Chapter 117: Aden’s Suppression Chip (Part 1)
Aden was just another face in the crowd—a factory worker lost in the chaos of Night City, trying to survive. He lived paycheck to paycheck, grinding away in an assembly plant just to afford the bare minimum. In this world, if you didn't upgrade, you didn't get employed. That's just how it was.
His job required cybernetic enhancements—mechanical arms with enough torque to lift steel plates, optical sensors that could detect microscopic faults in machinery, and processors that synced with assembly line rhythms down to the nanosecond. In Night City, human flesh just wasn't efficient enough anymore.
And yet, cyberware came with a price—not just in eddies, but in sanity. The more prosthetics you installed, the greater the risk of rejection. His nerves screamed each night like they were on fire. The inhibitors he gulped down by the dozen only dulled the edge—they never stopped the whispers or the headaches.
So when Aden heard about a revolutionary chip on the black market—a "suppression chip" that could substitute daily inhibitors—he was all ears.
He bought it from the old captain, a local fixer known for peddling everything from smuggled BD reels to black-market cybertech. The chip wasn't cheap—he had to pull some strings and toss in an extra hundred eurodollars just to get his hands on it.
Still, it was worth it. Inhibitors were expensive and brutal on the liver. If this chip worked as promised, he could ditch the drugs, save money, and maybe even move out of the slums someday.
As Aden turned the corner toward his cramped apartment complex, a friend greeted him.
"Yo, you're back!" a bulky man called out with a grin. "What'd you score, huh? You've been guarding that package like it's made of platinum."
It was Bud—his neighbor and a part-time street thug who worked with a minor gang in Watson. He wasn't the brightest, but he was reliable.
Aden smiled, holding the small white case in both hands. "Old captain hooked me up. Eleven tablets' worth of suppression—Umbrella brand. You wouldn't believe the hype on this thing. I even had to throw in a hundred on top of the regular price just to get it."
Bud frowned, scratching his buzzed scalp. "Umbrella? That some new startup?"