Hacker blinked as the temporary neural link faded with the end of the recorded memory. He shuddered as the dream’s images replayed in his head, recalling his own Cortex Reaver nightmares. That felt like waking from one of his own doozies, and he scrubbed at his face.
Clearly Rod’s suggestion of a neurally buffered therapy meet had worked out despite all the tinkering that had been done to make it work for Dan’s comfort and mental safety.
It had been Hacker’s idea at first - to come up with a modified version of the meet’s all-out neural link with Citadel Mind so Dan wasn’t suddenly faced with several minds’ worth of fairly personal information when he joined them at linked meets. Or suffered a greater intrusion into his privacy than his tolerances could take at first go.
So here he sat with Rod, Suzi, Penny, Cortie, and Dan in a quiet cargo hold full of assorted crates. They’d settled on doing this away from the Grove for a number of reasons; the cobbled-together router Citadel Mind’s techs had built for an experiment like this didn’t have much range, and needed hooked up to a decent cooling system.
A suitable system sat half-opened in a crate, a generator purring atop it while casting a warm white glow on the proceedings.
As he looked around himself, Hacker watched everyone except Cortie shudder and grimace through the dream’s aftermath. She wasn’t on the link for everyone’s fear of Dan’s memories triggering her own painful memories of Citadel, but instead stayed to provide quiet support in her tribble form in Hacker’s lap.
He glanced back to Dan, still shivering. Penny sniffled and leaned into Suzi, who wrapped an arm around her. Rod shivered, scrubbing at what remained of his living face with his massive palm and a long sigh like a weary gale.
“That’s….y-yeah…really glad she didn’t grab whatever body parts I had left and converted ‘em into a Reaver body. She uh, pretty much just…Photoshopped my face on some corpse body and broadcast that through the sttaion. As for that...that is some serious-grade psy-ops brainfuckery there, man. Jesus fucking Christ.”
He shuddered again, deciding tonight would be a Stam-up night. Tamora’s insistence that he stay off the stuff be damned.
He glanced down to the tiny ball of black-and-gray fuzz in his lap. That should’ve given Cortie a heads-up about what just went down in everyone’s heads. He hoped it was enough information without encouraging her to pop onto the server and see that mental trainwreck for herself.
As expected, her tiny cat’s eyes widened with horror. He mentally sighed with relief.
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janainaart
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