me… were all of these tiny cabinets containing Implants? Was he… I thought it through, quickly coming to my decision. “Accommodation, Database and… Energized.”
“A duplicate?” He tilted his head at me…
“An experiment, what happens if I mimic a Feature I already have.” He nodded at the response, apparently it was something he understood. Then again, Unique Features needed experimentation to be understood.
A few seconds later, some mechanism whirred to life. An arm attached to a metal beam running the entire length of the wall pulled out one of the tinier cabinets, quickly placing it down on a marked area reading: ‘Delivery Zone, Keep Clear’.
Within each of those tiny boxes was a small Iron sphere, each looking like a condensed form of some insect. BUGs, all Iron to my admittedly ungrateful disappointment.
“Mimic them.” Diamante took a seat against the terminal, waiting for me to start.
I began with the Accomodation one.
Reading Data… 10%… 30… 70%… 100%…
Development: NA
Feature: Accomodation V.0.00
Error: Insufficient Warpcode… unable to mimic Feature.
“Can’t do it.” I said with disappointment. “Must be because the BUG hasn’t had an owner yet, no Feature development means no stabilized Warpcode for me to mimic.”
“You can tell what Feature it has?”
“Yup. I can read the Warpcode and confirm the Feature within it, guess I’m a walking Implant Scanner of sorts.” I said, then it hit me. “Wait, if I’m a walking Implant Scanner…”
“Then you’re a walking goldmine. That’ll be good for any MAL hunts or deals with unknown goods.” Diamante confirmed. “Next one.”
I picked up the BUG from the box labeled as Database
Reading Data… 3%… 5%… 7%…
This one took much longer, it’s flow of code felt chunky and scattered like it’d been disarrayed. Diamante hummed to himself while I spent a few minutes dissecting the code.
100%…
Grade: Iron
Development: Tier 0 (Convergence)
Feature: Database V.0.09
Previous Adapters: Lucy Hickman (7m); Kalus (1y3m); Julius Renwick (2m); Atolanike Ajike (4m); Freud (1y6m); Old Sword (7m)
Error: Warpcode is significantly fragmented… Implant is unstable… unable to mimic Feature.
“Too unstable for me to mimic, this one went through a lot of owners. You testing me out?” I asked, but he just continued humming.
Next one it is. Energized
The reading went by surprisingly quick.
Reading Data… 20%… 60%… 100%
And the Implant was relatively normal.
Development: Tier I (Foundation)
Feature: Energized V.1.05
Previous Adapters: Yuri Tanasaka (3y10m)
The previous owner had it for 4 years? And it hadn’t even developed past what mine currently was at, that… I’d been told the entire time that I was developing fast, but talk about putting things into perspective.
Mimicking Feature… Error: Feature is already present within the Adapter; analyzing update history… compatible update found.
“It uhhh… can’t mimic it. But it’s saying something about there being a compatible update.” I was both excited, and wary.
“Absorb it.” He said it so casually.
I might as well have been told to put a gun to my head. “Uh… pretty sure it’s known to wait a long while before you absorb Warpcode from an Implant, shouldn’t I start out with Shards?”
“No. Absorb the Warpcode, Gold Features will need more than just Shard-derived code to empower itself. You can handle it, but only one for now.” He remained stern, but there was a caution in his voice.
It made sense, but it didn’t help me figure out the methodology. “Right, how exactly am I supposed to do this? Everything on the Net says-”
“Just wrap your own Warp Energy over the thing until it breaks, or I don’t know you’re already instinctively reading them, just pull more now!”
I gulped, praying this wasn’t all a very long and elaborate ploy to just steal my BUG. Wrapping the small bead in a warm breath of Gold, I began a similar process to reading it except this time I didn’t simply simmer around the surface. I burrowed through, the Iron orb cracking in my sight.
Scanning Warpcode…
What happened next was brief, but I felt like I’d vanished from the old underground layer of the mall and appeared in a valley out in the wilds. Or at least what I’d seen unclaimed America looked like. Frozen. Dry. My body exhausted most of its energy to produce heat to prevent my joints from locking in, the dead grass from a single month of spring cracked with the nervous shifting of my feet, their blades sharp like needles. The snow here was centuries old and hissed a mist into the air as nerves coughed caution through me.
I raised my blade up high, as two Nomads approached. They wore the pelts of animals I didn’t recognize, antlers pointing from their heads and huge arms of fur and claws held machinery foreign to my understanding.
My convoy had just been killed, the elite Yuzhou guards slaughtered by an ambush of MAL on our way back to New Californa from SynTec’s New Port City. It was just me left, and I had a job to do, these neanderthals wouldn’t stop me.
Iron coalesced over my sword, covering it in a sheath of dull gray that I’d been proud of. I slashed forward as one of the nomad’s lurched towards me, even if I was unable to match the beautiful slash our Division Commander had used against the MALs out in the wild, my attack had been beautiful nonetheless.
The thick leather armor of the nomads split, unraveling until crimson blood drenched out of the bisected head. I leaped for my next flow, before a brief glimmer caught my attention. A sniper scope.
A booming sound echoed, then it all faded.
Warpcode Absorbed… forcing compatibility… forcing absorption of Protocol: Warp Sheath
Energized V.1.06 has updated to V.1.07
Effect: Warp Sink Protocol can layer Warp Energy over Shardware, slightly increasing its durability.
Recalibrating recent adaptational learning…
Energized V.1.07 has updated to V.1.08
Effect: Increased efficiency of Warp Energy distribution over Shardware.
Data Mimicry V.0.05 has updated to V.0.06
Effect: Adapter may view glimpses of memories through any thoroughly scanned BUG’s Warpcode.
Data Mimicry V.0.06 has updated to V.0.07
Effect: Warpcode absorption is more efficient.
My eyes blinked, my eyes. Free to see the world trapping me in the steel cage of this storage space, but for a moment, for a few seconds I had been in the midst of a vast valley of frozen death. I felt everything, the coldest breath I’d ever taken, the faint smell of air unpolluted by city smoke, the clouds unbroken from the skyscrapers impaling them.
It was a hauntingly alien kind of beautiful.
“Ripley? You with me?” Diamante had his hands on my head, one of them prying my eyelids open so I could stare right into his unfeeling gaze.
“Did you know?” I asked.
“Know what?” He was feeling something, fear, excitement, maybe jealousy, I know I would be if I was him.
“That your BUG remembers everything?”