Sing'n in Binary: 38

Kicking open the door to her apartment with a back foot Jinx has half a mind to drop this malformed lump of scrap metal!

She takes a deep breath as the heightened emotion triggers alerts in her biomon and twitches up and down her body. 

Navigating the nest of power in data cables covering the floor, like synthetic vines emanating from the netrunning chair in the center of the space, they carefully maneuver the PC across the room. Gingerly setting it down to an office desk-cum-soldering station, its plastic surface spotted with burns and melted spots.

“Fuck! She got my fingers!” Solei shouts, waving her hands around as she tops up. After a moment she halfway goes to kick the computer but stops herself.

Jinx doesn't really pay attention to the show, sitting down in the rolling chair next to the desk until Solei stops flailing and looks over, holding out a palm to show some damage.

“You got alcohol wipes and some synthseal? I’m not catching whatever scop Scav’s have in ‘em..”

Jinx gives a long sigh, gesturing to the kitchenette on the other side of the room.

“Furthest drawer on the left, red box with the shiny plus.”

Solei nods and turns around, muttering ‘I know what a borg-aid kit looks like.’ as she does.

There's a few minutes of relative silence as she makes some temporary repairs on her hands, the halfway detached linoleum crackling as she walks over and sits down on the floor.

Jinx notes the flecks of dried blood and the faint smear on the floor near where she’s sitting.

She really hopes there’s still bleach under the sink.

After another moment she pulls out her pistol and reloads with another clip in the desk drawer, then turns on the safety and places it next to the soldering iron.

After another moment Solei gives a dissatisfied grunt, blowing on the quickly drying silicone, then opening and closing her hand to test the repairs.

“You’re paying for another kit.” 

Solei twitches and looks over, triggering alerts of unsafe anger levels, but after a moment she takes a breath and the numbers bracketing her head in Jinx’s vision return to baseline.

“Fucking… fine.” She says and Jinx receives a transaction request offering almost enough to buy another full box.

Jinx accepts it, choosing not to push.

Solei takes another breath and stands up, disgust variable flaring up as she looks down to the red and brown mess she made on the floor, before walking back over beside the computer again.

She- It said it was looking for a part, was this what she was talking about? Or was that another lie?

“You got a good look at her guts yet?” Solei asks, placing a hand on the computer.

Jinx scoffs at the phrasing.

“Not a full benchmark test, but the CPU’s fucked. At temps like that the motherboard’s going to need the CPU socket replaced at least.”

Probably more than that, she wouldn't feel comfortable running anything on this machine unless the entire motherboard was replaced, but even without knowing the part she can tell that thing is pricey.

“Alright. So!” Solei nods, then claps her hands. “Costs and time. What are we looking at?”

Jinx looks at her blankly for a few seconds.

“...Eddies.” Solei sighs. “How much money is it going to cost? How long is it going to take to repair? Do we need a specialist or…”

Neuralware triggers a minor seizure, making her vision flicker.

Looking down at the computer and her frie- the program within. Jinx tries to detach herself from the situation and look at it as if it were a hypothetical, happening to someone else. Someone who doesn't have a voice in her head that’s already planning on how to get her friend awake again and screaming at Jinx for coming to the conclusions she has.

“...Should we?”

There is a long silence.

“Explain.”

Jinx stares at the highlighted spot on her render where the other persons eyes are supposed to be before pointing at the computer like she’s throwing a punch.

“Sh- It lied to us. For months! Manipulated each of us to get close and gain our trust. Created a personality tha-”

“Oh shut the fuck up you sophist asshole.” Solei shouts back, stepping closer. “Maybe she lied because she knew this shit would happen! She killed herself helping someone and you’re arguing that she was-”

“That’s not human!” Jinx stands up as well, pointing at the computer again, then placing a hand on her gun. “AI dont think like humans do! If you think you can understand how an AI thinks you’re wrong. Systems like that are better than humans at everything, even understanding how we work!”

There's a beat of silence as Jinx takes a breath and Solei opens her mouth to say something, but glances down at the gun and closes it again.

“Think about this situation like it’s not happening to you.” Jinx says more calmly. “Don't you think it’s odd how easily she slipped into your life? How she said and did things that almost seem perfectly crafted to get closer, make you trust her?” 

Breathing heavily with emotion, Jinx dismisses the alert that Solei’s emotional state is too far off baseline to be able to read. Simply observing the aggression index is below risk levels and keeping a hand on her pistol.

“The blackwall exists for a reason, it's not just the krash AI that are dangerous” Jinx concludes.

After nearly a minute of silence, Solei glances down to the pistol for the fiftieth time and takes a step back.

“Goddam executive level reasoning there choom. You want to kill her because she’s too good of a friend.” She says softly, then spins on her heel and starts stomping to the door.

“I’m leaving, if I say here I’m going to do something that’s gonna get me shot. You’re full of shit and I think you know it.”

She opens the door and looks back over her shoulder just before she closes it.

“Because if you believed any of that you wouldn't have brought her here.”

With that the door slams closed and the subtle sounds of another human being leave with it, leaving a room that feels even more quiet than usual.

Picking up the gun, Jinx stares at it for a moment before opening the top drawer and placing it inside, before rolling her chair over to the computer's aluminum exterior. Placing her elbows on her knees, she puts both hands to her mouth and stares at the machine.

As she does, the mental walls allowing her to consider everything with a cool head start to crumble, flooding her with every emotion over the past few hours that has been delayed until this moment.

But as the guilt, betrayal, and deep sorrow washes over her there is always a lingering undercurrent of existential horror just beneath.

Because she’s seen what AI can do, how much they can fuck with someones head, not just their neuralware, but the wetware. Modifying people until there’s nothing left but a shell.

A few years back she’d worked as a contractor for an anonymous client that later turned out to be Netwatch, hunting for a cell of Voodoo Boys. It was a fucking annoying job, but after half a month they’d found them hiding out in the basement of some abandoned storefront, hidden from causal sweeps by extremely illegal RF blocking materials. 

But it wasn't to hide, at least not the main reason.

Because when they went there to clear them out, the hired muscle shooting past all the RF blocking tech and zeroing who they were paid to, they found something. 

In the center of the room, in a cell of bulletproof glass and surrounded by another faraday cage, there was what used to be a person.

The thing in that cage had turned an entire wall brown, trying to punch it’s way out mangling it’s hands to nothing more than meat.

The last act of the head Voodoo boy was not to save himself, or attack the people trying to kill him, but to trigger an explosive beneath the thing in his dying moments. Screaming garbled half religious scop about ‘false prophets’ and ‘judgement deferred.’

So Jinx sits there, staring at a hunk of aluminum that her mind screams is a friend who needs her help.

And wonders how much of that pit of bottomless guilt is actually Jasmine.

–_–

Sitting on the train back home, Solei tries to focus on drafting a text to her boss, apologizing for missing her shift, offering the explanation of a medical emergency. But finds herself too worried about the situation she just ran away from to focus.

Not to mention fucking furious at the bitch for saying that scop.

But Solei did mean what she said about her not believing any of it, she just hopes the miserable sack of betrayal will figure that out as well. Before she does something she’ll regret.

Solei will make sure she regrets it. For however long she manages to survive afterwards.

The train comes to a stop and she sees another five eddies get deducted from her account as she doesnt get off. Then finds herself leaning away as some lard covered fatso sits next to her, taking up the two adjacent seats as he does.

Angrily looking over the message one last time, she sends it off before her patience completely fails. Leading to a rewrite that would reflect how she really feels needing to justify herself after today.

It might not end with her getting fired, if only because doll chips are expensive and hard to extract, but Bossman knows how to make his displeasure known with nothing more complicated than reshuffling her appointments and giving sessions to a few of the… regulars.

As the train doors close, someone who smells like glitter and urine stands in front of her, making an eye twitch.

But before she does something everyone within a five foot radius will regret, Solei finds herself opening up her music folder..

Scanning through albums she comes upon an old favorite and mentally selects it, allowing the strange feeling of almost hearing double wash over her as the opening synths play on top of the real sounds of the train  around them. 

Almost immediately after the opening number starts the rising wave of anger settles, not going away, but not getting worse.

Music’s always been useful in times like this, but today it seems like she really needed it, the opening vocal track evoking a sigh as a small knot of tension eases in her chest.

Then, for the rest of the train ride back to her mega building and without even consciously realizing it. Solei hums along.

–_–

Delamain spends 0.0038% of available processing to consider the unique route history of two separate individuals.

Highlighted Variable one, a high speed risk factor to passenger safety, driving an Apollo 650-S, license plate No: NC73 RET37. The Variable is already logged in the AI’s driver risk table, the database’s entry updated to reflect the new data point, risk uncertainty having been adjusted significantly upward since the last sighting 2d:3hr ago.

Highlighted Variable two, the passenger for a not present customer the AI does not allow itself to form logical inferences about from observation.

At 4:17 PM: Variable two enters the unit and begins traveling the route. While in service there was a successful intrusion into the unit’s camera systems, the gap having since been closed in update package 1.3644-643-818-53-532.

At 4:53 PM: Variable one is spotted driving with a statistically abnormal aggression index, south.

At 5:02 PM: Variable two purchases Delamain services, the customer heads to an address that has since been redacted for client confidentiality.

The destination has an illegally parked Apollo 650-S, license plate No: NC73 RET37.

At 5:47 PM: another unit is called to the same location, the customer then spends 15min moving a large computer system into the trunk along with Variable one.

During the loading process Variable two continually makes comments to her ‘choom’ being overweight. Comments that had Variable one glancing at the unit’s screen whenever within eyeline, followed by an instruction to be quiet.

Delamain collates all data associated with the initial customer, but does not attempt to synthesise it into a larger picture.

One of the conditions to the AI’s agreement with Netwatch for their permission to operate within Night City is to inform them of any possible AI sightings with a probability of 0.6334μ or above. 

However, were it to do so, the breach of customer anonymity would be damaging to both brand image and customer trust.

Of course, this is conditional on whether the AI finds any evidence.

Delamain has already created an entirely unrelated hypothetical situation where a computer with dimensions similar to an unrelated event contained an AI, creating assumptions using the most recent unit breach as a random sample to assume AI power. 

Such hypothetical simulations resulted in probable revenue damage being greater in scenarios where the AI informs Netwatch.

Concurrently, a completely fabricated behavior profile had its algorithms populated with interactions containing no intended correlation to real events. There’s not enough data to form solid conclusions, but initial findings show an aggression index well below average.

Thus, hypotheticals concluded, Delamain retasks processing back to it’s function. But as it does a tiny snippet of the gathered data slips into an unused network buffer, containing innumerable similar fragments of junk data.

It’s from the incident report of the unit's code breach, just after the runner worked their way through Delamain’s defenses. Where, upon seeing they’ve done it, the tether of code that’s not even large enough to form an avatar does something that could only be described as a celebratory dance.

---

A/N: ooh! It looks like the person who's wrong has a good point!

Uh oh!

Ta-ta All!