Free The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) by Veronica Sicoe

issue.
    "I can't stand this, Jade. It's like being an
amputee. I can't even use the intercom right. And I don't want to stay here any
longer, either."
    "Why not?"
    I tilt my head toward him. "Like I've ever been
welcome."
    "Want me to welcome you more warmly?" He lays a
hand on my thigh, and I see the sarcasm blooming in his eyes. I try to smile.
And he smiles back. "I don't believe you're fine. Sounds like some nasty
shit you've been through."
    "Just help me get a new synet, Jade, and I'll be fine. I promise."
    "Let's say I can find one. Do you plan to swallow it,
or what?"
    "You'll implant me."
    He straightens and looks me in the eyes. "You're
crazy."
    "I don't have a choice. I don't want Preston or some
fucking metal monkey poking around in my head."
    "I'd have to break into the storage deck and search
through a gazillion secure units, then sneak you into the medical bay and use
the medroid to implant you. For which I'd have to hack into the medroid first,
then calibrate your synet correctly, and implant you too. And I'm no
doctor. We're going to get caught."
    I stand up and rub my itching palms. "Come on, Jade.
I need this."
    "What about me?"
    "You'll be fine. You're a roly-poly."
    He sighs. "Just to be on the same page here." He
stands up too, a head taller than me, one eyebrow crooked up. "You
actually want me to implant you with a stolen synet. Not just smack you over
the walnut until your senses comes back."
    "Smart guy." I wink. "Preston must have
some synets hidden somewhere. You find me one and we'll see from there."
    He ponders it for a couple of seconds, hangdog, then
blurts, "We can use the emergency equipment on the Transiter ! All
we need to do is disable the AI. Oh, Amelia's gonna neuter me if I mess that
up. It took her three weeks to get the AI back up and running. And it lost all
its memory."
    "That's great!" I mean the Transiter idea, but the AI's loss of memory is good news too. Preston doesn't need to
know how good my hacking skills really are, or he'd have me monitored
twenty-four-seven, even without a synet.
    "We still have to break into the engineering and
diagnostics bay," Jade says, thinking aloud. "And make sure no one
finds us. You know this is still a really bad idea, right? I'm no surgeon. What
if I screw up?"
    "I can't get any worse. I'm practically seeing
fairies dancing in the hallways. Next I'll be gnawing at my foot like a damn
floathead."
    He laughs. I've won him over.
    But my last argument still rings noisily in my ears. A
strip of all the lowlifes I've ever seen crosses my mind: all the narcos, VR
bingers, and Dreamers, and of course the floatheads. Just thinking of them
makes me shudder.
    Backwater addicts who can't afford the luxury of
high-class, low-risk drugs frequently end up shooting narcotics or running
black market VRs. They get trapped in glitchy realities while levy robots suck
their blood and spinal marrow for payment. The even more desperate ones turn
into Dreamers, allowing rogue AIs to rent their brains. They spend weeks in a
dream-like state, sometimes months, turning into babbling idiots with
plummeting IQs and disintegrating nervous systems.
    The floatheads are the worst though. They're my greatest
nightmare, ever since I ventured out into Maza's colony alone one day when I
was six.
    Consciousness-to-machine uploads—C2Ms—are normally used to
transfer the terminally ill into expensive databanks or holograms. But they've
also created an underground market, where criminals buy off the bodies of
addicts at ridiculous prices, promising them eternal life. Those who can still
afford it buy whatever's available as a body-substitute to download themselves
back into and live, if you can call it that, since the cheapest shells are
organ-supply clones—lab-grown bodies unfit to carry healthy human minds, let
alone distorted ones. The results are often grotesque zombies, insane and
crippled by disease. Colonial services routinely root them out, but some manage
to slip through