Chromed- Upgrade

by Richard Parry

Company tech is stolen on Mason’s watch. Rival megacorps want it, and they don’t mind killing him to get it. Framed for the theft, Mason runs. He tangles with off-grid rockstar Sadie Freeman on the grimy seam between the powerful and poor. Together they uncover a secret an entire city died to keep.

  Hunted and desperate, they must team up to survive. Together Mason and Sadie can save the world. Apart, both are lost. They must trust each other or die.

  Megacorps. Cyborgs. AI. Gene-spliced monsters. Syndicate enforcers. Off-grid illegals. Supersoldiers. Rock music. Violence. Einstein-Rosen bridges. Liquor. Enhanced reflexes. Power armor and energy weapons. Full body replacements. Swearing. Mind control. Telekenetics. G-Men. Drugs. Neural links. Orbital cannons. THIS IS CYBERPUNK.

  Book 1: https://www.books2read.com/Upgrade

  Book 2: https://www.books2read.com/ChromedRogue

  City Stories 1: https://www.books2read.com/Consensus

  City Stories 2: https://www.books2read.com/Delilah

  City Stories 3: https://www.books2read.com/Meltdown

  Book 3: https://www.books2read.com/ChromedRestore

  Night’s Champion

  Could just one night change your life forever?

  Valentine Everard and Danielle Kendrick have the Night’s Favor: they are werewolves. There are many who would steal the Night’s dark gift from them. The Night’s Champions must face down the corporate interests of Big Pharma, battle with masters of dark Vodou, and make their last stand against both vampires and the Riders of the Apocalypse. Armies fall. Zombies roam the street, and no one is safe. The world is close to its final Judgment. What can a handful of souls do against the powers of the heavens?

  Book 1: https://www.books2read.com/NightsFavor

  Book 2: https://www.books2read.com/NightsFall

  Book 3: https://www.books2read.com/NightsEnd

  Glossary

  Abinal A planet ruled by telepaths. Masters use “demons” to control weather and people.

  Active camouflage Light-refractive tech where crypsis is achieved through cameras to sense the visible background. Peltier panels and other coatings dynamically change camouflage appearance, rendering the wearer nearly invisible to visible and thermal detection.

  Agent A syndicate field agent. Synonymous with enforcer.

  AI Artificial Intelligence. So-called expert systems and machine learning are a long way from true sentient AI. Some success in military applications, particularly friend-or-foe recognition, has given researchers hope for true machine intelligence. So far, success remains elusive.

  APC Armored Personnel Carrier. Designed to minimize risk to agents while transporting equipment and people into combat zones.

  Apsel Federate One of the three major syndicates. Apsel control the energy market through their high-quality, safe fusion reactors. A connected, always-on world needs clean, renewable energy.

  Bionics Life-like augments for the human form. Bionics can be arms, legs, hearts, lungs, eyes, and more. Human modification can be purely cosmetic (see: clinic) through to extreme (mil-spec augments to make humans faster, stronger, and much harder to kill).

  Chassis Slang: the part of the bionic frame total conversions associate with their missing body. While dependent on the agent and Psych profile, this is most often the torso component of the biomechanical structure.

  Chromed Slang: those equipped with obvious offensive bionics.

  Clinic Facilities for enhancing human attractiveness. Clinics can reduce or reverse obvious signs of aging, alter bone structure, and change hair and eye color. Clinic services are expensive, their clientele usually higher-paid syndicate workers. Many health-care plans include clinic services to ensure salaried employees can work longer hours.

  Coilgun Also known as a Gauss rifle, these weapons use electromagnets as a linear motor to accelerate projectiles. The resulting high velocity payloads deliver tremendous kinetic energy on their target. They are different from railguns; railguns require sliding contacts (“rails”) to pass current through their projectiles. These rails suffer wear.

  Company [wo]man An employee whose allegiance to their employer comes before personal beliefs, loyalty to fellow workers, or even family.

  Console A computer. See: deck.

  Construct A non-organic humanoid.

  Cybernetics see: bionics.

  Cyborg A human augmented with bionics.

  Deck Slang: a (usually portable) console.

  Decker Slang: a skilled hacker or handler.

  Dispenser Automated calorie dispenser, most commonly used for beverages and instant foods.

  Dropship In-atmosphere or sub-orbital mission deployment aircraft.

  Fixer Slang: a dealer and contact-broker.

  Handler Support operative for field agents, usually operating from safe company headquarters. Handlers are typically gender-preference compatible, leading to better bonding with their assigned agents.

  Hard link (see: link) Link connectivity established through direct rather than wireless connection. Hard links are more robust, higher bandwidth, and difficult to hack.

  HUD Heads Up Display.

  Illegal Slang: someone without a link.

  Keffiyeh (also: shemagh) Headdress fashioned from a square scarf.

  Klicks Slang: kilometers.

  Lamesh weed A narcotic plant found on Abinal. It grows in marshy areas.

  Language pack Tech to deploy languages to the brain. Memories as someone learns a language (or other skill) are tagged by a virus, then deployed to other brains by water-soluble code packs.

  Lattice Tech hardwired to an agent’s nervous system. Outfitted with prediction and response routines, lattices allow faster-than-though threat responses. Interfaced via link to optics and overlays, they can yield precision combat maneuvers for ranged or close encounters.

  Link Slang: uplink. A tech interface allowing communications and data download to the brain. Links are used to order food, communicate on networks, install new skills, and have a range of military applications as well. Links serve as the information substrate for other modifications. Syndicates seek to make non-linked humans illegal (ref: Syndicate Registration Act) as links have certain direct-marketing advantages.

  Master A powerful telepath who can subvert human will with their mind.

  Medivac An emergency healthcare service, often military. Medivacs are usually armed and armored aircraft designed to take a near-death human to an optimal care facility.

  Megacorp Slang: syndicate.

  Memory sliver A portable data storage device, often very small. Slivers may be implanted into humans acting as data couriers. Data crystal, memplant, and data sliver are synonymous terms.

  Metatech One of the three major syndicates. Metatech specialize in mil-spec weapons and bionics. They often deploy agents as mercenaries, operating as a PMC (private military contractor). Their specialty is warfare.

  Mil-spec Slang: defense standard equipment, often called military standard. Mil-std, mil-spec, and MilSpecs are synonymous terms.

  Monoblade A bladed weapon with at least the edge forged from monomolecular structures (see: nano filament).

  Nano filament Slang: monomolecular wire (often a weapon) made from nanotubes of cylindrical nanostructure. These have properties useful to electronics, optics, and other materials science technologies.

  Nanotech Slang: nanotechnology. Describes tech manipulating matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale. Often used for fabrication of macroscale products, especially (often weaponized) robotics.

  Off-grid Slang: referring to an area or person not in the linked world, not surveilled, lost, or missing.

  Optics Slang: ocular implant to replace visual organs (eyes).

  Overlay HUD displayed on optics.

  Overtime A mil-spec upgrade increasing reaction time. Overtime modules manipulate the body’s endocrine system while decreasing nervous system response time. They effectively “overclock” humans. Short-term side effects include light perception and other senso
ry stimulus issues; many agents complain of phantom flavors or sounds. Long-term side effects include endocrine overload, burnout, and brain death.

  Psych Slang: psychology assessment team, used to check field readiness of agents. Psych often use re-education to reduce the effects of PTSD or non-loyalist behaviors.

  Railgun A device that uses electromagnetic force to launch high-velocity projectiles. The payload is accelerated along conductive rails.

  Re-education (Often forced) Programming of humans to change allegiances, thought patterns, and behaviors. Re-education was perfected by the criminal justice system and has been adopted wholesale by syndicates as another tool in their arsenal.

  Real Slang: the real world, also called “the real.”

  Reed Interactive One of the three major syndicates. Reed control the entertainment market. Their products include digital holidays, virtual relationships, and an array of family-friendly network programming.

  Remote See: construct.

  Rogue An AI (non-sentient expert system, as true AI doesn’t exist) no longer under human control.

  Seeker A zombie-like slave to a Master. Typified by all-white eyes and an altered body temperature.

  Sexbot or sex robot. Human-like, anatomically correct (or exaggerated) constructs for sexual pleasure.

  SMG Submachine Gun.

  Syndicate Compact Signed in 2087 between over a hundred syndicates, the Compact was designed to forestall war on a planetary scale. It allows for recovery of stolen assets in clear breach of intellectual property law, reparations between corporations, and a no-compete clause for senior company [wo]men. Signed into law in most geopolitical regions, it’s cited as protection against all-out syndicate conflict.

  Syndicate Large (typically global) corporation.

  Syndicate Registration Act A proposed legislative change allowing forced introduction of links into all humans from birth, plus retrospective introduction into non-linked adults. It is widely supported by all major syndicates and geopolitical entities. The proposal includes recommendations for non-compliance, which include a range of responses from incarceration to termination.

  Syndicate Riot Act Active legislation in most geopolitical regions allowing syndicate assets to disperse citizens if suspected of intent to riot.

  Tenko-Senshin Slang: Tenko-Senshin Intelligence Systems. Imaburi Tenko started a specialist weapons company before falling off-grid. His weapons are known as works of art, available only at astonishing sums. They run AI (expert systems) with a variety of features, notably to protect their owners. At least twelve were made before Tenko disappeared. Mason Floyd is in the possession of the twelfth Tenko-Senshin weapon, a small pistol that fires flechettes carved from a metal block by a laser. It then accelerates these using an internal railgun assembly, firing projectiles so fast they superheat air. Its internal AI has advanced friend-or-foe capabilities. Tenko was nothing if not creative.

  Total conversion Slang: a human mostly converted to bionics, leaving no visible trace of the original meat body.

  Tranqs Slang: tranquilizers.

  Uplink See: link.

  Vibroblade Slang: weapon with a thin blade that vibrates at a high frequency.

  Wireframe Overlays and HUDs commonly use wireframe models over the real.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks go especially to Arran and Erin for their merciless demands for more in the Future Forfeit universe. I released the original Upgrade in October 2014, and it was only with the support of friends and fans like them it’s become the remaster you hold in your hands today.

  I’d like to thank Hugh Herr for helping me understand that humans can never be broken. And Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu for ideas on how to alter memories with lasers (and eventually, a drink that tastes like chocolate that can teach a teenage girl from another world how to speak English). Raffaello D’Andrea gets a nod for showing what machines can do if only we have the right math.

  And here at the finish: my Rae. You believe, even when I don’t. Will you stay with me until the end of time?

  — R. P.

  October 2018, Wellington

  EXCERPT: CHROMED: ROGUE

  Company People

  There was a time when coming to this part of Seattle wouldn’t get you shot. Lace hadn’t had a promotion in years. Her home stagnated along with her salary. Harry wasn’t sure how she made it home each day, but maybe there were still enough people who wouldn’t gun down a woman in a wheelchair.

  What used to be tree-lined boulevards slumped into scraggly wooden skeletons. Harry thought the dead trees looked like they could use some company but had been planted too far apart to huddle together for warmth. He didn’t want to stick around for long.

  He clanked across the street, the sound of horns coming loud and fast to his right. Harry swiveled his torso, raising a metal middle finger to the driver of a low-slung combi van. The van was coated in graffiti. Hard to tell whether it was intentional, or the owner made the mistake of leaving it outside one night. The driver looked on, wide-eyed, at Harry and the cart he hauled behind him.

  It might have been surprising seeing a company total conversion dragging shovels.

  Harry made the dubious safety of the sidewalk. Despite the shitsville state of the neighborhood, the link worked fine. Fine enough that Lace’s sighs and general tone of derision made it loud and clear. He cleared his throat. “What I don’t get is why the big man was so convinced Mason would be in contact.”

  “With you.” Lace spoke slowly and clearly, like she was trying to teach a chicken algebra. He knew she’d be eye-rolling. “That he’d be in contact with you.”

  “Yeah.” Harry held back a sigh of his own. Won’t help. “That.”

  “Gairovald’s right.”

  “You would take the boss’s side. Carter been in touch?” Harry’s overlay showed he was nearly at his destination. He remembered a small townhouse, fence bright and green back when he still had a real body that could feel the sun. Harry hadn’t been invited here in five years. Time to change that.

  “She said she’d lost Mason.” Lace sounded surprised, like someone managed to turn lead into gold. “Can you believe that?”

  “No, not for a minute.”

  “You don’t think she said that?”

  “I don’t think Carter’s lost Mason.” Harry’s chassis wound down, the massive four-meter high bulk of it slowing with engineered precision as he arrived. The townhouse was where it should be, but the fence sagged. Only flakes of faded green paint remained, clinging on like an old man’s memory. The front gate had gone, lost in the intervening time he hadn’t been welcome. A fine drizzle of rain overlaid the scene.

  “I…” Lace’s voice cracked like an eggshell.

  “It’s okay, Lace. I know they’re watching you.”

  The link hissed for a moment. “Yeah. They watch all the time. They’re assholes.”

  “We used to do that job.”

  “Be an asshole?”

  “If that’s what it takes. When someone goes off the rails, you need people who can pull the pieces back together.” Harry reached out a big mechanical hand, the hiss of hydraulics vying against the street noise. A piece of the rotted fence fell, flaking into the dead flower bed behind it. “That was us. We were that team.”

  They used to be such beautiful flowers. Harry remembered seeing a bee, a real live bee here at the edge of the city. He’d been sipping a mojito, the sun making him sweat almost as much as the frosted glass. He looked at his metal hand, remembering his flesh and blood limb. The overlay dropped a wireframe on his new limb, telling him it was in perfect working order.

  Perfect working order. He hadn’t had a mojito or broken a sweat in five years. Harry felt he’d worked, but maybe not lived.

  “Pieces?” Lace’s voice was almost a whisper. “That’s what we did? Picked up the pieces?”

  “Yeah. One second.” Harry cut the link audio, tearing the fence down. He caught the action of a guy up the block. Harry waited as the
man jogged closer.

  He was average height. Above average concern, his brows furrowing into a thin line. He looked the type to start some shit, if Harry was a normal like him. He stared into Harry’s optics, struggling for the right thing to say. He settled on, “Uh.”

  “Hi.” Harry’s PA amplified his voice too much in the real. He turned it down. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Uh.”

  “Help you?” Harry relaxed as much as the chassis would let him, crouching low, trying to look smaller. This guy had cojones the size of melons to come up to him, and Harry liked that in a neighbor. Especially Lace’s neighbor.

  “We don’t…” The guy’s off-the-rack shirt stuck to him, the rain’s drizzle adding mugginess to the day’s sins. The shirt looked hand-me-down, maybe used by someone else before it got to its current owner. “We don’t get a lot of your kind here.”

  “Sure.” Harry paused, swiveling his torso to take in a forming crowd. “What’s your point?”

  “Uh. See, she’s not home, and I kind of try to keep an eye out.” His eyes darted to the Apsel falcon on Harry’s chassis. “I’m sorry about this, but I have to ask. Why are you here?”

  “It’s okay.” Harry wondered what Mason would say. “I’m just here to … make it right.”

  “Make it right?” The man laughed, but there wasn’t any trace of humor in the sound. “How can you do that? There’s not much left.”

  “I know.” Harry held up his metal arm. “These are strong. Stronger than anything I used to have. I can put them to work.” He extended his hand. “I’m Harry Fuentes. We used to … I work for the Federate.”

  The man reached out, tentative, trying to work out how to shake Harry’s massive hand. He settled for wrapping his palm around a couple of Harry’s fingers. “Julio. Man, I’m pleased to meet you. She’ll be pleased to see you. No one from the Federate comes down here anymore.”

  “Julio, you’re one brave motherfucker. Brave, or dumb as a box of rocks.”