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Cid's day started off badly and was just getting worse. The market had been flooded recently with cheap Taiwanese imports that people kept expecting him to fix. There’s only so much he could do with the pieces of junk when it was embedded in someone’s skull, and sadly just ripping it out wasn’t usually an option.
He decided to work out some of his aggravation refurbing some of the higher quality implants he’d bought in a second hand batch. He was knuckle deep in a KR-270 when there was a soft clearing of the throat behind him. He linked up to the camera in his repair studio, getting a fuzzy image of a tall, dark, and handsome figure, not visibly armed. "Be with you in a minute." He shifted the camera feed to a corner of his vision, keeping an eye on the man as he tried to finish re-aligning the warped matrix.
The stranger waited patiently, which was surprising. Most people who came to him were twitchy, tweaking, drunk, or all of the above along with a dose of surly to boot. That's all that really existed down here in the gutters, folks who did or were illegal shit, and who were always nervous and defensive as a result. Cid didn't ask questions, he just fixed what he could for as little as he could get away with, and kept people alive and able to work just that little bit longer. It wasn't a great life, but it was his.
Eventually he finished soldering the connection port he was working on and was able to set that aside, turning his attention to the customer. "Sorry 'bout that," he drawled, "What can I do ya for?"
The stranger shuffled his feet, staring at the ground in a way that was oddly adorable. Not a word that Cid would apply to most who graced his shop. "I got nagged into coming. I've got an old T-100 port and I've been getting shocks and feedback off it for a while."
Cid almost cursed. T-100s were practically Jurassic and had been shit even when they were new. He flicked his gaze over the lad: clothes weren't expensive but were clean, eyes didn't have that tell-tale manic gleam of drug use, there was a scar across his cheek but not many other marks of a hard life. He let out a long hiss through his teeth, "Not looking for a replacement?"
The man shrugged lopsidedly, "Been told it wasn't any option before. The installation wasn't exactly... well done. But anything you can do..." He half-turned like he was already expecting to be told to leave.
Cid waved his hand, "Oi, hold on, I work on all sorts. Show me what you got, I'll see what can be done about it." The man paused, then finished turning around, shifting his hair out of the way to expose a small port sitting behind his left ear.
Odd, that. Most ports were on the back of the neck, or the temple if they were small enough. Behind the ear wasn't exactly common. He shifted around the counter, coming up behind the man and taking a closer look.
"Well, it certainly wasn't a clean install," he said, half to himself as he examined it. "Skin's gettin' real red back here, possibly a partial rejection. Port entrance is all scratched up too, likely got some cross connections happening." As he ran his fingers over the area his eyes caught on something: another port, much better install, nape of the neck exactly like it should be. The lad had two ports...
There were a number of reasons for someone to have two ports, and all of them were illegal. People trying to hide stuff from the net that they didn't want traced. Two ports meant bad business, even for the folks he was used to dealing with. But this guy was calm, quiet, almost timid. He didn't seem like a danger. And it wasn’t like this was the first two-port he’d worked on before.
With the age of it, there was only one way to properly diagnose things and it was a bit awkward with a stranger. "Look,” he said, “I know we've just met and I don't even know your name, but I need to connect up to figure out what's going on here. Odds are good the issue’s more internal than external."
The stranger hunched his shoulders, tensing up at the mere mention of connecting, and Cid was sure he’d just lost a customer. But then his head tilted in a small spasm, no, a short, his hand coming up to rub at his temple. "Call me Wyvern," he said. It wasn't a handle Cid was familiar with but he tried to make it his business not to be too familiar. "And just... don't pry, alright?"
"Never do," Cid replied, gesturing to his 'operating' chair as he grabbed the necessary wires. Tech this old, he definitely needed some kind of firewall between them and something to make sure his own tech didn’t short out. Fortunately he had some self-made and trusted contraptions. "Just think pleasant thoughts: puppies and sunshine." Cid connected them up and closed his eyes, prodding at the unfamiliar bundle that was his connection to Wyvern.
The first image was indeed of a puppy or rather a half-grown wolf with a diamond on its forehead. It snarled at him and he wondered for a moment if it was some kind of guard program. The T-100 shouldn't be sophisticated enough for that. He let it be for now, stretching the connection out to get a feel for flaws. It definitely felt sluggish and there was something itching at his forehead that just felt off.
"Gonna have to sift around, poke at the edges and all that. It's normal, just try to relax." Thinking back to the guard dog he added, almost as an afterthought, "Got any guard programs I need to be mindful of?"
"Not- no. No guards in there," the man replied quietly, trying to force himself to relax into the chair. Cid didn't comment; it was never easy to let someone poke into their brain, let alone in a back alley chopshop-looking place like his.
"I'll see about getting one installed for you, if this goes well. Protection makes everything better." And with that he was off, diving through memories, trying to find the glitches and the boundaries of the port.
Most memories were just flashes of images, small bits of nothing that pop up and back down as the person thinks on them. Sometimes they're just sounds. But some, the big ones, were full blown movies, and you could get lost in them if you weren't careful. Cid was always careful though, avoiding those big blobs of thought as easily as breathing. But he still caught snippets from the smaller ones. Friends, or at least coworkers, drinking together. A lot of darkness, a lot of musty and rusty smells. A flash of metal in one left him a bit disquieted, but he moved past with businesslike disinterest.
Eventually he tracked down the source of the problem. Like a clump of hair caught in a pipe, some bad files have clustered in part of the system, slowly wedging up a ton of other files and memories alongside it until it was a pulsating, digital mass, corrupting everything around it. The good news is that it's something Cid knew how to fix. The bad news was it was a long job: he'd need to unpick all the wedged up memories and files slowly, give Wyvern's brain time to process them as he worked his way to the mass at the centre. Free it all at once and Wyvern would be left mind-blind.
He drifted back towards his own anchor, a sunshine-smiled girl with yellow hair in pigtails, and let himself be tugged back into his own body, feeling the tingles in his flesh as he broke the connection. He glanced over to Wyvern who looked hazy, even though Cid had been careful: having your brain poked around was never comfortable. He waited until the man's eyes focused again.
"So, am I doomed?"
"Ye of little faith," Cid chided. "You got a clog. It's not the worst I've seen." It wasn't far off though. That mess must have been accumulating for at least five years or more. "But it is going to be slow to unpick if you don't want an overload. Say every three days, come in here for another appointment."
Wyvern didn't look entirely convinced, "And how much is that gonna cost?"
"Two hundred credits a session, since there's no guarantee how long it'll all take. Will likely take at least three, maybe five if the memories in the clog are hard to deal with. That part's all on you." What he didn’t say was that the center memory was always bad, something the brain didn’t want to process that just sat and messed things up around it. Experience had told him it was best to inform clients of that after a session or two, once they started seeing progress.
Two hundred was on the higher end of his price scale, but this was the kind of job that required a deft touch. Hell, clinics with credentials would be charging ten times that, at least, though they usually offered therapy to go along with it. He was just a mechanic, down here it was the dirty way or nothing at all. But he knew the job well. He'd have to find like memories and pull at them together, untangling pieces of the knot until he could get at the center. Hopefully the lad was good for it, at least for a few sessions. Even if he didn't clear the whole clog, clearing any would be a boon to the poor man's mind.
Wyvern's hand pressed to the normal port at the back of his neck and his mouth twisted again. His eyes narrowed as he surveyed Cid. "I'm trusting the folks that recommended you for you not to fuck me over." It came out overly harsh in contrast to the pleasant demeanor the lad has had so far. "I'll need a bit of time to pull some money together. What's the cost for today?"
Cid frowned and totalled up an amount that he was hoping wouldn't scare the lad off, "Fifty for a consult and deposit for the first session, and try not to do any heavy lifting with either port for a while, we need to avoid making the issue worse than it already is."
Wyvern snorted, "I need to raise over a grand's worth of credits without using my ports?" He scratched at his temple, "Fine, I'll see what I can do." He stood from the chair, wavering a little on his feet from the after-effects. He pressed against his neck port again and Cid felt a mental clink as the credits landed in his account. "Three days? Any particular time?"
Cid checked his schedule but he didn't tend to be booked much in advance. It was usually desperate people banging at his door in need of a fix. "Any time." The lad stood, nodded and left and Cid let out an exhale. Well, he certainly hadn’t been hard on the eyes, just hard to read. And two ports… Bad business all around, but then again who wasn’t in his line of work?
He pushed Wyvern from his mind, damn near forgetting about him save for the small appointment reminder on his calendar as the days ticked by. It actually was good the lad had booked out early, Cid was able to wave off a couple bigger tasks for a different day to ensure he could dedicate time to Wyvern's job.
When the door to his shop opened he tried not to seem too interested, switching his video feed to the shop interior to see the same sullen, handsome man standing there, waiting patiently.
"Go on, have a seat," he waved toward his operating chair, not looking up from his current task. "Get yourself comfy. You eaten today?"
"You didn't say anything about eating," Wyvern grouched as he lowered himself to a seat.
"I thought it was common sense to have energy for things like this." Cid turned away from where he'd been inspecting his setup and reached one drawer down. He pulled out one of the energy bars, plastered with a bright pink kitten and a claim of strawberry flavour that was about as true as its nutritional benefits. "Here." He tossed it over to the lad.
The nice looking- no, Wyvern took a moment to peer over it skeptically before ripping open the wrapper and tearing into it like he hadn't eaten for days. That made Cid pay closer attention to Wyvern's cheekbones, which were maybe less genetic and more a sign of too many skipped meals. Cid could include a few snacks as part of the service, just a way of making sure his client didn't pass out on the table.
Fauxberry bar consumed, Wyvern resumed watching Cid all too warily, fingers clenching white-knuckled onto the sides of the chair. "So, what exactly are you going to do?"
Cid grabbed out his connector and ran through a basic calibration program, checking for all green lights. "De-tangling can be an unpleasant process. Going to be pulling out clumps of memories and seeing what comes with them. No way to do that without you reliving them, at least in part. Ready?"
"Are you going to see them too?" Wyvern asked, suddenly much more tense than he'd been a moment ago.
"Yeah, though I promise I don't keep backups or anything of the like. Nor will you have anything I ain't seen before. Just think of me as directing traffic, I'll shuttle a few like memories out together, you go through 'em, and then they're cleared and we can move on to the next. May not be pleasant memories, but the task itself isn’t dangerous."
He saw Wyvern thinking through it, lips twitching as his eyes shifted back and forth. Clearly there was some stuff in there he wanted hidden. Cid was fully telling the truth, he wasn't going to save any backups, wasn't going to do more than glance at what he had to, but this task required trust regardless.
"Fine," the lad let out a sigh, forcing himself to stillness. "Go ahead, how bad can it be?"
‘Very,’ he thought, glad his face was hidden from the lad. Instead he said "Good lad," hoping it came out confident.
Cid grabbed his own chair over, worn to fit his body from years of use and settled into it before finally connecting up. He was more cautious this time with a longer job, making sure that his anchor was clear for getting out and then headed down through the swarm, ignoring some of the smaller memories that spun around him like fireflies until he reached the outer edge of the clump.
It was like one of Mid's puzzles, trying to find an edge that wouldn't knock half the clump apart. Sometimes he could tell how bad a memory would be from how it looked but this clump had been fixed in place so long that all the memories were tinged and twisted around each other. He found a loose edge near the surface and dug his mental claws in, steeling himself as he lifted.
He was in a yard, real grass between his toes. Who the fuck had real grass these days? A small child, hair as blonde as Mid's but with a more red tinge, yelled something at him but the words were lost to the wind. He felt the mental presence of Wyvern nearby, almost tugging him away but he held fast into the tide and kept traction to pull the memory loose, already feeling the thread of more memories coming loose in its wake.
He focused on the kid, his strawberry blonde locks easy to pick out among a sea of darker colors. He always appeared in brightness, at least how Wyvern saw him. Moments of birthdays, of smiles, of giggling while rolling around on the real fucking grass with that large dog he'd seen earlier. Clearly a source of happiness, a son or a sibling or something. He felt Wyvern's protectiveness over the kid as if it were his own, and he couldn’t help but glance back at his anchor, his sweet daughter who was his world.
Suddenly the brightness vanished, instead replaced with a cramped closet and the young boy crying in his/Wyvern's arms. And that protectiveness was muted, more like acceptance and sadness than the earlier fierce pride. He pushed that thought through as fast as he could, getting them both out of it and swimming back up to the surface, to his anchor, for air. That was a good first batch, time for a check-in.
"Ack," he shook his head, coming back to himself and working through the ensuing dizziness. "Hadn't bargained on that last one, sorry. But that was a good first round." He disconnected his hookup. "Sit with that a bit," he said, grabbing a bottle of water and pressing it into the other’s hands before pushing back to give him space. "It's rough at first, but we can probably do another batch before it gets too much for today. We'll try again in a few minutes when you're ready."
He didn't miss the way Wyvern's hands shook, almost dropping the water, or how they near squeezed too tight around the thin plastic. He also didn't miss the long line of throat exposed as the man tipped his head back, pouring the water down as if he was parched. Nope, mind on the job, not the lost soul with pretty blue eyes.
Cid forced himself to turn away, hands fiddling with the gadgetry as if he was adjusting something. His own throat felt parched now but he wasn't sure if it was just a sensory ghost from the connection. He'd gone a bit deeper than he meant, his own image of Mid blurred down with the other boy like twins. He reached for his stock of energy stims, popping one just to help clarify things. Losing his anchor was about the worst thing that could happen in a job like this.
He glanced back to see those mistrustful blue eyes watching him, tired but ready. A slight head nod was all he got before he hooked them up again. He at least had something to work with now as he returned to the memories. The areas where some had dislodged were clear, though it felt like barely a scratch on the surface, the slightest glimmer of untarnished memories beneath. This time he focused on the dog, pressing his virtual hand against the pile and feeling out for where it guided him.
Memories charged at him again like a flurry of puppies barking for his attention. He used himself as a conduit to let them flow outwards, feeling the buzz of joy from Wyvern in the back of his mind. These were happy to spiral away, fleeting little moments that they were. He felt a strange sensation, almost a lick to his hand but made of ice. He could almost see a shadow of one of the puppies, pulling him towards a cluster of memories. Before he could touch it though, there was a flinch in the mental connection and he was pushed back, away from the cluster in a riptide. He just about clutched his anchor in time to avoid getting swept away, holding onto it like a lifeline until he could pull himself back out to safety.
He surfaced hard, cursing and panting as he came back to himself. Wyvern wasn’t much better off, they looked at each other with eyes wide, breaths heavy as they recovered.
“Lad,” he said, forcing calm into his voice to cover his rising anger. Wyvern looked so scared. “It’s ok, really. Not all memories are great. But don’t fuckin’ do that again, or you might mind-blind us both in the process.”
Wyvern nodded, hunching down on himself. Cid sighed, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, focusing on his anchor to ensure he was fully back in his own head. “Two hundred credits, see you in a few days. Get out.” Well fuck, that came out harsher than he intended. “And make sure to get some food and drink in you tonight. It’ll help. Be seeing you.” He hoped the smile he plastered on was reassuring, but the chime of credits entering his account and the sound of the door opening and closing was all he got in response.
***
He was honestly a bit surprised when Wyvern returned a few days later. The first session hadn’t been great, he figured the lad would have bailed. But no, for a change he actually looked a little better. Cid wasn’t sure if it was from the first session or from the lad hopefully eating something beforehand this time.
It started out good enough, at least. He managed to free up a good amount of the mess, staying on safer ground. He let Wyvern guide him in that, staying away for now from the areas that he could feel the current of his mind tugging him away from. They'd have to be tackled eventually, but it was clear the lad wasn't ready for that yet.
Not that the memories they did tackle were entirely harmless. Too many clumps led down to an iron tang of blood and spiky lightning jags of pain. It was strange though. Cid had been in the minds of many violent people, and there was a certain amount of bloodlust and pride that was usually associated with those memories. There was none of that here, instead he felt like he was pulled away from those bloodiest, almost like shame.
Always lurking out of the corner of his eye was that dog from before. Cid felt a weird sense of disappointment coming from it, disappointment at him? It was something especially harsh delivered with those blue eyes. Blue eyes like Wyvern’s. It wasn’t fair, Cid liked dogs. He didn't like being judged by them.
He couldn’t get that dog out of his head when he surfaced for a break part way through. It wasn’t exactly common for memories to act autonomously, after all. Everyone’s mind was different though, clearly this memory acted as a guard all on its own. Of what, though?
When he dove back in, the dog was waiting for him. Judging. It grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him in deep before he'd even had a chance to get his bearings. He tried to fight it, to turn back to his anchor to pull himself out, but the dog was strong. It pulled him directly to the tangled mess of the clog, diving straight down to the heart of it. To the core, hard memory that created the thing.
It was dark. He was in an alley deep in the understreets, neon lights high above the only real illumination. There were others around him, backing him up, but all eyes were turned to him, waiting on him. Him and the beaten man sprawled before him. There was blood on his fists, on his knife.. he'd done this. And his friends around him were waiting for him to finish the job. He didn't want to, he hated this, but this was the only thing he could do, the only path for him. So he bottled up his revulsion and screaming inside, where they couldn't see..... and he finished what he'd started.
It wasn't clean. The man struggled till the end, fighting and crying even as the air bubbled out of the cut at his throat. Blood was everywhere, the stink of it, painfully metallic even in this urban hellscape. Those eyes, pleading even when his fate was sealed, begging for relief.
Cid turned, disgusted, only to be greeted by the dog again, sitting patiently behind him, looking up at him in sympathy. He reached out to pet the hound, and the memory fizzled out around him, finally unraveling the clog that had affected Wyvern's mind, taking with it far, far too many memories that should have been dealt with slowly. This wasn’t going to go well.
Cid came back to his body breathing hard and feeling the ghost of sticky blood on his hands. Movement drew his eyes across to the figure on the other bed, pale faced and sweating like he’d run a marathon. Their eyes met and, for a moment, the ghost of those pleading eyes rose back in his memory and the revulsion, an echo of Wyvern's own revulsion at his action, surged up like bitter bile in his throat and he flinched back.
He saw it register and searched for words of reassurance, but they caught in his throat. There was a distant clink that he knew were credits being deposited and in a blur of movement, the lad was dashing for the door.
"Wait," Cid yelled.
Wyvern paused in the doorway, gulping like he was doing the best he could to keep his breakfast down. "You promised not to take backups."
"Of course," Cid stammered out. "I keep my word."
"Then we have nothing else to say, do we?"
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to marshal his own sense of self amongst the lingering twist of Wyvern's memories. When he opened his eyes, Wyvern was already gone.
Fuckin Greagor's triple tits, that was one hell of a way to end things. He didn’t keep track of memories, they weren’t his, but he always got a sense of the person he was working with, and Wyvern had seemed like such a good guy. Maybe he'd be worth getting to know more, he was certainly cute enough to fit Cid's interests. But after that fiasco, there was no way Wyvern'd be coming anywhere near him again.
He consoled himself for the next week in knowing that at least he'd helped the lad out with his issue. The last session hadn't been kind, there were definitely going to be side effects of a block that big breaking all at once. But that memory had been the core of the clog and with it gone, he knew the rest would fade out as they should have. Wyvern could heal, and that was the best he could hope for.
He tried to put the lad's past out of his mind too, though that proved far harder. Even more so when he found himself cornered by Hugo. Hugo, known for his stim-hacks, his muscles and bulk twice that of any unmodified man, and dumb as a bag of bricks to go with it. Hugo, who decided that Cid was to blame for not being able to fix his black market spinal port because it had been built by two blind men in a garage high off their ass on Neopop.
Reason wasn't going to get past the drugged sludge that was all that was left in Hugo's head but Cid was long past his best fighting days. A cut price neuro-hack had left his left arm with limited mobility and that was even beyond being years past his prime. This wasn't how he'd hoped things would end: so many more things he wanted to do, so much of Mid's life he wanted to see. His little girl was going to revolutionize things. He just wished he could have seen it.
Cid closed his eyes, queued up a pleasant memory in the neural interface and waited for the end.
It didn't come.
There was a scream that wasn't his and he snapped open his eyes. Hugo was hunched on the floor, hands pressed so hard to his eyes that Cid swore he could see blood oozing between his fingers. The back of his neck was exposed and there was a strange device affixed in the port, glowing a bloody red.
Behind him stood Wyvern and the lad looked like hell. He'd lost many more pounds that it didn't look like he could spare, his eyes were sunken dark and red rimmed. Cid thought he had fixed the issue but the lad looked haunted. Clearly recovery had not gone well.
"Wyvern?" Cid asked, barely able to believe his eyes.
The lad looked almost as equally surprised to be there, moments before he collapsed in a soundless pile to the ground.
Cid staggered to his feet, inching his way past the twitching and garbling Hugo to unplug the unconscious Wyvern from his neck. Hugo didn't resist, Cid wasn't even sure if he was seeing reality at this point. Whatever virus Wyvern had uploaded, it was a doozy, Hugo would be down for a while if not forever. Best to get them gone before any of the big oaf's friends showed up.
His body may not be fit for fighting anymore, but he was at least capable of carrying his half-starved savior back to his workshop, locking the doors tight behind him in case anyone had followed the pair home. He lay Wyvern down in the operating chair, checking him over for any obvious injuries. Nothing, save some serious malnourishment. He cursed under his breath as he dug into his emergency stash, pulling out a soylent iv. Crass and itched like the dickens, but it was fuel for those who couldn't use their mouth or no longer had one. It was the work of a moment to get it hooked up and running, and he sat back to watch over his new charge as he recovered.
It was a few more hours of Cid pretending to fiddle with some more defective gadgets before Wyvern started to stir. At first it was just a few twitches of his leg like a sleeping dog and then with a gasp, the man sat upright. Cid dropped what he was doing, skidding over to the chair in time to steady the man before he took a header to the ground. "Hey, you are safe."
Bright blue eyes squinted up at him, blinking a number of times as he sluggishly returned to consciousness, "Wha' I doing here?"
Cid judged it safe enough to let go of the man, stepping back and pretending he didn't see him sway as if following after his hands. "Felt it a bit rude to leave my savior in the middle of an alleyway for anyone to ransack for hardware."
Wyvern's mouth took on a bitter twist, "Not much more than I deserve."
Cid sighed, fingers missing something to fiddle with to take the edge off the conversation. "So you took a life, maybe you've taken a lot more. You saved one today. World like this, there's no room for black and white. You just need to decide what shade of grey you are before it eats you up again."
Wyvern didn’t respond to that, just looked down, losing himself in thought. "I personally like me some grey," Cid continued, wondering where the hell he was going with this but trusting his mouth to lead him true. "Means you're smart, and adaptable. Means you're not so far up your own ass or too far gone to be worth a damn." He bit the bullet, throwing out an idea that had been percolating in his mind as Wyvern had slept.
"You got somewhere to stay?"
Wyvern's mouth quirked up in the corners into a wry smile, "Fell out with some friends of mine recently. Turned out there was a shade of grey too dark for me." He leaned forward in what might have been a seductive pose if he hadn't wavered for a moment, steadying himself with a hand on his thigh, "What are you offering?"
Cid chuffed out a laugh, "I won't do you a disservice of pretending I'm not interested but this, at least, is not a transaction. ‘Sides, you are far too scrawny for me right now." Cid gestured towards the metal door, "I got a spare bed at the moment and a soft spot for strays. Plus, apparently, a need for a bodyguard. Room, board, and a legal job besides. What do you say, Wyvern?"
The lad’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes but it was more than Cid had been before. “Call me Clive.”