508 Getting Acclimated

I didn't make Syn stay for long or stay awake the entire time, since I knew she had an early shift at the hospital the next day. I cut her shift off after five hours at one in the morning, just so she could go home and sleep for six hours. That gave her enough time to get ready and head to the hospital for her Eight A.M. shift. The twelve hour long shifts she worked were both brutal and lucrative, which was why losing one could have caused her so much trouble.

After tucking me under a blanket and calling for a taxi, she used my clicker to pay for it before she handed it to me. Syn looked slightly sad as she walked over to my apartment door. She glanced back at me and the sad look changed to a smile, because she saw that my eyes had been glued to her backside. She bid me a goodnight after that and closed the door behind her.

I thought about storing my current outer wrappings and wondered if Syn might have linked into the apartment's security cameras. They weren't hackable, thanks to the ICE programming they had, or Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics. However, as a medical professional, she did have full operator access to my apartment and could tap into the feeds if she felt like it.

Instead of spoofing the cameras or anything, I decided not to get up or adjusted my wrappings or casts. It wasn't like I needed to be physically mobile to do anything, especially in this world. I felt out with my technomancy and it touched the viewscreen. I turned it on while pretending to choose the options using the clicker.

Once I had it on, I turned it down slightly and laid back and pretended to stare at it for a while before I closed my eyes. With the screen showing fairly loud ads and then delving into a show about Night City's nightlife by a popular doll, I reached out mentally for the apartment's cyberdeck, or home computer.

It was usually what I could attach a cord to and use my neck port to shunt my digital avatar into virtual reality. That would let me access the digital landscape that represented the city-wide net. Well, the legally accessible parts of it, anyway. The public archives, history records, retailers selling everything, and any corporation sponsored sites that they used as the public face of their company.

Their private servers, nominally referred to as data fortresses, were usually hidden behind very expensive and highly ranked ICE programs. They were usually developed in-house, so none of their competition could buy out the security company and gain access to those proprietary protection programs.

They even had teams of their own netrunners to both test the defenses of other companies and to track down any attempts to breach their own security. Some companies offer rewards if you can either find a loophole or managed to brute force a break-in. In some cases, that was both digitally and physically, so the corpo netrunners had to be at the top of their game all the time. That is, if they were a good one.

I wasn't going to poke around anything dangerous, especially not while running a connection through my personal systems. Only an idiot would do that. So, I browsed all the 'free' stuff I could see and started copying blank isolinear computer chips and loaded them up with the data. Since it was a format only I could use, I would only have to bring out a portable computer terminal from Star Trek to browse them.

The amount of technological data that was out there for free, was a bit surprising to find. I mean, there wasn't any patented materials or anything, since those were usually secured inside the data fortresses of the many corporations out there that owned the patents and designs. But general technology? Like schematics for car parts and construction, using hover technology safety features that made the vehicles almost seem like they are floating when you drive them, it was all there for me to take.

Even the programming was out there for a normal person to both learn and copy from, which made the knowledge I gained both a necessity and quite dangerous. Who knew that you could make a racing bike almost like the virtual reality ones that programs used in the movie Tron? They actually worked in real life, thanks to the safety features you legally had to install on the motorcycle to not kill yourself as soon as you hit the accelerator.

Some shops and corpos made good money modding bikes, cars, and vans with armor plating and protective ICE programs to stop them from being stolen by every gonk on the street that could run a basic hacking program, which was almost everyone in Night City, because they all had cyberware to function in life.

Thankfully, my ripperdoc Victor Vektor had left the jack-in port on my neck, even if it wasn't attached to anything. It would let me fake attaching to systems, like the cyberdecks at school, and I could use my technopathy to form the necessary connection. I'd just have to be careful about having the proper digital signals and verifications to spoof the teachers and my fellow students.

I was pulled out of my thoughts and my digital pilfering when my apartment door opened and Gloria Martinez walked in carrying an EMT backpack. “Morning, choombatta! Tank gave you the deets?”

“Last night when I signed up as your day nurse for the week.” Gloria said and the door shut behind her. She paused near the couch and looked back over at the wall of windows that had caught her attention the last time she was here. The view was still spectacular and I let her enjoy it for a few minutes.

“They're polarized and you have to send the retract command for anyone to see in.” I told her and she looked relieved as she smiled and took off her backpack. I then had to gasp loudly when Gloria pulled off her heavy EMT jacket and revealed a bright blue sleeveless top that really showed off her assets.

Gloria's smile became a knowing smirk at my reaction and she hung her coat onto the back of a chair at the kitchen table. She glanced around and saw the vending machine with extra choices and she looked surprised that there was no visible sign that you could add physical eddies to buy anything.

“I'll have a number two synthetic scrambled egg special with the soy-potato side, and orange flavor synth-coffee, please.” I said and she looked startled and turned her head to stare at me. “The vendi's hooked to my accounts, so don't worry about having to transfer eddies for it. It's covered.”

Gloria shivered slightly and looked back at the machine. Her hand reached out and paused as she tried to remember what I asked for, which almost made me laugh out loud.

“Number two, soy-potato, orange flavor synth-coffee.” I repeated and she nodded and hit the right buttons. “You can grab whatever you want, too.”

The thunks of the machine depositing the meal onto the tray almost covered Gloria's sucked in breath at my offer.

“You're feeding me, so it's only fair you get to eat, too.” I said, repeating what I told Syn the night before. Just like her, Gloria quickly made her choices and was almost bouncing as she brought the loaded up tray into the living room and set it down on the coffee table in front of the couch.

It wasn't a surprise that she had taken a copy of my own meal, right down to the synth-coffee flavor, and she fed me a bite with one spoon and then took a bite of her own with another spoon. By the time she was about a third of the way through both meals, she kind of forgot that they were separate meals and started feeding me and herself from both of them. Even the cups of hot coffee were shared equally.

I didn't mention it, though. She was relaxed as she took care of me and I wasn't going to ruin that by pointing out that we had shared the same spoon for the last fifteen minutes. When the food was gone and she magnanimously let me have the last swallow of synth-coffee from her cup, my eyes widened slightly at the familiar pressure feeling and I nervously looked from her cup, to my cup, then down to my waist, and back to her face.

Gloria laughed and got it right away. “I got you, choom. This ain't my first veg session.”

I was relieved when she grabbed her backpack and pulled out the same hose and container that Syn had used at the hospital. I wasn't as full as I was then, so there wouldn't be a repeat of what happened then.

Gloria set it beside the couch on the floor and knelt before she reached for the bindings around my waist. She put on gloves and deftly loosened the wrappings enough to release me from my confinement and she clamped her mouth shut when I was fully revealed. Her eyes darted to mine to see if I was going to say anything and I kept my mouth shut.

She nodded slightly and positioned the receptacle to not kink the hose and she carefully handled me and set the hose to attach it to the tip. Since I was feeling much better than I had yesterday, her gentle touch made me react in the way any healthy male would when a beautiful woman touched them down there.

Gloria caught her breath as I sprung right up for her and she had to grip the hose and me tightly to maintain the seal. That just made me grow harder for her, because damn, she had a firm and gentle grip. She tried hard to not say anything and bit her bottom lip cutely, which was a bit of a turn on.

The two of us stayed there for nearly a full minute in silence as she held the hose to my very firm and quite prominent erection.

“Are... are you going to go or what?” Gloria finally asked.

“Huh?” I asked, eloquently.

The complicated look on her face actually made her look more attractive, because she almost looked like she had no clue what she was supposed to do if I didn't pee for her. Instead of saying anything else, she gently lifted me and the hose slightly and then set them back down while still holding on.

“Ohhh.” I moaned for her and twitched hard down there.

Gloria blushed brightly at getting me to make that sound with such a simple move. When I started letting my bladder empty, she sighed with relief and kept the hose from slipping, since me being erect made the tentative connection even more unstable and she had to hold them together firmly.

I was done a few second later with the container about half-full and Gloria looked just as relieved as I felt with the pressure gone. She gave me a slight jiggle and a single pump with her hand, to get that last bit of fluid out into the hose, and I gritted my teeth together to not moan again.

She easily saw my reaction and again looked conflicted, then blanked her face and used awipe to clean me slightly after detaching the hose and held it with one hand. She carried the apparatus into the bathroom and gasped when she saw how big it was. I heard her and decided not to tease her or offer to let her take a bath in the tub.

A few sounds of water running later, Gloria came back out with the cleaned apparatus and tucked it back into her backpack. She knelt again and reached for me. I tried to not react as she tried in vain to tuck me back under the wrappings. The difference between the space my softness took to what my hardness needed, was enough for her to realize that she was not going to be able to put me away for a while.

Gloria adopted the same tactic as Syn did at the hospital and covered my waist with a towel. “Let me know when it goes away and I can put it back.”

I nodded and she took off the rubber gloves, tossed them in the trash, and then cleaned up the remains of our meals and tossed the trash and carried the tray and dishes back into the kitchen. She came right back and looked at the couch, then at the vidscreen showing the popular news channel.

“Plenty of room at the end.” I said and wiggled a finger to point at the end of the couch by my feet. “Watch what you want or take a nap. I know you've had a drek shift at work.”

Gloria gave me a pointed look. “How did you know that?”

I had to grin at her. “When have younothad a drek shift at work, choombatta?”

Gloria made a scoff sound and sat down with a flop. Her chest did some interesting things and she looked both pleased and a little put out that I really was checking her out and wasn't just playing around.

“You're too young to be looking at me like that, punk.” Gloria said, pointedly.

“In a few years, who's gonna care how old I am?” I asked and lifted my gaze to her face. She was intentionally not looking at me as she stared at the television.

“You're in David's class.” Gloria said in rejection, only her voice was not as firm as it probably should have been.

I chuckled. “Everyone's in David's class. Our whole year uses our classes as meditation time to socialize instead of learning the lessons.”

Gloria blinked her eyes several times as her brain processed that and she turned her head to look at me. “What?”

“It's all we do, actually. The info's flicked into our heads instantly at the start of class and the rest of the time is just us assimilating it in the background as we all gather together with our chooms.” I said with a shrug that barely shifted my bandages and reminded me that there was a partial cast over my chest. “Half the time we share the deets of the latest BD to hit the streets.”

Gloria looked surprised that class was more about meeting people and socializing than a teacher imparting knowledge to the students.

“Things are different in a corpo academy, choombatta. If you can't network with your chooms while you're networking in cyberspace, you fail before you ever take any test.”

Gloria stared at me like I was speaking gibberish.

“Even if you hate the gonks, you gotta be polite, firm, and keep your cool. Otherwise, what's the point? You'll be stuck at the bottom of the corpo ladder with no chooms or aces to help you climb it.” I said with a laugh. “Unless you like the taste of feet stepping on you as they climb over you.”

Gloria opened her mouth to say something, then she thought better of it and closed her mouth. For the next half an hour, we watched the broadcast that talked about some of the renovations being done in the seaside Cubeland, or commonly known as the Cube Hotel at the far edge of the the city in safe zone called Pacifica. It was close enough to Playland to have the hotel residence qualify for a 50% discount on the park's entrance fee.

“What's your cyberspace specialty?” Gloria suddenly asked.

“Design and construction.” I answered without hesitation. “With a major in programming and a minor in medical. The interactions between the flesh and metal is fascinating, as are the skeez and dorphs needed to mitigate the integration and rejection.”

Gloria was quiet for a few seconds. “Is that why Vic keeps singing your praises?”

I chuckled. “Not really.”

Gloria looked over at me. “Then why can't he shut up about you?”

“I paid full price for all my chrome upfront before he ordered it.” I said and she looked shocked, because Victor was a ripperdoc and could source parts for a lot cheaper than full price and he made oodles of eddies from me. “I also helped him reprogram and redesign a lot of it, so it looked like it was all custom made while using standard parts underneath.”

Gloria's mouth dropped open and looked at a loss for what to say.

“I may have also paid for a replacement cyber-arm for some street kid and adjusted the programming to let the thing expand to make it last for more than six months.” I admitted. “He's a growing boy and it should compensate enough for that until he grows too big for it to work for him and it needs to be changed out for an adult one.”

“You...” Gloria stopped talking and looked back at the television without saying anything else.

I mentally smirked at pretty much blowing her mind and looked back at the television myself. The seeds had been planted and I just hoped they bore fruit eventually. If she had some idea what I was going to be doing in the near future, it might be enough to change how things were going to go for her in the future.