Another kick came against the side of the warehouse, creating a second dent next to the first. Outside, someone began yelling angrily at the others. A few seconds later, there was the sound of wheels screeching and doors slamming.

  A message from Stick-Point arrived a moment later, letting him know that several edgers had just arrived at his location.

  The indistinct sound of voices yelling reached his ears, as the corpos had their hands forced. With additional edgers here, they wouldn’t be able to simply force their way in and do whatever they wanted.

  Trace waited a moment before he swung the lever that would move the bars and unlock the door. Carefully, opening the door, he stepped outside and closed it behind him before anyone could react. The locks settling into place automatically with an audible thunk.

  He angled his body away from everyone, his CD-10 in his left hand. He was still wearing his short-sleeved shirt and wanted to keep their view of his arm minimized for as long as possible.

  The argument had stopped when he stepped outside of the warehouse. He raised a questioning brow at everyone.

  “You heard my demands before, so let’s see an example of this item I supposedly have in my possession that is stolen. Like I said before, you aren’t getting inside my place. I’m not letting you simply tear through my belongings and just grab or plant whatever you want.”

  “We do not have something physical to compare it against,” The lead corpo agent ground out while thrusting his hand behind him. “We do, however, have a dozen high-resolution images to compare the item in question against.”

  One of his companions handed him an ink-sheet.

  A car he didn’t recognize squealed to a stop and Ko, followed quickly by Monroe and a couple of others Trace didn’t know, tumbled out.

  “What in the BLAZES IS GOING ON HERE?” The man roared. “Why do people keep showing up?”

  Georgie blinked at the agent in disbelief, not understanding why he didn’t understand what was going on. “Um, you are attempting to invade an edger’s residence. It only stands to reason that he would call for backup.”

  Ko and Monroe rushed over to Trace’s side, while Georgie and the agent kept arguing. Now that the sides had evened out some more, he could truly start to breathe easier.

  “Why did you come outside?” Ko hissed at him.

  He gave her a minute shake of his head, stopping her from saying anything more. That wasn’t the time to say anything, not while they had an audience. It was highly likely that some of the corpo agents had auditory augments and would be able to hear anything that she said.

  The lead agent growled in frustration and turned away from Georgie, who was being propped up by another agent to compensate for his shorter leg.

  “Anyway, ignoring everything going on. We have reason to believe that you are in possession of stolen goods from our corporation.”

  Trace waved his pistol in the air. “So, you have said multiple times already, I know. What you haven’t said is why you think this, or how you came to this inane conclusion in the first place.”

  Ko’s cyberware hand subconsciously tightened on the hem of his shirt as she gripped it behind her back.

  The man turned on the screen of the ink-sheet he had been given and grinned. “The item that was stolen is a cyberware arm. The one you have installed, in fact.”

  Trace snorted and began to laugh. “You caused all this for something I wouldn’t have even stolen, but the mender who did the job? You truly are a special kind of corpo, aren’t you?” He chuckled, seeming to relax some. “Let’s see these images you promised. I want to see if they even match my arm. If they do, then I probably didn’t pay my mender nearly enough for the job they did.”

  The other edgers all broke into laughter at that, understanding what he was trying to say. Anyone who could get their hands on corporation cyberware good enough that they would send a squad to retrieve it was to be revered.

  The agent fumed and finished pulling up the images of the arm in question and began showing them to the gathered crowd of edgers.

  Trace leaned forward and looked at the images, without reacting outwardly. “Those are some nice pictures, I admit, but you haven’t yet said why you think I have your arm installed. I’d like to know that before I show you what my cyberware arm actually looks like.”

  The edgers had gone back to watching the agents, waiting for their reply. No one liked to be surveilled without their permission. They all knew it happened. It was a fact of life, but to be confronted with it like this was another thing entirely.

  “A drone was sweeping the area during a routine operation and happened to catch a glimpse of your arm.” The man ground out.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “A glimpse?” Trace asked doubtfully. “You came all this way for a glimpse of a black cyberware arm?”

  Everyone present could hear the sound of grinding teeth as he sharply nodded once.

  “Right,” Trace shrugged and turned his body to fully face everyone, presenting them with the slim, natural-looking matte-black cyberware arm. “As you can see, while my arm is black and looks somewhat similar to their images, they are not even remotely the same.”

  The group of corpo agents all narrowed their eyes. That was not what they had been expecting in the slightest.

  A few minutes later, everyone but Georgie and Ko had left. Monroe had been subtly eying his arm in masked confusion. He had needed to leave with his ride, who had turned out to be his mechanic friend.

  Georgie approached Trace with his odd swinging walk. His face was stormy, and cheeks mottled with broken capillary veins. “Is this something I can expect to happen again?”

  Trace rubbed the back of his neck and shrugged. “I didn’t expect it to happen this time.” That was a small lie. “Who can say what will happen in the future?”

  The warehouse owner stared up at the sky and muttered angrily to himself. “Okay, here is what we are going to do. I can’t evict you. The contract you signed prevents me from doing that. However, I do not want to mess with corporations or their nasty agents. We are going to put another contract together, and you are going to buy the warehouse from me. Your monthly rate will stay the same, but I expect you to pay lump sums toward the total value whenever possible. Are we clear?”

  Trace nodded. He was more than fine with that arrangement. “How much are you asking for the warehouse?”

  “Well, it is two floors, and some work has been done to it recently, so the roof and walls are all in good condition. The doors are both reinforced.” The little worm listed out everything Trace had personally paid Monroe to fix. “With these recent improvements and ignoring the condition of the basement level, I think the value of the warehouse has risen to at least six hundred and seventy thousand credits.”

  It was all he could do to hold himself back from laughing in the man’s face. “How about two hundred, and I don’t shoot you and stuff your body down a hole?” He growled back.

  Georgie paled and took a hurried step back, which resulted in him falling over. “Fi-five hundred and twenty thousand then. It’s what it was evaluated at before you began renting the place.”

  “That’s a bit more reasonable,” Trace agreed. He wanted to grumble about the price more, but understood that he had already pushed Georgie as far as he was likely to go.

  ***

  Inside the warehouse, Trace was sprawled out on his bed, while Ko was sitting on his computer chair. It had taken them a while to work through the new contract with Georgie, but the man was finally gone. All the keys to the place and other information about the warehouse now belonged to Trace. Not that the keys did him any good. He had swapped those out a while ago.

  “Okay, I’ve been plenty patient. I’ve even messaged Sevorah and Stick-Point for you, letting them know everything worked out. Now tell me, how did you manage to change the way your arm looks to such a degree? I know it’s not an illusion.”

  Trace sat up with a groan, massaging his still sore neck. He opened his G.H.O.S.T. System menu and began fiddling with the various options in the ‘Secret Menu’. “You know I performed a proper nanite ‘Upgrade’ on the arm before leaving on the trip?” She nodded, as he had briefly mentioned it in one of his messages to her. “That improved my control of the arm and did some things to its internals. Nothing really visible on the outside though. This morning, I used ‘Overload’ on it, and that was what made the major physical changes to how it looked.

  “The process still takes information from the database we are asked to create for the upgrade process. My guess is that it is similar to the ‘Upgrade’ in that without the extra information, the end result would still be good, but not…” He waved at his arm. “This! I mean, look at it. The metal is harder, the synth-muscles inside are stronger, and the entire thing is more durable and precise than before. And I’m nearly positive it’s several pounds lighter as well.”

  What they were looking at was a miracle of engineering. Which was exactly what the function had always promised to be.

  Ko gently tapped her fingernails against her teeth, before suddenly stopping as a thought came to her. “Can you upgrade your arm again?”

  “What? No. You can only upgrade each item one time, you know that.”

  She nodded and leaned forward. “Yeah, except you then went and modified the arm from the ground up using ‘Overload’. It’s practically a new arm at this point.”

  He had kept the menu open while talking to her and decided to humor her. “I’m not entirely sure that is true. Even if it was, what would be the point of doing the upgrade beforehand then? Now that we’ve seen what ‘Overload’ does, can we even say that using the feature raised the quality of my arm?”

  Deckard, who had been pretending to not listen, finally gave up on the act. “It did. ‘Overload’ builds on what is already there. The better the initial product, the better the end result. Using ‘Upgrade’ before was definitely the right move. If you can indeed use it again, now, then it can only become better.”

  With the matter settled, Trace pulled up the ‘Upgrade’ menu and then highlighted his arm. Unlike what he expected, it did not show up in red and instead appeared as a viable target to be upgraded once more. It would seem that by doing things in this fashion, they could get an extra ‘Upgrade’ out of the system.

  However, it didn’t seem as though he would be using this one anytime soon.

  ‘Information on related augments has been found in the database. Cost to upgrade this special-grade cyberware arm has been increased as available modifications have been found and integrated into the design.’

  Trace took in the increased cost and gagged on his spit. The materials that he had been hoping would be enough to do two upgrades were now only enough for one, with a little left over. It was also going to cost him nine units of nanites.

  The cost to perform the next upgrade was significant, and also not even possible for him at the moment. It wanted triple the amount of materials from before, and fifteen units of regular nanites. A number well outside of the ten he was capable of currently holding.

  He would need to increase his maximum amount before even thinking about going down that path.

  Ko sat back with a satisfied smile on her face, happy that she had been right. While off to the side, Deckard’s avatar was slowly spinning in his chair, thinking of the possibility. This wasn’t something he or his mother had imagined happening when they had designed the system originally.

  This was exactly why closed-beta tests were needed, because things like this were always being discovered. If this happened while the system was out in the wild, who knew what loopholes people might find and the damage they would cause?

  https://www.amazon.com/author/joshuakern

  

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