The Neuralink was finally online. I could feel the augment’s influence coursing through my mind like the jolt of a strong caffeine high. Thoughts by the dozen were happening at the same time, like whispers bouncing around different places inside my skull.

So far this was a good sync. A bad sync with a new NL could cause a surge of cascading data and my head to explode.

Having an apartment full of my brains and my headless corpse would not be a positive experience for my roommate when he comes home. So my ability to keep things together inside my skull was going go also keep me from being an even messier roommate.

I turned back to the glowing screen of my Teledec to get a rundown of the connection I had made into the Omnarch Corporation’s network. So far I had already bypassed the first three layers of the system. Telebreakers never went past the third layer as usually the more fun stuff like hacking ATMs and pirating the latest videosim.

The fourth layer and beyond was where Omnarch kept their serious research and development documents. It had to be place where they were keeping their advanced mind hacking software, the Vnym AI.

My Neuralink was holding strong so far, which is pretty good for a black market brain augmentation. They were often built from parts salvaged from the Repurposing Center, where old silicon goes after it breaks.

A typical off-market NL would most likely have been cobbled together from parts pulled from dead guys who didn’t need them any more. The docs would pull the chips, toss them in the repurposing bin, and someone on the inside would lift them for a new user.

But I spent a premium on my NL, this wasn’t from some stiff’s brain. It hadn’t had any thought prints or conscious syncing applied to it, which meant I could hack systems better than ever before.

I could see the network all around me as it was overlaid into my reality. With just a thought I could jump from one data sector to another. It was near instantaneous.

The data flowed through my mind as I absorbed anything I could find relating to Vnym. I couldn’t process it all fast enough, so

I sent chunks of compressed data to be reviewed when I take a nap later.

Suddenly, an abrupt and searing pain began to grow in the front of my head. It was a headache unlike anything I had ever felt before, even during the most epic of hangovers. The pain was soon accompanied by the sound of shrill garbled noise, which also seemed to radiate from inside my skull.

The pain grew more and more intense, until the world around me went black.

I woke up in a small room. It looked like a maintenance room, with stained off-white tile lining the floor underneath rows of shelves. The hanging lights above flickered as they swayed just slightly. In the center of the room was an empty circular table.

Confused, I began to look for a door to leave. I’m not sure what happened earlier with my NL but i needed to get out of there and have a word with the guy who installed it.

But there was no door.

I began to panic. How did I get in here and how was I supposed to leave?

The twinkling sound of a music box began to play from behind me. I turned to see that the once empty table was no longer empty. There was a small wooden music box with a tiny figurine inside. It looked like a little fat clown.

I closed the music box. The image of that creepy clown was not making this situation any easier to deal with. At least this way there’s also be no creepy music.

But the music box kept playing. As the song kept playing the walls around me began to crack, showing what looked like thousands of otherworldly eyes peering at me from the darkness beyond.

They were all focused on me.

I then made a mistake and looked into the darker corners of the room. Shadowy hands reached outwards to me, searching the air to lay claim to me. With them came a desperate chorus of moans, they were hungry.

The room violently shook, causing me to drop the music box. It fell to the floor and broke apart into a dozen or so pieces.

But the twinkling music kept playing. And this time, a mad cackling had joined it and it sounded quite familiar.

It was my voice.