What Have We Done: A Cyberpunk Action Thriller on the edge of LitRPG (When Tomorrow Calls Book 3)

by JT Lawrence

  “Keke will be so damn happy to see you.”

  Zack’s face animates. “Keke?”

  “She tried to go to your trial.”

  “There was no trial.”

  “That’s what she was worried about.”

  “They hired some actors and a cardboard court. And just like that …”

  “Are you angry with her?” asks Kate.

  “Angry with Keke? No. Never.”

  “But—”

  “She’s not the reason I went to the crim colony. My job is the reason I was arrested in the first place. Because creeps don’t understand the big picture.”

  “What is that? What is your job?” asks Kate.

  “Do you know the allegory of Plato’s Cave?”

  Kate shakes her head. She’s heard of if before, but has no idea what it means, and she’s certainly not in the mood for riddles.

  “What about the Lotus Eaters?” asks Zack.

  “No,” says Kate. “So can you please just tell me what the hell is going on?”

  They pass a giant bonfire spewing acrid smoke. People are tossing pavement detritus into the flames. Broken furniture, boxes, anthrobot limbs. Some of the people are bare-chested and they’ve stained themselves with some kind of war paint: blood? Ash and spit? They’ve got wild eyes and shout randomly as they feed the fire.

  “Yes,” says Zack, taking her hand. They arrive at their destination and jump off the tram. “It’s almost time.”

  There’s no way the Lipworth Foundation’s security system will let an escaped convict in. Bernard senses Kate’s hesitation and says, “Leave it to me.”

  She has a word with the guardbot and there’s a call to someone else, and with a ping of green their entry is authorised. Bernard is clearly more influential than Kate imagined. The receptionist advises them that the power will be cut by 14:00. They hurry through the shiny, brightly lit white corridors, avoiding the elevator. “It’s 12:39,” says Kate, looking at her bare wrist: a habit she’s never been able to kick.

  They arrive at Silver’s private ward. Kate pushes open the door and sees her daughter in the oxygen tent, in the same position and state, and it’s as if she’d just left a moment ago.

  The DarkDoc stands up, relief splashing his face. “Kate.”

  He takes her by the shoulders and holds her an arm’s length away, inspecting her.

  “Jesus Christ. What happened? Are you okay?”

  Kate squeezes her elbow and winces. “I could do with some painkillers.”

  “I’m afraid we’re all out,” Morgan says.

  “You’re kidding,” says Kate. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “They’ve put all the narcotics on double lockdown. It’s to stop the looters from coming in here.”

  “How’s Keke?” Kate asks.

  Doctor Morgan replies in his vintage-engine purr: “She’s fine. I checked in on her half an hour ago. She’s a tough cookie. She wanted to be discharged … wanted to go looking for you. I told her to hang tight, that you’d be back.”

  “Surgery?”

  “No. The surgery bots have been powered down.”

  “What about human? Human surgeons?”

  “Not here. This isn’t a hospital. My bet is they’re all working their third or fourth shifts in a row in ERs all over the city.”

  More people who didn’t get the memo. Or maybe they want to spend their last day helping strangers. That kind of generosity of spirit doesn’t come naturally to Kate. Her first instinct has always been selfish: to protect her own before anyone else.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” says Morgan. “I was worried.”

  Zack walks up to the oxygen tent, unzips it, sticks his head in and scans the back of Silver’s head. He looks worried.

  “So you’re Zack,” says Morgan. “Silver’s been saying your name over and over. She seems to think that you’re the one who knows how to save her.”

  Kate thinks of the mob at SkyRest. “She’d better be right.”

  “It’s not going to be easy.” Zack’s face remains the shade of overcooked oatmeal.

  “What do we do? How do we wake her up?”

  Zack blinks, deep in thought. “It’s not so much about waking her up. She’s actually awake, even though she doesn’t look it.”

  “Then?”

  “You’re really not going to want to hear this.”

  “Tell me,” says Kate.

  “It’s going to be an extremely … difficult thing for you to do.”

  Jesus, this man with his non-answers. If he hadn’t just saved her life she’d want to throttle him. He is just not capable of a straight answer. Her face heats up: anger, desperation (Fraught French Rose). “I’ll do anything.”

  This seems to snap him out of his trance. “Silver’s mesh …”

  “I know,” Kate says. “It’s like some backstreet … I can’t believe—”

  “No,” Zack says. “Not backstreet. The opposite is actually true. It’s a highly sophisticated piece of—”

  DarkDoc jumps in, “I’ve never seen neural lace like that before. It looks to me like some biopunk put it together with what he could get drone-delivered to his basement. And the way it was implanted, well, it’s a quack-job at best.”

  “I agree that the surgery itself was badly done,” says Zack, “but—”

  “Doctor Morgan is the leading techdoctor on the continent,” says Kate. “If anyone knows about mesh, it’s him.”

  “Look,” says Zack. “The reason you don’t recognise the lace is because …”

  Zack has the doctor’s full attention.

  “It’s because this technology hasn’t been invented yet.”

  Chapter 75

  Slate Sorrow

  “Um…” says the DarkDoc, scratching his scalp, perhaps thinking Zack is delusional. “Hasn’t been invented yet?”

  “I know,” says Zack, “it’s not easy to understand.”

  “Help me.”

  Kate’s brain is also whirring. Not been invented yet?

  “Aliens?” she ventures, and it does a good job of breaking the tension. They all cough out a single laugh, apart from Bernard, who seems to be the victim of a permanent humour failure. Kate pictures Bernard suddenly as a chubby baby in a vintage highchair, with a cooing young mother pulling faces and playing peekaboo in an attempt to make her ever-serious baby laugh. In Kate’s imagination, baby Bernard ignores her mother and just stares ahead.

  “Not quite.” Zack finally has some colour in his face. He’s looking more vital, more like the Zack Kate met that day at the Gordhan when her twins were toddlers. It’s as if his sense of purpose, being here, helping her, is making him age backwards.

  “Then?” asks Doctor Morgan.

  Kate says, “Why you? Why would she ask for you of all people?”

  Words drift unsaid in the sanitised air like white balloons.

  “I promise you I’ll answer all your questions,” says Zack.

  As his eyes find Kate’s, she realises they still have a connection—a strange, electric, impossible connection—after all this time.

  “I’ll answer every single one of them, but right now we need to get you meshed as soon as possible if you want to save Silver before they cut the power to this part of the grid.”

  Kate blanches. “What?”

  “According to my calculations,” says Zack, “This power will be on for another…” He checks the clock on the wall. “Seventy-three minutes. That’s barely enough time to implant the lace, get you immersed, and for you to bring Silver out.”

  “It’s too risky,” says Doctor Morgan. “It’s way too risky. And even if it weren’t, we’d need more time than that.”

  “I need to get meshed?” asks Kate, still shocked at the turn of the conversation.

  “Honestly: the risk is substantial,” says Zack.

  “It’s more than substantial,” says Morgan. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”

  Zack stands his ground
. “It’s the only way.”

  “You can’t do it,” the DarkDoc turns to Kate. “You’ll end up … you’ll end up like Silver.”

  They all look at the bone-white body inside the oxygen tent.

  Kate drags her gaze back to Morgan. Don’t you see? Her eyes say, I can’t not do it.

  “It’s a simple procedure,” Zack says to the DarkDoc.

  “Don’t look at me!” says Morgan. “There’s no way I’m going to perform that surgery.”

  “You’ve performed tech surgeries that are way more grey market than this,” says Kate. It was, funnily enough, how they had met. Morgan had agreed to perform a surgery that was dangerous and illegal—one that had at the same time cost Marko’s eye and saved Silver’s life—and here they are again. “You’ve never let red tape stand in the way.”

  “It’s not about red tape.”

  It’s about you, his eyes say, but she turns away so she doesn’t have to see his plea.

  “Those were patients,” Morgan says. “Virtual strangers.”

  Kate paces as they talk. They’re running out of time. Her nervous energy is making her feel as though she’s walking on air. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters!”

  “This thing, right now, saving Silver,” says Kate. “That’s all that matters.”

  “I can’t be responsible for sending you into catatonia. Because that’s exactly what I’d be doing.”

  “You’ll be doing what I’m asking you to do. It’s my decision.”

  “Look at the clock,” says Zack. “We don’t have time to argue.”

  It’s twelve forty-nine. The ChinaCity/Sandton band will be shut down at fourteen hundred.

  “Please,” says Kate. They’ve been in this position before. It was Keke who had finally convinced him to go through with it. Keke is uniquely persuasive when it comes to people of the opposite sex. Or any sex, really. “Please, Morgan. Please. It’s our only chance.”

  He turns inwards, steps closer to her, and says in his low voice, “I don’t want to lose you.” When she can’t think of a reply, he continues, “But something tells me I already have.”

  They start moving to the operating room. Bernard pushes Silver’s bed along so they can all stay together. They get Kate settled in what looks like an operating chair. Zack pulls a hospital gown over her head and adds another layer of linen while Morgan washes his hands and collects the implements he needs. The tools clatter in the silver tray, and the cold metallic sound sends slush down Kate’s spine. Zack and Bernard throw on cotton gowns and scrub their hands, too.

  Why are they helping her?

  The DarkDoc has a cold, hard edge of desolation around him (Slate Sorrow). He’s holding his freshly sanitised hands up like surgeons do in old films. He automatically looks around for his team, expecting them to know what to do, but it’s only the escaped criminal and his warden.

  The DarkDoc shakes his head, closes his eyes and is quiet for a moment. He fills a syringe with an orange liquid, fits a needle, then takes Kate’s arm in his tender, gloved hands.

  “What’s that?” asks Zack.

  “Anaesthetic,” says Morgan, and brings the needle to the crook of Kate’s arm.

  “Stop,” says Zack. The doctor frowns at him.

  “You can’t use general anaesthetic for this. Kate has to be fully conscious in the immersion. We can’t afford any downtime.”

  “The local anaesthetic is on lockdown,” says the DarkDoc. “I can’t do this without anaesthetic.”

  “Yes, you can,” says Kate. Her knuckles are white.

  Chapter 76

  Galaxy of Bright Rolling Pain

  “Jesus, Kate. Do you even know what you’re saying?”

  “Get on with it,” says Zack. “We don’t have a second to lose. I’ll brief her. I’ll talk her through the difficult parts.”

  “The ‘difficult parts’?” says the DarkDoc. “We’re about to perform brain surgery without any kind of anaesthetic. We don’t even have painkillers, for Net’s sake.”

  They all look at Morgan, waiting. The flash of anger passes, and his face clears. “Fine,” he says. “We need a laser blade. The surgical ones are locked away.”

  Zack thinks of Lewis and pulls out the old cutthroat razor, bought with his first SkyRest Reward twelve years ago. A gift that was never given. “Will this do?”

  It’s patterned with dried blood. A landscape of dark brown blooms and grasses on a flashing silver background.

  “Is it sharp?” asks the DarkDoc.

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’ll do.”

  Zack quickly washes it at the sterile station while Bernard parts Kate’s hair and uses scissors to cut away the long strands. Zack brings the soap spray with him on the way back, spritzes the area of her scalp that needs shaving, then picks up the razor and puts a hand on Kate’s shoulder.

  “Hold still.”

  As Zack shaves the back of her head, Kate’s practically blinded by the burnt orange of deja vu. Of course, she knows why. She’s done this before, except last time she was cutting a chip out of her own scalp to save her life. The orange throbs in her temples; she’s never felt it as intensely as this before.

  “We’ll need to secure her,” the DarkDoc says. “If she moves during a sensitive time in the surgery it will be catastrophic.”

  Bernard finds large surgical bands and they tie Kate down. Every part of her body is fixed to the operating chair. In a strange way the restriction is comforting, but when she hears Morgan picking up a scalpel, the terror comes running at her. A ferocious dog of fear.

  “I need to score through your lambdoid suture to insert the mesh properly.”

  Kate tries to nod, but she can’t move. Zack comes into view.

  “Okay, talk to me,” says Kate, her teeth buzzing with nerves.

  Zack takes a seat in front of her and levers it right down so that they can look each other in the eyes.

  “This whole procedure will only take ten minutes,” says Zack.

  “Eight,” says Morgan.

  “Eight minutes, Kate. Okay? It’s gonna be hell, but then it’ll be over.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going to talk you through the whole thing. Focus on what I’m saying, not what you can feel happening.”

  “Okay.”

  “Eight minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  Zack nods at the DarkDoc, and he makes the first incision.

  Kate draws in a sharp breath through her teeth. The pain is acute, but it’s manageable.

  “First I’m going to brief you on what you need to do to bring Silver back. Then, when the pain gets unbearable, you must find a place in your mind, in your memory, where you can go, and leave this room behind. Think of a place you want to go. Get it ready in your mind. You’ll need to disassociate. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Kate knows which memory she’ll use. She can feel the scalpel make two more incisions, and the small flap of skin is folded back. She clenches her jaws. It’s a low blue flame of pain.

  “All right,” says Zack. “Once you’re meshed, you’ll be able to become totally immersed.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll just see it. It’ll be all around you. Like a projection, but deeper. More real.”

  “Like my synaesthesia?”

  “Like your synaesthesia on MDMA.”

  “Where will I find Silver?”

  “Let your subconscious do the work. You two are connected in a way that’s difficult to explain. You know where she is, you just need to find her, and you need to do it quickly, and get out.”

  “I’m worried I won’t be good at this. That I won’t be able to find her.”

  There’s a sharp stinging at the back of Kate’s head and she cries out.

  “Just remember that the immersion isn’t a foreign thing. It’s not someone else’s design. It’s all yours. It uses your thoughts to create itself. The lace is just the connector. You are the operating syst
em.”

  “Yes.” Kate remembers that from the VXR therapy she had for her PTSD. The experiences were so vivid because they came directly from her brain. It was like living and breathing in the actual downloaded memory.

  “So you go, follow your instinct, and find Silver as fast as you can. She’ll be close.”

  There’s another sharp pain, as if someone has stabbed her in her brain stem, and stars explode in her head. Zack keeps talking but she can’t hear him over the pain. All she manages is a low groan. Blue fireworks, silver stars, hissing agony—it’s as if there’s no space for her brain anymore, it’s all being crowded out by the galaxy of bright, rolling pain.

  “Can you hear me, Kate?” says Zack, but she can’t talk and she can’t move her head. She’s desperate to know what else Zack is saying, needs to know what he’s telling her, but all she can hear is the groan she can’t keep inside.

  Bernard hands Morgan the bonesaw beam.

  “It’s almost over,” says Zack. “This is going to be the worst part, now. And then it’s over.”

  Kate feels water on her face. Is she crying? Sweating? Clear liquid drips onto the expensive tiles below her. She can’t imagine how the pain can get any worse.

  “Get ready to leave the room,” coaches Zack. “Visit your memory now.”

  Morgan begins to score through her lambdoid suture. The laser makes a crackling sound as it cuts through the fissure in Kate’s skull. It’s so intense her body begins to shake. Saliva splashes out of her mouth.

  “Two minutes,” says the DarkDoc.

  Kate wants them to stop, would do anything to make them stop. She struggles and tries to tell them she can’t survive this pain.

  “Leave the room,” says Zack, but she can’t. The pain is so overbearing it holds her right there in its terrible vice: It’s like being frozen but burning hot at the same time. She wants to scream but her voice is no longer working.

  The buzzing continues, and it feels as if her brain is exploding in slow motion. Kate vomits. The bile splatters the floor with bitter green. Zack wipes her mouth for her, her nose, and cleans the floor. “Leave the room,” he says in a hard whisper, and Kate closes her eyes and swims away from the operating room. Swims through the ceiling and out of the building till she’s way above it and it’s not smoggy anymore: It’s 2022 and the sky is a brilliant clear cold blue.