What's keeping you awake at night ...

[netrunnerzero]

There's a man sitting in bench in the nexus with medium length length sliver hair and hard eyes of a blue-gray hue.  He leans forward in the seat with his hands clasped together in front of him.  He looks as though he's trying to crack his knuckles, but they won't crack.  His fingers are the right shape.  Joints in all in the right place, at a glance, but the hands are entirely formed of stain resistant metal.

Zero looks as if he's not looking at his surroundings, but through them and through you too, if you're approaching him.  He feels a question like an inch in the back of his mind and it's apparently one that he can't help, but to scratch.

"What's keeping you awake at night?"

Comments

[netrunnerzero]

"Oh. You think I had some kind of accident or a birth defect, don't you?"

Zero nodded his head slowly, a faint smirk drifting over his lips.

"These hands do more than the hands I was born with ever could. I payed to have a ripper doc take off the flesh I was born with for these. I can interface with machines in a way I couldn't before, bypass security that exists in my world, shoot straighter and punch harder."

He flexed the fingers open and closed. "It's the better, faster and stronger of my home. It extends to parts other than the hands, too."

[ministryproject5]

"If you made the choice they would still seek to elimate you. Both are crimes." Few understood the way Dominic's government operated but that was proably for the best. Their control was absolute and privacy non-existant, at least in the cities.

"You could be describing the reason I was bred. I am faster, stonger, better senses, better health and more resillent than everyone else." Dominic wasn't metal but he now knew he wasn't completely human either. "There is a doctor weaning me off the medications that were used to subdue my less desirable characteristics. I know why they regressively bred the subsequent generations."

[netrunnerzero]

"Must be a powerful agency for anyone to put up with all the infringement."

It's sort of funny to him that they didn't have their own upstart revolutionaries, but perhaps they had. It was hard to glean the nuances of someone's government in a passing conversation.

"And I damn well would resent anyone interfering with whom I'd choose to procreate with."

[ministryproject5]

"The Ministry has been consolidating power for over a century. Once Big Brother was installed and the reprogramming began, few resisted. Those who do live in the wilds or the dead cities."

Dominic paused and that last comment obviously made him uncomfortable. In the silence he brought a hand up to rub his back between the shoulder and spine. "I wasn't... didn't know I could choose until a few months ago."

Dominic had been deep in brainwashing and deep in the Ministry before he was liberated. "What is your government like?"

He had a feeling this man was from a very different place than he had seen before.

[netrunnerzero]

Zero notices the gesture. It seems almost shy or bashful on the other man. For a moment, he wondered about what kind of knowledge gaps a person might have when one's government is trying to do all the thinking for you and he supposed he felt a certain kind of pitty for him.

"Ostensively it's a democratic republic, but now that they've rebuilt a bigger, badder military to push people around with ..." He lets his voice trail off. "The government is very interested in protecting its own interests and maintaining a good quality of life for wealthy people - but there are pockets of lawlessness, sometimes very large ones, among the non-wealthy."

"You ever heard the saying 'might is right'? That sums it up well enough."

[ministryproject5]

There were a lot of gaps. Not that it would be surprising to anyone who knew even the basics of how Dominic had spent most of his life. Those gaps were closing quickly with his natural curiosity and quick wit and intellegence. Still, there were so many things, especially socially.

"We were bred to be the bigger, badder military. The Ministry is not pleased that so many of us have escaped into the wilds and gangs." He took pleasure in being a thorn in the side of the Ministry and that had been growing exponentially since he was brought out of it.

"No." He hadn't heard it but he had definitely run into many people who would believe it. He did respond, nearly mechanically with "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Poverty is Wealth. Big Brother is Watching."

The propaganda of the Ministry was still a reflex in Dominic's mind. Words spoken over and over until they were without thought when spoken. "They would add Might makes Right if it had survived the rewriting of truth over the years."

[netrunnerzero]

Zero, who had given up smoking decades ago, finds himself wishing for a cigarette. He hadn't pictured the conversation getting so political, though, he supposed it didn't bother him that it did. It just wasn't something he found himself overly thinking about in everyday life.

No, what was getting troubling was the thought that perhaps their governments weren't as far off as he wanted to believe they were. How easily his phrasing fit into their propaganda.

"Maybe the big difference between your government and mine is that mine just isn't big enough to do the things yours could. Otherwise, it may have."

Zero tilted his head to the left and the right, stretching out his neck until that did crack. The other nice thing about mechanical hands is that the joints within them never got stiff.

"So you're up at night because of habit, but do you actually want to be?"

[ministryproject5]

Dominic nodded in agreement. He could see this man's assumption about the government being true. "There are four versions of ours and they rule most of the planet."

Big was maybe an understatement. He could see how smaller government wouldn't be able to get such a foot hold the way the Ministry had over time.

"I don't know." Dominic admitted. "I had no wants before I started deprogramming. The doctor helping me is focusing on the more dangerous parts of my programming. Sleep cycles, sexual programming, social programming are not priorities."

Dominic could only shrug. He had never even considered his sleep cycles other than how it made him off other people's sleeping time. "Do you want to be awake at night?"

[netrunnerzero]

Zero makes a face at the mention of sexual programming. It's not an exaggerated response by any means, but it might give off the vague impression that he has some opinions about the subject. He had already eluded to some of them already, after all, but there was no reason to go on and on about it.

"No, I don't." The ever present rasp in his voice is a little less prominent when he speaks softly. "But I can, at least, use the time to think."

[ministryproject5]

Dominic had seen that expression more than once since being freed and while he didn't feel it himself, he did understand. He knew not to ask as well.

"I have helped people sleep before." He said it and then realized it might not sound the way he intented. It was still a genuine offer. "I spend the nights working now. I appreciate not being alone, usually."

[netrunnerzero]

His instinct was to say no. He wasnt the kind of person that appreciated anyone doing something to him that he didn't understand.

He also didn't really know this man. The impression he had was that this was nice enough, but Zero wasn't quite ready to extend that level of trust.

"And how would you go about doing that?"

[ministryproject5]

Most around Dominic were wary. He was an agent of the government and it was hard for people to trust anyone who had been in that position. He understood even if he didn't have the instincts to distrust people himself.

"I can do pressure therapy for relaxation." Before he went on his posture turned nervous. "I am learning other techniques now that I am being weaned off of the Ministry drugs."

[netrunnerzero]

"From warrior to healer, hrm? That's aspirational."

Does he sound like he means that? Perhaps. It doesn't sound overly cynical, but he doesn't exactly sound convinced either.

To some degree he's projecting. At one point in his life, Zero had been living his own version of whatever qualified as a peaceful existence in Night City and he'd ended up being pushed into violence. Now it feels like all he knows anymore.

He had found his was to do some good, now and then, but he was under no pretense that it made up for the wrong that he'd done. He was just ... surviving. As everyone had to find their way to do.

"I appreciate the offer, but I don't think it will address the problem."

[ministryproject5]

Dominic thought on that assumption for a moment, slowly shaking his head no. "I was trained to be a warrior but when I turned ten and would have been taken out to make my first kill I was diverted to the Ministry of Love because my intellegence. I was 15 when I took the lead on improving the breeding project that created me." Dominic thought of himself as a doctor or a scientist far more than an enforcer like some of the others had been. That however, didn't make him any less deadly than the rest that had been bred. "My siblings were not so lucky."

He can't resist asking. "What is the problem?"

The longer he spent around others and off the medication the more Dominic genuinely wanted to help others. In some world, less apocalyptic than his, he might have been a compassionate doctor or found disease cures rather than what the Ministry had instructed him to undertake.