David hung up the phone and sat leaning against the wall for a few more seconds.
Right now, he missed that small apartment more than ever, but he couldn’t go back yet.
The top priority was to figure out what on earth was wrong with his body.
He had to find a professional to check it.
A ripperdoc…
A figure instantly flashed in David’s mind: Doc.
In Night City, most people went to a ripperdoc they knew well for cyberware and chrome modifications.
He helped Doc flip illegal braindances on the side for extra cash, and even when the school required a neural wreath upgrade, he had handed it to him to tweak.
If something really was wrong with his body, or if whatever was controlling him had invaded through his cyberware, Doc was the person most likely to find the issue…
David stood up and walked over to the motorcycle with the 6th Street paint job.
He looked at the bullet holes on the bike’s frame, hesitating for a second.
This ride was way too conspicuous.
But without knowing whether the NCPD was currently hunting him, riding a motorcycle that gave him freedom of movement seemed safer than catching a cab or taking the metro in Watson Northside.
“A bike it is, then…”
David took a deep breath, straddled the bullet-riddled 6th Street motorcycle, twisted the throttle, and sped off.
Santo Domingo.
Arroyo, Mission Waterfront.
Neat rows of public benches lined the coastal guardrails, the sea reflecting the neon lights of the street shops.
David parked the motorcycle outside a building by the walkway.
Doc’s clinic was tucked away inside this building.
He looked up to confirm there was nothing unusual in the surroundings.
He then raised his hand and knocked on the metal door before him.
Clang, clang, clang…
Hearing the knock, the doctor—who was in the middle of replacing a prosthetic hand—stopped what he was doing.
He looked up, a pair of optics mounted on his face with lenses like a spider’s compound eyes, reflecting the dim glow from the screen on the wall.
The screen was playing local news:
“Early this morning, a violent shooting occurred in Santo Domingo, leaving six 6th Street members dead on the scene.”
“Police preliminary assessments suggest an internal gang feud, with the killer suspected to be a hitman or mercenary who fled the scene on a 6th Street-painted motorcycle.
The investigation is ongoing…”
The doctor switched off the news, and the clinic instantly fell silent.
He pulled up the security feed from the entrance.
On screen, David was looking around cautiously, as if preparing for a shady deal.
Parked right beside him was a motorcycle.
“Hmm…?”
The doctor zoomed in on the camera feed.
The details of the motorcycle became clearer—the 6th Street paint job, the stars and stripes on the fuel tank, and several fresh bullet holes on the body.
The metal around the bullet holes flared slightly outward, clearly left by point-blank shots.
“…”
The doctor didn’t open the door right away, but stared at David on the monitor for a moment.
David stood at the door with his hands in his pockets, twitching his leg nervously, his gaze shifting around, glancing back every couple of seconds.
Looking at him…
Either he had stirred up trouble, or trouble was looking for him.
The doctor pressed the button to unlock the door.
The iron door slid open with a creak, dim yellow light leaking out from the gap.
“Get in.”
David took one last glance behind him, crossed the threshold, and shut the door behind him.
The doctor sat behind his workbench, tightening the prosthetic hand he had just replaced.
He looked like a dried corpse drained of all moisture, with messy hair and unhealthy grey-white skin.
“Trouble find you?”
“No…”
David shook his head, rubbing his nape as he said, “Doc, check my cyberware.”
“Which piece?”
“All of it.”
David paused, then added, “Especially the neural port.”
The doctor pointed his spider-like optics at David’s face, the lenses rotating slightly as if scanning something.
“Notice anything strange lately?”
“Sometimes I lose control of my body, and I’ve been hearing a voice in my ear,” David said with a touch of agitation.
“He controls me to do all kinds of reckless shit, like…
jack a bike.”
“Loss of control?
Hallucinations?”
The doctor’s five slender metal fingers wiggled like squid tentacles: “Interesting.
You’ve got an Arasaka system on you.
Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t be that easy to hack.”
He was half a head shorter than David.
But those whirring optics made David feel like a test subject on a dissection table.
“Lie down.”
The doctor pointed to the old medical operating table in the center of the room: “I’ll do a full scan on you.”
David walked over and lay down.
The cold metal surface chilled him to the bone, making him shiver involuntarily.
The doctor’s emaciated fingers fumbled at the back of his neck for a moment, before plugging a cold cable into the neural socket alongside his spine.
Bzzzt—
David saw the nearby monitors instantly fill with dense lines of data: cyberware status, neural reaction time, blood oxygen levels…
all sorts of parameters he couldn’t understand cascaded down like a waterfall.
Looking at these unfamiliar metrics, he was thinking about something else entirely.
“Doc.”
David suddenly asked, “Is there any kind of cyberware…
that can rewind time?”
The doctor’s fingers froze over the keyboard.
He glanced at David like an insect observing its prey.
“Rewind time?”
“Yeah.”
David swallowed nervously: “Like…
making everything around you reverse, going back a few minutes or even a few seconds, and then starting over.”
“Of course not.”
The doctor let out a raspy sneer.
He turned back to stare at the screen: “You’re an Arasaka Academy student, shouldn’t you know better than to ask me a stupid question like that?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is an iron rule of the universe.
Time only moves forward—it doesn’t rewind.”
“But…”
“You been watching BDs lately?” the doctor interrupted him.
David froze.
Before being controlled, he indeed had watched illegal braindances—all kinds of them.
“I did.”
David answered truthfully: “The BDs you sold were pretty good quality.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
The doctor kept working, his tone utterly unphased: “A bunch of dumbasses who fried their brains on dirty BDs have asked me the exact same question.”
“Braindances are realistic enough, and they’ve got fast-forward and rewind functions.”
“More than a few antique dumbasses can’t tell reality from hallucination.
After watching them, they start blabbering nonsense—saying time rewound, saying they saw the future, saying they met aliens.”
He looked at David: “Which kind do you think you are?”
David fell silent.
Right now, he could clearly feel his own body.
Could that period of time when he was being controlled really have been nothing more than a hallucination?
David stared up at the ceiling, his mind a tangled mess.
“Stop overthinking it.”
The doctor seemed to read his thoughts: “That’s just BD sequelae for you.
Stay away from those dirty chips for the next few days.
Get more sleep, and stop letting your brain run wild.”
David remembered that voice in his head.
Was that lunatic really non-existent?