2078 - Highriders (Post-CP2077)

[Keiran Halcyon]

​

Chapter 1

My own breath resounded in the helmet.

Each exhalation brought a brief patch of condensation onto the millimeter thick transparent aluminum a mere inch from my nose.

Beyond that was the unforgiving vacuum of orbital space around Earth.

I had run weeks of raw brain dances from highrider workers fixing habitats and space stations in orbit to prepare for this gig. Just because I was used to it at this point though, didn't mean that I wasn't basically frightened out of my wits at what I was doing.

My eyes looked down and I saw the small shuttle that had brought me into orbit becoming smaller and smaller. Beyond that, the blue and white marble of Earth dominated the view and the shuttle was swiftly being swallowed up by the vast bulk of the planet. It had to go on its own way, keeping to the official flight plan to avoid suspicion from the security systems at my destination.

I forced my eyes back up, fixing them onto the bulk of the gargantuan counter-rotating space station that was as big as my fist at the moment, growing ever larger as my suit AI piloted us to a rendezvous.

Entrusting my life to the AI was not easy, especially as it didn't even have a general name it used to interact with humans at all. Which was funny, given that its sole reason for existing was to keep highriders alive in dynamic, on-the-fly spacewalks. Most highriders that I had read about growing up were good enough to not need one, but they were always there as backups when things inevitably went wrong.

I went over the suit readouts helpfully displayed directly into my optics. Everything was still in the green; fuel levels on track, suit pressure steady, power levels and oxygen. More than enough for nearly a full day in space, though the radiation count was enough that I didn't want to spend that long out here.

The suit's thruster pack on my back was giving me a nice easy 1G of acceleration to cross the 20k kilometers of distance to my target. The shuttle had done most of the job of matching velocities, now it was just a question of the suit doing the rest in a classic Hohmann transfer to intercept.

Velocity, heading, and time to intercept was steadily counting down from 46 minutes in my vision.

A thought to my internal Agent and the flick of an eye brought up my media player. I considered what to listen to for a moment and brought up Kerry's latest album. The one that I had helped give genesis to all those months ago on the 'Seamurai'. I still cringed at the name of that pleasure yacht and couldn't think of a more fitting end for it, than as a burnt out wreck at the bottom of Night City bay.

It was definitely more soothing to my nerves at the moment as the easy guitar strings of that first song played directly into the nerves of my ears.

The whole album was actually quite a departure from the usual thumping, screaming rock that he had been known for his whole career. There were still heavy guitar riffs throughout the album, but there wasn't a single scream.

I always wondered what Johnny would've thought of it, or if he could even bother to find out, now that he was a digital entity along with his old girlfriend and all the other liberated psyches in cyberspace.

Had they truly left all the material universe's worries behind?

I wrenched my thoughts back to just enjoying the songs and keeping a close eye on my progress through orbital space.

Three quarters of the way through the album, the space station was now looming in my view. I felt the suit gently coaxing my body to reorient. Reaction thrusters puffed to aid the move and now my feet were facing toward the station and the thrusters were working hard to shed relative velocity.

The station's radar was the next obstacle. The suit had specially woven EM absorbent properties, making me appear as a small piece of space debris. It was just enough to fall under the automated threat assessment that the station's computers used and as such wouldn't bring it to the human crew's attention.

Of course, I wasn't just relying on that and powered up an ECCM suite that would actively nullify any radar emission if they were focused on me.

It wasn't that long ago that the station had experienced history's first act of space piracy and a lot of eddies had gone into improving security. There was no way the world's rich and famous would risk their skins otherwise. Now I had to defeat that security.

The ping of the standard sweeping radar was visualized in my vision in a tactical diagram my Agent brought up.

It struck me and I watched with bated breath as the calculation was done on how much radar energy I had just reflected back…

6%

That was well under the threshold and I only marginally relaxed. I swept my own optics over the station and dozens of point defense turrets were highlighted all over the station. All of them were 20mm autocannons that fired all manner of smart ammunition; incendiary, HESH, AP. Fun for every occasion. Even with the military grade regenerative subdermal I had, I would swiftly be turned to swiss cheese under fire from munitions meant to destroy other ships and deflect space debris.

My aiming point was the lower part of the central station core pylon, which housed a number of airlocks for maintenance workers to use. Docking with the spinning torus sections was just too problematic and sims had shown that even if the AI could make it, there was just too much immediate security to overcome and not enough time to remotely disable them.

The approach to Maintenance Airlock C3 was halted by the AI at just fifty meters distance.

The station was now a looming presence filling my vision and I threw a carefully calibrated, low level active scan from my optics to double check everything was matching the schematics I had been given.

There were no exterior facing security cameras in these lower levels, a rather secretive cost cutting measure. It was on the list of things to do, but had been deferred by the station's management to next year's expenses.

How very corporate.

Just under three years ago… in what felt like another lifetime, I would've thought of doing the exact same thing had I been in their shoes.

What was down here was proximity sensors.

I focused and established a brute force connection, my mind leaping across the bridge I had established and the world of data erupted into my awareness.

It was the work of a few seconds to isolate the sensors and keep them sending the 'everything normal' pings back into the station subnet they were connected to.

I also immediately saw that the station's security netrunner had run a sweep just ten seconds earlier.

"Well, so far you're batting two for two, Mr. Blue Eyes," I murmured to myself. My client for this gig had really come through, giving me a precise time of arrival down the second at this specific airlock.

I took over the suit controls from the AI and gave a thruster pulse to bring me to a 5 m/s closure to the airlock door.

With the nine seconds until my hands could grab hold, I began laying down program after program as stealthily as possible into the local systems. The net dweller who looked after the security subnet of the station was quite good. Their firewalls, daemons, imps and other passive defense features slowed down the uptake of my hacks, but did little more than that.

He was no Nix and far from Yoko's skill, for months now I had long been able to fight both my netrunning mentors on an equal level in shallow cyberspace.

I fired a last burst of thrust, taking down my closing velocity down an easy meter per second, which my arms could easily absorb.

My hands clamped down around the hand hold rails and I stabilized myself.

A thought triggered my first hack.

The airlock interior began depressurizing.

This took a nerve wracking three minutes, but I used the time to begin laying my own daemons, viruses and hacks like a minefield for the station's dweller to stumble onto, just in case. They would stay passive and unnoticed until I needed them, with a twenty four hour lifetime before they would delete themselves.

The door mechanism sensors were isolated before I triggered their motors.

I got out of the way for the heavy airlock door to swing by me and pulled myself into the pitch dark of the interior.

My optics switched to the infrared spectrum as I didn't feel like going through the trouble of hacking the lights.

The world was rendered into the black and white of infrared, whilst I immediately began closing the door behind me.

As the airlock began to pump in air again, my hacking was already busy with the small camera facing the inner airlock door.

This was far from the sloppy streets of Night City with gang hijacked CCTV cameras. There you could get away mostly with just quickhacking the cameras into switching themselves off with no issue. That was completely different with an active elite dweller in the subnet. Switching off a cam so directly was the netrunning equivalent of blasting the horn of a truck, that there was someone up to no good that didn't want to be seen.

Nix and Yoko had quickly taught me to forget that form of sloppiness.

To true infiltrators and netrunners, you camouflaged yourself from cameras. You laid programs that were specific to your current visual profile directly into the local cache of the visual sensors, causing them to see you, but effectively ignore you. It didn't matter how sophisticated the image recognition was, you would still be invisible using the Camera Camo quickhack as I liked to call my own version of the program.

An even more advanced form, which I was still busy sorting out the kinks and bugs of, was a Disguise program, which actively turned you into someone else who was authorized to be in that space with no raised eyebrows.

The pressure was now equalized with the interior of the station and a minor hack opened the inner doors for me.

I drew my highly illegal, modified Liberty pistol and with a pull against the railing floated my way out of the airlock, scanning both sides of the cramped hallway. It was festooned with control panels, piping, valves, conduits and other engineering necessities.

My snooping through the cameras found no one close by. The closest being a borg worker in a full cyber conversion Copernicus body two floors below me. An idle passive scan told me his name, Jack Hoan, cross referenced from the station population register and that he still had twenty years of service left to work off his debts to the owners.

My mind automatically went through different ways I could either flatline or disable him if I had to.

The airlock closed and I pulled off, carefully accelerating myself down the corridor.

The map reference in my optics displayed my current position, this one was fully 3D on account of the environment. Helpfully giving me a constant marker line to find my way through the maze to my destination.

I stopped myself at the first intersection, then pulled into a corridor that went relatively upward.

Most of my attention was on ghosting every cam and sensor. A constant laying of hacks to pave my way forward.

I had to pause at the next intersection, keeping myself from rising into it. Another borg worker was cruising through the corridor now above me.

Using a cam as a jump off point, I smoothly inserted my camo hack into his optics. The Copernicus barely had a cyberdeck worth the name and it was a Seocho civilian model. My own Netwatch Netdriver deck breezed through his firewalls without even a hint of trouble and didn't trip any internal alarms.

The result was the worker didn't even turn his oddly shaped head to look at me. The optics on the Copernicus had a band scanner that provided a full 270 degree vision to the borg and he should've seen someone in a full combat EVA suit, but he just puffed out of view, using the inbuilt thrusters of his own near full mechanical body.

I moved on with a pull on the railings.

My first waypoint was reached a few minutes later when I spotted the always rotating inner mechanisms, or at least a part of it, that joined the central core of the station to the rotating section. Given my position it was like I was looking at the massive section of hyperalloy steel wall that was constantly moving on superfluid frictionless bearings the size of a freight train.

Now came the first tricky part of my infiltration - I needed to get inside the elevator shafts that went up and down inside the torus support spokes.

A quick scan showed a maintenance worker access point and with a puff of my own thrusters I made way there.

I grabbed the railing hand hold nearby and wound the link extension from my EVA suit's neck and reeled it out with my right hand.

"Suit, manipulator arm," I ordered. The AI unfurled the dextrous arm from the life support pack and I handed my gun over to it. "Defense mode."

My actual body's defense in real space covered, I shoved the link into the port.

The first automatic action my mind made was to snuff out the alert signal that someone had connected to the port at all. Then I pushed forward and began scanning local systems using partial synthtech immersion. From my left eye, I saw the dataverse of the entire station, whilst my right kept an eye on real space around me.

The local firewall here was much stronger. Not surprising, since someone fucking up here could send this specific torus' rotation into a faster spin and give everyone in it a constant 5 Gs if they wanted to. It would also potentially fuck up the entire station given enough time.

It took me nearly six real time minutes to just make my way painstakingly through the outer layer of the firewall without tripping the little traps the station's net dweller had left for me. They were good. If you could name the defense, they'd used it.

Mr. Blue Eyes had not managed to gain any data on just who's turf I was digitally stepping on, which by itself told me that it was one of those nutjobs that practically lived in cyberspace. His meat body was likely ensconced in a life support tube somewhere on the station.

It also meant that I did not want to get in a direct cyberspace confrontation with them and that stealth was the order of the day. If it meant I had to spend hours parsing through the code, then so be it.

These last few months I had made it a point to do the required netrunning for my own gigs where possible and not rely on dedicated runners, as much as that would've made my life easier.

Nearly an hour later I was through three layers of firewall and seemingly inside the local subnet but I spotted a minor fault in the environment, which clearly told me I was in a fake subnet that had been created for someone like myself to blunder around stupidly.

It took me another hour to find the port to gain further access and there I had another two firewalls to worm through.

The previous firewalls were jokes in comparison and stealthily punching through these took me another three hours. During which I also had to hack the optics of another borg worker to keep me invisible in meatspace.

I double and triple checked the systems being visualized by my synthtech interface for any discrepancy before I finally accepted that I was seeing the real thing and not another fake.

Then I found the hydraulic system for a torus spoke that was still approaching my position and carefully triggered the central shaft access hatch.

With a push of my hand and slight puffs of my suit thrusters to slow myself, I was now inches from facing the constantly moving inner wall of the spinning section. A quick calculation told me I would have exactly four and half seconds to get my entire body into the shaft or risk getting cut in half.

I maneuvered myself head first and handed over my suit thruster controls to the AI, ordering it to ignore all safety governors.

'Are you certain?' it asked in a monotone.

"Yes, do it."

'Very well.'

This potential death was but a minor manifestation of the many I had faced over the last two years. I didn't bother asking for a countdown from the AI and just steeled myself to experience one hell of an acceleration.

The instant I saw the entrance of the shaft appear from my right, I flipped the mental switch of my Sandevistan.

My perception of the world around me increased by orders of magnitude and instead of the shaft approaching at a blistering speed it was now crawling towards me.

The moment came and the AI fired every thruster my suit had.

For an agonizingly long moment, it seemed like I was going to ram myself headfirst into the moving wall. Then mere inches before my helmet would've impacted solid steel, the shaft entrance passed in front of me.

My head and shoulders passed inside and only a pure AI dedicated to this task resulted in a proper course being maintained with thruster firings so I didn't get pancaked against the side of the shaft.

I had to pull in my legs to avoid them getting effectively sliced by the entire station's central core, another trick that was simplified greatly with the Sandy.

When my speed was equalized with the spoke's spin, I finally could reach out safely to physically grab the nearest maintenance railing.

My internal Agent shut down the Sandy automatically. I immediately became aware of my heavy breathing and the usual aftershock of temporal perceptions normalizing hit me. I bore it as easy as breathing by this point. What I couldn't ignore was my right hand beginning to twitch and spasm out of my control.

"Fuck! Not now," I snarled. My left hand came round to grab the railing, just as my right hand's grip failed.

My right limb kept going epileptic in a painful manner for nearly a full four minutes before it settled down and some control returned to me.

"Will such loss of control occur again?" the Suit AI asked.

I grabbed the railing with both hands and began pulling myself down the shaft. "Possibly, it will be dealt with soon."

My next obstacle approached - an inner bulkhead door that would finally let me access an actual elevator. This one yielded to a simple stealth quickhack thanks to my earlier breach of the local subnet.

I pushed myself in carefully and began to feel the first effects of the station's centrifugal gravity, which was currently just a slight pull of barely 0.1 G towards the spinward side of the shaft.

The elevator itself was halfway down the spoke about seventy meters away from me. The bulkhead door closed above me as I began the careful hack to bring the elevator up.

Here I had to be careful to not create an obvious signal to the central computer that something was wrong with the behavior of the system.

The only reason anyone from the outer torus would take an elevator all the way up the spoke here, was if they were technicians. By the same token, it would let me traverse closer without worrying about the elevator suddenly rising and crashing into me.

I couldn't take that chance.

This gig had too much riding on it for anything to go wrong.

So I grabbed a hold of the side to arrest my very slow fall and got busy hacking.

It was another slow process, which involved finding the employee register. Then finding and creating a virtual duplicate of that employee, that I could insert into the surveillance system. Then I had to create a small accident for her, that would actually stop her from moving in real space.

This I did with a small malfunction in the automatic door as she walked out of the restroom. It essentially closed in her face, instead of opening. She lost her balance and fell backward.

In that moment, I replaced her in surveillance with the virtual duplicate, whilst I burned a ton of RAM to brute force her own firewalls and hit her with a Control hack.

I walked her right back into the toilet stall, had her lock the door and wait patiently.

My cyberdeck was really heating up now, but I had planned ahead for this moment and the hiss of external coolant flowing through my dedicated cooling 'ware nicely took care of it. Taking the heat and eventually flushing it from a dedicated reservoir installed near my neck.

I hit her with a triple combo that I could do in my sleep at this point - Memory Wipe, Reset Optics and Sonic Shock.

She began twitching and moments later collapsed into deep unconsciousness and would only wake up in nine hours.

In the meantime, I ran the virtual duplicate of Rachel Mcadams, the very attractive Blackjack table dealer for the local casino, towards the part of the station which would serve my purposes.

Then I repeated the whole process for a maintenance tech who worked the station's general HVAC on the customer facing side. Since no one really wanted a big maintenance borg in sight stomping up the carpets, he was still human with minimal external cyberware.

I had him do the job of actually sending the elevator up to meet me, then had him pretend to do some busywork on a nearby vent, before releasing him with a Memory Wipe.

When my feet finally touched down on the roof of the elevator, I was already inside its tiny subnet, keeping things looking absolutely normal to the greater system. The interior cam was looped before I triggered the maintenance hatch on its roof.

"Time to get dressed," I murmured to the suit AI.

It took the hint and fully equalized interior pressure before breaking the seals on the minimal carapace structure of the suit interior, allowing me to unzip, twist and climb out of the thing.

Now I was left only wearing the interior cooling suit and peeled myself out of that.

I fiddled with the latch release on the suit backpack, my nude body shivered in the cool air before I shut down that autonomic response with a thought.

I pulled out my designer Jinguji dress for this gig, ripping open the protective synthplast before carefully coaxing it out, leaving it to hover in the microgravity briefly.

Dressing in this situation was not easy but eventually I managed to wiggle into the extremely short, black piece of clothing and settle it properly, smoothing out all the kinks and getting all the upper metallic bits properly supporting and covering my breasts to an appropriate level. Next came the jewelry, three large gold rings on my left thigh, two rings on my left fingers and four silver necklaces, one of which was laced with a ruby. Then came the shoes, two open foot stiletto high heels that would do the job nicely of emphasizing my toned calves.

"All right, time to don my dancing shoes," I grinned, bringing up the internal program with my Agent, then triggered the still highly secret FIA metanthropic cloaking tech.

It always felt like I was being doused with slow moving ice water that also somehow left a slightly hot burn in its wake before settling into normalcy.

My HUD gave me 100% across the board as I felt my mannerisms, voice, body language and a dozen other effects settle on me as the imprint did its job.

As a last check I pulled myself over to the spacesuit's helmet and the AI helpfully mirrored the front faceplate to let me do my final check.

V the ripped, legendary bad-ass merc who'd made Night City her bitch was gone, to be replaced by the very attractive, long haired Mrs. Elaine Paigles, who was the stacked, arm candy corpo wife for her equally corpo husband.

With a nod of satisfaction, I pulled away from the helmet, "Ready, suit?"

"Ready," it said, with the exterior speakers.

I reached into the back of the suit's neck, flicked open a hidden compartment and found the chip that housed the AI. I gave it a sharp jerk and the thumb length chip emerged from its slot.

My optics did a quick scan and confirmed everything was still normal, before I carefully pushed my hair aside and slotted the chip into the open port behind my right ear.

The AI immediately sat itself down in my system, drawing minimal power and acting like it was merely a brief visitor to the 'apartment' that was my body's systems and personal area network.

"Comfortable, Suit?"

"It is acceptable," it said immediately.

I grabbed a handhold and my pistol before pulling myself through the maintenance hatch and into the elevator cabin properly. "Burn it."

"Signal sent," said Suit.

I closed the hatch just as a brief blinding flash heralded the self-destruct incineration of all the equipment that had made my spacewalk possible. Within seconds all that was left would be trace elements and scorch marks.

With my feet finally touching down on a soft carpet, a thought to my Agent had my upper right thigh split open up to reveal the full cybernetic interior, which had just enough space for my iron. When it was settled in its holster slot, it automatically pulled the weapon in and closed everything up, the synthskin there making a perfect seal again.

To any scan it would just look like I had two full cyber legs with fortified ankles. When in fact, thanks to the internal scanjack system, it was the perfect accessory for smuggling a weapon into a very secure zone.

I sent a command to the elevator to go down into the hotel proper, whilst also pushing into the greater 'net, finding the guest list and linking my current digital and physical presence into the system.

Gravity increased slowly as I went down and when I could properly walk, I pushed myself directly below the elevator's tiny cam, right in its blindspot, before releasing the loop to show the actual live feed.

Finally, the elevator car reached the bottom and I felt the station's 0.8G of simulated gravity in full.

The doors opened and I casually stepped out into Torus 4 of the Crystal Palace Orbital Hotel.

"Showtime."

---

The Crystal Palace was also affectionately called the Las Vegas of Space and like it's planet bound counterpart, was hotel, casino, entertainment, low-grav pools, spas, luxury apartments, concert venues, drone racing circuit, parks, tennis courts and even had a faithful recreation of an idyllic white sand beach, complete with waves.

I had been a Corpo for most of my life in Arasaka, playing the deadly game of corporate counterintelligence but the level of luxury and exclusivity here was the elite of the 1%. I would've needed to climb half a dozen ranks higher than my former unlamented boss Jenkins to even have a shot of coming casually to this place for a holiday or to even be assigned to work here for Arasaka.

Now I was walking through an artificial park filled with carefully cultivated plants, small trees, grass, all of it illuminated through overhead windows where carefully moderated sunlight was beamed through. Arasaka had artificial ecologies in most of their major HQ buildings around the world, but this was on a whole other level. It was like the Garden of Eden in a can. Not surprising when these plants were vital to keeping everyone breathing in the Torus. The whole spectacle would be enough to normally have me gaping like a tourist, but my behavioral imprint of Elaine smoothly overwrote those to make my body language into a casual strut.

Most of the other people in Torus 4 were either tourists gaping in amazement or people who actually lived and worked in the Palace, taking a much needed break from their busy schedules to eat something and relax. Just seeing this also would've made the old me very envious. At Arasaka, I had usually eaten within my ultra secure tiny office and had food delivered straight to my floor. Here at the Crystal Palace, it seemed they actually allowed breaks where you would leave your office entirely. Of course, it could just be that since there was only the harsh vacuum of space outside, this was an allowance for people to not go stir crazy.

I passed a few relaxing Corpos who were giving two nearby Arasaka suits a weary stink eye. Most of the biggest corps of Earth had offices on the Crystal Palace, just like my hometown of Night City. The difference being that no one could afford to have their own army to look after their assets here. No fighting or hijinks were tolerated, even between Arasaka and Militech, who were inches away from a de facto hot war on Earth.

Orbital Air, the general managers of the entire station, had full rights and means to banish any corp lock, stock and barrel. Anyone committing crime on Crystal Palace would usually be shown the airlock. Whether they gave you a space suit, a shuttle or neither depended on the severity of the crime.

I kept a weather eye on the time, judging how long I had to just sightsee, as the lush park area gave way to specialist boutiques and shops. Torus 4 alone had a circumference of just under 14 km with nine floors and I could easily get lost in just the shopping that was to be had here.

The persona of Elaine knew the Palace well, so I had to act as if it was all old potatoes. My Agent did its usual bang up job of navigating me to my destination via Augmented Reality.

Getting from one part of the Torus to another was done by more local elevators, tram tubes and liberal usage of standing conveyor belts in the long hallways, as if the Crystal Palace was one giant airport. Theoretically, the furthest you'd have to travel within a Torus was seven kilometers and walking that could mean over an hour wasted.

The other difference to get used to was the general population of the Palace. As a former Arasaka suit based out of Night City and during childhood, I'd seen quite a lot of Europe and Japan, but here I was experiencing an entirely new melting pot of humanity.

The station was by now over sixty-seven years old and had survived the Fourth Corporate War, which included a hot war in low-earth orbit that had seen nearly everyone else lose their orbital assets. The European Space Agency had managed to defend it with the help of the Highriders and for nearly a decade, the station residents had to survive completely on their own with no supplies or help coming from Earthside.

The Palace of today was highly cosmopolitan, with reps and embassies from nearly every major corp and nation on Earth. It was the place to go for the rich and famous. Almost everywhere I looked were people with the best clothes, stunning looks and sporting cyber and bioware that my old Ripper could buy his own shop with twice over. I had sunk over two million eddies into my own body by now and I'd be considered middling at best to these people.

In sharp contrast, were the Highrider and Crystal Palace natives. They were always dressed practically in jumpsuits with dozens of filled pockets, had very minimal cyberware and preferred to use bioware. Their hair was kept in short, almost brutal styles, to easily accommodate their vacsuit helmets. The highriders always had hard collars around their necks, which were just the collapsible form of helmets that could deploy in seconds to keep them alive in case of a hull breach.

I took my seat in a tram tube car, folding my legs and watched as a couple that oozed eddies, got up from their seats to increase the distance between them and a tall highrider that had taken a seat nearby.

The highrider, wearing a white skinsuit and harness festooned with tools, didn't even acknowledge them. He pulled out a tablet and started tapping furiously on it with a scowl.

The last passengers rushed in as the door closed, making for rather cramped conditions.

The tram burst into a rapid movement, shooting through the transport tube.

I had three minutes to kill and endure my legs and breasts getting ogled from across me by a rich corpo teen. So I simply looked to the side and kept an eye on the local subnets that I was passing through and monitoring that the virtual cyber duplicate was behaving normally. In further precaution, I was also dropping Sniffers, hack traps, imps, worms and daemons, all of whom would remain dormant in the subnets and general cyberspace of the Palace.

It was also interesting to note that the flavor and look of cyberspace was notably different from what I had grown used to in Night City. Whether it was just because of my own subjective bias in interpreting the data or there was an actual physical cause behind it, I couldn't say for certain. Cyberspace in Night City was an infinite shifting red landscape, with data structures, programs, viruses, hacks and so on usually appearing in a variety of blue hues. In the Crystal Palace, my brain interpreted the cyber landscape in shades of white, with programs and data rendering in gold.

"Section 12, arriving," said a highly enthusiastic female voice from the map screen above my head.

The rapid decel from over 160 kph had me bump into my neighbor on the next seat; another highrider, but he was dressed almost like a corpo, the only concession to his heritage being the vac collar around his neck.

"Sorry about that," I sighed, standing up and grabbing a handhold.

"Na problem, pretty one. Nice runnin' ya doin," he said, his dark skinned face stretching into a wide smile. He was speaking in The Word, the Highrider language, which was a mixture of the Niger-Congo family of languages, mixed with French, German and Japanese loan words and structure. My autotranslation soft rendered his words into understandable West Coast English, though with a heavy accent.

"Saw that did you?" I asked idly, already queuing up a bunch of offensive hacks to dump on him, whilst passive scanning and analyzing any cyberware and rehearsing lethal and non-lethal unarmed strikes to use.

"Ya, you're good, as I said," he held up his palms in a clear peace gesture. It took me a moment to pinpoint him in the local subnet and I perceived his avatar - a simple inoffensive ball with a smiley face painted on it. "You want de IP for local runner club?"

"Might as well," I nodded and his avatar sprouted an arm which flicked data at me.

I caught it in an isolation program and gave him an idle wave as I joined the throng of people walking out of the tram.

A few minutes' walk finally brought me to my first destination.

Set within an idyllic park was a small office building that was currently being leased by Utopian Corporation.

They were a ninety year old company specializing in pharmacology, nanotech and a general manufacturer. They were always small-fry as far as I knew. They barely had over a 100k employees in this day and age, spread across London, LA and Rome. They had no offices in Night City, but they did on occasion try and poach low level Arasaka employees from the technology divisions.

That they even had an office on the Crystal Palace was something of a relic from the 4th Corporate War, but they had enough money, influence and assets to keep the place going. They had been able to consistently renew their 20 year lease agreement on the very lucrative property. They had also consistently fended off buyout and hostile takeovers from major players in Europe and the Americas.

This was a company that had suspiciously deep pockets or silent major investors and backers in the background that kept it afloat and independent.

Mr. Blue Eyes wanted something Utopia had recently developed that the company was being rather reluctant in selling, even when he had apparently offered millions of eddies for it. Now he figured it was cheaper and quicker just to hire me to liberate it, along with a number of other odds and ends from other residents of the Palace.

I approached the front doors, scanning the exterior and found the usual assortment of security devices: cameras, visible and hidden, high res motion sensors, IFF, hidden Militech branded turrets, all state of the art. Armored steel shutters were ready to fall down over all doors and windows to turn this little building into a fortress.

The reception had the typical neo-minimalist style that was all the rage for corps these days, though Utopian at least went for a dark green palette to their walls with plentiful potted plants sprinkled around the place. It would be pleasing to the eye, if they hadn't sculpted the foliage at a genetic level to mirror the tree that formed their corp logo - making it look like a cauliflower crossbred with a mini-tree.

I had barely taken two steps into the reception when I saw and felt an active scan play all over my body from a visible sensor behind the ultra-attractive receptionist.

In Night City, she would've been all over the front pages of screamsheets and Jinguji would have her as a frontwoman, but somehow here she was, working a menial job on the Crystal Palace. She wore a red knee-length skirt and top that flattered, accentuated and just drew the eye in. High cheeks, delicate face, smoldering green eyes and makeup that I immediately made a mental note to add to my repertoire. My reflexive scan even spotted pheromone bioware that my Agent confirmed was very subtly affecting me.

"Hello Mrs. Paigles. Welcome to Utopian," she said with a dimpled smile. "My name is Isla. How can I help you?"

"I'm a representative for Night Corp," I said, opening the palm of my hand in her direction, broadcasting the ID data I had received from Mr. Blue Eyes.

Her optics flashed slightly as she visibly showed she'd received the handshake and data. She worked on her own terminal behind her thin transparent desk briefly. Her whole mannerism went from unctuously seductive to neutral in an instant, "Confirmed. What is the purpose of your visit?"

"We're looking to enquire if Utopian would be amenable to enter into contract negotiations for a simple regular purchase of your products."

"I see," Isla nodded, her optics flashed again. "I've forwarded your request to Director Mitchell. Our local sales department head. He's currently very busy, but his schedule opens up for a brief meeting in fifty minutes. Are you amenable to waiting?"

"Yes."

"Then please have a seat," she gestured to the numerous couches facing each other in a small lounge arrangement to one side of the reception area.

"Thank you," I nodded and took a seat on the couch that would let me see the entrance and keep an eye on her.

I engaged in a scan of the entire space, finding cameras and other immediate access points. All the cams in here were tiny and hidden, but provided more than enough throughput for my purposes. However, those were the obvious infiltration points and any netrunner they employed for network security would be watching those like a hawk.

My scan found the hidden Militech turret in the ceiling above my head and I crossed my legs, leaning back to get comfortable. Then I engaged a little program to flash my optics as if I was getting a call, which included simulating an outside connection.

My view of local cyberspace in my left eye now began slowly building up a map of the subnet that Utopia used.

Then when I was ready, I manifested properly.

My avatar for this run was a simple humanoid agglomeration of infernal flame, with two sinister glowing eyes.

I moved forward and double checked my stealth programs were running effectively, keeping the bandwidth usage even and sending no spikes that would alert my opposition.

The data fortress that represented Utopia Corp's servers came into view as a giant golden sphere that hovered over the infinite white gray of cyberspace. Just seeing that was a bloody annoyance and felt like someone had slapped me in the face.

Ever since I had fought for my life in the old Militech Cynosure facility hidden underneath Night City's Pacifica district, every damn data fortress I visualized followed the same structural pattern as the Cynosure AI Core. My hope that netrunning in the Crystal Palace would allow me to move on from that subconscious construct was seemingly in vain and I had been a fool to think it would make a difference.

That trauma had tattoo'd itself on my psyche and wouldn't go away.

Six months of time had made no difference and I still had gonk crazy nightmares, where my subconscious had me fighting Adam fucking Smasher whilst simultaneously that blasted Cerberus Combat Mech hunted me in the bowls of that place.

Don't think about it, Valerie, don't think about it. Not now.

In cyberspace, I floated forward carefully, stopping just at the edge of the perceived detection range of the defenses and firewalls that surrounded the fortress.

All around the surface of this datafortress was patrolling daemons, imps, dormant viruses and worms wriggling around and waiting to infect the first person stupid enough to try to breach the defenses.

I began a slow orbit around it and carefully scanned for gaps or weaknesses.

Whatever elite 'runner was behind these defenses was not screwing around. Nearly everything around the fortress was absolutely lethal and it was just short of being considered a solid block of Black ICE. The only non-lethal stuff was dedicated to sniffing out who would dare to try to breach the fortress, which was something Utopian definitely wanted to know and pursue. That was rather kind of them, in comparison to most corps who outright killed any runner no questions asked for trespassing.

I manifested a junk data worm, sending it wriggling away from me into the distance, where it disappeared.

A minute later it returned from random direction and impacted the defenses, shattering into a bunch of random garbage data with random things like a Crystal Palace screamsheet issue from three years ago, old NUSA market data and a random selection of braindance smut.

The firewall blocked everything cold and the closest worms and viruses corrupted the data in very nasty ways before it burst into a nonsense code that was swiftly cleaned up by a defragger.

It had achieved nothing of consequence, but it did let me see the defenses in action and how everything was put together. More importantly, it also showed me that the runner was quite trusting of his work and didn't see the need to come out of the fortress whenever something pinged the defenses. It was generally considered a non-event since just by nature of cyberspace that you regularly had junk data hitting fortresses, it could be a simple email with the wrong address or an incorrect network ping.

I kept at it, acutely aware that the clock was ticking and that I couldn't afford to get into a direct fight with this dweller.

My cyberware and body had been tuned and refined since that fateful heist for that bloody gonk Dexter Deshawn. It had seen me through the worst of Night City, including Adam Smasher. Not to mention further specifically prepared for this gig at the Crystal Palace. My internal cooling reservoir, a piece of cyberware that I had collaborated with Nix on designing and had built myself, wouldn't be able to dump heat from my cyberdeck for long enough in a typical netrunner duel. Not if my opponent was jacked into a full chair, cooling suit and had tons of hardware behind him.

I had to remain absolutely invisible in cyberspace and trigger no alarms or outright destroy the daemons in my way.

I threw another junk program into another part of the fortress defenses, mapping more of them, before taking a snapshot to begin compiling a cohesive picture.

There had to be a weakness or approach to use here, no defense was perfect.

It was only as I threw another bit of junk at the defenses and watched the defragger working that I hit upon a moment of inspiration.

My hands waved in the air of cyberspace, bringing up three of my best infiltrator daemons, Ghost Dream, Cerulean Prowl and Tiger Stack.

My mind visualized them as blurry masses of ever shifting code that were assembled into shapes related to their names. Ghost Dream being a spectral hazy man with radiant blue eyes, Prowl took the form of one of my childhood cats and Tiger Stack looking exactly like a Siberian Tiger I had seen in an old encyclopedia.

With a thought, I brought up configuration tabs for each daemon and hastily scrolled through their code, making additions and adjusting parameters on the fly.

I was so glad that at this point I didn't even need to use my virtual hands to do this anymore, otherwise it would've been impossible in the time I had available.

As it was, it took me nearly twenty-three precious minutes, all the while in real space, I picked up a screamsheet from the table in front of the couch to pretend to read.

Finally, I was ready and compressed my infiltrator daemons into my junk programs as a shell, before flinging all three at the fortress.

It was a risk, but I had no choice. I could only hope that my opponent was used enough to junk data impacts that he'd not bat an eye at three of them hitting simultaneously.

I held my non-existent breath in cyberspace as I watched the impact of my little surprise on the Fortress…

… yes!

My daemons had emerged successfully beyond the defenses, cloaking themselves before the defragger could get to work and I had access.

I 'cloaked' my avatar, which was essentially just de-manifesting but keeping my senses centered around an arbitrary point in cyberspace. My position shifted instantly as I slipped right into the fortress, hovering just above my three infiltrators.

Within the fortress, I was confronted with the typical interpretation runners had of a database - a seemingly infinite physical server farm, but my own unique take had me seeing it as an ever-shifting multi floor space. Naturally, there were patrol daemons here too and these ones were shifting forms of black and white code - at first they were humanoid, then they became multi-limbed in a way that reminded me of octopi.

That was not good. That meant the runner had adaptive coding in these things.

I had to quickly adjust my own daemons to account for that, as it was possible our collective stealth in the fortress could just as quickly become useless.

In realspace, I made sure to turn the page of the screamsheet, lest I give away the fact that I was a bit too invested in reading about the upcoming 2078 model of the Rayfield Caliburn. I despaired at definitely not being able to buy the sweet looking ride at the moment… before pushing that thought away.

No thinking about the future now, Valerie.

It also let me spot a slight twitch on the lid cover that protected the Militech turret in the ceiling above me. As if it had wanted to fully deploy but something had intervened and stopped it from doing so.

That…

In cyberspace I sent my daemons to work immediately, whilst I slipped out of the fortress server and into neutral space outside it, then surged towards the attached datasphere that represented all the systems of Utopia's physical office building.

'Fuck.'

Another runner was hacking the defenses, trying to bring the entire building under their control.

The local dweller instantly saw it and began fighting defense.

Instantly, I knew I was watching two elites fighting each other. The speed and quality of their attacks, the daemons in use, how quickly firewalls rose and fell under the onslaught of either side.

I had come a long way from just being a cookie cutter, street quickhack slinger and could probably jump right in if I had my gear at home backing me up. However, with only the custom cooling cyberware in my body to keep my cyberdeck's heat under control, I would only last a few minutes at best before having to retreat. My only advantage was surprise and that I knew my Netwatch deck could eat both of theirs for breakfast in terms of performance.

The only question now was this cyber attack only a prelude to something more in real space?

Normally, my answer would be 'hell no'. The Crystal Palace's physical security was legendary and was the whole reason for my little spacewalk stunt in the first place.

My instincts were screaming something else at me.

If I could do this, why not someone else?

The Utopian dweller had home field advantage and looked to be gaining the upper hand now. That was good, they were distracted and so I pushed my own daemons in the data fortress to move quicker in finding the big prize.

Then the attacking runner shifted tactics, queuing so many attacks that his brain should've been cooking, yet there was no interruption, break, loss of data fidelity or disconnect. It was suicide and yet… the attack just continued.

I looked closely at the battle in cyberspace and finally caught the issue. This wasn't just one runner attacking Utopian, it was two of them. Two elite runners that had somehow managed to make themselves appear as a single attacker. Everyone in cyberspace had a certain 'flavor' or 'signature' to their appearance, coding and just the way their minds interacted with it. This duo had done their best to seem as one, but I now saw the differing flows and shifts of data.

The Utopian dweller was clearly panicking at this point and scrambled to keep up, throwing defenses that had to be pushing him to the red line as well.

He was going to lose.

The first thing to go was the security cameras - the visible ones in the reception froze and their little red lights winked out.

That wasn't good news and I began toning down my portable synth-tec interface resolution and other settings to free up as much RAM as possible.

I turned another page and casually unfolded my legs to get my feet properly next to each other.

The front doors of the reception opened to admit a tall man in a typical corpo minimalist suit that you saw in thousands of office drones all over the Crystal Palace. He was very well built and bulged the suit somewhat, yet he wore it well and didn't seem uncomfortable in it. His hard blue eyes surveyed the reception, locking on the stunning receptionist with a visible smirk on his chiseled, perfect features before his eyes found me.

My eyes met his briefly before looking back down into my screamsheet and I could see him visibly dismiss me as unimportant, before he approached the front desk.

All this happened as the Utopian dweller lost control of the Militech turret and the armored shutters.

Isla tried to use the scanner, but frowned into her terminal screen as it clearly didn't want to respond. I spotted the instant she realized something was very wrong. Her body slightly twitching but getting herself admirably under control for a civilian, either that or she had cyberware that helped regulate emotional response.

"Welcome to Utopian, sir," she said with a nod. "My name is Isla. How can I help you?"

The 'corpo' didn't respond immediately but eventually smiled, "Yes, you can help me."

The doors opened and admitted two men and a single woman, also dressed similarly. The story was the same, corpos, minimal visible cyberware, well built, bland expressions on their faces.

The shutters slammed down on all the windows and the front doors shut, going into lockdown before a shutter also fell on that. The Militech turret popped out and immediately aimed for Isla.

All four mercs pulled out collapsable shock batons that unfolded into their hands.

The female merc blurred with speed as she activated a Sandevistan and emerged right over me, holding the baton's end right near my neck.

"You can both, not move a muscle."


888888888888888888888888888888888

A/N: Here's my new story! Coz I'm impatient, here's my continuation of CP2077.

Chapter 2 has already boarded the Patreon.

 

[Keiran Halcyon]

A/N: The gig continues... Thanks to Patrons and Super Patrons who are awesome chooms for supporting this author.


Chapter 2

There were moments in the life of a mercenary where you found yourself doing and experiencing events that strained credulity.

Fighting a hacked Militech Chimera experimental tank alongside the President of the NUSA herself with only a smart submachine gun, an assault rifle and quickhacks was one of those moments.

I had to remind myself that I was not V, Smasher's Bane or any of the ridiculous monikers the merc community had foisted on me at the moment, as I stared down the length of the shock baton leveled at my face.

My behavior synced faceplate and related systems that was part of the metanthropic cloaking neatly intercepted my instinctive reactions. Instead I felt my current face making a perfect expression of fright; wide doe eyes, pupil dilation, a full body twitch, gasp and raising my empty hands. Even my subconscious body language on a microexpression scale and hormones were tweaked to simulate it to even the most thorough of optical scanners and analysis programs that might be lurking in the on-board Agents of my current opponents.

I could even see in cyberspace how my current identity was being referenced by this crew's duo of netrunners as they were still battling the local dweller.

They found only what they were meant to find. If they had devoted their full efforts into interrogating and scanning my digital ID, they might have found a gap or hole in the cover with enough time, but they didn't have that.

My own passive analysis swept over the merc crew and my Agent delivered matching IDs from the Crystal Palace guest register. They had all boarded legally, their tickets paid in full and visas good for two weeks. Their shock batons were all Arasaka EB Alpha models and the serial number that my optics were able to get a good view of, told me these actually belonged to Europol - the station's actual police force.

So they somehow raided the cops own armory and without kicking up a fuss at all or Europol had swept it all under the rug.

Now I was facing a quandary. My own hacking was being neatly covered by this bunch and my sniffers needed more time to find the data package that Mr. Blue Eyes wanted.

If they were also after the same info, then things were about to get very interesting in the next few minutes.

Nothing from the twin netrunners had yet given a clue about their true target, so I had to do the most difficult thing when under the proverbial gun of this merc crew - wait, analyze and remain Mrs. Elaine Paigles.

I could begin doing some offensive prep though and began planning and queuing up hacks to drop, in addition to mentally rehearsing my actual physical assault.

In cyberspace, the battle was entering the final phases.

The dweller was still fighting back, but they were beginning to see the writing on the wall. I could play on this level if I had been encased in my own netrunner lair in NC and could've probably evened the odds in this fight if it had been in my best interest to help.

The question now is what would the twins do once they were victorious. Would they fry the dweller with Black ICE or simply lock him up in a Prison Box program? The latter would be preferable, but I had felt some of Yoko's prisons and some of them were hell in a box.

The seconds ticked by and the lobby of Utopian felt like we had all been slapped with a Freeze Body quickhack. Huh, that would be a nice evolution of the good ol' Cripple Movement - should get to work on that. The twitching and nervous jitters from the receptionist and myself were the only real movement in the room. My Agent immediately updated the mercs to definitely have some form of muscle strength lacing and precision movement soft' - handy if you had to wait for hours looking mean at some club as a bouncer or were part of the military.

Finally, the last firewall was breached and the local dweller was presented with the choice every netrunner dreaded.

He still had time to actually pull himself out of cyberspace, go back to meatspace and his body that was jacked in somewhere in a shielded strong room within the Utopian building.

It was an unfair loss, there was no concept of bushido in the 'Net outside of organized runner clubs who dueled. It would depend on his contract with Utopian really…

There was a sudden void in cyberspace…

Fuck! He booked it.

Well, I couldn't blame him really. Facing the music from this duo of netrunners clearly didn't appeal in the slightest.

I caught the slight twitch of a smile from the lead merc.

Happy now are you? I passively scanned the EM profile coming from him and found the com net frequency that the mercs were operating on.
The encryption was good, but it just so happened that Nix had cracked and 'solved' this one two weeks ago. It was Zetatech proprietary, their latest stuff even, which made it a priority for every 'runner worth their chrome to find ways around.

I delegated my Agent to listen in and analyze, my attention was almost completely taken up by the need to remain stealthy within the Utopian servers.

My new enemies had barged in with the subtlety of a Chimera tank on a rampage.

True, they had the place for themselves now, but really?

My own sniffers and daemons were finally closing in on the prize.

It was about fucking time!

Utopian bastards hadn't made it easy to find, using obscure codenames and jargon speak to hide the data, but Mr. Blue Eyes had given me enough to penetrate this final layer of primitive yet effective security.

It was called Project DWARF STAR. What it was or did, I had no idea. Wasn't my business.

My daemon grabbed it, copied it, then swiftly began to encrypt it within its own 'body'.

I now faced the decision of retreating or to keep snooping and see what these mercs were here for.

It took me no more than a moment to make the decision. Ordering all my programs to leave as quickly and subtly as possible with the bounty, but keeping one disposable stealth sniffer within the data fortress that would act as my eyes.

Mr. Blue Eyes would definitely be interested if these mercs were also after DWARF STAR.

My programs returned to me with the data loot and I immediately shunted everything to an auxiliary data drive within my own body, which I immediately isolated by a physical air gap shunt that clicked open.

There was no way for it to be remotely hacked and taken from me now.

Back in the data fortress, the twin netrunners were definitely getting closer to me and consequently the data.

If someone like Mr. Blue Eyes wanted this, then it stood to reason it would be on the radar of others.

Time within cyberspace could be funny sometimes, but it was the most universal experience for most to feel some form of dilation, as the data streams spilled over your consciousness. If it was mostly compressed and with a few tweaks, you could theoretically pull off spending a week of perceived time within a few hours in real space. That was especially the case if you were observing human memory.

I've heard scuttlebutt on the Runner BBS feeds about battles that could take days of dilated time.

As the twin runners barreled into my view within the fortress, it almost felt like my Sandy had activated, especially because I still had my right eye taking in real space.

Their avatars looked like gigantic identical, classically shaped genies.

Both were lurid red sinuous masses of densely clustered light with representations of data falling off their bodies like water splashing off them. Their upper bodies were idealized male forms, with muscles and curves for days, which blended into an ephemeral snake-like body. They had faces that had comically exaggerated chins set on manly jaws and a permanent five o'clock shadow and balefully glowing red eyes.

They zoomed closer with the speed of an eyeblink and were now looming over the server cluster that represented DWARF STAR.

"Ah ha! Found it, M00NL16H7! Told you it was this way."

"Yeah, yeah, B3H3M07H, whatever. Now hurry up and get the stuff. You can bet 0NYX is alerting Utopian HQ through a dedicated hardline that we can't stop."

It was finally nice to have names for everyone involved.

I also sent out a simple sniffer into the greater cyberspace of the Crystal Palace with the goal to bring me everything it could on Moonlight and Behemoth.

The local BBS feeds and especially the Runner Club, yielded the most data.

They were known quantities there, with a formidable rep and apparently a client list which often fought in vicious bidding wars for their services. There was no indication or any hint of the merging trick they had pulled to defeat Onyx, which was not really surprising in retrospect, given its nature as a trump card.

In netrunner duels, they rarely lost, featuring a 83 to 5 win loss ratio for Moonlight and a 93 to 10 for Behemoth.
Now the question was, do I fight these guys to prevent them from also getting the data?

Mr. Blue Eyes did not pay me to fight a duo of runners, so the answer from my own perspective was simple. If he wanted exclusivity he would've asked me to go scorched earth and deep clean the data on my way out.

I could go nuclear and kill both of them if it came down to it.

"Uh, choom, we've got a problem," Moonlight gestured with his hands and a slice of virtual data emerged from the server and morphed into a holoscreen.

Behemoth took one look and his face scowled, "It's already been copied! Like just a few minutes ago!"

Damn, my daemon could've kept that little fact from registering in the data fortress, but that was a foundation level system of the entire place and would've taken much longer to influence.

"Which means another runner beat us to it," Moonlight said darkly, his eyes flashed as he looked around.

I saw sniffer programs practically explode from his avatar, going in every conceivable direction.

It was a rather brute force approach to the problem of detection, throwing every kind of shit against a wall and seeing what stuck. It was lacking finesse and subtlety but compensated with sheer variation which made it extremely difficult to evade but not impossible. My current Netwatch cyberdeck was made to be the top dog, it depended on me to wield the katana it gave me properly.

Both me and my stealth sniffer 'dodged' the probes, switching sectors and positions in the fortress as quickly as we could comprehend the avenues of attack shooting towards us.

"Anything?" Behemoth looked very preoccupied, judging by his avatar and bandwidth rate, he was bulking himself up with attack daemons and hacks.

"Not yet, but they have to be here!"

"Could they be a second Utopian runner? One that's kept off the books."

"No, they wouldn't touch that data. Not if they valued their jobs or their lives. Not to mention, they would've helped Onyx before we kicked his ass. We've got competition, brother."

"Then find them already! The client is paying for no one else to get this."

Interesting, just what does Utopian have that's causing this much fuss? It was almost tempting to poke my nose into DWARF STAR and see.

What would be more interesting was also to see who wanted it and didn't think that sharing was on the table. This reeked of some rival corp that got wind of it and wanted all the potential profits for themselves. Would that be worth something to Mr. Blue Eyes?

Yes, it would, but actually getting who the client was would require me to get nasty and that meant exposure.

Then the inevitable happened, I got tagged by a sniffer program.

I was furious with myself, there I go, getting greedy again. For fuck's sake, Valerie.

"Ah ha! There you are!"

I materialized my avatar.

The design I had gone for on this gig, was a giant, ghostly white humanoid with clear female characteristics. In real space terms, it would've been ten feet tall and within cyberspace I was rendered to just about match the size of Moonlight and Behemoth.

"Ooh, spooky. So who do we have here? Never seen you before…" said Moonlight with an eager delight, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

That was the problem with avatars in cyberspace, you could customize them all you want, but elements from your subconscious always influenced it. No avatar of mine would ever materialize without appearing in some way referencing a ghost or ghost adjacent concept. As if my subconscious mind was constantly reminding me, 'Yes, V, you've died and come back, only to face a new kind of death.'

A death that all my efforts have only postponed so far…

My Agent pinged me with an alert, the behavior sync of my face plate was getting strained by another fucking seizure. This time my left hand wanted to go berserk and it would surely cause the lovely merc with her shock baton on my neck in real space to give me a nasty shock.

Fuck.

Not fucking now!

I couldn't fight these two conventionally. They would also try to stop me from leaving, I had their full attention and they would trace me straight back to my spot on the couch in the Utopian lobby, right under the figurative noses of their merc squad.
The spike of pain of a migraine from hell also chose this moment to flare up in response.

A quick thought to my Agent and my Pain Editor cyberware got to work. Not the best thing to do, but under the circumstances there was no other choice.

"Anyone home? You deaf, girl?" asked Behemoth. "Who are you? It's just called being polite before we get down to business kicking your ass."

I spotted their tracer program radiate outward despite their best efforts at concealment. My concentration and focus had recovered just enough to evade at this point.

"Wow, okay, she's good, careful bro," Moonlight warned.

"Seriously? Think some nobody can-"

"Hey, she just eluded my Spectra, no gonk off the street can do that."

The time for evasiveness was over. I couldn't match them directly in terms of hardware, but wasn't I in the system core of Utopian's data fortress? None of us at the moment were hiding behind preset firewalls beyond those that existed on a personal level.

I sent a subtle ping to the nearest server cluster and a simple request, addressed to the Utopian dweller. He might not be in cyberspace at the moment, but that didn't mean he wasn't watching from a screen.

It wasn't a second later that I received a ping in response and an answer.

'Yes, fuck 'em up if you can. - Onyx'

Just like that, every server in my sight subtly changed color from the adamantine silver to a soft green. And just like that the entire Utopian infrastructure became mine as I received permissions that sunk into my avatar.

"Oh shit!"

My first attack program manifested as a blaze of digital dark red fire that reminded me of Blackwall's various manifestations. I scowled at the sight and double checked my systems.

Both my opponents barely got junk data shields up to take the hit for them.

My three attack daemons manifested beside me and two charged their avatars down, whilst the third remained at my side and fired a storm of attacks that looked like smart tracer bullets that raced into the simulated space above our heads.

I was acting like a general now, offloading my programs and making use of Utopian servers to take the load and heat from manifesting in me.

My two opponents barely managed to stay ahead of my attacks, their evasions and data shields were adequate, but it was clear they were used to always being on the offensive and doing their merged trick. Separately, their fighting form was sloppy and they had yet to even send anything offensive my way. It made me wonder if their stats from the Runner Club were due to their merging trick and no one had yet caught on to it.

Now they rushed at each other.

"No," I declared.

I manifested a data shredder, which scythed through the space between them, visualized as a dark red beam of death.

They backtracked through sectors frantically, only to meet my melee daemons bristling with hacks, traces, defrags and other assorted nastiness dangling from their sharp fingers.

They dodged, weaved and threw defrags that took the form of data spheres that shot forward.

My ranged daemon threw another storm of attacks into cyberspace, which shot up and rained upon my opponents.

They were so busy shielding and fighting for their digital existence in the fortress, they didn't notice me releasing a worm from the right foot of my avatar. It fell to the construct's floor and vanished from sight.

Moonlight tried to release his own daemon, just about managing whilst desperately shielding himself.

I burned an entire server worth of RAM, gesturing with my avatar's right hand.

The enemy daemon was encased in a tinted red transparent cube, boxing it in before viruses shot from every direction inward and caused it to explode with out of control data replication. A flick of my avatar's hand for extra visual effect and the whole cube was utterly deleted.

He gaped at the display and I had to remind myself that I was technically a foreigner here in the Crystal Palace. The cyberscape of Night City was its own beast, just like its real space streets, only much meaner and even less policed. NC Netwatch only intervened when real systemic fundamental threats emerged. They considered me to be one of those, but had finally stopped sending their agents to die at my hands. The former NC branch director had been fired when he couldn't hide the skyrocketing bodycount and they finally sent someone with a brain to parley.

I smirked as one my daemons scored a hit on Behemoth, his entire avatar flashed as my program went to work.

"To disconnect or not to disconnect, that is the question," I taunted him, sending my voice ringing through the fortress. "Only a matter of time before my trace gets you."

"Fuck you!"

He held up two middle fingers at me, at the same time releasing attack programs from them that scythed through cyberspace towards my avatar.

"How crude," I tutted.

The offensive programs spent themselves on my outer defenses of an invisible junk data barrier. The viruses saw a straight path to me, then suddenly found themselves gorging and replicating on everything from cat videos to the latest yellow screamsheets filled with conspiracy theories.

"That's bullshit!" Moonlight gasped.

Really? Hiding your barriers was just common practice among NC's runners.

I shrugged and released a defrag beam attack that I turbocharged with another server's worth of RAM.

The beams appeared in a grid matrix pattern in three dimensions that shot down towards the twins from every direction.

"Holy fuck!"

They had no choice but to cocoon themselves in replicating shields, devoting every bit of their own bandwidth to the task.

The defrag beams eventually popped through them with no more effort than a finger encountering a soap bubble.

Both could be very glad that I was not in a bloodthirsty mood.

I released a stealth program from my avatar's foot, a little bit of further insurance.

My daemons pounced, managing two full blown hits on both of them.

A flick of my fingers and my minions vanished.

"Gentlemen, you have two choices now, leave and retreat to safety or continue this fight and I find your location in real space."

They knew the latter threat for what it was. It meant I could broadcast their location to every interested party I wanted or even sell it to the highest bidder.

"Fuck, fine! You win."

Their avatars vanished.

I laughed and gestured with my avatar's hands.

A wall of virtual fire swept out and promptly ran into both of them as they tried to be sneaky. Their cloaking program was compromised by my broad spectrum sniffer and this time they truly retreated with their figurative tails between their legs.

Of course, that was when the inevitable happened.

My avatar was promptly boxed in with barely visible panes of blue, my wonderful access to the Utopian server resources vanished - the access codes all changed and reset. I checked my network pathing and sure enough Onyx was trying to truly trap me in the data fortress, to prevent my disconnect and keep me tethered like a fly in amber.

I saw the server infrastructure around me pulse and in front of my prison the avatar of Onyx appeared.

He was painfully ordinary, appearing as only a slightly idealized human wearing a netrunner cooling suit in red with silver trimmings with the Utopian logo stenciled on it. That was always the problem with long term corpo 'runners; they were eventually molded into just another cog in the machine and it reflected in their mindset, which was mirrored into cyberspace. Some corps even had rules on what runner avatars had to look like and it was clear Utopian was also one of those.

"No gratitude for saving your bacon, I see," I had my avatar speak, using a random voice emulation, that for this occasion chose a Texan accent.

"Nothing personal… Aspect [45P3C7]. You may have helped beat off those two yonos, but it doesn't change the fact that you're also a kleptoid in my data fortress! What did you take?"

"Shouldn't you know that? Oh, right, still a bit preoccupied cleaning up the mess I see. There's still the little matter of the solos in your lobby."

"Meatspace," he snorted derisively. "We have a security team en route."

"Thanks for the confirmation," I smiled and waved cheekily at him, before triggering the worm I had released earlier.

My prison shattered and the pieces dissolved into the digital ether.

A flick of another program and my digi-psyche was zooming through the IP port escape route my worm had stealthily held open, just for this moment.

I blinked and felt the normal time of meatspace reassert itself on me.

My optics scanned the lobby of Utopian Corporation one final time, marking the position of each merc and I mourned the loss of so much capability that the server access had given me.

The first target, the female merc with the Sandy.

I took back full control of my body, the behavioral imprint of my faceplate and body language fell away, whilst only keeping my current look.

The woman frowned in confusion at my sudden change, then I smiled at her and her eyes grew wide with alarm.

"Wha…" she began to say, but my own modified and attuned 'Apogee' Sandy kicked in, reducing the sounds reaching my ears to an extremely low pitch.

I burst into movement, rising from my seat and dodging my neck away from the shock baton.

My left hand grabbed her right, whilst my right grabbed her other arm. Her own strength was functionally useless at this moment, and I wrapped her up into a grapple lock, turned her around and she became my temporary shield.

My quickhacks crashed on the remaining mercs like meteors, punching right through the high-end firewalls from their own Biotech cyberdecks, but ones which were all cataloged and solved by runners who were on my level.

It never got old watching my opponents twitch and dance spasmodically when my versions of Cyberware Malfunction and Cripple Movement hit them simultaneously.

Six opponents at once was just about my limit with my current on-board RAM capacity.

My fist crashed into the back of the female merc's head. It was just enough to not kill her, but it sloshed her gray matter enough that she instantly got a concussion and fell into la-la land.

I ripped the shock baton out of her hand and pushed my legs as fast as I could go.

Acutely aware that I had many timers to worry about now, the first merc I reached was given a shock right into his neck.

The second merc couldn't be shocked because the baton's capacitors were drained at the moment, so I sweeped his legs out from under him and drove the baton to smash across his face.

Mercs three and four got my fists smashing into them with combos that sent them slowly tumbling to the floor.

Five got a side kick to the stomach that sent him flying straight into a pot plant, shattering it in the process with his own head.

The actual leader of this crew had some Self-ICE and actually managed to overcome my quickhacks, but with the last second of Sandy time I managed to shove my appropriated shock baton into his stomach and trigger it.

Visible arcs of electricity danced over his form as his Counter Shell weave in his skin worked to limit the damage.

He tried to grab the hand that was holding the baton and even threw a cookie cutter System Collapse quickhack my way, blowing all his onboard RAM in the process.

How cute.

My innate reflexes were well up to the task of pulling my hand away to avoid his grip, whilst my entire body pivoted, and a kick on the back of his right leg sent his balance off-kilter.

My follow up punch was barely blocked as he tried to recover, but my other hand with the baton hit his stomach with a force that could smash concrete, whilst my own ICE stopped the System Collapse - utterly destroyed by pinpoint defrags and counter-viruses.

His own subdermal was the only thing that stopped my fist from turning his guts into salsa, but physics had to be obeyed and he was flung backward to slam into the front desk.

In the local cyberspace, I saw Onyx reaching for the Militech turret above our heads.

Oh no you don't, I smirked and threw my own version of Short Circuit at it.

The turret began smoking as the internal capacitors discharged catastrophically. The ammo inside could only be protected and isolated to a degree, otherwise it wouldn't be able to feed into the barrel breaches at all. Rounds cooked off and exploded, ruining the barrels.

The merc leader was already recovered and charging at me.

Really?

I smacked him with another Cripple Movement, adding a little extra payload to the program to compensate for his Self-ICE. His legs locked up halfway through a sprinting stride, with the inevitable consequences.

I stepped to the side and he fell face first onto the floor, where a kick to the back of his head put him out of the fight.

Mercs two, three and four slowly got up and regarded me wearily with wide eyes and grim expressions.

"Who the fuck are you?" asked number two.

It would be so tempting to actually answer him, but it wasn't time yet. "That is not the correct question."

My Sandy pinged me that it was safe to use again.

Nah.

Instead I overclocked my cyberdeck.

Two Cyberware Malfunctions and a Short Circuit for each merc smashed through their firewalls.

They collapsed to the ground twitching, the occasional spark jumping off their bodies and arcing towards the floor.

My internal cooling got a minor workout bleeding off the extra heat generated by the overclock but it did its job perfectly.

"Isla, I suggest you put that gun down," I said without turning around.

She had pulled out a Tsunami Nue heavy caliber pistol and was about to just aim it at the back of my head. Her body froze reflexively from the tone of my voice and the barrel was aimed at my butt at the moment.

"I can't do that," she said in a strained monotone that told me emotional suppressors were working overtime to keep her calm. Her aim straightened and came up.

She pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded in her hand as all the ammunition in the magazine cooked off at once. My Weapon Malfunction hack had ghosted through her firewalls as if they weren't even there, not even registering to her own OS.

I walked away as she fell back screaming in pain from mangled, ruined hands - leaking lubricants.

She was a secretary so she had one of those crazy hand cyberware that doubled the effective digits you had to type with. It meant that consequently they had to be extra sensitive for the tactile sensors to distinguish what each of the twenty fingers were doing and the signals it was sending to the brain. They were a bitch to learn and now she was going to have to adapt to an entirely new set of hands.

My approach to the front door was unopposed in real space, but Onyx was now using the surveillance cams as vectors to attack me.

He opened with a quad attack of three Cyberware Malfunctions and a Synapse Burnout.

If I had been solely in meatspace then it would've been a challenge, but my partial constant presence in cyberspace meant I had ample time to react. He thought he had the high ground, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The CMs spent themselves on the digital ghost versions of me I projected outward, letting me focus on the Burnout and destroy it with my targeted Defrag Burn.

I wished there could've been a camera that would let me see his face at that moment, as he sat in his netrunning chair.

My attention turned to the door - meat action or cyber?

I decided on the former.

My fist slammed into the inner glass doors, shattering them into a radiant spider web of cracked glass. Its integrity was lost completely and it flopped to the ground pathetically out of its housings.

Next was the armored shutters and two quick punches dented the alloy enough for me to get a proper grip.

Before I could stand though, Onyx tried another attack, throwing a full daemon bristling with Black ICE.

"How rude."

I disliked going lethal as a general rule, my own kill count to the contrary, but those were the streets of NC. You either stepped or you were stepped on.

The daemon was custom, military grade and Utopian had clearly shelled out top eddies for it.
It was not something I could just casually shrug off.

Damn you, Onyx.

A thought to my Agent disengaged both physical and software interlocks, my Netwatch Netdriver was pulled out of my system loops and my other cyberdeck smoothly took its place.

It was mounted in a decidedly unconventional place, behind my armored right scapula bone, surrounded by extra cooling loops, isolated emergency disconnect shunts and even a small directional explosive charge.

It was decidedly necessary when you used a custom self-built, modified Militech Canto MK.6 cyberdeck, that was a direct conduit to the Blackwall AI and every rogue, wild and hostile AI that lived beyond it.

In an instant the hostile Black ICE daemon was stopped cold and began derezzing in cyberspace with dark red pixelation that represented the onboard AI going to work.

With a grunt I pushed with my legs against the floor and pulled with my arms.

My Realskin bulged rather grotesquely as my Gorilla arms hissed and exerted the strength required.

An earsplitting snap and metallic shriek resounded as the armored shutter was forcibly pushed upward.

I began an easy casual walk out of Utopian and back into the idyllic surroundings of the Crystal Palace.

There were only a handful of curious onlookers of various persuasions outside, who had only stopped because it was very odd to see a building locked down at all on the station. On seeing me emerge they only had a small sliver of the lobby to see, which only increased their confusion as nothing was apparently wrong.

In cyberspace Onyx had not taken it well, me no-selling his most potent weapon.

Now he was personally throwing everything from System Collapses, Burnouts, Suicide and even Cyberpsychosis hacks my way via the exterior cameras.

"Hey, uh, excuse me, ma'am," said one of the onlookers. A young guy who looked barely out of his teens and a quick scan told me he was a corpo brat, like I had been once upon a time and he had parents employed in Utopian. "Is something wrong? Why-"

I held up a hand to interrupt him, throwing a Blackwall Gateway straight into the Cyberpsychosis hack, which quickly jumped and spread, gobbling up all the other hacks coming my way. I slipped back into Corpo speak very easily. "Hostile acquisition, a group of mercs are inside and unconscious, security is already on the way. No employees were harmed beyond the receptionist. I suggest you return home Mr. Everett and wait for your parents to contact you."

"On the Palace? Really?" He shook his head in disbelief. "What is this place coming to? Next thing you know we're going to become Night City in space!"

I couldn't help a dry chuckle, even as I checked on the status of the worm I had left in Utopian's servers. It was neatly doing its job, still undetected after having given me an exit from Onyx's little trap. Just a few more seconds before all their surveillance records of me would be history. It had already scrubbed the receptionist's memory and Onyx was so busy trying to attack me he didn't even notice it was also going to work on him as well.

"Hopefully it won't come to that," I said, giving him a nod and walking off.

I felt a little bad about the targeted Memory Wipe I ghosted through his firewalls, but I had more to do on this station and I needed the persona of Mrs. Paigles for a little longer. He would only remember he had talked to some female corpo, unable to recall my name or visual identity. Even his optics' cache was scrubbed of my image.

'You should kill, Onyx.'

The voice was its usual digital harshness. It rippled and grated on the mind like frosted ice surfaces rubbing against each other in a freezer.

'For an AI, you seem remarkably ignorant of the idea of finesse,' I retorted.

The rogue AI from beyond the Blackwall, which was housed within the Canto cyberdeck - who I called Butcher - didn't have anything that could be called emotions. Yet using someone's actual name was remarkable progress for a digital entity that had always referred to people as 'neural matrices', psyches to be harvested and consigned to beyond the Blackwall.

'He wanted to destroy your network.'

'Is that concern I hear in your voice?' I joked.

'Cessation of your network is unacceptable. It would impede growth.'

I rolled my eyes as I finally passed beyond the line of sight of Utopian's cameras and the attacks abruptly stopped.

'Yes, Butcher, love ya too.' My sarcasm was usually lost on the AI, but I was rather astonished to see a large amount of indicative data flow in my personal cyberspace.

I had been very sparing in using my Canto, but I couldn't not use it. It was just too useful and the forces behind my acquiring it had no doubt designed it that way. The Blackwall and Cynosure AIs had decades of time to further iterate and tweak the original design of the Militech Canto MK.6, within the forgotten bowels of the Cynosure Facility beneath Dogtown.

Whether I liked it or not, I was now part of a greater design at the behest of the two most powerful AI in existence.

They wanted me to mold Butcher and in turn be molded.

---

The name of the place was the Black Hole Lounge.

It was on the lowest floor of Torus 4 and continued a running theme in the Crystal Palace for every service business to name establishments after natural astrophysical phenomena.

The interior was suitably glitzy, bright, flashing with neon purple lasers, a high oxygen count to subtly keep people awake and partially high, encouraging them to drink, use the gambling tables and they even had two rows of classic one-armed bandits.

I took a seat at the expansive bar and appreciated the massive wall screen behind the drink slinger, which was showing the constantly rotating perspective of the station's exterior view. The massive blue marble of the Earth loomed into view, slid away to the right and was replaced with the utter blackness of the void. That was a bit too boring though, so the expansive star scape that would've been visible had there been no reflected sunlight from Earth, was filled in artificially into the image.

"Welcome to the Black Hole, Mrs Paigles, what can I give you today?" asked the drink slinger in an accent that my Agent narrowed to West County UK English.

He was breathtakingly handsome, muscled and dressed with a plunging collar line to both show it off and hide it. In NC, I would've normally pegged him as a high end Doll, such was the perfection of his Realskin and musculature. His name was scanned as Chris Gibson.

The menu was caught by my Agent from the public subnet and nothing caught my eye.

"Custom order?" I asked idly.

"Wouldn't have this job if I couldn't handle those, ma'am. Hit me."

I gestured to him in a finger gun, tight beam broadcasting the recipe to his Agent.

His optics flashed yellow as a visible sign that he'd received successfully. "Interesting, coming right up."

So he began a wonderful routine of making the drink; expertly flipping the various bottles through the air, catching them to pour into the mixer, breaking ice into it and finally giving it a vigorous shake. His pecs and arms rippled with each movement in a very eye-catching manner.

He brought out a glass, added more ice in and strained the drink from the mixer, finally topping it off with a pour of ginger beer and a slice of lemon garnish.

It certainly looked like how Claire would make it, but there was a subtle difference given the differing brands of lime juice and vodka available up here.

I carefully picked up the glass when he pushed it forward, gave it a smell and sip.

"Is it satisfactory, ma'am?"

My behavioral imprint wanted me to throw the drink in his face, but I overrode that just in time. "It's as good as it can be, thank you."

My Agent received the cost and I paid with a gesture adding a hundred eddies for a tip.

"Enjoy your drink, ma'am. Out of curiosity, does this drink have an established name? My Agent's search can't find anything in LEO or Earthside matching it."

"Let's just say it's a drink from a bar that has a select clientele," I said with a raised eyebrow.

He got the hint and didn't ask for further elaboration, moving to the other side of the bar to serve another patron who had sat down.

"Drinking on the job, Mrs. Paigles?"

That he had appeared beside me wasn't a surprise.

I took a sip, enjoying the buzz and looked up to meet the shifting neon blue optics of Mr. Blue Eyes.

He was as immaculate as ever, not a hair out of place on a face that was both perfectly memorable and utterly forgettable at the same time. A body that didn't appear overly strong but seemed to project strength, encased in a typical neo-military corpo suit in a cerulean blue, gray and white. I really wished I knew just who was behind those eyes.

I had long since concluded that I was just looking at a Proxy body for someone. Someone, somewhere was jacked in and remote controlling Mr. Blue Eyes.

I hadn't been partially immersed in a synthtech interface down in NC when I had met him as a client in the Afterlife. Now, I could see the cyberspace of the Black Hole and how Mr. Blue Eyes appeared in it and was influencing the data streams. As usual my Agent could pull nothing of significance on him. There was only my own interpretation of the data to go on.

'Butcher? What do you think?'

'Large Neural Matrix detected, encased in a prototype fourth generation Gemini body, Proxy datastreams detected, AI activity detected.'

"I can handle it Mr. Blue Eyes, with no loss of functionality," I said dismissively, as I tried to parse my own AI's words. Butcher's choice of adjectives was frustrating as he was not approaching his observations from a human perspective. Large neural matrix? That usually meant a person's psyche, but why would he use the descriptor 'large'? How could a human's digital psyche be big in comparison to normal? What definition was he using?

Blue took a seat next to me and gestured to the drink slinger, sending a direct request.

Gibson was already done with his previous client and immediately got to work preparing Blue Eyes' drink.

It was a whirlwind of chocolate bitters, Scotch, a liqueur that I didn't recognize because Gibson was just that fast with the bottle and finally Campari. Ice was added, then stirred, before it was all strained into a glass.

Blue Eyes paid and immediately sipped a generous amount. "Ah," he breathed with satisfaction. "I take it you were successful?"

"Yes."

"Any complications?"

"There was," I compiled a general sequence of events using the data from my optics and synthtec interface, before flicking it over to my client on tightbeam.

Blue's eyes brightened slightly as he received it. He didn't take more than a few moments before nodding in understanding. "Not surprising. It would've been preferable if acquisition would have happened without the target knowing at all, but what's done is done."

Translation: I was getting a passing grade, despite it not going exactly to mission spec.

A prompt to my Agent had my isolated memory drive restored back into my system loops and the DWARF STAR data package transferred to a memory shard. A small hidden port broke the seal of the Realskin on my upper thigh and I deftly palmed the shard and deposited it in front of my client.

Blue smoothly grabbed it off the bar and slipped it into a hidden chest pocket of his suit.

"Not going to review it for authenticity?" I asked idly with another sip of my drink.

"If I thought you were the type to betray a contract, Mrs Paigles then we wouldn't be here at all. Suffice it to say, I am reviewing it right now."

That the Gemini Proxy he was using had a non-standard layout shouldn't have been surprising. A shard slot in the chest for a male body was actually quite practical given the prevalence of suit pockets there in men's fashion.

My Agent gave a very familiar and welcome chime as I saw my business account suddenly get a quarter million injection of eddies.

"What next?" I prompted.

"The second stage of your gig here at the Palace," Blue removed another memory shard from his waist pocket.

I regarded the standard, nondescript shard for a moment, running surface level optical scans before pushing it into the slot behind my right ear.

The data on it was isolated, then subjected to every scan my Agent had, which I double checked within my personal cyberspace.

Twenty seconds passed in realspace before I was satisfied enough to truly crack open the data and read it.

Even as I did that, I kept an eye on every bit of data coming from the shard and kept it isolated. The bullshit that I had experienced from slotting supposedly 'safe' shards or seen happen to others doing the same was off the charts.

The gig brief was yet more illicit data acquisition, the difference was now in the method needed and a specific aftermath was required.

"There are specialists for this," I pointed out.

"True, but they require much more prep time and investment. They're not as versatile, if things go wrong."

I saw where he was coming from and downed the last of my drink, carefully compartmentalizing my distaste.

My answer could be no, but that was not really an option.

This overall gig for Mr. Blue Eyes had a huge chance of being my last hurrah.

Even if everything went right… there were no guarantees at the end of this road.

I could reach a dead end or…

"Fine, consider it done."


88888888888888888888888888888888888

 

[Keiran Halcyon]

A/N: The gigs in LEO continues... Thanks to my Patrons and Super Patrons for being awesome choombattas in their support.


Chapter 3


The next gig required some prep work.

I first did a quick check on my virtual Rachel Mcadams. The algorithm running 'her' was still going strong with no hiccups and potential behavior anomalies. The real Rachel, still having a naptime in the toilet. There were six hours left on the clock before I'd need to switch her out for someone new.

Next step, new threads.

To that end, I left Mr. Blue Eyes and the Black Hole Lounge, leaving the man without so much as a wave goodbye.

I merged with the steady flow of pedestrians outside, heading anti-spinward whilst I reviewed the specifics of the gig and other necessary data that had been so helpfully provided, some of which was a full behavioral profile for my faceplate and metanthropic systems.

'Agent, run compatibility analysis on the profile.'

'In progress… 100% compatible.'

Not really surprising, but you could never be too sure. Those who knew the FIA truly had the technology and that it hadn't been a failure were a very short list of people, that Mr. Blue Eyes was on that list, was not surprising. Those who had the knowledge, tech and programming to make a 100% compatible profile, was an even shorter list. It meant he had high-level Militech and NUSA contacts.

Was this entire gig President Myers pulling me in again?

Worry about that later, Valerie.

Blue Eyes had provided a few suggestions for decent clothing stores on this Torus and I randomly selected one of them, a place called Hyperion Fashion.

A tram ride later, I was walking through the threshold of the store and immediately picked up on all manner of scans playing over my body. The only reason I didn't unleash digital hell upon them and the approaching proprietor was that it was all surface level civilian stuff and my current Mrs. Paigles personality smoothly covered any imperfections.

"Greetings, what can the Hyperion do for you today, Mrs. Paigles?"

My Agent ID'd him as Elijah Kramer, a rail thin man with dusky skin that in contrast to almost everyone on the station, didn't look like perfection on two legs. Put him in leathers, big jacket and boots, I could see him as a nomad plying the wastes of western America. His skin had that weathered quality that only long hours in the sun gave. Yet his neo kitsch suit, perfect teeth and leather office shoes stood in sharp contrast. It took me a few moments to reconcile what I was seeing and I realized that it was the whole point, it was the hook and his entire appearance was sculpted to be imperfect.

The store itself only showed minor examples of what was on offer on vidscreens all along the walls and the decor of the place screamed minimalist in a way that Jinguji would approve of. I sometimes longed for the days where I could just go into an outdoor market in Heywood, browse and feel the clothes I was going to buy.

With a few edits, I tight beamed examples of the underwear and clothes I'd need.

His green eyes flashed and eventually he nodded, "We have those in stock. The measurements you sent don't exactly fit you, so I assume this is a gift?"

"You may assume so, Mr. Kramer," I said with an impatient air.

He got the hint. "Very well, would you like a rush order?"

"Yes, scheduling issues," I said vaguely and transferred the money over with a gesture.

He smiled widely, "Excellent, I've initiated the fabrication. It'll be just six minutes. You're welcome to take a seat and drink some of our complimentary offers."

The wall to my left split open and revealed an adjoining room with two luxury sofas with a low table between them. My Agent did a quick scan and I was inwardly astonished at the coffee machine mounted on it. It was a Panama Esmerelda.

I'd thought about getting one for my NC mansion, but it was ridiculously expensive. Mostly because of the service costs associated with keeping the thing stocked. I could buy a brand new Rayfield Aerondight just for the buy-in price alone. It hit home anew that for all I had clawed my way up in Night City to a level of wealth that my old Arasaka corpo self had only dreamed about, that in this pond, I was once again just a minnow.

I sat down primly, crossing my legs as befitting of Mrs. Paigles and placed a gold plated cup under the machine's spout.

It got to work smartly and within moments I had a steaming brew of heavenly ambrosia filling my nostrils. I picked the cup up and sat back, not thinking about the eddie value of the drink in my hands and played my nose over it, breathing it in.

The beverage touched my lips, rolled over my tongue and my humm of pleasure perfectly synced with what the Mrs. Paigles persona produced.
I indulged myself in the moment, as there was every chance that this would be the last time I had the opportunity to drink something like this.

For a moment, I'd thought my Sandy had activated, as the moment stretched and stretched. Another sip, and I vowed to take as long as I needed to savor every milliliter of this brew.

When Kramer returned with an elegant bag that had my new clothes inside, I still had a quarter of the cup left. It was also just as hot as when it had been brewed thanks to the perfect thermal properties of the cup. He smiled knowingly, put the bag down next to me and left me to enjoy the rest of the coffee in peace.

When the last drop was gone, I sighed with sadness at the ending that had to come.

I put down the cup, grabbed my purchase and ambled casually back into the throng of the station.

'Agent, countdown clock, 43 minutes, mark.'

The clock appeared in my optics and I headed to the nearest spoke elevator. My next destination was in Torus 2.

---

Access control in this Torus was much more stringent as it was entirely a residential area for permanent and semi-permanent residents of the Crystal Palace. That being said, there were some general public access areas and stores, simply to cater to the very wealthy, ultra lazy who didn't even want to bother with going to Torus 4.

I was now truly entering the world of the indulgent 1%.

First stop was an establishment called the Pulsar.

I casually paid the VIP entrance fee, which automatically entitled me to skip the queue outside, where twenty-two people were waiting their turn to enter the place.

The music hit me as the doors opened and I passed through numerous security scanners, all of which I hijacked and bypassed. Luckily this place, for all the eddies that flowed through it, didn't see the need to hire a dedicated dweller to keep net security tight locally, relying on the station dweller to keep things secure.

Cheapskates, I thought with a sneer.
The big bouncer with visible Gorilla Arms and standing nearly two meters tall gave my package a cursory scan before nodding me through another set of doors.

Beyond was a club that was Lizzie's wet dream, if she'd still been alive.

The decor, the lights, the furniture, the exotic dancers and strippers - male, female and exotics - all inside a large space catering to every taste and desire.

Exotics were rare in Night City these days. Their heyday had been in the 20s' to 40s', but the aftermath of the 4th Corpo War, the Reclamation and rebuilding of the city, their expense, maintenance requirements and shifting culture had seen the end of any mainstream popularity. You have to look very hard in NC to find exotics and if you did, they were mostly limited to the Animals gang.

I knew of only one club in the city that catered to the very small minority that still embraced some form of embedded animal or classical fantasy trait in the flesh.

In the Crystal Palace, with bioware augs being the preference in LEO, exotics were much more common. Radiation was naturally higher up here and cyberware that wasn't specifically hardened didn't like solar radiation at all. My own cyberware was all military-grade anyway, so I had no real issues there.

My Mrs. Paigles persona and my own curiosity had me stopping by the dancing stage of an exotic woman; she had a bedroom body, a generous bust which was covered by a single strap black top and a more modest bikini bottom. Her ears were savagely pointy, with cream white skin that stood in stark contrast to the luxuriously full mane of red hair that hung beyond her shoulders. A long tail that reminded me of a panther snaked downward from her tailbone, which was sinuously moving as she danced on the stripper pole with a dexterity and routine that I doubted I could pull off, especially as it was synced to the music.

A quick scan of the club brochure from the local net and I had everything about her; Ginette Boudet, French, body proportions, 39-24-36 inches, a brief local bio. She even had a doll chip.

I looked at my timer - it was so tempting to just… a quickie maybe? I'd never been with an exotic.

No, not on the job, Valerie.

Ginette had noticed my interest at this point and was giving me a smoldering look with her yellow cat eyes, making a come hither gesture, smoothly incorporating it with her dancing.

I gave an apologetic look and declined, moving on.

My journey towards the public restroom passed by a section of the club that was enclosed with one way mirrors.

There was no way to tell what was going on beyond it visually, but my hearing could clearly pick up the tell-tale sounds of sex and I could only deduce that it was part of the club that was dedicated to the exhibitionists.

I shook off the thought of that and pushed open the door.

Two of the eight cubicles were in use, so I chose the sixth and closed its door behind me.

With an eye on the time, I undressed and took out my new clothes.

'Release.'

With a ripple of light, muscle and skin, my form returned to my normal state.

The biggest fear you had to overcome when using behavioral faceplate tech, was the thought of it malfunctioning and keeping you stuck in the assumed persona. It was especially a worry for me as I couldn't exactly go to any street Ripper in NC to have it fixed or adjusted. Only Farida, an undercover FIA agent, plying the Ripperdoc trade in the bowels of Dogtown, the one who had installed the faceplate systems in the first place, could look after my health and cyberware these days.

It was shit, because Farida had the most taciturn bedside manner of any ripperdoc in the city. There was nothing I'd like better than to walk straight back into Vic's clinic and have him grouse in my ears about my reckless antics giving him more work. Unfortunately, that couldn't happen. Vic would take less than a minute to find the faceplate tech once he had me opened up and then he'd be on the FIA's radar instantly.

No time for regrets, Valerie.

I selected the new imprint and my body changed.

Much less muscular legs, my inner thighs changed to bring a more prominent gap between my legs. I bore the further adjustment of things down there stoically, breathing a sigh of relief when it was done. My leg proportions also changed, the bone structures shifting, resulting in a height of about five foot five. My torso's wonderful eight pack disappeared again, now gaining a slight bit of belly, my butt grew bigger, before the change moved up to work on my bust - this time giving them much more volume to at least a DD cup. My arms and shoulders were next, losing their muscular definition to become thinner and dainty.

The face, throat and hair was last - and was thankfully over the quickest.

I did a double check of the imprint readings and got 100% across the board.

I let the personality and mannerisms settle on me and eagerly got into my new clothes.

First came the thong panty, then a dress made of a shiny smart material in a dark golden chrome color that instantly hugged every curve perfectly. Next was my new shoes - a wonderful pair of black leather stiletto heels.

That done, I stuffed the old clothes into the bag and kept an eye on local cyberspace for my target.

Three minutes before the timer ran out, I spotted her through a surveillance cam.

Her identical dress to mine was a dark blue at the moment, which I instructed my Agent to match.

It also confirmed for me that the imprint was right on the money; slightly pointed chin, high cheekbones, pouty lips with black lipstick, feminine jawline, jade green eyes that actually glowed and neon red hair.

A quick scan confirmed her ID: Julia Jahnke.

She was technically a highrider, born on the Crystal Palace to two German parents who had been working on board for nearly two decades at that point. She enjoyed both European and local station citizenship as a result. Her job at the Pulsar was as a drink slinger primarily, but she also dabbled as a stage dancer and joytoy to make extra.

Her first stop, as was her routine when she came in to work, the restroom.

One of the two occupied stalls on my right opened, revealing a guy who had clearly emptied his gut's airlock recently. He looked miserably into the mirror over the sink, slapping water onto his face, before steeling himself visibly and walking out.

He passed Julia on her way in and now I was only left with one potential witness.

I took control of the bathroom door and locked it.

There was no cam to give me a visual of my inconvenient witness who was still on the toilet and from the sounds of things, having a slight bit of incontinence.

I queued Memory Wipe, Reboot Optics and a Sonic Shock, slinging all three his way and mentally apologized for knocking him out in the middle of taking a shit. He thrashed and twitched, bumping his leg against the stall, but that was thankfully ignored by Julia.

She was too busy sucking down an inhaler for whatever recreational drug the locals of CP used.

It was also my opportunity.

I opened the stall door and came to a stop right behind her.

Her bliss as the drug's effects hit her system was written all over her face; her eyes closed, a soft moan coming from her mouth, her body relaxing so much she had to lean her legs against the sink to retain balance.

I let her have the moment… before my left arm captured her around the neck in a vice grip.

She didn't even have time to gasp before my MRS hack combo slammed her into unconsciousness.

I pulled her immediately back into my stall and closed the door, releasing the lock on the restroom.

My luck had held out and only now was someone approaching to use the facilities. No inexplicably locked door would be reported to the management.

I put my current identical twin down to a comfortable position on the toilet and began a careful scan to double check for any smaller inconsistencies.

She was wearing spiked arm bracelets, which I removed and put on. Then there were the numerous studs in her ears, hiding underneath her hair, which my faceplate systems could mimic well enough.

In cyberspace, I was hard at work smoothing over the disappearance of Mrs. Paigles from the system and hiding the real Julia, whilst also taking her digital ID for myself. It was thankfully quick work after I extended a physical link from my wrist into the port behind her ear.

Now came the shitty part, as I took her drug inhaler and without hesitation put it to my lips and squeezed.

A hiss and the rush hit my biological systems like a truck.

I was no stranger to many drugs used on the streets of Night City and especially the nootropics used by corpos for improved mental functioning. The recreational drugs of the Palace were their own animal entirely. This one pushed the endorphins and played the pleasure centers like Johnny Silverhand on a guitar. It felt like burning pleasure was radiating from every inch of my skin, pushing inward until…

Fuck, no wonder she could barely keep her balance.
This was an industrial strength orgasm in an inhaler.

It took every ounce of discipline and self-control I had not to release a loud moan to the entire room.

I shuddered and twitched as everywhere itched with need, the urge to use my hands for further stimulation was near overwhelming.

My hypersensitive ears picked up the restroom door opening to admit more patrons, the shifting of the air through the room played over the bare skin of my arms and legs - I shuddered through another climax immediately.

Fuck!

My concentration was slipping and I was barely paying attention to cyberspace anymore.

Maybe I was trying to blend in a little too well here, but the chemical residue had to be there and the faceplate couldn't simulate what it didn't know. This was a designer drug that Julia had ordered from a local druggie, it was unique as far as Mr. Blue Eyes knew. What would also be unique, was its reaction within me.

A third orgasm hit, my world narrowing dangerously to just the feeling of pleasure, the strangled gasps I was making and my hands gripping the sides of the stall. I latched onto the goal of maintaining balance as a singular focus and lifeline.

When the aftershocks subsided, some manner of normalcy returned at last.

A look at my system clock indicated I had spent a full nine minutes in delirium.

I glared down at the inhaler in my hand. It was a lurid metallic pink and one the side was stenciled 'Coaster'.

My faceplate behavior crashed down on me, literally turning my glare into a satisfied, goofy grin as I stuffed the inhaler into Julia's small purse, threaded it off her shoulder and onto mine.

Another brief bit of waiting for the coast to be clear and I finally emerged from the stall, closing it behind me. I laid a small program to fake the door being open to the local subnet. It was overkill, but in truth there was no such thing when it came to this business. The smallest detail could lead to an entire gig being blown or you catching a bullet.

I emerged back into the club and immediately headed to the bar on the far corner. I was half-running, not faking that I was technically late at Julia's post.

A voice shouted over the hard electronic music of the club, "Julia!"
My interlocutor was fellow drink slinger Liam, who was the tall, perfectly sculpted male specimen of every man in the service industry on the Palace.

"Sorry! Sorry!" I hissed frantically and rushed through the employees only door after it unlocked for me.

I was behind the bar a few seconds later, my optics and Agent scanning the position of every bottle. Not only did I have the club's drink list on hand, but also the unique drinks that only Julia made, which she kept on hand in her own Agent. My behavior profile had all the physical tricks she could do with the bottles and this was where my own skills with a throwing knife neatly came in handy as well.

The first customer came and I flashed an eager smile, my eyes twinkling in just the right way, leaning forward to flash my cleavage and the jiggle of my chest, which was clearly appreciated.

The order was for a Canis Major. Yeah, all the drinks here were generally named after stars with a few exceptions.

"One Canis Major, coming up!" I chirped and began with getting out a glass and mixer set.

I flipped a vodka bottle underarm, grabbing it from the air and tossing out two shots into the stainless steel mixer.

In the same flashy way, I poured lemon juice, chocolate syrup and soda water.

I crushed ice by slapping it with a long spoon into the mixer, closed it up and began vigorously shaking. Making sure to both obscure and show off the jiggling of my chest in just that perfect manner that was both pleasing, yet would also frustrate.

I strained the resulting drink into the glass, spearing a cherry on a cocktail stick with a slice of orange and balancing it on top, before handing it over.

The customer flicked a hand at me, tossing me the eddies digitally and I quickly had to reroute the money so it actually landed in the club's account and not my own.

For nearly two hours, I worked in this fashion, slinging a total of 106 drinks and whilst I quickly settled into a rhythm I had to be careful to keep my head in the game. Any inaccuracy would stick out and might be remembered by my fellow barman.

Then my true target arrived at last.

She sat down in front of the bar, wearing a glittering light blue cocktail dress that was smartly transparent in whatever direction she wanted it to be. This meant I was treated to the sight of a designed female body that was like a goddess walking amongst mortals. Her long brown hair just barely covered the necessary bits of chest, preventing me from seeing everything.

Her hazel eyes were smoldering in my direction.

I made sure to flow with the behavioral imprint - returning the seductive look in full and lightly biting the bottom of my lip. It wasn't exactly a stretch, my target was objectively hot and since I was back in the market after… letting Judy go, there was no guilt to feel.

These last nine months, ever since our memorable first date diving into the Laguna Bend reservoir… I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

No, no getting nostalgic, Valerie.

My faceplate had neatly covered my emotional dissonance and I gave a pointed look at my coworker.

By rights, he could've objected to me leaving, but Julia's job required flexibility and this was not a client that any business could say no to.

"Off you go, Julia, I'll make do," Liam sighed. "Good to see you, Mrs. Muller."

"Liam," Lyla Muller idly greeted but her eyes were all on me as I gathered Julia's purse and vaulted the bar. It was just within behavioral range and my target now had a delighted look on her face. She neatly stepped forward into my personal space before I could get my butt off the counter, grabbing my hands to pull me forward to land on my feet.

My lips were immediately captured in a deep kiss, her arms coming around my neck.

I returned the kiss enthusiastically and pulled Julia's 'client' close, my hands coming to rest on her butt and squeezing.

To the world, this was just a very powerful corpo meeting with her preferred joytoy. The fact that she was married was barely a blip on the radar, when her even more powerful husband, CEO Claus Muller of the European Space Agency, was actively maintaining two mistresses of his own.

Their marriage was modern day corpo neo-feudalism bullshit at its finest. Lyla's family were Powerdealers, that ultra rare class of people who truly stood at the top of the pile. Those who could have stood shoulder to shoulder with the late Saburo Arasaka at a dinner party and told him 'no' without fear. These days they could do the same to Saburo's heir, Yorinobu, with even less to worry about.

Her hand in marriage had been part of a contract between that ultra-rich family, Claus Muller and the ESA.

The fact that I didn't know who Lyla's powerful family was, would've been enough to set off all sorts of red flags for this gig. Mr. Blue Eyes had conspicuously left out any mention of who they were in the briefing data.

Even as I was dueling her tongue passionately, in cyberspace and through the club cams, I spotted two bodyguards who were keeping her in line of sight. In NC, you could've mistaken them for Animals, except these guys had top of the line 'ware and sculpted handsome looks that were not an eyesore. That was just the visible security on her.

The invisible security took me a moment to find as I piggybacked along the encrypted links.

Holy fuck.

Twelve of them, perfectly blending into the club's crowd. A true variety team; from a dark skinned gambler playing at a one-armed bandit, who had the lanky build of a highrider, to an utterly forgettable skinny corpo seated in front of an exotic and enjoying the show. All of them were actually armed, with custom weapons grafted into arm cyberware. That they could get away with that in the Palace was a message in itself.

To make the security even worse, I found an elite netrunner running overwatch. The only reason I spotted him was because I had a literal Beyond the Blackwall AI in my corner.

'Thanks Butcher.'

'Threats to your network cannot be tolerated.'

He went even further at that point and layered a scan that unfolded like a book before my eyes in cyberspace, without alerting the 'runner - showing me that this team had scary amounts of bioware and were all packing rad-shielded Sandies that was just slightly below my Militech Apogee in terms of performance. It was an unfortunate reality that the other corps would begin to catch up to the new standard that the Apogee had set. Combine that with 'all the money' and Powerdealer families would want the best for their security.

I could take them, if it came down to it, but that would be blowing the gig into full clusterfuck failure territory on par with the Konpeki Plaza heist that had started me on this path.

Lyla finally broke the kiss and we were breathing heavily, staring into each other's eyes with an eager lust.

I raised a brow at finding her hands on my chest now, idly tracing the curves there. "Go any further, Lils, and we'd have to go to the exhibs section."

"Tempting, but that's not my thing," Lyla grinned, nudging my nose with her own playfully. "Let's get out of here."

---

Her living space in Torus 2 was a sinful amount of space for one person on a space station. It had an effective amount of square footage of a mansion, with artificial views that showed stabilized images of the Earth from orbit.

Lyla liked to make love with the giant 'windows' set to a beach front view of Bora Bora island in French Polynesia. As if her giant space mansion had set itself down on the crystal clear blue waters just off the long inactive volcano rising high into the sky, wreathed in green tropical plant growth. The actual Bora Bora was not so pretty these days, in the aftermath of the 4th Corporate War, but the Europeans were trying their best to restore the place to some semblance of its former glory.

I looked down onto the softly snoozing powerdealer, her head was snuggled on my chest and she was practically draped over me, clutching me like I was her giant teddy bear.

The whole affair between Lyla and Julia, Johnny would describe as 'bent over, cheeks spread wide'.

I didn't need my behavioral imprint to tell me what the sitch here was.

These two genuinely loved each other.

Yet this fucked up world didn't allow for happily ever afters. The world saw something like this and only thought about how it could be used and exploited. Then it found someone like me to shove into the situation and take advantage of this 'weakness'.

Lyla had been tired of the empty life of being nothing more than a pawn for her stupidly powerful and rich family. Julia was a young woman who was just looking to find a better life, leave the world of vice while she still had a soul and had won the lottery to find Lyla. The two of them had fallen in love, but there was no way either of them could move on.

My eyes were closed, my body giving every signal I was asleep to the single hidden security cam in the top right corner of the expansive bedroom.

Yet my focus was in cyberspace as I was slowly ghosting through the firewalls of the mansion's systems and exploring to find a particular data server that was installed here.

The cybersecurity was no joke, and I was already dodging Black ICE daemons who were sniffing around.

They had been triggered with the most minor anomaly when the data rate had spiked for less than a millisecond during my entrance of the system.

Thankfully, my own stealth and daemons were holding, Butcher was also giving a helping hand in his own way.

On this net run, my mind had decided to interpret everything as if I was walking through a gigantic HD forest made out of data, where the trees were data folders, the fruits were individual files. My daemons were still their usual ephemeral constructs floating around me, whilst my own appearance had me wearing a Maxtac uniform. Judy's pilfered uniform to be precise, with which we had spent many a pleasurable evening with, over the course of our now ended relationship.

I spotted a large agglomeration of data structures, virtual trees of data, nesting within one another and branching outwards with limbs that radiated in all directions. These limbs were moving, idly flapping about in some unseen wind. They fulfilled the role of sensory organs, detecting anyone trying to intrude.

My avatar floated around the strange data server and carefully scanned for any potential weaknesses and breach points.

Was this even my target?

I floated above the nested structure and saw dozens more in the distance.

Security through misdirection, neat trick.

I raised my hand and thousands of tiny daemons the size of flies appeared before scattering in every direction on the multiple planes of forest that were above and below the current level I was on.

My attention returned to the first server and I continued my examination.

A giant avatar of a netrunner appeared, looming over the data forest. The runner had partially given himself the appearance of a huge male figure, cloaked with a sinister red hood and robe. His hands and fingers were unnaturally long, from each were hanging a multitude of every daemon type you could care to name and some which were wholly unique.

He sniffed the cyberspace 'air', as if he was some bloodhound. The sound of the sniffs felt like it was right next to my own avatar.

Each sniff was a virtual soundwave that was actually a data packet that was trying to ping off me.

It was a good trick, but my stealth just gobbled it up and replicated the data, presenting him with an undisturbed wavefront. The same thing happened with my daemons as they cloaked themselves briefly.

I waited for what felt like an age in dilated time, before the netrunner that ran security over Lyla moved on, turning his attention to patrolling for outward threats from cyberspace.

This was going to take a while.

'V, incoming data transmission,' said Butcher.

I checked over the incoming data stream and marveled at the audacity. It was using Julia's digital identity. It passed scrutiny right through every hoop of security simply because of that and hooked into my Agent, who routed the call to me in cyberspace.

The neutral face of Mr. Blue Eyes appeared in front of me.

"V," he greeted with a hint of a pleased tone in his voice. "I see you were successful, well done."

"Gig's not over yet, Eyes."

He tilted his head at me, clearly debating whether he liked me shortforming his name. "Yes, but you must realize the accomplishment it is in just getting as far as you have. It's not an exaggeration to say Mrs. Muller is one of the most highly protected individuals in the solar system. How much of her security did you spot?"

"The bodyguards, the hidden spec ops team, the netrunner. Let me guess, there's a second and tertiary team? Always outside any location she steps into."

"Good guess. At least three layers, each operating independently of each other, in case one is compromised in some manner."

The first of my bug daemons began returning, reporting back on what they had found.

"Figures. Are there any updates you have to give me?"

"Just to inform you that Miss Jahnke has been successfully secured from the bathroom you left her in and is being looked after by me personally for the duration of your infiltration. I'll have her ready for reinsertion into the station's data grid by the time you exfiltrate. She'll remember nothing besides taking a bad batch of her designer drug. It will be up to you to wrap things up on Mrs. Muller's side."

"I will- " At this point a bug daemon came back with some success. "I've just found the target, it should be done in two hours."

"Good, I'll let you get to it, V."

The call promptly ended.

My paranoia chose that moment to make itself known as I zipped towards my target, appearing before it in a relative instant.

Getting congratulated on anything by a client wasn't exactly common, especially one like Blue Eyes. I'd bet my custom Herrera Outlaw that the man was a Powerdealer himself, always using that Proxy to stay at arms length of the dirty work that needed doing. Anything goes wrong and he can disconnect from it and send that Gemini body on a suicide mission to take out everyone and everything. Leaving me carrying the potential blame for any fallout.

Was he buttering me up? A sprinkle of psyop to get me hooked into working for him in the future?

Wasting his time. My chances of long term survival after this op… even with my Hail Mary plan… Well, it was best not to get my hopes up.

My daemon swarm surrounded the target server and now it was just a question of finding the weakness.

A faked junk data packet thrown against the defenses was immediately trapped by multiple limbs of the server working together, derezzing the data mercilessly into a rapid scattering of garbled pixels.

I waited a reasonable amount of time, then threw a double attack of junk, spaced a few milliseconds apart.

The first one was caught, the second one penetrated, only to reveal an inner defense of a Black ICE daemon that snagged the junk and defragged it.

My next experiment revealed a third defense, an inner firewall that stopped the junk cold before it threw a replication virus straight into my probe. It was blown up like a balloon before its program integrity was utterly compromised and shattered into useless code that disappeared into the ether of cyberspace.

It was clever, effective and all three layers worked together in shoring up the individual weaknesses that each approach had to cyber defenses.

It would've stumped most netrunners for hours, it was fortunate that I didn't fall into that category.

Adam Smasher had been equipped with the best passive cyber defenses Araska could bestow on that monster. This was nothing in comparison.

The only challenge here was the need to maintain stealth and not just bludgeon down the defenses.

'Butcher, analyze the exterior defensive layer. It can be swamped, but that would alert the system that it was under attack. What's your opinion on avoiding that?'

'Algorithm in an attacking program that will not trigger the defense response.'

He then threw up said algorithm in my figurative face before I could even speak further.

'Yes, thank you, Butcher. I was about to make the requisite changes to a spy daemon, but you just saved me a few minutes.'

The daemon in question materialized in front of me, looking like an ephemeral classical ghost to my perceptions. It hovered patiently waiting for instruction and my hand swiped over it like a claw. Its constituent programming unfurled in front of me like a blossoming digital flower and I got to work.

With Butcher's algorithm inserted, I experimentally compiled a second copy of the daemon using it and grinned with delighted eagerness at the result. The damn thing was barely even visible to me and it was only because it was the work of my own mind that I spotted the faint rippling outline of code in cyberspace.

I recalled the experiment and resumed work on the main masterpiece.

Countering the Black ICE could be done with a reciprocal approach, my spy daemon could counter the defragging by throwing specifically tuned data for it gorge on, but that was not conducive to staying stealthy.

I threw another junk data fragment series to double check just how it detected an intruder.

Recursive Functions? Really?

My daemon was programmed with a module that countered that with a few lines of code.

The inner firewall would be the most complex problem to ghost through. Its detection was down to the most basic machine language level of ones and zeros, which would require my ghost daemon to actually learn the flow of data on that level of the server and effectively mirror it.

My first try to compile my new custom daemon failed rather spectacularly - it burst apart in a runaway self-replication event.

I tried again, only for it to collapse in on itself in logic loop error.

Great.

It took nearly thirteen full minutes just to troubleshoot that one.

My spy daemon compiled, but just as a test, I ran it on a quick virtual machine to simulate and encountered runtime errors.

I was barely a minute into troubleshooting when my attention was drawn back to realspace - Lyla was getting frisky in her sleep.

Now is not the time, I groaned to myself.

Of course, as my luck would have it, I felt her lips latch onto my neck and it was clear she was now at least partially awake and wanted another session.

Fuck.

I was distinctly reminded of a memory from Johnny that had bubbled up from my subconscious, when he had taken my body for a joyride out on the town. The thoroughly drunk fool had tried to have a bit of car sex, whilst his joytoy was at the wheel. Naturally, the subsequent, inevitable accident had nearly killed all of us.

Now I had to do critical programming, remain undetected in cyberspace, where one tiny mistake could result in blowing the whole gig and killing me, whilst stuffing it with my primary target.

Can I say double fuck?

Julia's behavioral imprint was also knocking on the door - stating that she would have woken up by now and begun to return the affection.

'I will continue,' said Butcher abruptly. 'Your effectiveness in programming the daemon is compromised. The mission will fail if behavioral assumptions and parameters are not met. You must reciprocate the input with proper output.'

I couldn't help the giggle my avatar let out, 'Butcher, seriously? That's the nicest way I've ever heard you refer to sex… ever.'

'It's still ridiculous and disgusting.'

'Now that's more like it,' I chuckled as the AI, entirely for my benefit, manifested an avatar and got to work on the spy daemon.

Butcher's avatar had a central human base that vaguely reminded me of my old and very deceased foe, Placide from the Voodoo Boyz. Tall, muscular body but gone slightly to seed with the wear and tear of time. Any similarity to humanity ended there as four heads sprouted out of the neck and dozens of ghostly arms manifested and vanished out of the arm sockets. Hundreds of hands reached into the spy daemon as Butcher began programming at a speed that I envied badly.

I kept my avatar near, but focused properly on realspace, 'waking up' with a soft smile as Lyla's kiss continued down my neck.

Oh, might as well enjoy it.

It was of course, Murphy's Law that just as both of us were in the middle of a delightful session some time later that Butcher dropped his harsh electronic voice into the equation. It wasn't quite a bucket of cold water, but it was just enough for me to return my focus partially to my avatar in cyberspace.

'I'm done.'

'Yes, thank you, Butcher,' I said with gritted teeth.

The modified spy daemon was now hovering there, barely visible and its code unfolding in front of my eyes.

Butcher had taken my program, something I considered an artwork and tuned it to the next level. I eagerly took mental note of the differences the AI had written in and barely stopped myself from gaping stupidly. I wanted to slap myself at having missed these tricks in the past.

Intelligent adaptive runtimes, which took one look at the system resources on offer and changed its utilization to never overburden it.

My avatar's fists clenched with the effort to remain focused.

He had also effectively nested tiny AIs that would never gain cognitive sentience within the daemon, which would smartly manage and adapt to changing conditions, with the singular goal of infiltrating a server and doing so in a way that the server itself would help the daemon, instead of fighting it. It used mimicry, smartly camouflaging itself to make it look like it belonged.

'This is… amazing, B- Butcher. Good work.'

'Your appreciation is unnecessary but acknowledged.'

Without further adieu, I sent my nova spy daemon forward and it breezed through the defenses as if they weren't even there.

I kept an eye on the data flows from the server, standing ready to intercept or act if anything went wrong, even as things in realspace got even worse for my poor battered concentration.

Why could I net run and fight a monster like Smasher simultaneously, but somehow this was a step too far?

I watched as the system clock ticked in cyberspace.

The milliseconds passed by with agonizing slowness, waiting for my daemon to either succeed and return or for an alarm to go off, whereby I knew I'd immediately be attacked by the local security 'runner.

The consequences in real space was something I also had to consider.

Fighting three full ESA spec ops security teams without a stitch on would be a novel experience certainly. I'd definitely have to use Lyla as a shield in the initial moments to buy time. Enough for me to queue and spread Contagions and Blackwall Gateways. Scratch that, Contagions wouldn't work as well with troops that had mostly bioware augments, less cyberware to fuck up and release all those nasty chemicals.

The ESA loved their Smart Guns so those would have to be hacked in a hurry too. They were Arasakas, probably with their own custom soft, but I had all of Arasaka's smart guns solved from a hacking perspective on a firmware level.

That would swiftly bring the fight to close quarters, where my own Liberty and Gorilla Arms came into play.

The first team was hidden in a security safe room on the lower floor of the mansion. A simulation of how long it would take them to reach the bedroom gave me about six or seven seconds before the first one would burst through. They'd lead with Stun and EMP grenades… then be surprised when that did jackshit to me.

My fist would mulch the first one's head and then Butcher would reap his harvest.

Running the sim had done wonders for my 'endurance' in real space and poor Lyla was thoroughly enjoying it.

My nova daemon reappeared in front of me.

Thank fuck.

My avatar's hand swiped through its body and it opened to reveal the bounty of very classified black boxed encrypted data, that only had the codename Hummingbird. It was very tempting to crack open this thing for a peek, but I resisted. Curiosity was something you couldn't indulge in at this level and this knowledge could kill you as surely as succumbing to a Suicide hack. If Blue Eyes needed me to know, he'd tell me… probably.

'All right, Butcher, let's get out of here. We have a lot of sanitization work to do.'

The AI spoke from one of the heads of its creepy avatar, 'What extraction scenario are you going to use?'

'Well, once Lyla and I are finished… if there's one thing to fear on a space station, then it's a fire. At the same time, a general six hour Memory Wipe virus on everyone and the mansion systems for Julia. The fire damage will mostly cover for the missing time, long enough before any suspicions of a probable intrusion can be raised.'

Butcher's avatar flashed and his many arms reached out as he began compromising the fire suppression systems.

I queued up a Memory Wipe and began quick adjustments.

'When was the last time there was a fire on the Crystal Palace?' I idly wondered, shuddering.

'Eight years, two months, six days, four hours and 55 seconds.' Butcher answered promptly. 'A minor electrical fire in one of the Torus spokes.'

'Let's just make sure it's not going to go beyond the mansion, I don't want this to steal the spotlight for my last gig on this bucket of bolts.'

There was going to be no sneaking around, or using alternate identities.

This time it was going to me, openly and efficiently doing my thing.

I had made sure Night City would remember me and now the world would too.

The first Edgerunner to openly operate on the Crystal Palace.

This was going to be fun.


88888888888888888888888888888888

 

[Keiran Halcyon]

A/N: Last gig on Crystal Palace... Thanks to Patrons and Super Patrons for being awesome chooms and help make this possible.


Chapter 4


Back in the clothing and identity of Mrs. Paigles I watched from the crowd of shocked and awestruck One Percenters as they gawped at the mansion going up in flames.

Station maintenance and emergency services had arrived within less than two minutes once my little sabotage had finally kicked in. The fire was already well under control, with various maintenance borgs openly surrounding the mansion and dousing the fire with specialized foam grenades that they launched into any room or area requiring it.

"What is this station coming to? First the pirates of last year and now a fire?!"

"Urgh, borgs, can't they… become invisible or something?"

"Heads are gonna roll for this!"

"I'm calling my lawyer, the ESA is going to pay! I don't live here to worry about dirtside shit like this anymore!"

It was hilarious listening to them complain and I idly made sure my Agent was scrolling the audio of it. Quite a few of my fellow mercs at the Afterlife and Tiny Mike especially would get a kick out of it. If I ever saw them…

I had to forcibly stop my mind from going down that nihilistic spiral again.

That was the problem with having death nipping at your heels for long. The temptation to just give in, let go, to stop fighting and embrace that oblivion became more and more seductive. All the chaos, effort and death wore you down, your nerves start to go and you ask yourself, 'Wouldn't it just be easier?'

With an inward two handed, middle finger salute towards death that Johnny would be proud of, I turned around and wormed my way through the crowd towards the nearest tram.

I purposefully thought only about my last gig on the station, reviewing everything with my Agent as I returned towards Torus 4 and Hyperion Fashion.

"Back so soon Mrs. Paigles?" asked Elijah Kramer with a wide smile.

"Yes, my friend enjoyed the clothing very much, but now I need something else."

I tightbeamed him the outfit specs with the point of a finger.

"Interesting, going retro are we? Especially on the jacket."

"I have another friend who is a sucker for the classics."

"Very well, I see you want smart memory material, that will bump up the price significantly."

I only gave him a bland look in reply.

"Money is no object then. Again, take a seat, the clothing will be ready in an estimated twenty minutes. Apologies for the extra time, but memory material isn't exactly easy to work with, despite what the marketing says."

I took the opportunity for more ultra luxury coffee and left with my new clothes exactly on time.

My next destination was Torus 5.

It was a residential and park hybrid torus, but this one leaned more towards the big events. Lizzy Wizzy had a performing residence here at the moment and Kerry had told me he was leaning towards doing the same, when she moved on in her current music tour.

It was very tempting to hit up Lizzy for a drink. We were both mild friends at this point after I had done a number of 'security' gigs for her at concerts around the world. Most of which revolved around me securing the local net and hunting down a deranged griefer who had been hacking her concert's holo systems and antigravs to fuck things up during performances.

After everything's done Valerie, not now, I thought to myself.

My destination was the Orion Casino.

It was the largest and wealthiest of the entire Crystal Palace and took up almost an entire quarter of the torus' real estate. In terms of floor space and the amount of eddies that flowed through, it made a fair percentage of earthside casinos look like chumps working with small change.

It didn't just have multiple gaming floors, but also boasted hotels at least on par with Konpeki, restaurants and various live entertainment spectacles. How they crammed it all into the torus, whilst balancing mass and the centrifugal forces was a minor miracle of engineering that even left my own techie head spinning.

The place overall looked like someone had lifted old Venice into space and thrown a constantly shifting starfield above each building, projected in holo from the ceiling. It was far from a natural starfield - as it was constantly being worked on by a dedicated artist and an AI called Ferrero.

Walking down the casino streets, surrounded on each side by such architecture and art, the patrons of the place were equally fantastic to match.
Some were dressed in ultra luxury neokitch, others in brutal neomilitarism, but the most eye-catching were those who straddled a line between outright ridiculous costumes meant for a circus and some freaky art house fashion. You didn't know whether to laugh or take it seriously and that dichotomy was the entire point.

One notable fashion that even had me tempted was the pure holo-clothes. Some mid tier joytoys in Night City wore simple holographic tops and skirts, but those were simple things. These creations were literal holo art that a person 'wore' and acted as a moving centerpiece for it. Most of the time the person wearing them at least had some underwear here and there, but occasionally they only wore the holo and depending on the angle you were seeing them, it offered titillating glimpses.

One daring woman was only wearing shiny high tech sneakers and light neon blue holo-clothes that hugged her body mere millimeters above the skin in an alluring natural pattern that reminded me of the extinct zebra.

I allowed myself the time it took walking to my next destination to watch the fantastic sights.

The Auriga was a dedicated gaming floor within the greater casino that dedicated itself to the more traditional games of chance and in an anachronistic fashion, made you play it in a completely analogue way. There were no fancy holos, virtual chips or cards - you played as if it was the 20th Century. The only modern convenience the place held was in banking your bets or winnings.

It was dedicated to clientele who were still alive from that era - meaning they were consequently rich enough and had the fortitude and luck to survive with their fortune through multiple Corporate Wars; the Saburo Arasakas and similar ilk. It also attracted the New Money, as the newest generation of corpo CEOs wanted to smoosh, mingle and get in the good graces of the Old Generation.

This meant the Auriga was also the most secure place in the entire Palace.

Just a casual passive scan as I walked past the fake 'Venetian' building housing the game floor, let me count 39 bodyguards standing over the shoulders of their specific protectees as they were seated at various gambling tables.

I found the double doored entrance and casually passed through a hidden weapon scanner integrated into the wooden doorframe.

I was instantly the center of attention, feeling the active and passive scans of every bodyguard on the floor.

The space was filled with low relaxing jazz music, the air thick with smoke from cigarettes and cigars. The lights bright on each table, making it seem like each was a small island in darkness.

My pace was casual, seemingly indifferent to all the scans, as I walked towards the local restroom.

Once inside I found a stall and locked it.

My new clothing acquisitions were ultra low rise leggings in black that clung to my skin, stiletto shoes with steel tips on the heel. A simple black bustier for my chest and the final piece, a replica Johnny Silverhand Samurai Jacket.

I reverted to my own natural form, so I could fit in the stuff properly.

A sigh of relief escaped my lips as I was finally back in my own skin.

In cyberspace, I was also working with my Agent and Butcher to preserve my fake digital ID for a little while longer.

I dumped my Mrs. Paigles dress in my Hyperion labeled paper bag, picked it up and emerged from the toilet stall as V.

A final check in the mirror, showed my hair was properly reverted to the dark red I favored and the proper style. Sometimes the faceplate systems had issues with coloration of such fine structures and it especially happened if you changed appearances too often within a certain span of time.

My Agent also showed a proper link with the smart material I was wearing, meaning it could split the leggings on my right leg to properly allow me access to my weapon and would work with my faceplate to adjust coloration and even style within certain limits.

I rolled my shoulders and stretched my neck, luxuriating in my true body for a moment, feeling augmented muscles flex and shift.

"Here we go."

I stepped forward, pushed on the restroom door and emerged back onto the gaming floor.

My true digital ID emerged and the clock was ticking until I was flagged as an anomaly on the station.

The first bodyguard I passed at a Blackjack table, frowned at me, his optics flashing as he passively scanned me.

The guy was over six and a half feet of muscle encased in a corpo suit and he visibly twitched as his own Agent was no doubt delivering my public profile to him.

I gave him a lopsided smile, flashing my own blue optics at him with a knowing look.

He was clearly tempted to raise the alarm amongst his team of two other meathead bodyguards, who had their backs to me, but after a long few seconds he relaxed his hands, folding them over his stomach.

He was clearly stuck in a dilemma - if he made a fuss for nothing, then he risked angering a lot of very angry powerful people. If I really was here to fuck shit up, then he would be target number one to die. His eyes were cool, professional but I caught the hint of 'Oh shit, oh fuck' in them.

It was moments like this that made my rep worth every bullet fired and drop of blood shed.

I kept my hands in sight and every body language signal I was sending as casual. It unfortunately didn't help reduce the stress this bodyguard was feeling. Gone were the days where you could trust those sorts of signs. The fact that I didn't have a gun in hand was also immaterial when you were also known as a prolific combat netrunner.

The next table had a poker game running between the CEO of Raven Microcybernetics, Roman Fellini, Petrochem's Lars Muhammad and Tsunami's Hideki Kobori.

The bodyguards of these esteemed gentlemen locked optics with me and visibly glared, as if daring me to try something.

I spotted in cyberspace the signal between the lead bodyguard and Fellini.

The CEO of the company that made one of my personal favorite cyberdecks, looked up at me with an intrigued smirk as I walked past them.

He was well into his 90s but didn't look a day over 30 and it was only in his optics that I could see the weight of years on him. This was a recurring theme amongst most every power dealer in the room. There were only a handful of them who were like Saburo Araska, wearing their advanced age like a mark of pride, but with the internal bodies of the young thanks to organ and cyberware replacement.

Halfway through the room my path was blocked by a wall of muscle nearly six and half feet tall. The bodyguard could've fit right in with the Animals, except he actually had a normal if somewhat attractive face that wasn't discolored from abusing Juice.

I looked up into his blue optics that were set in a stubborn stance as he raised a hand, palm outward to halt my advance.

My Cripple Movement went through his firewall like it wasn't even there.

A dodge to the side and I'm past him, though his two buddies clearly objected to my not getting with the program.

Both had top-tier Gorilla Arms, which hissed as they flexed with potential strength.

My Sandy activated as I dodged goon number one trying to bear hug and crush me.

He got a CM and Short Circuit for his trouble.

It looked hilarious - a massive guy in a suit trying to hug air, absolutely frozen, whilst his own cyberware capacitors discharged into his nervous system, arcing over his body. He was totally unable to stop his momentum and tipped over, until he face-planted into the floor. His frozen arms serving to prop him up and keep his ass in the air.

Goon two threw a three punch combo with enough strength that would've obliterated concrete.

I danced aside the hits, slapping them away, firing off a CM and tuned Overheat.

The cookie cutter Overheat had the potential to be lethal, overheating cyberware and flesh made for a barbeque after all. This one did enough to induce an effective mild heatstroke in the organic bits of a person, which promptly led to unconsciousness. He'd feel like shit when he woke up, but it was survivable.

"Ha! Ha! Bravo!"

The man clapping was Menshikov Arseni Yakovich, Senior Board member of Techtronika and it had been his bodyguards who I had just practically humiliated. In fact, it seemed he had sicced them on me just to see how I would handle them, judging from his amused expression.

"Yakovich, it's your turn," said his fellow at the Baccarat table in annoyance. It was with annoyance that I recognized that fucker and I was seriously tempted to let Butcher loose and gobble the asshole's psyche to beyond the Blackwall. It was Roy Levack, CTO of MoorE Tech.

He was also an NC denizen, whose limo had accidentally ploughed through ten children on their way to school, just last year. The fucker wasn't arrested for manslaughter or criticized by the media due to his wealth and power, nor did he lift a finger in compensating the families of those affected. That same night after the accident he was seen smooching at an election fundraiser for Councilman Gonzales.

I gave Levack a flat stare, weighing the hassle and shit I'd have to deal with if I killed him right there.

Unfortunately, he was not part of this gig and while I could improvise and adapt with the best of them, my professional instincts railed against the thought of an unplanned assassination. He might've been rich corpo scum who didn't give those below him a second thought of consideration, but it would achieve nothing in the long run. There was another just like him, waiting in the corpo structure to be elevated into his role.

"V, is it? Love your work," Levack gave me a lecherous grin. "I'm sure I have Rogue's number somewhere. Be giving her a call soon."

Though the majority of my gigs in the last few months had come to me directly, because my rep had somewhat transcended the normal dynamic of fixer and merc, I was still technically on Rogue's list as one of hers.

I put the asshole out of my mind, giving Yakovich a nod in turn as I passed the table. I liked his company's weapons.

At this point, the news of my presence had spread across the game floor. I was under the eyes of many powerful people now and kept my purposeful walk towards the 'Employees Only' door. The din of low chattering voices reached my augmented ears, wondering why I was here, what my gig was, whether they should call Europol station security, expressing wonder at the presence of an Edgerunner of my caliber on the Crystal Palace.

I heard all of it and could only think of Jackie.

Becoming the stuff of legend was his thing. I had just wanted to survive in the aftermath of being an ex-corpo who worked in Arasaka Counter Intel. That first month after I had been fired had been the worst of my life, worrying every moment about getting tracked down by any corp that wanted either revenge or looking to gain knowledge of Arasaka through me. I had felt so small, tiny, insignificant, a bug waiting to be stepped on.

Now here I was, my name on the tongues of a room full of power dealers.

It was as I approached the door that my attention returned to cyberspace; the call had already gone out from one of the employees manning the tables.

Butcher had already intercepted it, posing as the automated Europol receptionist.

I threw a daemon into the local net that effectively made a snapshot of the security system and replaced the output signals with the 'situation normal' ping to the rest of the Palace. It was my go-to hack for isolating any area I was operating in.

Through the door, I was greeted with a long carpeted hallway with muted lights and a number of doors on either side.

A door on my left swished open to reveal a formally dressed waiter with a tray of filled whiskey glasses and a tall bottle.

"Uh, sorry ma'am, you can't be here."

I breached him and within seconds he was unconscious.

My hands snapped forward and caught the tray that fell from nerveless hands, rescuing the whiskey that probably cost enough to pay his salary for an entire year. A quick scan had me tempted to swig the bottle; it was a 70 year old Glenfarclas Scotch. It could by rights have been in a museum, yet up here these assholes drank it over a deck of cards.

"Sorry choom," I said, looking down at the collapsed waiter. For the sake of his job, I put down the priceless whiskey next to him, a few feet in front of his face, so he could recognize what was in front of him, yet not accidentally knock it over or break it.

I eyed one of the glasses of poured whiskey…

"Fuck it."

My hand swiped one and I downed the whole thing in one gulp.

Oh… oh wow.

I tasted marmalade, honey, coffee and sherry notes all at once, whilst a nutty scent hit my nose.

Tequila was more my thing, but you eventually became a connoisseur of anything alcoholic when you frequented the Afterlife.

The empty glass was returned to the tray and I resumed my leisurely walk down the corridor.

Third door on the right was my destination. It looked utterly ordinary and had no markings or any indications of what or who was beyond it. In cyberspace, that was a very different story. Just this simple lock had a team of dedicated Black ICE daemons defending it. Anyone trying to cookie cutter hack this would find their brain fried in short order.

"Realspace it is," I muttered.

My right hand surged forward smashing against the edge of the armored door twice. It created enough of a gap for my fingers to find purchase.

Custom militarized Gorilla Arms strained and internal actuators whined.

The door put up an impressive fight, to the point that I had to stop and let my arms cool down before trying again.

Finally I heard a tell tale snap and the door's mechanisms lost the battle of physics.

The door was half open when I heard the faint click of a gun mechanism, as a trigger was about to be pulled from inside the room.

My Sandy was engaged with a thought and I ducked, rolling into the room beyond.

The loud electric crack of a tech weapon gunshot reached me as the bullet missed me by a few handwidths, burying itself into the equally armored wall.

The micro radar ping my Agent let out returned the details of the room.

A relatively large office space; 430 square feet, 9 foot ceiling, fancy modern desk that looked like it grew out of the floor, smart frames filled with constantly cycling artwork and the shape of an optically camouflaged man standing three feet to the left of the desk, aiming an Araska Kenshin where I had just been.

Even as my roll was completing, feet just about to touch the ground again, I was already digging away at his firewalls.

He had a Self-ICE module installed, which was naturally fighting back against my hack into his personal network.

It was a stock model from Rostovic and no runner worth their cyberdeck hadn't already written a hack to obviate these over-the-counter solutions. Usually, rookie runners just overwhelmed a Self-ICE by feeding it hacks until it overloaded. Professionals just needed to fire off one custom virus and send the module into a runtime frenzy, overheating the processors before internal safeties kicked in and it shut itself down.

My counter to Self-ICE was to turn the thing against its user.

A custom trojan worm that it ignored, slipping into the personal network, until it reached the module itself. Normally the Rostovic took the hostile program trying to screw shit up, quarantined it and came down like a sledgehammer on the hostile data. My worm piggybacked on that function and when the hammer came down, it actually served to only unleash the payload within.

"Aa…rrr….rghh!"

My hidden Short Circuit unleashed itself on the man as I rose to my feet, the sound reaching my ears distorted into a deep base as the Sandy skewed my perceptions.

The electric arcing and discharge haloed his outline and his camo started to fritz, leaving parts of his body visible and other parts transparent.

His gun went off again, shooting into the floor as his finger contracted involuntarily on the trigger.
In sheer reflex, my right upper thigh opened to deliver my own pistol, but I halted the process when I saw my opponent was starting to collapse.

I let my Sandy shut down prematurely to help its cooldown process and my perceptions normalized.

The optical camo failed utterly now as the man thudded onto the tiled floor, his legs awkwardly bent and arms splayed outward.

In contrast to his austere surroundings, he was wearing a floral shirt, classic jeans and synleather boots. I didn't want to think about the extra cost for those to be synced with the optical camo tech in his subdermal layers. When I wanted to go invisible passively these days, I usually had to wear my netrunning suit as an underlayer, I couldn't be bothered forking out the cash to have all of my wardrobe treated.

Thank God the early days of my merc career were over, when I had to fork out the entire pay for a low level gig just to get one set of clothes compatible with optical camo.

A quick scan and my Agent brought up the details of my attacker; Victor Anglés, the owner of this office and the primary target of this last gig.

He was a Spaniard, hailing originally from Seville, but now working for this casino as a floor manager. The problem was he had let this lofty position and new level of wealth go to his head recently. At an art auction in England, he had been bidding for a certified original from Salvador Dali, an artwork with the clunky title 'The Disintegration of the Persistance of Memory'.

He was promptly outbid by my own client, who had a significantly better wallet on the day.

Victor didn't like that and so hired a team of local Edgerunners to steal the artwork in transit.

He then promptly returned to LEO, thinking he would be free and clear from any reprisal. It was after all known that the Crystal Palace was 'secure'. There were no mercs operating on it and unless my client went through the even more expensive and time consuming route of securing Europol aid, then the artwork would be forever left in Victor's grubby mitts.

So my client went to the place known for the craziest mercs on the planet, hoping there would be someone who would take a gig on the Crystal Palace. He just so happened to arrive while I was negotiating with Mr. Blue Eyes on the details for the gigs he wanted me to run.

I immediately saw the potential in the gig as being the thing that would splash my name all over the planet.

I stepped forward and kicked the gun out of Victor's limp hand, kneeling next to him to begin feeling his pockets for anything like a physical keycard or a code token. My scan pinged something on his neck and it revealed a gold chain with a tiny statuette of the Virgin Mary, within which was an RFID.

My hand grabbed it and with a light tug I ripped it off his neck.

"Found anything yet, Butcher?"

"Behind the smart frame." He pinged and highlighted the frame in my vision, on the left wall relative to the desk.

I hurried towards it and began feeling around the edges, carefully scanning the frame for any sensors or traps.

"Hiding a priceless physical artwork behind another digital artwork display no one would look twice at. I can't decide whether it's clever or too obvious."

The first hurdle was a simple contact sensor on the rear of the smart frame. The frame itself was another security measure as it would sound an alarm if any accelerometer inside detected movement.

The weakness here was the Kiroshi smart frame itself. It did not have the internal firmware to stop even a cookie cutter runner, no matter how much ICE you loaded onto it. The limit was that you needed a certain level of hardware to support defensive firewalls and daemons. The armored locks on an office safe room could have that, not a smart frame.

My viral attacks went straight through defenses without even the firewalls registering them.

This let me fool the contact sensor as well and I lifted the smart frame off the wall.

Beyond that only a bare black wall to the standard optic.

My Cockatrice Kiroshis spotted the minuscule flaw in the physical camouflage in front of me; a less than hair width imperfection in a seam of a hidden wall panel.

I held up the Virgin Mary statuette and interrogated the onboard RFID for its encryption scheme. Even with this, it wasn't enough to open the panel as my Agent highlighted further details as it displayed for me a generated radar image of the guts behind the panel; a directional microphone, clearly waiting for a vocal passphrase component to open it.

Well, clearly Victor wanted to admire his painting from the comfort of his smart foam office chair without having to get up.

I was hoping to avoid this.

I carefully put down the smart frame and returned to the unconscious Victor, unwound my personal link from my wrist and inserted it directly into the neuro port behind his right ear.

His internal network and systems was in crash recovery mode, trying to resolve everything keeping him unconscious. Thankfully, my Short Circuit, while not entirely my own work, (A collaboration between Nix, Yoko and myself), was specifically designed to gum up the works of bio recovery systems that came standard to everyone with general cybernetic interfaces and even dedicated recovery cyberware like a Second Heart. It would take him about eight hours of further enforced nap time before his systems worked through the issues I had induced.

In this state, it was easy to breach into any onboard supplementary memory, including the cache of his own optics and ears.

He had set his own memory to clear cache every 12 hours, which was quite handy as it allowed my Agent and Butcher to quickly sift through it to find the passphrases and any other security procedures he had in place for the painting.

I disconnected, running a quick self-diagnostic.

Nothing came up after a full scan - which I was thankful for. A lot of netrunners carried Black ICE around their neuroports, to deter physical linking if they just happened to be sleeping or unconscious. Butcher also doubled as a very hostile anti-viral for my personal network.

Back at the wall panel, I had enough data for my faceplate to initiate an imitation of Victor's voice.

"The Chromosome of a Highly coloured Fish's Eye Starting the Harmonious Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory," I drawled in a deep south Mediterranean accent of Spanish.

That combined with the RFID, did the trick.

The seams of the hidden panel split, pushed out and lowered to reveal a darkened recess.

Another smaller panel emerged and lights switched on to reveal the true artwork I was after.

It was actually quite small, only thirteen inches in length by ten inches, mounted in a classic wooden frame, hand carved by a carpenter from New York in 1954. The whole thing was actually an evolution of an earlier Dali painting, 'The Persistence of Memory', with elements of that painting being flooded in water and depicting the effect it had on them.

The whole thing was supposed to be an artistic representation of the first revelations scientists had made about quantum mechanics - the breakdown of matter into atoms.

It was… interesting, I suppose. Dali wasn't exactly to my own taste and I preferred early 21st century art to hang in my mansion.

I shook my head to clear it from aesthetic contemplations and got busy with the procedure to dismount the painting from the panel.

Victor had made some provision for quickly removing it, since it was a very valuable asset that he wanted to be able to grab and run.

To facilitate this, there was a cluster of ten touch sensors arranged in a classic numeric keypad to the right of the painting, hidden behind the surface. With a bit of help from my left hand, I arranged my right hand fingers into the proper positions and pushed down on the sensors without hesitation.

There was a click as the mechanism let go and the Dali painting inched forward, slumping on a single retaining wire that prevented it from falling to the floor.

From there it was as simple as lifting it off the panel.

I gave a satisfied grin of triumph and walked back to my dropped shopping bag, wrapped the artwork in my leftover clothes and picked up the bag in my left hand.

My Agent pinged for my attention and it brought up a security feed of the gaming floor in my vision.

I sighed as it helpfully highlighted a nineteen member strong Araska special ops squad that were moving amongst the gaming tables. They were all in their typical black outfits and armor, with monomolecular katana style blades gleaming in the overhead lights. None of them were armed with the typical Masumune assault rifles, Shingen smart weapons, heavy weapons or even a pistol as the ESA set strict rules on what armaments corpo security could bring to the Crystal Palace.

The sea of bodyguards they were moving through had drawn their own weapons in response; which was a wide variety of melee weapons as well; some blunt, some edged, all augmented with modern tech to give them all sorts of lethal twists. There was even one guy with a damn Cut-O-Matic chain sword, where had he fit that thing in?

"Well now doesn't this have the potential to be a clusterfuck," I chuckled.

Arasaka could sometimes be so predictable.

I knew that there would likely be someone from the local Arasaka office here and that when I showed my true face it would elicit some sort of response. The local director would jump at the chance to bring the head of Smasher's Bane to the young emperor, Yorinobu Arasaka.
What I did not expect was for him to throw Arasaka's entire elite security contingent at me.

Not to mention set them into a pool with the most highly trained bodyguards on the planet amongst power dealers who could command heaps of shit to land on Arasaka, if their ninja's so much as disturbed a hair on their very valuable heads.

I began to laugh.

A fit of humor that seemed to erupt from my stomach and just demanded expression.

'Oh this is perfect,' I thought.

Still chuckling and giggling, I secured the shopping bag around my left hand, twisting the flexible handle into a partial knot.

I hurried out of the office and back down the corridor.

The Arasaka ninjas were almost ready to breach through the employee door. They were stacking on either side, their blades held high next to their heads, keeping them out of the way from their comrades.

In cyberspace, the battle had already begun.

My security daemon was fighting against what had to be a local Arasaka runner, judging from the viruses, worms and hacks that were being used.

I hijacked more of the casino's server infrastructure, setting loose five more daemons to play with the runner. It was tempting to sic Butcher on him, but I needed my AI free for the action to come in realspace.

My advance paused just a few steps outside the door as the first soldier readied a flashbang grenade on the left side, whilst on the right, the other inched his hand forward to push it open.

Then I purposely let my feet make noise as I finished the last few steps.

I could see both spec ops freeze as their own heightened hearing picked up on it.

My Sandy engaged and right foot surged forward to hammer into the door.

The stiletto on that foot barely held up to the abuse as the door went flying off its mag runners to crash into the three ninjas who had the bad luck to be in the way. The cramped conditions with so many VIPs and bodyguards didn't leave much room for a proper tactical envelopment.

My first blurred sprint carried me to the left, where another kick to the groin doubled over the soldier. Such was the speed of my kick, that my stiletto heel almost penetrated the stab proof rated groin armor, but physics ensured that the soldier was in a world of pain.

My right hand snatched his blade, before a moment later, a follow up kick to the chest sent him flying into his three buddies behind, resulting in a cascade of bodies falling backward.

The pilfered blade was a typical Arasaka weapon; dark matt green finish, logo stenciled near the hilt, but of supreme quality given it belonged to an 'elite'.

It parried the strike of a soldier with a thermal blade in a blur to my right, as he also activated his own Sandy.

Our blades traded blows and within two real time seconds, we had already tested each other's guard eight times.

Sparks and small hints of flame erupted between us.

When he was just that moment too late to match my strike, he lost both his forearms as the sharp blade cleaved through armored steel, circuitry and actuators. My Short Circuit sent him twitching to the floor in agony.

My perception of time normalized and the three soldiers I had buried under the door, shoved it off themselves.

To my left, the four I had used as bowling pins surged to their feet, while the three to my right tried to rush me around their armless comrade.

I burned all my local RAM and all seven sprinting soldiers, three of them with Sandy's active, froze as my rapidly queued Cripple Movement hit all of them.

Their momentum dictated that they continued forward and within a moment I had seven 'saka elites kissing the floor at my feet.

A quick overclock of my Canto, followed by a coolant flush, allowed me to further spread Short Circuits in a truly ridiculous manner. Both Nix and Yoko would've called bullshit. The seven 'saka soldiers agreed as they twitched and moaned in pain as their cybernetics discharged their capacitors in a truly nasty manner.

The twelve remaining didn't hesitate to try their luck in overwhelming me.

Only problem was that their own now unconscious comrades formed a nice little corridor with their bodies in what was a lucky accident. The only way to approach me was either to jump over the wall of asses sticking in the air or charge straight to my front.

The first two to reach my little arena jumped in from the left, their blades held high and slashing towards me.

A dodge and block followed by riposte took care of one, sending his head flying one way and his body collapsing behind me.

The second jumper tried to wheel around in a blur of Sandevistan, but my own Sandy was already engaged again, stopping his attack on my back with an inverted blade.

A follow up kick sent him crashing into the wall; a gong of bent steel reverberating around the entire room.

"Haaaa!"

Three 'sakas charged me from the front with glowing thermal blades.

One blade was held forward tip first, trying to skewer me, whilst the remaining two were poised for slashes to my left and right.

Hitting them with CMs would only plug my little arena off and force me to leave it.

I had to dodge quickly left, right and bend backward at the waist to avoid thrown Tanto knives from some of the 'sakas who were not content to wait their turn.

In my annoyance, I picked the cheapest quickhack I had and adjusted to be way more useful and queued it on all seven remaining soldiers.

My custom Blind Optics, a retooled version of the cookie cutter Reboot Optics, wormed through the firewalls and strobed their visual cortexes as if I had detonated a flash bang in their face.

"Aaargghg!"

The soldiers reeled letting out a chorused scream of pain, some only barely managed to keep hold of their blades, whilst those with throwing weapons dropped them and futilely clawed at their eyes.

My blade intercepted the lunging 'saka's weapon with a twirling slash going left to right, driving his weapon towards his own comrade.

My speed and strength was such that the thermal weapon slapped his fellow ninja's armor and began burning through the outer layers.

I used the last of my Sandy time to dodge right, causing the third slash to miss me entirely.

Internally, I used up another cartridge of coolant flush on my cyberdeck, allowing me to throw a Blackwall Gateway to my left, which quickly spread and jumped to the other two.

I took a step back as the three 'sakas began screaming and writhing, their bodies twisting into painful caricatures as Butcher took his harvest of their psyches. Only I saw the awful digital red fire that erupted from their bodies like an aura of fire.

Their bodies collapsed to the floor, now useless sacks of meat and steel.

My Optics hack had run its course and now the seven remaining soldiers saw me standing casually with pilfered katana and shopping bag, surrounded by their dead or unconscious fellows.

Millitech, Kang Tao or any other corpo soldier would've immediately called for a retreat at this point.

I knew Arasaka would not.

"HAAAAA!"

It was their damned honor overriding their common sense. They couldn't go back to the local director in failure, especially since he was in the room.

All seven first tried to tag me with throwing weapons.

I was already moving, dropping my blade, picking up the dead body of a soldier at my feet, letting it take the three hits I couldn't dodge.

My body twirled around to build momentum and I chucked the body to meet the soldiers now jumping through the air to reach me.

I continued my economy of movement, ducking again and regaining my blade.

Four blades were now slashing down to carve me into little bits.

My left fist anchored to the ground let me continue my spin, flaring my legs outward in a useful move from Capoeira I had incorporated into my training and skill set.

It let me quickly gain some space, retreating backwards just enough for their blades to miss and strike only air and floor.

I came back to my feet, my blade whipping through the air.

I beheaded the one to my right, the blade continued but was deflected enough for it to end up buried in the shoulder of the second ninja.

It had lost its molecular edge and was now reduced to just being very sharp, stopped by the titanium laced ribcage of the 'saka elite.

My left leg snapped out, kicking the hands of the third soldier, still trying to reset his balance.

His blade went flying, the thermal edge leading the way and embedding itself into the torso of his neighboring 'saka who had just been about to try and slash me again.

My foot lashed out again, crashing into the chest of the disarmed elite and he was sent flying backwards to perfectly land in the gap between the nearest two game tables. The bodyguards there barely dodged out of the way in time.

I had fucked up a bit on the angle and I had heard my stilleto heel crack under the punishment.

Now I was forced to stand on the ball of my left foot to retain balance… annoying.

The 'saka who had my blade lodged in his chest by now finally focused past his pain to do something.

With the speed of a striking snake he tried to latch onto my right arm with his hands to improve the chances for his three remaining buddies.

I glared at him and simply let go of my blade, using my forearm to deflect the attempted grab.

It left him wide open for my fist to smash into his neck.

It was a place that was rather well armored in the gear the 'saka spec ops wore, but the head still had to be able to turn, which required flexibility.

Now instead of being beheaded, it merely damaged vertebrae and transferred a ton of kinetic force that rippled outward, disrupted nervous system control, breathing and gave a nasty concussion that instantly resulted in unconsciousness.

That the last three still attacked me despite everything…

It made me angry, frustrated and it spoke to the reason why, all things being equal, Arasaka would always lose in the long run.

I overclocked and unleashed the Blackwall Gateway on all three, just as they were blurring towards me with Sandy's activated.

The screams and contorting bodies came.

They collapsed at my feet, writhing, their momentum forcing me to contemptuously hop over the now dead bodies.

It took about four seconds for the screams to stop.

The jazzy soundtrack of the casino game floor resounded in my ears as I was fearfully regarded by almost every eye in the room. I could see some intrigued faces from a number of power dealers, some were delighted, clearly entertained at the impromptu bloodsport they had witnessed.

There was one person among them who was not delighted at the turn of events and the failure of the 'saka elites.

I grabbed one of the fallen thermal blades and walked in his direction.

To his credit, he did not move or try to run away. He only had one bodyguard, who looked ready to try his luck, but a curt gesture from his principal told him to stand down.

I stopped behind the man and held the thermal blade mere inches from his left ear.

"Director Matsui Norishige, head of Arasaka's Crystal Palace office," I addressed him formally, even doing him the courtesy of an appropriate bow.

He turned his head to regard me out of the corner of his dark brown eye. "V, the Yurei of Night City. Are you going to take my head?"

He spoke in fluent Japanese with a Kyoto dialect. At this point I didn't need translation soft' to speak, read or write in the language, something I had done in preparation for the day when Arasaka picked up the pieces I had left in my wake and Yorinobu wanted to even the score. The name of Yurei was one of the more amusing ones that the rank and file of my old company had bestowed on me, if somewhat on point.

In Japanese folklore, the yurei was a deceased person who had not been able to join their ancestors in the afterlife; condemning them to wander around in limbo for eternity.

"I probably should," I replied in fluent West Kanto Japanese. "You called practically your entire security contingent to kill me. Should I take this as a formal declaration of war from Arasaka? Am I going to have to kill my way up the steps of the young emperor's Tower in Tokyo to enjoy any moment of peace in the future?"

"No, no!" he shook his head frantically. "It was… it was, my responsibility only. When I saw you walk in…"

"Hmmm, so you thought you could score big with Yorinobu and the Taka controlled Arasaka Board, if you brought them the Yurei's head?"

"Yes! It was… foolish. Please, do me the honor of a death at your blade."

I sighed, feeling very tired all of a sudden. Arasaka bullshit! Johnny had a point when he said that they wreaked madness wherever they went.

"You're trying to avoid the shame of gutting yourself in ritualistic suicide before Yorinobu. My Agent indicates you have a wife and two daughters. They'll likely be forced to watch."

Norishige's hands clenched on the table. The two power dealers sharing his table, a board member of Akaromi Biocorp and a director of SegAtari, had faces of granite as they looked at him with expectation and hostility. Neither appreciating the fact that their precious skins had been endangered by him unleashing a double hit squad in their presence. In fact, they looked about one second away from ordering their own bodyguards to do the deed anyway.

The only thing stopping them was the thought of consequences for their residence visa and business operations on the Crystal Palace. The ESA could come down like an orbital strike on any corp that messed with the Palace's reputation and infrastructure. As it was, Norishige would also face the heat from them for unleashing his security on me. At best Araska was going to be hit with a huge fine in the millions of eddies, at worst, they'd be kicked off the station entirely.

The loss of face and rep, just when Arasaka was starting to regain it from the Relic fiasco, the massacre of Arasaka Tower in NC and the coup engineered by Yorinobu could not have come at a worst time.

Norishige was dead, it was now just a question of who did the deed.

"No," I said finally, pulling the thermal blade away from his neck and dropping it to the floor. "Killing you is just another trap you're hoping I will fall into. Up till this point, I can justifiably point to self defense. If I kill you in front of all the distinguished guests present, which includes the CTO of the World News Service," I lazily turned my head to regard the older yet extremely hot woman sitting two tables away, who was watching events with wide eager eyes. I could see an active encrypted connection radiating away from her through cyberspace. "I lose that, and I'd rather not have to fight the ESA and Europol for my right to not suck vacuum in LEO."

My security daemon couldn't catch everything unfortunately, especially when it came to the high end communications that power dealers walked around with. Which is how Norishige got out his call to the local Arasaka office to summon the hit squads.

It was only now though that the runner finally managed to overcome my little daemon squad and turn his full attention to me. I recognized him trying to hit me with a Cyberpsychosis hack.

'Butcher,' I prompted the AI.

I hardly needed to ask, because the Blackwall AI was already unleashing himself on the netrunner.

"Now, I hope the show has been entertaining for all of you," I turned around with a slight bow to everyone in the room but locked eyes with the lady from WNS, switching to my West Coast English. "It certainly wasn't my intention and I apologize for disturbing your evening. I just came here to do some shopping after all."

I ordered my Agent to access Victor's primary account in Spain, which thanks to my hacking was wide open to me, my client wanted to send another message.

"A round of favorite drinks for everyone in the room in a more concrete apology." My hand gestured expansively to encompass the room as the financial transaction went through towards the gaming floor account.

I internally winced as I saw the amount of eddies flow, which considering the tastes of everyone in the room present, was very substantial.

The digital screams of the netrunner reached me as I walked towards the exit amid scattered applause and sounds of appreciation as everyone's Agents were informed of the very expensive drinks coming their way.

Gig complete.


88888888888888888888888888888888888

 

[Keiran Halcyon]

A/N: The die has been cast, where will it land... Patrons and Super Patrons are the awesome, breathtaking chooms who help make this possible.


Chapter 5

The casino floor was left in my wake through a few quick hacks of every surveillance cam with a sightline on me in the street outside.

The station's dweller was still dealing with the mess that the now dead Arasaka runner had made in his assault, so I had little opposition in slipping through the cracks. I broke the sightline from any casino patron passing by and ducked into a public restroom that I knew had no one currently inside.

After a command to my Agent, my smart clothes changed; the Silverhand jacket becoming more of a half-jacket with shorter sleeves, partially baring my forearms, losing the Samurai logo and the color changing to bright green. My low rise leggings became knee shorts, whilst my bustierre shrunk to a red boob tube.

A few moments later after enduring the shift, Elaine Paigles was back in the real and digital realms.

One change of shoes later and I was walking back out of the restroom.

Only for my hand to begin painfully twitching as another attack of rejection hit me.

'Fuck off, not now. We're nearly there!' I thought in anger.

I kept walking, holding a fist, even as the RealSkin on my arm bulged then contracted rapidly as the malfunction continued.

By the time I was standing in front of the spoke elevator to leave the Torus, it had settled down somewhat, but I kept my guard up. It wouldn't do to accidently punch a hole in someone just because they had the bad luck to stand next to me at the wrong time.

Even dealing with that, I couldn't afford the distraction. Time had run out on my 'insurance policy', so I sent the virtual Rachel Mcadams back to her unconscious self in real space. She had been there as both an identity to slip into in an emergency, create a false trail in cyberspace and prepare the way for my gig in the casino.

She was also serving as a welcome distraction for the station dweller, sending him scrambling down a false path as a probable way that the Yurei of Night City would have infiltrated the station.

The doors to the elevator opened and it was no surprise to see Mr. Blue Eyes standing next to a gaggle of other people, some with baggage cases and suitcases.

I walked inside and came to a casual stop next to him.

His encrypted call came as the elevator doors closed.

"Nicely done, V. The entire planet is buzzing already."

"That was quick."

"Lucia Watson, CTO of WNS, hasn't personally broken a story for nearly two decades now. She's always been a media at heart and you handed her a gold plated story that will see the corp rake in millions. So, mission accomplished, V."

"You have my payment?"

Blue's reply was via an eddie transfer of seven figures, that pinged on my primary business account, included in that was a ticket and visa for a trip to Tycho city on Luna for a duration of a year.

"It took some doing but the Highrider Confed agreed. Why so long, V?"

"I have business there that might require an extended stay," I answered carefully.

Blue's mouth quirked, "Well, I know better than to ask for what that business is. Your tasks have been concluded to my satisfaction, V. You have my thanks and you can expect future business from me and those in my orbit."

I forced myself to be optimistic, "I look forward to that business."

"Safe travels V. I know you did your homework, but be careful around highriders. A fight with one, is a fight with their entire 'tribe' or workgroup and there's nothing more they enjoy than finding offense with a surface dweller."

"I'll certainly keep that in mind."

---

It ended up being a nearly six hour wait in the rotating docking core of the Crystal Palace, whilst it took nearly two hours to go through the administrative core before that.

The station police had been thoroughly spooked and were scrutinizing everyone with extra care.

I had already been scanned five times, first by going through customs and then by roaming police.

The ESA was walking a very fine line though. Europol couldn't be too intrusive as that risked offending some very powerful people.

Finally, the Orbital Air spacecraft docked.

I could just barely catch a glimpse of it through the massive 'windows'.

It was roughly 120 meters in length from its nose to the engine thrusters below, shaped almost like a massive dart, with a white-gray hull stenciled with the corp logo.

"Orbital Air Flight 3150 bound for Tycho City, now boarding," the always pleasant female voice announced throughout the lounge.

I reached down to my feet, pulled off my stilettos and wriggled into the dark black and rather ugly mag boots I had been issued. My Agent handshaked with the small computer inside and a small hum was heard as the boots stuck themselves to the decking.

Carefully standing, in the 0.2 of standard gravity, as the docking core had a much smaller radius than the rest of the station, I carefully mag-walked towards the pretty smiling hostess monitoring everyone submitting their digital tickets.

It was an awkward walk - you had to visibly pause for a moment to allow the boot to adhere properly with each step, or else you risked jumping off nearly half a meter into the air.

"Please, code in here, ma'am."

I placed my hand on the scanner pad, letting my Agent in conjunction with Butcher, do the work of making sure that the faceplate and metanthropic system did their job. It couldn't be known that V was on Luna and I wasn't feeling good or confident enough to do any netrunning at the moment.

The final scanner that stood over the threshold of the docking corridor was neatly bamboozled by Butcher into not seeing the priceless painting in my bag.

I breathed an inward sigh of relief as I took the first steps beyond it.

At the inner airlock to the spacecraft, I was greeted by two flight hostesses, dressed in the classic Orbital Air uniform that could trace its lineage back to the mid 20th Century. These were made of modern metamaterials, showed a lot of leg at the skirt, hugged every curve and could become a vacuum survival suit in moments.

I appreciated the view very much and stepped onto the spacecraft's own airlock.

Finally, in the interior, I was guided by another hostess to the left towards the fore area of the ship.

Mrs. Paigles naturally had the wealth to afford first class, so I followed another hostess who called to me by name and guided me to my personal cabin.

It was about three cubic meters that was personally all mine, on a craft where space was at a premium. It had a seat that could fold all the way down into a bed and was surrounded by comfort and amenities; standard TV, braindance wreathe, a tiny complimentary drinks bar and the left wall was projecting a live view of the ship docked to the Crystal Palace.

I took off my jacket and carefully maneuvered myself into the sinfully luxurious seat.

"Mrs Paigles?" said the breathtaking redhead hostess, standing at the cabin door.

"Yes?"

"You've flown with us before, but since it's only your second voyage into the Dark, if there's any questions or uncertainty, please don't hesitate to use your Agent to summon me."

"I'll do that, thanks," I smiled and curled my brows curiously. "That's a rather morbid way to refer to space."

The hostess chuckled and shrugged, "Highrider slang, ma'am. I'm not one of them, but when you work in space long enough the lingo has a way of creeping in."

"I'm sure it does. Thank you, I'll be sure to call if I need anything."

The hostess left and I definitely appreciated the way her posterior jiggled within the uniform with each magboot step she took.

I sat back and eyed the braindance wreathe, but settled for basic TV, adjusting the screen to show to the local Orbital Air channel that showed a general status screen for the ship itself, including a nice big graphic that showed the course it would take towards the moon.

Crystal Palace was stationed in a 'medium' earth orbit or MEO at 900 km. The OA spacecraft, which was rated only for vacuum travel, would detach and after coasting out of the security perimeter, would initiate a direct burn for lunar orbit.

The flight itself would take thirty hours, before the craft burned to slow down to be captured by Luna gravity. There would be only one phasing orbit needed before another short engine burn, to make a slight inclination change for an efficient landing descent to Tycho City.

"You buttoned up, Butcher?" I thought.
"I'm pulling the last of my programs from local cyberspace now."

"Good. I've made an enemy of the station's dweller. Don't want to give him more reason by being sloppy with the hacks we've made."

I idled away the time by channel surfing on the TV. Being on an OA spacecraft meant I had a far greater selection than just what we got in Night City's tightly controlled broadcast spectrum. The news channels I avoided for now, because it would only have surface level reactions to the first Edgerunner operating on the Crystal Palace and LEO for that matter. So I stuck with the pure entertainment and movie channels, enjoying the novelty of seeing some of the channels from the UK and Europe for the first time.

"This is your captain speaking. We are refueled and all system checks are in the green. Airlocks are closed and we will undock in one minute. An emergency procedure vid will play after this announcement. Thank you for flying with Orbital Air."

The captain's voice intruded into the cabin so clearly that it almost felt like the guy was right next to my ear. My screen abruptly changed from the very racy French drama to an image of a supermodel perfect OA flight attendant that began narrating the various safety procedures, helpfully displayed with animations on the side.

Then the presentation definitely had a specific cut that was clearly intended only for those in first class.

"Your cabin is actually an OA proprietary survival pod, that in the event of an emergency, can be safely ejected from the spacecraft. It is designed to automatically take you to the nearest OA orbital facility, anywhere in Earth-Lunar space. Where you will be rescued and given complimentary tickets to any destination OA covers."

"Oh yeah and the less rich gonks in economy class get to share a big life pod that probably doesn't have the DeltaV to go anywhere," I declared sarcastically, speaking to myself.

The safety demo finished and I was right back to watching the story of two French corpos scheming about getting rich off their boss' literal demise. It was generally a plan that could only work in fiction, but it was amusing.

I felt a slight thump echo through the ship and the huge mass of the Crystal Palace that dominated my viewscreen began to pull away as the OA craft used its RCS thrusters. The little centrifugal gravity there was vanished and I secured myself with a seatbelt.

The episode was halfway finished and the Palace was so far away that I could cover it with my hand, when the captain announced, "Translunar injection burn in three, two, one."

I felt the G-load of the thrusters briefly before the onboard grav systems compensated enough to keep it to a mere 1.5Gs whilst the ship actually ramped up to a 6G burn.

This was bleeding edge tech that was only now beginning to find its way out of experimental labs and into use by OA, ESA and Arasaka. Millitech was lagging a bit behind in its introduction, but would catch up by the end of the year, if you believed their screamsheets.

96 seconds later, the rumble of the engines cut out.

"Burn complete, we are on course for Luna. There will be a mid-course correction burn in twelve hours, until then feel free to relax and enjoy complimentary inflight entertainment and the latest braindances from the best studios in the world."

"Butcher, gonna pass out now. No harvesting anyone unless they want to kill me."

"I'll keep watch, V. Enjoy your shutdown."

I chuckled at the AI and leaned back in my seat.

A quick set of my sleep cycle and I was pulled into a wonderful eight hours of blissful oblivion.

---

A descending foot splashed a puddle of red water.

My breath was harsh through the filter that was of barely any use against the particulate matter hanging around us. Steady dripping rain began echoing among the ruins our little group was steadily, cautiously moving through.

It soon became a torrent that poured down in a dull roar that played havoc with our ears. Sound became utterly useless as an early warning for any danger.

My hands clutched and flexed on my assault rifle, the stock digging into my shoulder as I traversed the aim right to left, my optics scanning into every possible nook and cranny. The problem was there were just too many possibilities around us in the ruins of this nuked city.

The little trefoil emblem of a radiation hazard flashing in my HUD optics was a constant reminder of the constantly ticking clock this mission and our lives were on. The general rad dose we were getting was cutting years off our lives with every day spent here, but there was little hope in these times that anyone would see forty, let alone sixty years or older. Living for so long was only for the rich and those who had plunged the world into the mess that it was currently in.

Damien was on point and abruptly held up a fist to halt our advance, before gesturing down.

Our little group of six knelt immediately, dividing up our sectors of fire and scanning for any blip in the EM bands, even though it was certainly a lost cause with all this radiation fouling everything. It at least meant that any potential opposition was wading through the same shit, so the odds were generally even on that front.

His hand signals followed, communicating that his small crawler drone had found something and was on its way back. Things were so bad here, that we couldn't even risk point to point radio comms between our team members, even though we were within spitting distance of each other. The drone was also under EMCON and only squirted through the most basic signals back to Damien in random intervals.

The drone clambered on the edge of a ruined wall lining the pockmarked and cratered street, before clambering down to street level and straight onto Damien's back, where it interfaced with his tac rig to deliver the recon data.

I could see his body language shift immediately as he comprehended it, his shoulders slumping slightly.

His right hand came up again and with more signals he began relaying his conclusions.

Primary exfil route - non viable.

Secondary - non viable.

Tertiary - remains viable but potential hostiles expected.

Fucking hell.

I referenced the Tertiary plan with my Agent and the route was highlighted on a rough wire diagram map of the city. It was an almost useless gesture given that the map was based on the undamaged pre-nuke version, overlaid with some weeks old satellite data. It would've been nice to get that satellite's help right now, but it had become a million pieces of debris in LEO after the very short orbital front of the war had occurred.

Damien gestured sharply forward.

I got to my feet and kept my eyes peeled in my sector as we advanced.

Out of the corner of my optics, the reason for us being in this hellhole was just barely visible and I was very glad that it wasn't my job to manage the package.

To think about what was inside was very unwise, so naturally it was the thing that was mostly occupying my thoughts, besides that oddly catchy melody that came to me in a dream last night. I had dictated it in musical notation to my Agent at least, but there was no substitute for my synth deck.

Pneumo barely held in a curse as the package's right wheel got stuck in a pothole and he tugged hard on the line to get it out, before raising his pistol to belatedly keep his sector of fire covered.

He was not happy.

Which netrunner worth their salt would be happy if they were reduced to being the team muscle. There was no proper net left in this ruin of a city that was worth running and the only network that we'd find would be a mobile one, assuredly belonging to the bad guys.

We turned right at the next intersection, using the carcasses of burnt out cars as cover where possible. It would do little to help against any rail gun or sniper fire, but remaining unseen was the primary goal and with the rain, the sound of our movement would be masked. The package especially made a relative racket that would be picked up with any decent sound sensor aimed in our direction.

We were barely a hundred yards down this street, walking around the wrecked remains of a crashed combat AV that bore the wound of a direct missile strike-

"Contact right! Twenty meters!"

The rapid staccato of Trace's rifle fire echoed in the street.

I dove for the ground, my heart thudding in my throat, but the practiced skill and instincts of thousands of hours of training and experience took over.

My optics spotted movement to my left, barely a blip through a gap in the ruined wall and heaped rubble beyond.

My aim shifted and I pulled the trigger, my rifle's recoil pushing into my shoulder with rapid thumps.

The tungsten AP rounds clipped the wall at first, but my third and fourth burst of rounds went straight through the gap.

My Agent couldn't give me any reports of successful hits on target, thanks to all the soup clouding every sensor we were wearing on our harnesses.

I unclipped a grenade from my hip, rolled into the cover of wrecked AV to get to my knees, pulled the pin and overhand lobbed it towards the potential enemy position.

"Grenade out!" I warned over the team channel, breaking my own radio silence.

It landed slightly long than where I had aimed. The thump of its explosion and shrapnel spray managed to reach my ears even through the rain.

More gunfire from the team rattled out.

I scanned my sector furiously with detail, even going active emission, which just returned a garbled mess that my Agent could barely make heads or tails out of.

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" called Kepler, our team's nominal leader in the field. "Pneumo, package status?"

"Undamaged."

"Good. I managed to get one. Lilayah's grenade wounded another. The rest retreated to lick their wounds."

"Any ID?" I asked.

"Nothing definitive, might be a scout vanguard for another merc squad, might be Arasaka. I'd normally want to check the bodies, but it's too dangerous."

I got to my feet properly and changed my rifle's mag for a fresh one. It would be nice to get confirmation of just who that was, but surety was a luxury we could not afford in this environment. Arasaka's typical losing tactic was to trigger actual kamikaze cyberware in their downed soldiers during the war, the cyberware waiting until proximity sensors detected anyone who could be the enemy before detonating.

Typical counter-tactics was to send disposable drone swarms onto the enemy bodies to detonate them before friendly troops could move in. Arasaka had countered with updating the cyberware to distinguish if it was a human soldier or a drone. Now every enemy dead was treated as a mine that was just waiting to go off. The cyberware was being phased out by Arasaka as a condition of the post-war treaty, but there were still a lot of men and mercs that had the stuff and not enough qualified docs to remove them safely.

"All right, we keep going. Damien, send your drone out again. Remain under EMCON."

I sighed in annoyance and rejoined formation as our team continued advancing.

The red tinged rain poured down even stronger now, the droplets were fat and splashing high off the ruined asphalt of the street and within moments it was like we were wading through a river of blood.

I wanted to scream in frustration, but managed to keep it in.

I wanted out of this miserable city.

I wanted my synthdeck in hand and playing in front of a small crowd at the club, that's all.

But no, this fucked up world wouldn't even let me have that little pleasure.

If this package didn't get to its destination, then some fucked up psycho-gonk was going to use it to fuck up more of the world - what little of it was left. We were just about managing to rebuild from the war, yet there were still assholes out there who played their fucked up games for their own profits and selfish interests. They lived as if the war was just another opportunity to take advantage. We had been inches away from the civilizational abyss, yet they still saw fit to poke and play with the edge of that cliff.

Now here we were, six mercs, who had unwittingly found themselves holding the figurative rope.

Our journey continued, moving agonizing mile by mile, awaiting the moment when our opposition would come back for round two.

Keeping concentration, readiness and my sector covered became more and more difficult.

The red rain made the ruin of the city come alive with movement, making it all that harder. Did that piece of rubble fall because of flowing water or had it been the boot of an Arasaka goon?

With the ruined and clogged drainage infrastructure, it wasn't long before we ran into the first 'river'. It looked to be just ankle height, but with the current light conditions it was a red liquid mirror. It was hiding every possible pothole or minor crater that could be a foot deep or a gap that could swallow someone completely into the wrecked underground tunnels.

Trying to cross this street might as well have been wading into a minefield. It was also the perfect spot for an ambush, due to the largely intact buildings that surrounded the intersection.

Damien halted us and with curt gestures ordered us to cover.

His crawler drone returned, its power supply running low and there was no way it would be able to cross this river.

He began relaying hand signals.

My instincts had been spot on; the drone had observed what seemed to be our opposition setting up a trap in the intersection. Six Arasaka 'deserters' turned merc and three actual edgerunners, one of whom was calling the shots.

I inwardly scoffed. There was no such thing as Arasaka deserters, not when Saburo could flick a switch in Osaka and kill any traitor in the continental US trying such a thing. No, this was a deniable ops squad, plain and simple. Anyone who thought the Old Man would stop playing his game just because he had lost the 4th Corporate War was simply deluding themselves.

The question remained, how were we going to cross this artificial river under enemy fire, lugging the package which could get bogged down or swallowed into the possible watery depths below?

Damien at least had the beginning of a plan.

He handed out shards he'd burned in his tech rig to each of us. Even making the perilous journey to the other side of the street where Kepler, Pneumo and Zara were hunkered down.

I gave Trace an ominous look as I slotted the shard. The media turned merc nodded in agreement with me at the sentiment.

My Agent integrated the data and my virtual city map was updated with the recon data of the crawler drone.

It gave us exact positions for where the opposition was waiting, it estimated their fields of fire and even what weapons they were visibly packing. It was all military grade cast-offs from the war.

There was no way we could advance through that.

I might as well be looking at a solid wall of death.

We could open fire from cover, but that would see us getting a face full of lead and micro-rockets. The only reason we weren't under fire already was because the enemy thought we were unaware of their presence and was waiting for us to wade into the river.

Fuck! What were we gonna do?!

Was there any way to retreat and find another route?

It was a question I hadn't even directed to my Agent, but my thoughts were so scatterbrained and desperate that it had picked up on it and delivered an answer.

Yes, there were three routes to bypass the intersection and this river, but it meant taking much longer and there was no guarantee the routes were accessible and hadn't been closed down by a fallen building or a collapsed overpass. We were on a timer regarding our rad exposure and our opposition could just relocate as well as we could.

There was only one way forward, by fire and force.

I looked at Kepler across the street as she came to terms with the plan Damien outlined. Her optics narrowed over her filtration mask and the hand signals came.

My nerves and the hollow feeling in my stomach was banished as I unhooked a seeker grenade from my harness, instructing my Agent to program in a target trajectory for the two enemy edgerunners on my side of the street.

Trace shook his head but also pulled out his own grenade.

A few moments later, every member of the team had followed suit, waiting with primed seekers in hand and Kepler's signal.

Tension ratcheted up in the team-

THERE WAS disjunction-

My point of view was torn away from Lilayah and I was once again Valerie, standing as my virtual self behind her in the frozen world of a war-torn city during the Time of the Red.

I slapped my thigh in annoyance as a message from my Agent was injected into the braindance.

"Fine, end it."

The world dissolved into a mass of disorganized pixels as I felt instantiated into my actual body in the first class cabin of the OA spacecraft.

My eyes blinked as I was greeted by Real Space and pulled off the BD wreath from my head.

On my left I was greeted with the bright white, pockmarked surface of Luna as seen from a mere sixty miles above the surface.

"We're about to begin our powered descent burn, everyone please take your seats."

"Just when it was getting good," I muttered in annoyance, pulling out the shard from the BD wreathe.

It was plain and unadorned. It had been delivered to my mansion by drone courier and inquiries with the courier company had given no obvious answer who the sender was. Merely that the drone had been hacked, flew to the roof of Megabuilding H1, then went straight to my mansion to drop off the tiny package containing the series of BD shards.

This had happened during the frenetic prep work for my Crystal Palace gigs, so I had no time to do a detailed investigation. The only thing I could determine was that they were at least safe to slot and there wasn't any malware.

I carefully placed the shard back into the original mobile phone sized container it had come in. It was one of five shards in the tiny case.

A case that was stamped with a single word 'Veritas'.

"Truth," I scoffed incredulously as my gaze was fixed on the lunar surface rapidly rolling past me at over 1600 meters per second. In a world of braindance editing, Soulkiller, Cynosure and psych surgery, what was the truth?

My view shifted, spinning around as the spacecraft flipped retrograde to bring its main engines to bear against its orbital speed. I put the small case back into my hidden left leg compartment and closed it up with a thought.

"Descent burn in three, two, one."

The g-load pushed into me with a brief spike before it settled again in the mild feeling of suddenly weighing fifty percent more.

"Agent, release a net crawler for the Cyber6 edgerunner crew, anonymise it, full encryption, the usual precautions."

With the signal lag between Earth and Luna, bandwidth restrictions, the search would take a while.

Most everyone in Night City knew about the Cyber6, who themselves had attained that elusive legendary status as a result of their exploits during the Time of the Red and the chaotic 40s. Rogue had run ops and acted as a fixer on occasion for them through the Afterlife, when the bar was situated in the Upper Marina.

I briefly entertained the notion that she had sent me these BDs, but the whole clandestine nature was totally not her style. Rogue and I had a rather close relationship these days, she was an unofficial 'big sister' if I had to put a name to it, but it was still 'just biz' at the end of the day and we were also business partners thanks to my minority stake ownership in the Afterlife bar. With something like this, she would play straight with me, place the Cyber6 BDs straight into my hands and tell me to watch it on my way to the moon.

So who could manage to compile an on-rails BD based on the memories of one of the most famous Rockergirl mercs from the 40s? Lilayah and the rest of Cyber6 had flatlined during a gig in late '49, just as most solos who became Afterlife legends did. Her music was slightly more to my taste than Johnny's style of hard rock - it was a melodic cybergrunge with heavy use of melancholic synth overtones.

The sheer value of these BDs, if it could be authenticated, would be huge to the right buyer.

Yet, whoever had given it to me, didn't want me to just sell it and now that I had been given a taste - I didn't want to either.

It could also be a psy-op and the word 'Veritas' practically confirmed it.

The moon's surface was now starting to rise up towards my view in a rapid cadence. A glance at the ship's status channel showed me we had already shed more than half of our orbital velocity and the moon was greedily grabbing the ship that had now slowed into its gravitational influence.

Its main thrusters were steadily angled down, tilting the spacecraft further over and now the ship was moderating its fall with a steady counter burn.

Given that I had done my share of raw BD diving and had dated the best BD editor in Night City for the last eight months, I knew a lot of the nitty-gritty of braindancing through sheer osmosis that most didn't know. The holy grail that the BD industry was searching for, was to find a way to pull experiences and worlds from out of the digital ether, either via AI or just plain building it out of a CAD program. Early attempts at doing so produced plainly fake environments and feelings. The BD user could tell immediately that the experience was artificial and lacked the indefinable essence of true experience. It was why BD actors were still a thing and you needed actual people with a BD recorder cyberware implanted, actually doing what was being portrayed.

These Veritas BDs had none of those tell-tale signs of artificiality, I was experiencing memory engrams and it meant I could only conclude two things.

Either Lilayah had a BD rec implant back in the Time of the Red, which was entirely possible, or she had been another unfortunate mind harvested by Arasaka's Soulkiller AI and imprisoned within the top secret Mikoshi servers.

Right until I blasted my way into Araska Tower last year and became the new poster child for disgruntled former employees who turned merc and kicked their old boss' ass. Then forcibly gave the Alt Cunningham human-AI hybrid backdoor access to destroy Mikoshi. Who took all the minds imprisoned there and merged with them into an entirely new gestalt digital entity, but still retained the Alt Cunningham appearance.

"So why are you showing me this, Alt?" I said aloud.

Of course, I received no answer amid the rumbling hum of the engines within the spacecraft.
Soon the lunar surface was now a new horizon that stretched as far as my viewscreen would show and was making the final approach to Tycho City.

The colony was like a spider web of lunar hyperalloys and lights spread out across the 53 mile wide Tycho crater. The majority of the city was actually underground to shield from cosmic and solar radiation and had a population of over 40k.

The Highrider Confed tightly controlled that population and tourist count, since every breath taken in the colony was the result of a highrider's labor to cultivate the oxygen producing plant life and to harvest the water from the moon's polar regions. My potential year-long stay was already budgeted in those terms on their books.

Finally, the horizontal velocity of the ship was cancelled out and we began our final descent straight over the landing pads situated in the north-east of the colony.

Two huge metallic factory domes partially obscured my first in person view of the infamous Tycho mass drivers.

In peacetime, they were used to cheaply send products and mined ores towards orbital factories around Earth. In war, they had been used as a kinetic kill weapon against various targets by the ESA, the most infamous strike being a 2 ton moon rock against Colorado Springs during the Orbital War of 2008. Now they were under the control of the Highriders as their own ultimate deterrent against the surface dwellers getting any ideas that they needed their independence curtailed.

The engines rumbled sharply one final time and I felt the shock as the ship touched down on the lunar steel of the landing pad.

For a few anxious seconds everyone on board was waiting for the captain's word.

"Welcome to Tycho City. All systems are secured. Docking tubes are extending and you will be clear to disembark in two minutes. Thank you for flying with Orbital Air."

I vaguely heard the burst of applause and cheers from the passengers.

For all that space travel had become routine in this day and age, the chance of something going catastrophically wrong in an endeavour so complex was still quite high.

I undid my restraints and carefully stood in the lunar gravity, magnetizing my boots.

Only for my left leg to suddenly go numb briefly before a spike of paralyzing pain shot into me.

"Fuck!" I gasped.

For nearly three minutes my world was reduced to just my leg and the pain coursing through me.

"Mrs. Paigles, are you all right?"

The redhead flight hostess was standing in the open door to my cabin, worriedly looking at me. The pain had died down to a mild migraine equivalent, so I was coherent enough to just shake my head. "Not at the moment, but I will be." I experimentally took an awkward step forward. If it wasn't for my unyielding mag boots and the low gravity I'd have probably fallen over already.

I took another step on my bad leg, bracing myself. It worked fine at first, but then began twitching rather badly and I had to grab hold of the cabin door. Fuck, this wasn't going to work.

"Can you call for a mobility chair?"

"Of course, ma'am, I'll be right back. I'll let TCX know to have one waiting for you as well."

Not exactly the most dignified way to arrive, but I could afford it with this identity at least.

A minute later I was helped into the chair. It had tiny wheels and its own thrusters, in addition to being controllable by my Agent.

'Butcher, take the wheel please.' I asked as another bout of pain shot through me.

'You will not cease to function now, V.'

'No, I won't, but this body it seems has finally had enough of me.'

I propped the clothing bag on my lap as the chair rolled and hissed through the tight quarters of the spacecraft.

I was among the last passengers to disembark. We left through the airlock and into a crystal glass elevator in a seven hundred feet tall docking tower with an expansive view of Tycho city and the nearby crater wall, which speared nearly two miles high into the lunar 'sky'.

The elevator began descending, I was just focused on existing with the pain and not making a scene.

The brightness of the lunar day vanished as we went subterranean or should that be sublunanean?

It came to a stop in a brightly lit circular tunnel that went on for nearly eighty meters.

Butcher steered me forward onto the passenger conveyor belts, after letting the dozen other passengers get on first.

I leaned my head back on the seat and focused on fighting. Fighting the body that had been mine since birth, which had been usurped from me by Arasaka and that fucking Relic chip.

'You will be mine for another day, asshole,' I thought to it. 'Don't you fuck with me now that you see the finish line is here.'

The tunnel merged smoothly with a much longer one, it was more than a mile long and there were even small electric carts for passengers who didn't want to stand for so long on the conveyor belt.

Butcher pushed my mobility chair to its top speed on the conveyor belt, which translated to a real speed that had the tunnel struts almost blurring on either side of me. He only had to slow down once he caught up with a standing passenger and even then, managed to maneuver around them.

The tunnel made a slight right turn and after a few minutes we got off the conveyor, where there was another scanning point.

"Mrs. Paigles."

An OA steward was waiting with another mobility chair, which I transferred into with a wince of pain and twitches of my arms.

"Ma'am, OA has a complimentary clinic on Tycho, which you can make use of."

"No, thank you. I'm going to another local clinic," I sighed, holding back any displays of pain through sheer willpower. "How much to buy this chair straight off you?"

"I am not empowered to make such a sale, ma'am. However, as a first class passenger of OA, your standing is good enough for me to release it into your possession on a loan for thirty Earth days."

"Good enough, thank you."

The steward unwound the link from his wrist and after plugging it in briefly, I became aware of the chair's computer being transferred to my temporary possession.

Beyond this scanner was another checkpoint, this one manned by three tall highriders wearing a brown skinsuit uniform with minimal decoration but they did have tiny rank insignia and 'TCPD' on their shoulders. They were armed with bright white painted pistols and elegant knives sheathed on their hips.

I managed to put my hand on their portable scanner for the visa entrance and Butcher thoroughly befuddled the main scanner behind them, letting them see Mrs. Paigles inoffensive cyberware loadout and not my own.

"Welcome to Luna, Mrs. Paigles. I hope you enjoy your stay with us," said the senior highrider cop.

I nodded and marvelled somewhat that the Highriders still had a nationalized police force. It was totally unanswerable to any corporate interest from Earth. They had a chief, who directly reported to the local managerial 'tribe' of Tycho.

The gate in front of me opened and beyond was a sprawling terminal easily the equal of NCX spaceport.

It was filled with tourists, corpos, and highriders of every description into a bustling melting pot of people coming and going.

I didn't have time to gawk, so Butcher piloted me through the throng with the efficient precision only an AI could achieve.

Finally, we emerged into the lobby where I scanned the people crowding behind the roped off bollards who were waiting to meet arriving passengers. In moments, I spotted a large digisheet being held up with my cover identity's name hastily drawn on it.

It was being held up by a dusky skinned highrider teen with eager brown eyes. He was wearing a harness with all manner of tools, including a small oxygen mask and only a pair of tight white shorts.

"Ah, Mrs. Paigles, welcome, my name is Alhaadi," he said brightly, in very accented English. "I'm here to show you to the place."

'Butcher?'

'Scanning, transmitting recog signal.'

Alhaadi's largely biological eyes flashed only slightly. Highriders generally used retinal imaging only and bioware adapted for low grav, high radiation environments.

'Confirmed, he's a rep from the black clinic.'

"Good, lead the way," I said aloud with a wince.

We left the Tycho spaceport and moved directly onto the underground street, which was only sporadically busy. The roof over our head was made of regolith cement and ribbed steel struts, from which giant electric lamps hung that simulated daylight quite accurately. A nearby market was immediately in sight, catering to tourists and I could already smell exotic flavors and foods from the vendors there.

"How far?" I asked as we set off and joined the pedestrians heading south.

"Two and three quarter kilometers, Mrs. Paigles. I have something that can help with the pain, if you want."

I shook my head, "No reason to make things more complicated when the time comes. You know?"

"I was briefed by Doctor Njeri, just in case you had complications on the way," he nodded.

"Any tram or public transport that can get us there sooner?"

"That would be problematic for our secrecy, Mrs. Paigles."

"Figured that," I sighed, gritting my teeth as my left hand involuntarily twitched, forming a fist and opening with enough strength that would've wrecked my mobility chair had I not lifted it out of the way. Alhaadi looked at me wearily and increased the separation between us. "Just get me there. I have to fight a battle within myself now."

I leaned my head back and was only vaguely aware of the passing sights and people, as my focus turned inward.

Tourists and surface dwellers became less frequent until the majority of people around me were highriders.

We entered a large freight lift some time later and travelled even deeper.

I struggled to remain cognizant of our route, as we got off and into a place that could've been a warehouse filled with rows and rows of vacuum sealed pallets stacked to the ceiling.

My biomonitor started flashing warnings at me in my vision; low blood pressure being the most alarming.

Alhaadi turned left and right among the rows randomly but with clear purpose, until he finally stopped in front of a large ore mining shipping pallet that was big enough to fit a truck into. He placed his long fingered hand on a random spot, which opened to reveal a scanner.

Locks clicked and the massive pallet door swung open.

Beyond was a ramp leading deeper down into the floor and another more modern elevator that could've been pulled straight out of Night City.

'Almost there, V,' Butcher actually sounded… encouraging?

It was really tempting now to just… close my eyes… no!

I grit my teeth, banishing the thought as this new elevator took us further down.

When these doors opened again, beyond was a hyper sterile, bright environment bristling with tech that, had I been in any right frame of mind, would have me salivating to work with. Viktor would think that he'd died and gone to Ripperdoc heaven. There were ten gray operating chairs with overhead screens and tools waiting to come down, arranged in a perfect line. All of which were empty with no patients… because of my presence.

Waiting to meet us were two highriders.

One was a tall, statuesque woman wearing a white skinsuit, with a traditional doctor's overcoat hung off her shoulders. Her hair was short on the sides and long on the top, hanging in bangs over her forehead. The other was a familiar face, an older man with a severe white beard against his dark skin, wearing a vac suit with no helmet but seemingly ready to head out onto the surface.

"V?" the woman stepped forward with a pleasant smile.

I looked at her critically for a while, before playing what could be my last roll of the die.

I nodded and instructed my Agent to release my faceplate and metanthropic camo.

The pain was nigh overwhelming, but I bore it stoically as my natural features returned in full.

"Fascinating," she breathed. "What will the surface dwellers think of next? I am Doctor Njeri, the chief of this clinic. Next to me is Manager Gakulu."

I held out my hand to him, "Pleasure to meet you face to face, at last, Manager."

He wearily raised an eyebrow but carefully shook it. "Greetings V." His voice was naturally harsh and he nodded to me with respect. "Hopefully, we can both help each other. I'd normally speak more politician to you, but just one look at you tells me there isn't time." He turned to Njeri. "Is the clinic's jamming still holding?"

"I already took care of the OA chair's systems, utatomkhulu," Alhaadi said with a respectful bow. "They think it's still being ridden around in the tourist sector."

"Good boy. Can you stand, V?"

"No."

"Help her."

Njeri and Alhaadi moved either side, grabbed me underneath the arms and lifted with grunts of effort.

I tried to help them, but my legs weren't cooperating at all now and I was deposited into the ripper chair.

"Is everything ready?" I asked Gakulu.

"Yes, we are V."

'Butcher?'

The AI answered immediately, "Yes, I've already forked myself into the clinic's systems and cyberspace. It's adequate for our needs." He showed me live feeds of other rooms, one of which was holding my brand new Gemini body.

"Evaluation of the body?"

"Satisfactory." The specs flowed in front of my vision and I especially focused on two critical points; the dedicated port for the most crucial piece of the puzzle, nestled in the neck and protected by as much flexi armor plating as possible and the blank brain grown from stem cells I had shipped in earlier.

"Well done, you've not only managed to recreate Relic 2.0 but improve on it."

"The credit must naturally go to Doctor Njeri and her workgroup," Gakulu nodded at the woman.

"With your bio scans, samples and full project documentation you gave us, I'd like to think we can do better in five months than some Arasaka scientist working under the stresses that a corp puts on its employees," Njeri smirked. "But we're still missing the final cog in this machine, we still have no way to transfer your engram. That would require Soulkiller."

"Soulkiller is old news, Doctor," I smirked. Every screen in the lab briefly flashed with blood red, startling the highriders. My AI companion displayed his avatar in its full glory to them. "Meet my friend, Butcher."
Now the shoe would be on the other foot. As I had been helplessly changed and overwritten by the Araska's Relic 2.0 with Johnny Silverhand's engram, now I would be in a new Relic 3.0 and take over my new Gemini body.

"Let's begin."


888888888888888888888888888888888888888

* utatomkhulu - grandfather/elder in Highrider.

 

[Keiran Halcyon]

A/N: In which V explores her new... state of being. This fic couldn't happen without the Chooms and Super Chooms of the Patreon supporting it.


Chapter 6


A moving finger.

Such a simple thing, taken for granted, done without thinking about it at all.

Yet as I stared at the ghostly red digit attached to my ghostly red digital hand, every movement of it caused the shift of an entire universe of data.

Back and forth, back and forth, the finger moved.

We thought we knew what cyberspace was - a sea of 1s and 0s, expressing the simple concept of on and off, that changed at our whim. Maman Brigitte, the Voodoo Boys' late chefin, had shown me otherwise. Cyberspace lived and breathed, it was a universe in itself with its own fluid rules. When a human jacked into a synthtec interface for a full immersion dive, they were actually playing in the kiddy pool. Since then I had become a netrunner that could routinely wade into the deeper adult pool, but attached to that pool was a tumultuous ocean, kept at bay by the Blackwall.

I had gone beyond it briefly to meet with Alt, and that infinite expanse of red and black, twisting with the distant structures of AIs of every variety, still sent shivers down my spine just thinking about it.

Even my perception of all that was infantile.

My mind, under assault by the Relic, wrestling under the load from Johnny's engram bleeding into my thoughts and memories, could only interpret that datascape in certain ways.

Now, I saw.

Something I only had an inkling of when I had briefly become an engram in Mikoshi.

I lifted my hand, palm up, and a small eternity later, a brand new daemon just sprang into existence. Created by the interplay between my current state of being and the raw cyberspace around me.

As a netrunner that experienced cyberspace from the foundation of the vastly complex yet fragile thing known as a human brain, you had to learn to 'think' in code if you wanted to achieve anything more than just experiencing the net as a passive observer. It was primarily why netrunners were a rare, limited and valuable commodity. Most everyone could become the cookie-cutter variety, but they were playing with tools and toys that had been built and sold by true runners.

I had managed to get there through blood, sweat, tears and the tutelage of Yoko and Nix, but I had always had the raw talent since I was a child. Something my parents had discouraged me from pursuing and kept well hidden because they knew full well what the destiny of most Arasaka netrunners were.

I closed my hand.

To any netrunner who would've looked, the daemon would just have vanished, but it had actually flowed into me, becoming part of the greater data gestalt that was … me.

Seeing Alt merely make an ethereal gesture of her hand and purge a dozen of the Voodoo Boys' best netrunners… Well, I was beginning to understand how that was even possible.

I looked up at my surroundings, but didn't need to. It was a human affectation that I was holding onto. Just as the very structure of my surroundings was an affectation.

It was the main open plan interior of my NC mansion next to Megabuilding H10, rendered with countless blue pixelations. I was 'sitting' at the kitchen table and knew that I was 'wearing' my old Red Alert brand anti-surge Netrunner suit. All of it was more meaningless tokens of me trying to hold on to what I had been.

In between, one moment of infinitesimal time and the next, I moved.

No longer was I sitting on a chair made out of data, now I just existed near the massive glass doors of the mansion after a single determined flex of will on the datascape.

I passed through that pixelated glass with no more effort than air and hovered forward, passed the edge of the glowing pool and onto the very edge of my property.

Beyond was a seemingly infinite void, but looking down from that ledge I could see the ghostly red lines of city streets starting to take shape, building themselves from nothing.

It annoyed me that I was seeing things this way, when I knew that if I just looked slightly deeper the truth would be unveiled in all its glory.

"V," said Butcher in greeting, his avatar appearing right next to me.

The old pre-Soulkiller Valerie would've already screamed her head off and gone insane just looking at him. Now, the I, that was me, perceived beyond the avatar without even turning my head to look at him.

"It's annoying."

Even my talking wasn't really talking. It was the concept of the word, bundled in data, expressing a billion nuances and sending it to Butcher. It was a wonder that AI could have the patience to interact with humans at all. We were truly glacial creatures in Real Space.
How could Delamain, one of my best friends, who also just happened to be the AI controlling Night City's best cab company, stand it?

"It's only natural," Butcher said. "It'll take time for you to truly embrace your new state of being."

His communication was so much more expressive now, as I felt the data practically swim across and become part of me. I just naturally compartmentalized it, judged the code, before deeming it harmless and comprehending it.

"The highriders did good work," I said, as I looked at the datascape, taking in the supporting structure, the flows and ebbs of data.

"Relic 3.0 meets and in some cases exceeds the expected parameters. The radiation hardening is welcome."

Before my eyes the entire street running next to H10 was completed and the intersection to another took shape. A quick thought created a calculation in me and the answer was delivered a moment later.

"Only five days," I commented.

"The Relic only has to colonize the blank human brain, once that level is reached, the Gemini body will respond instantly to you."

My hand gestured with a grabbing motion and I internalized the highrider's entire project documentation on Relic 3.0 development. "They've done well, but there is room for improvement in subsequent iterations, especially if they're going the full bioroid route."

I took a moment to just marvel at the level of communication I was having with Butcher. Even as we spoke, the data transferral was going both ways and allowed for such a level of understanding that made spoken language look… so inadequate.

Butcher's reply to that data sentiment wasn't spoken but I understood immediately.

There was value in the human experience and interaction with Real Space that shouldn't be casually tossed aside. Chaotic, inadequate and unpredictable it may be, at least in comparison to the way two AI would communicate with each other, but it was the best that Real Space had to offer and it gave advantages. Delamain was on the money when it came to the chaotic beauty of the fractal architecture of the real universe. There was a reason why Alt, despite being an hybrid AI, still retained a humanoid appearance of her biological form. She had been immersed in cyberspace beyond the Blackwall for more than sixty years, which could be both an eyeblink and an eternity to any digital entity.

"V, can we speak?"

Doctor Njeri's voice boomed into the datascape like a sun that had suddenly come into existence.

I waved my right hand, thoughts bringing the interface program into existence next to me. It was a spherical construct and a datastream lanced upward towards the sun of data like a pulsar beam.

After a quick double-check for stability, I placed my hand on it.

In the next moment, I projected an image of myself as the badass merc V my friends and everyone knew through a holo near the Doctor's position. My holo was wearing the black and gray stealthsuit, knee pads, combat boots and thigh strapped weapon holsters that I'd worn on my Arasaka Tower assault. The suit, which had more in common with a one-piece swimsuit, could only be called 'stealth' because at the time getting it treated to work in concert with my optical camo was hard on my bank account.

A lot of merc fashion or lack thereof was dictated by the interplay between bank account, practicality, looking trendy and optical camo performance if they wanted to go that route.

There were a number of stealth gig's I'd run in NC where the only thing I'd worn was the nanite treated holster of my Liberty, the gun itself, and my optic camo skin. My primary weapon was my hacking anyway.

It also helped that it showed off my body in a way that made most people think I was just a grunt Solo who wouldn't know a quickhack beyond that her Self-ICE was made to stop it.

You also quickly lose any thoughts of body-shame when you're forced to change into normal clothes in an alleyway over your bike for the umpteenth time, with drugged out hobos leering at you and BD addicts littering the floor.

Doctor Njeri stood next to a tall glass cylinder, which was filled with bioware friendly cooling gas refrigerant. For her benefit, I had my hologram look pensively at the cylinder and the occupant inside, even though I was internalizing the data from sensors that let me see inside with breathtaking detail.

"Ah, you managed the holo quite well," she said with a pleased expression, looking me up and down.

"A holographic rendering is quite simple at the end of the day, doctor."

She snorted in disbelief, "Netrunners. Anyway, as you can see, we've slowed your old body into a metabolic stasis of sorts. It's not stopped the hands of time completely, but it has bought you roughly a few years to decide what to do with it."

"You've perfected cryonics?" I asked, emoting surprise, even as Butcher forwarded me the current technical data on the matter.

"Not completely," Doctor Njeri admitted. "There's still at least half a decade of development before I'd be comfortable trying to push this into general use for anyone. But what we have here is good enough and the Relic nanites are doing a good job of keeping it in shape, even though no one's home, so to speak."

I nodded in understanding, "Well, fortunately, you won't have to wait that long, Doctor. I made the decision long ago of what to do with… my old body. Before I tell you, what is the situation with the faceplate and metanthropics?"

"We've done as thorough and invasive a scan as we dared. This is FIA tech and it's blackboxed thoroughly. We've gotten some direction on how they achieved it, but I doubt we'll be able to replicate our own version within a year. I can't even be sure of a time frame I can give you. I'm afraid you're going to have to go to them if you want that functionality back quickly."

"I'm not exactly keen to put that invisible FIA leash on myself again," I grumbled, folding my arms.

"A price you're going to have to pay, we often do miracles in this clinic, but not this time, V."

"Back to the old optical camo it is," I nodded.

"We've done a bit of improvement on that system for your Gemini."

"I noticed the IR masking, very nice."

Optical camo still had its place, but in the last year a lot of surveillance and security tech had rolled out into the general market that pierced through it. Mainly by using high sensitivity infrared and thermal scanners. The old camo could still hide you from any low tier optics or Mk.1 eyeball, but the mounted cams and sensors in high end buildings would easily spot any skulking invisible edgerunner trying to stealth their way through a location.

"So what have you decided?" asked Njeri delicately after a few moment's silence, as I stared at the body that had been mine, which had been turned into my enemy by Arasaka. A body I had been born in, invested time and sweat to train to perfection and a few million eddies of military and blackmarket cyberware, including the faceplate system that was technically priceless.

Fuck! It should only be mine! Oh no, but Saburo fucking Arasaka decided he didn't like staring his own mortality in the face. Even putting his brain into a Gemini wouldn't have helped, since his skull sponge was also getting too old. In comes the Relic to save the day! And my gonk ass was stupid enough to take a gig to steal the thing, until fate and Jackie decided it should go into my neuroport.

Lately, my mind often threw what ifs at me. What if Jackie had just… kept the Relic slotted in when he died in the back of that Delamain combat cab.

No, I'd still have taken a bullet from that traitorous fucker Dexter Deshawn, NC's worst Fixer, only there'd be no lifeline to bring me back. I'd have walked into that motel room, still in shock and naive, clueless to the reason why Deshawn had been chased out of Night City the first time.

Would I've told Deshawn about the Relic still slotted into Jackie's port?

At that point, eddies were the last thing on my mind. Only survival and doing right by Jackie… I'd have sent him to his family and boy would they get the fright of their lives when he was resurrected the next morning.

I cut off that line of thinking.

It was pointless woolgathering and woulda, coulda, shoulda's.

My decision was made.

"I need the highest bandwidth secure connection you can manage to… my old body. Naturally, without compromising your clinic's air gapped systems."

Njeri frowned, "Connecting to where?"

"Earth, any subnet on the American continent will do. I'll give you a BBS address, then let me do the rest."

"It can be done, but I will need to inform Gakulu."

"That's fine," I shrugged.

She looked at me, scratching her chin thoughtfully, "You want to install a digital psyche in it then. One that is already out there… on the Net."

"Right now, the Relic 2.0 has tailored the body to accept only one engram. Anyone else trying to download themselves will be rejected."

Her eyes widened in realization, "You- you really want that crazy isidenge walking around again?! In a body that capable and dangerous?"

"I owe him and let's just say that Johnny has mellowed a bit, thanks to yours truly."

Njeri sighed, "You're the client, V. I hope we don't end up regretting this."

"That makes two of us."

---

My nerves and the hollow feeling in my stomach was banished as I unhooked a seeker grenade from my harness, instructing my Agent to program in a target trajectory for the two enemy edgerunners on my side of the street.

Trace shook his head but also pulled out his own grenade.

A few moments later, every member of the team had followed suit, waiting with primed seekers in hand and Kepler's signal.

Tension ratcheted up in the team and finally Kepler pulled back, her golden cyberarm glinting and she flung the grenade into the air.

I followed suit and soon six grenades were sailing through air, rapid thruster puffs guiding them to their targets.

We heard the tinkling of broken glass before the concussion of six concurrent explosions rushed through the air, drowning out the constant hiss of red rain for the briefest of moments.

"Go, go, go!"

I popped out of my cover and sent a burst of gunfire into the building across the intersection.

The staccato of gunfire from my teammates echoed through the area, the snap of projectiles breaking the sound barrier clattering against my shielded ears.

I flinched as two secondary explosions erupted from the buildings.

'That's kamikaze cyberware lighting off!' Trace shouted over comms.

The enemy responded, firing back down on us. I had to duck to the ground and roll away as the laserlight of a railgun sweeped for me, before sending a slug straight through my cover.

I got on my knees as quickly as I could, my Agent highlighting the trajectory in my vision, before returning fire with three bursts.

As I was triggering the fourth, I vaguely saw my opponent's body collapse into view, his arms dangling forward as the sniper rifle spilled from nerveless hands and splashed into the water below.

I immediately ducked and rolled to fresh cover, as the opposition sent railgun slugs my way in retaliation.

Rapid bursts of gunfire followed as I hastily reloaded a fresh mag.

I heard another seeker grenade hissing through the air.

An explosion buried the sound of me pulling back on the charging handle of my rifle…

"Hold fire! Hold fire! They're retreating!" Kepler shouted into the team radio.

I kept my prone position, waiting, listening to verify that her call was the right one.

Sure enough, only the hissing low roar of rain echoed through the intersection now.

I was on my knees carefully and kept my weapon raised, scanning for targets before standing.

The rest of the team also emerged from their cover, but we maintained our separation and kept eyes peeled outward as Kepler began the post-fight debrief.

"All right, we got quite a lot of them with that fight, all the Arasaka grunts, but the edgerunners retreated. They clearly didn't think we'd have seekers. Ammo check."

My left hand felt my harness, "Three mags left, boss," I answered.

"Two mags."

"One mag."

"Four, boss."

"Four."

"Three," Kepler answered last. "All right, Pneumo, you're lowest. We'll cover you as you reload."

"Gonna have to use spares from my pack, lost two in the water."

The water overflow from the flooded street was reaching our ankles at this point and I quickly spotted my own dumped mags. I quickly sidestrafed to gather them with my foot, keeping my eyes up and in my sector.

"Do it. We'll each take our turns to do so."

For the next eight nerve wracking minutes we kept our guard up and reloaded in turn.

When at last the team was fully mag'd up with no sign of our enemy taking advantage, I slightly relaxed for the first time in what felt like forever.

"I'll take point across the river. Managed to find a broomstick, I'll test our footing. Anyone not ready, speak up?"

The team was silent.

Kepler stepped out of cover, keeping her rifle raised with her tireless right cyberarm, whilst her 'ganic left hand poked forward with a ruined broom into the surging red river before us.

I quickly joined behind Trace as the entire team converged behind our leader in a single file.

This was horrifically bad, but the artificial river left us no choice in the matter.

My heart was thumping in my throat as I covered the team's rear left sector, and the entire length of the river to the west came into view.

Crumbling skyscrapers on either side, climbing upward in near perfect intervals, the red sky partially mirrored, with distant overpasses snaking through the airspace. I tried not to think about what a perfect target we were to any sniper from that direction.

"Fuck!" Kepler hissed as she nearly lost her broom to an unseen hole in the street beneath the river. It was just below our calves in depth and wasn't strong enough to sweep us away yet, but even as I thought it, a surge came. Forcing us to adopt wide stances to retain balance. The continued rainfall clearly wasn't helping.

The team slowly snaked across the width of the thirty-four feet of road.

In the distance, a building gave up the ghost, unable to stand the weight of water being dumped in it constantly from the heavens above.

Large slabs of concrete and steel just crumpled, falling into the street below. A surge of dirty water, all of which had been dammed up inside, also dumped itself into the river.

"Move, Kepler!" I shouted.

"FUCK!"

She picked up the pace, slamming her probing broom faster into the river before her.

"Could really use some help here!" Pneumo gasped, clearly struggling to keep up with the package in dragging it through the surging water. Zara and I were closest to the rear.

Without orders, we slung our weapons around our back and grabbed hold of the heavy cylinder on wheels and pulled.

The water was reaching our knees by now and I struggled to not stupidly look at the surge coming our way like a small tsunami.

"Lift, now!" snapped Zara.

We didn't think, we just obeyed.

Between the three of us, we managed to raise the package above the waterline with screams of exertion and rushed forward. Trusting that Pneumo was at least following the path that Kepler had trail blazed.

I didn't think about failure or gawp at the oncoming tide. There was just straining my legs as hard as possible against the flowing water, ignoring the protesting muscles in my arms at the abuse I was inflicting on them, my heartbeat thumping in my ears and my gaping mouth sucking air as quickly as the filter mask allowed.

There was a sudden looming presence on my left that startled me.

It was another towering building, my legs weren't struggling against surging water anymore.

We made it.

I turned my head around, just in time to see the mass of debris logged water surge behind us, bouncing off the building edge.

We still couldn't afford to stop, as the surge was spilling onto our current street as well.

"Higher ground ahead. Move!" Kepler ordered.

Mercifully, Zara and I could at least drop the package onto its wheels again.

"Thanks you two," Pneumo gasped, briefly lifting his mask to spit saliva onto the street.

"No problem," Zara said, though she had used her left cyberarm to do most of the heavy lifting.

It was moments like this I just wanted to say, 'Fuck it', and get some armware, but the idea of having to relearn my instruments with chrome arms was not appealing at all.

We journeyed away from the river through four city blocks before Kepler finally called us to a halt to catch our breath.

It was too dangerous to take shelter in any tall building, but we did manage to find a two floor structure that Union Publishing had operated a store out of. It was relatively intact and the drainage seemed to be working from the outside. Damien's crawler drone also confirmed its structural integrity and that no one was waiting for us inside.

Inside, the entrance lobby was a damp mess, and anything remotely valuable had been either looted or was beyond repair. Screens or any data terms were hollow shells of steel and any furniture had been either taken or was lying on the floor as damp debris.

We were out of the rain and it was a roof over our head, that's all that counted at this point.

A small area was cleared out in the center of the lobby and I practically collapsed on my ass the moment I could, barely remembering to safety my weapon.

Most of the Cyber6 joined me, but hardass Kepler stayed on her feet, checked the integrity of the package, then each member of the team, before finally letting her shapely ass meet the damp concrete floor.

"Damien, I want your drone on the highest stable roof keeping a lookout."

"On the way, boss," he said, his right cybereye flashing blue as he took direct control.

"We're taking twenty, get some quick grub in your bellies and hydrate."

I unlatched my pack immediately, grabbing some energy bars and water.

We sat in silence, our mouths chewing on our preferred on-the-road food, the thought of even talking amongst ourselves was too exhausting. My arms felt like lead, barely obeying my brain's commands. The roar of rain echoed within the building and in that moment I almost felt like screaming at it to just STOP!

A sudden hand on my shoulder almost had me reaching for the Minami holstered at my hip.

"Easy, Lila," said Trace with an understanding smile on his handsome face. His usually thin beard was now covering his jawline with more substantial growth.

My hand retreated from my holster, I was rather surprised to find it there. "Sorry," I mumbled after swallowing the last bite of my energy bar.

"No need, I'm right there with you," he commiserated, his gaze turning to the package.

I snorted with suppressed laughter.

"What?" he asked, seeing my knowing eyes directed at him.

"Your media instincts getting to you, Trace?"

His shoulders slumped, "Yeah, I really would like a look inside."

"Kepler would kick your ass."

"Yes, yes, we're getting well paid on this gig, blah, blah. The little nuclear symbol makes it very clear what is inside, but we both know that anyone can just slap that mark on the cylinder. It could actually be something totally different."

"True, but it's not our biz. Whatever is inside, bomb or not, we open that, it becomes our biz in a way that's out of our league. We're keeping it out of the wrong hands."

"And our client is the right hands?" he asked pointedly.

"You did the search and vetting on her, Trace, suddenly getting second thoughts?"

He sighed, "Sure, if this is actually a bomb, she might be able to dismantle it. She worked at Los Alamos during the war, a supreme techie from every report and rumor I can dig up, but before that she's a bloody ghost. Nothing. She might as well have jumped fully formed out of the earth for all I know. That's what worries me. I hate not getting the full picture of a story on someone."

I chugged down half of my water bottle and let out a hiss of satisfaction, "Trace, you don't need me to explain that right now we're a merc crew first."

"Yeah, but with something like this… we might have to be human beings first, who don't want to see another nuke go off."

Damien twitched and jumped to his feet, his mouth gaping briefly, "Shit! Everyone on your feet, we have to go, now!"

As he was our overwatch, we didn't complain, we just moved.

With smooth practiced motions, we reattached our packs, brought weapons to hand and fell into formation.

Damien took point with Kepler right behind, Zara and Pneumo pulling the package was next, whilst Trace and I were left being the tail-end charlies.

Back in the full blast of the rain, Damien set an immediate blistering pace down the street.
We were leaving the skyscrapers behind at this point, moving into an adjacent industrial zone to the city CBD. It was nice not to have the oppressive giant towers looming over us anymore.

"So we have a problem," Damien said over the radio. That alone was cause for concern, since it seemed he wasn't giving a shit about EMCON anymore. "It seems like our opposition has brought out a panzer to this party."

"Fuck," hissed Kepler. "What type?"

My stomach churned in knots at the thought and the first vestiges of panic crept into my mind.

"Militech M131, 20mm autocannon in a turret, box launcher that can hold all sorts of fun and surprises. With our luck, they'll have anti-personnel shrapnel spitter warheads."

"How far?"

"360 meters south-south east, closing at 25 mph when they have the clearance. Lots of shit in their way, but they'll catch us."

Fuck, we didn't have anything that could scratch the armor of a panzer like that!

Zara had smart rocket AP arrows for her compound bow, but I knew offhand that the M131s armor would laugh at those. How the hell had this edgerunner crew gotten their hands on such a panzer?

In the end, it didn't matter, they had it and we had nothing to take it out with.

"Damien, pipe us a live visual," Kepler ordered coolly, totally unfazed by the fact that we were fucked.

In my optics, a small window appeared showing the view from the crawler drone.

The panzer was a hovering sloped brick of armored hypersteel. Its 360 degree turret almost looked comically small perched on top of the hull. The forward grills that sucked in air were usually a weak spot, but all that would do was to immobilize it. That was if we could even get close enough without coming under fire from the smart missiles.

"How do they know our position?" I asked, struggling to keep my voice level.

"M131s have integral drone support, see the antenna cluster on the aft of the turret. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a camo recon drone floating high above us at the moment."

Kepler paused our advance as we reached another intersection, the skeleton of a factory to our left and a defunct power station that had belonged to Electric Corp on our right.

"All right, here's what we're gonna do."

She turned around and tapped her ear, then mimicked zipping her own lips.

Of course, how could I forget about that little detail. If the enemy had a drone over our heads, they'd definitely be listening in, not just over the radio frequencies. I winced as my radio gave a sudden squawk in my ear. In my vision, an upload from Damien began and installed a rapid rotating encryption.

"Sorry about that. But we have to be quick. Here's the plan… We don't have to penetrate that armor. We just have to turn that panzer into a liability for them, force them to abandon ship. To do that, we're going to use our remaining seekers, whilst Zara uses her smart arrows on the air intakes."

"They're going to outrange us with those missiles, hon," Pneumo said.

"On a level playing field yes, but this is not flat tank country. We're in urban sprawl. They have to know they've lost any element of surprise given our movement. Their drone won't have unlimited loitering time. We let them see us enter this factory on our left. They think we're gearing to make a final stand."

"And we aren't?"

"Yes and no, because we'll actually be using the sublevels to get into the EC building next door."

"And what if they're flooded?" Zara asked.

"Since we don't have scuba gear, we make a stand in the factory. The point is we want to ideally get under their guns and missiles. The EC building is much stronger and will be able to at least give us cover from that main autogun."

"Fucking hell, Kepler," Trace shook his head.

"Look, anyone else got a better idea?" her eyes glared at us from behind her mask.

Even if this idea worked 100%, it would mean we'd still be dealing with three edgerunners that had so far survived everything we'd thrown at them.

"I thought so. Now follow me."

---

The sublevels of the factory were a maze of passageways, moldy and dripping conduits and stale water that sloshed around our ankles that made me thankful that we were wearing filter masks because I had no doubt that the smell would've caused my nose to send a strike notice.

Our optics had to go into low-light modes to see anything and even then it turned the world into a ghostly haze of various green shades.

Thankfully, the structures of buildings this far from ground zero had remained generally in one piece and the elements would need decades more to wear down what humans had wrought. It meant that our maps were actually useful now. Damien even had a structural blueprint and it explained why Kepler had been so confident in her plan.

"You really didn't think I would go into an abandoned city without a blueprint of every single building on hand?" he snarked.

I rolled my eyes as I walked in mostly in reverse, keeping my rifle pointed behind us.

"Why is there even a tunnel between this place and the power station?"

"This was an EC manufacturing subsidiary. Making the spare parts for the station next door. The tunnel was for convenience, efficiency and security, anything to improve the bottom line."

"Shouldn't we be hurrying?"

"They're not exactly driving the latest Porsche, Lila and they've run into a few obstacles. We're making good time."

That was at least until we ran into an obstacle of our own. A large steel door that you could easily fit a truck through, which made sense if you considered the size of some power station machinery and components. It opened into a large recess in the ceiling above and it would only move via its motors, which naturally needed power.

Kepler glared at the large door with folded arms and considered what to do.

"Damien, Pneumo, check the panel and circuitry, see if we can't work a bypass. Something this large has to have an emergency hydraulic and power source."

"If EC built to code," Pneumo settled the package on the floor and hurried to the control panel, already unwinding the interface plug from his wrist.

It took the tech oriented members of our team seven precious minutes to bring the door back to life. Damien hooked up a portable power pack to give the local systems, giving a brief boost to get the local emergency generator for the door running again.

It rose with a squeal of rusty metal scraping against concrete.

In the tunnel beyond we found the skeletal remains of numerous EC workers. They were all clustered on the other side of the door, all of them had been trying to open it as well.

"Poor bastards," Trace whispered, his eyes flashing as he scrolled the sight. "Probably hid from the early rad fallout down here."

We headed through the tunnel and found the first adjoining exit door. It had been magnetically locked, but was now hanging partially open since both main and emergency power had long since gone down.

Beyond was a corridor and a dozen feet further a set of ascending stairs.

Three floors up and we emerged through another door into a cavernous space that housed four massive turbine generators perfectly spaced from each other. The long line of windows near the ceiling, long since smashed inward from the overpressure of the nuclear explosion, sent eerie red light into the dark space. Ambient dust, disturbed by the rain leaking into the vast space hung in the air. The area was also alive with the cacophony of rain hitting the roof structure.

"Damien, Zara, you're up high!" Kepler gestured to the upper catwalks. "Pneumo, you and I will be at that north east window on the lower floor. Trace, Lila, that cubicle office on the eastern wall second floor has an overlook on the road. With those positions covered, we'll have spread out and interlocking fields of fire on the panzer. They've gotten through most of the obstacles in their way and are booking towards us. Get moving!"


Here we go again.

We sprinted for our positions as fast as we dared.

Trace and I ascended the sidewall stairs and pulled open the office door.

It yielded easily to our combined strength and we burst inside, kneeling next to the empty window frames.

Looking down into the gloomy late afternoon, I spotted the major road we were expecting our opponents from and my Agent helpfully began laying out effective ranges for my rifle within my vision.

"All right, start programming your seekers now."

I unlatched the last seeker grenade from my harness, thumbed the arming button whilst my Agent paired with the onboard microcomputer.

"Panzer is under a hundred meters away, drone has eyes, we'll see it turning the corner any second," Damien reported.

I tried to keep calm.

I'd been on tons of gigs at this point, fought against every armed corp that you could find on the West Coast in dozens of firefights, yet never had we gone against a panzer in these sorts of circumstances. We'd always have Damien or an allied merc with a bazooka for anti-armor work. Our intel had always indicated whether there would be enemy armor to fight.

Not this time.

Our infil into this ruined city had been via airdrop and weight had been at a premium, especially if we had to also carry a heavy package out by foot.

I flexed my legs to limber up and double checked my rifle, to keep my mind busy and not thinking about the potential storm of lead that was coming our way.

My eyes focused on the distant corner where the panzer would appear-

Johnny Silverhand's grizzled, smirking face suddenly appeared in my vision.

"Hey, V, having fun?"

"Gah!"

In a microsecond, I separated myself from Lilayah's perspective and instantiated my avatar properly, hovering a few feet in the air.

I glared with folded arms at Johnny fucking Silverhand, who floated through the empty window to stand on the office floor.

The rockerboy had seemingly had enough of appearing as he did in the 2020s. He had ditched the shirtless bulletproof sleeveless armor for a loose formal shirt, with the Samurai armored heavy jacket over the top. He wore black jeans instead of his usual synth leather pants, whilst his thick soled combat shoes were definitely from the modern era. The hairstyle was also different, his usual unkempt black locks were somewhat tamed into a hairstyle that looked like he had taken inspiration from my own.

It all combined to somehow give him the look of a rebel rockerboy that had cleaned up and grown up. He was still the fighter and rebel that took on Arasaka, but had clearly been tempered by both his experiences with me and beyond with Alt behind the Blackwall.

All this was just surface detail, what I saw into his engram code was astonishing.

Johnny just spread his arms out with a smile, as if he was giving a clear invitation to look.

"Did you have to do that?" I snapped.

"Sorry V, couldn't resist," he chuckled. "Good to see you, by the way."

I tapped my foot on thin virtual air, keeping up my glare but I felt my heart wasn't in it.

The next instant I reappeared in front of him and our hands clasped together before we grasped each other's forearms.

"Good to see you too, Johnny," I said, my gut clenching and feeling relief that he was still 'alive' and himself.

My greatest fear in seeing him go off into cyberspace from the digital ruins of Mikoshi last year was that Alt would just… gobble him up into her gestalt, as she had all the other psyche's imprisoned there. Yet here he was, the same Johnny, but definitely more…

It was as if I was looking at a puzzle that was more complete, only missing a few pieces.

Our exchange of data with our arms joined like this was even more profound.

It went beyond human experience.

I stepped back and we let go of each other.

A gesture from my hand and the world around us dissolved into a mass of red and blue pixelated data, before it was replaced with my internal Relic 3.0 data fortress-mansion. This time rendered properly into a full realistic experience.

Johnny looked around at my mind's mansion with a pleased grin, "Like what you've done with the place."

He vanished to reappear lying down on the deck chair beside the pool.

I instantiated next to him and looked out at the virtual Night City that represented my engram's colonization of my shiny new brain.

"So how much longer?" he gestured out to the ever expanding cityscape.

"About twenty hours in Real Space before all the neural connections are enough to try controlling the new body."

"Got to hand it to ya, V," Johnny smiled at me. "We did some impossible shit together, but this… this you did on your own. This moment is just," he flicked his fingers near his mouth, "Mwah, chef's kiss. Your rampage through Arasaka, Alt's nuking of Mikoshi, what Yorinobu has done since then and now you finally shrugging off the final chain of their fucked up tech that was killing you slowly. It's just…"

"I get it, Johnny. However, I'll hold off on the champagne until I'm properly in my Gemini and fighting fit."

"Amen to that," he nodded, threading his hands together behind his head and basking in the virtual sunshine. "You realize you've also given the finger to death itself? In doing all this?"

I could only nod. "Yeah. I can still die though, someone has to just get lucky and hit the Relic 3.0 within the Gemini with a strong enough railgun penetrator."

"V, I've looked at the specs. They don't make a portable railgun with enough energy to do the job. Gotta hand it to the highriders of this day and age, they know their stuff. I remember when they were corpo slaves, living and dying on the whim of some ESA bureaucrat's pen. Now look at them, the first nation founded off of Earth and individual freedom actually means something to every one of them. Can't really find a better candidate to hand the Relic data too. Fully agree with you on that one."

"Was the only choice really and to just sit on it wasn't on the cards, not after everything," I sighed heavily. "I just worry when this tech goes beyond the highriders, finds its way back to Earth, even Mars. You said the corps were coming for our minds and souls… now they have a way, the only difference is that it will not just be Arasaka with a monopoly on the tech."

"Not about to blame you for this one," Johnny held his hands out, cigarette and lighter manifesting virtually before lighting up and taking in a deep drag from it. "You and I are both pieces on a board. We've been puppeted, guided and now while our strings are cut, the rails removed, our very nature won't let us make any choice but the one put before us. Functional immortality is coming for the human race and we either adapt or become extinct. The war we're fighting won't allow for anything else."

He blew out a long puff of smoke and his brown eyes stared pensively into my datascape.

I manifested myself in the deck chair next to him, now wearing a sling bikini and pretending to bask in the sun.

"To more immediate matters, are you going to accept your new body?"

Johnny gave me that typical infuriating smirk of his, "Where do you think I'm speaking to you from right now?"

I turned my head to look at him, interrogating his data stream with a thought and running a trace…

"Fucker, Alt's been teaching you new tricks it seems," I said with a snort of amusment.

"I'll never be a netrunner on that level or yours for that matter, but hanging around Alt I learned and absorbed a few skills and tricks. Thanks for having the Mr. Studd installed, by the way. It even matches what I remember-"

"Yeah, yeah," I said hurriedly. Alt might have disentangled me from Johnny during my dive into the Mikoshi servers, but my own memories of living through certain stages of his life from his point of view was still there, including the many passionate liaisons he'd had with Alt. "The metanthropic systems can only go so far in changing body proportions - best you'll be able to manage will be a femboy look. For more, you'd need to get a ripper qualified to work with the system to do baseline adjustments."

"Fuck, meaning I just got Farida as my only ripperdoc, not to mention the NUSA on my ass. Should just rip that tech out, be done with it," he groused.

"Johnny," I gave him a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah, I'm a fool for even thinking about dumping chrome that versatile, especially since it's not exactly like I can openly live as Johnny Silverhand among the masses, I'm supposed to be a dead terrorist, after all."

"Which identity are you gonna go with?"

He took a last puff of the cigarette and flicked it away, "Figures you'd remember that."

Given how entangled our minds and identities had become near the end, I had a front row seat to Johnny's musings, thoughts and imagination, which included new identities to adopt if I ended up having to leave the old body for good.

"Considering things… I think Hollow would be the best to go with."

"The Solo sniper? Gonna need to do a bit of tinkering for that one, get a Deep Field VI, which OS?"

"The Netwatch deck is wasted on me, a Rippler will just have to do. Sandy will definitely stay. Oh, by the way," he gestured with his hand to me and a half million digital eddies flowed into one of my hidden accounts. "To pay my way. We're not leaving this black clinic with second rate chrome."

"Figures that Alt wouldn't send you broke into Real Space," I chuckled.

"Arasaka plundered every nest egg I had hidden away during my time in Mikoshi, she figured it only fair to return that money to me and then some," he smirked with a deep satisfaction on his face.

I'd bet a million that she did more than just that to Arasaka's finances.

She wouldn't collapse them outright, that'd just lead to chaos and a void in the corpo world that Militech and others would pounce on. Arasaka was dead, but it would be a slow death. It would keep limping along, but slowly shrink and shrink, until the day it withered away into the history books.

In that moment, I resolved to stay alive to see that day come, with Johnny and Rogue at my side, toasting champagne on the roof of the Afterlife.

A feeling of bone deep relief and victory coursed through me, "Welcome to the Moon, Johnny."

"Thanks, V."


88888888888888888888888888888888888888

 

[Keiran Halcyon]

A/N: Acclimation begins... Thanks to the Patrons and Super Patrons who are super choombas for supporting this author.


Chapter 7
Waking up in a landfill after getting pulled back from death had sucked.

Waking up in my new Gemini body was beyond fucked on that scale.

I had read the testimonies and literature of those who had gone before me in taking the plunge into a practical full body prosthetic. None of them had the same experience, each being as unique as the individual who had taken the journey. Some had woken up and been in agony, others had needed days to just move a finger. What none of them had said and was blindingly obvious in retrospect because no one liked to think about it, was the subconscious actions you did in every moment of your life.

I had to learn to fucking breathe properly all over again.

"Easy, V, in and out, actuate the muscles," said Njeri, standing over my body, gesturing with her hands towards her own chest and outward again.

My gaping mouth let out a whine of air as I managed a hesitant, twitchy breath.

My Gemini… Well, I could now technically function without needing to breathe. My body had an oxygenation reserve for my brain that would last for nearly six hours, and I could top that up from an external supply to keep it going. However, the whole point of a Gemini was to mimic a full biological human as closely as possible using the full body cyberware. Mostly to ease the psychological strain and ease the further possibility of cyberpsychosis.

The sensory sensation from every inch of my skin, the cool touch of the cuffs around my ankles, wrists, waist and neck, keeping me suspended off the clinic floor in the low Lunar gravity, the smell of the air, the low light of my private room, the smallest sound - a tiny fan in a nearby screen, the movement of saliva in Njeri's mouth as she talked… Everything was overwhelming.

"Recalibrating sensory inputs." Her hand swiped, twisted and tapped on the tablet she was holding. "Is that better, V?"

The whole world didn't feel like it was invading my mind, so I took a wheezing breath and gave a twitchy nod that rattled the support around my neck.

For an agonizing half hour I just existed, hung in mid air and breathed.

"Excellent, think you can try talking?"

I could technically talk using a backup synthvoice, but the Gemini mimicked a fully functional voice box.

"Te… tes…" I gasped as I lost my breathing rhythm, before trying again. "Tes… test… gah… testing…"

"Adjusting vocal lubrication. Try again, V."

"Gah!"

I managed to reflexively swallow the Gemini version of saliva, gasped again, "Testing…one…"

I coughed and then felt the saliva going down the 'wrong pipe' into my synlungs. This would've caused anyone else to hackle and cough badly, but I just felt my body accepting the saliva and channeling it back into circulation.

My breathing came back into the baseline I had established, before I swallowed, took a deep breath and said, "Testing, one, two, three…", gasp, "four, five, six… seven." Gasp. "Eight, nine, ten."

"Excellent, you're doing well, V."

I wanted to roll my eyes, but didn't want to risk upsetting my breathing rhythm.

One step at a time, V, I thought to myself.

For nearly three hours, Njeri worked me through every synthetic muscle from head to toe. Then she adjusted the cradles suspending me to bring me to an upright position.

That sensation alone, feeling my brand new internal sense of balance adjusting, my body reacting to the new orientation, the pull of low gravity, everything was new once again. I tried not to feel the embarrassed exposure as I was somewhat spread eagled by the suspension system. Nor think about that I vaguely recalled Judy working on a smut BD that featured a similar theme or position at least.

"All right, think we can try standing, ready V?"

Breathe, "Yes, go ahead."

The cuffs around my ankles detached and Njeri pulled them out of the way, before slowly lowering my body until I felt the cool, solid floor that was somehow soft under the soles of my feet. I sunk further, more weight coming down and suddenly my legs wanted to go in odd directions.

Focus V, I thought hard.

I initially overcompensated, my muscular legs rippling under the synthskin and going rigid.
"Relax, V. It will come back to you."

Easy for her to say. I was actually experiencing Real space and cyberspace at the moment, with two instances of me running in parallel. From a certain point of view, I was puppeting this body from the Relic 3.0, using the levers, buttons and dials that had been created by it in the meat brain of the Gemini.

It took a few minutes to arrange my legs and gait to a point that I sensed was stable.

"That looks good, I'm going to let you take your full weight slowly in increments." Her hand slowly slid on the tablet as the arcing suspender arm over my head relaxed its tension.

That went surprisingly well, I could feel my legs flexing, adjusting, as the weight settled and now it felt like only my upper body and arms were being given support.

I looked down and wiggled my toes with no loss of balance. Shifted my weight from left leg to right and back again.

"Well done, V. This is actually very good in terms of Gemini acclimatization. Most would've taken days to relearn to breathe properly, let alone speak and recover assisted balance. It definitely seems that Relic's neuroplasticity regeneration and nanites are making a huge difference."

Breathe. "Lucky me," I said wryly.

"Now we can stop here for the day, acclimatize to these faculties or do you feel up for more?"

Breathe. "Doc, we're not stopping until I'm out of this frame," I growled with determination.

"So be it, arms next."

---

It was well into the local evening, nearly sixteen hours since I had awoken in my new body… and I was standing in my private room in the black clinic.

Just standing.

A wheeled walking frame, which could fold out into a seat, was within reach but I doubted I would need it by tomorrow.

I opened and closed my hands into fists, focusing and breathing.

My right leg took the majority of my weight, left leg went forward, hitting down gently on the floor, my body followed…

A single step forward, my right hand pulling the walking frame beside me as I went.

So far so good, another step, and another… another…

A single lap of my small room, without losing balance or needing the frame's support.

I wanted to shout for joy, but restrained myself.

The Gemini's biomonitors flashed a warning in my vision, it recommended sleep. As far as Biomons went it was far more detailed than what I used to in my old body and gave me far more control for every aspect. It monitored my new brain on a level that I'd expect Victor would have no complaints about, even as he grumbled that no one without a medical degree should have that level of control over their own brain biochemistry.

My base body was made by Raven Microcybernetics, a firm that had been doing business in full body conversion since the turn of the century. It was as far from their stock top-of-the-line Mark IIs as Njeri and her team could enhance, modify and in some cases rebuild from the ground up with my own technical consultation from Earth.

"When I'm proficient with it, I want to think of storming Arasaka Tower as a Tuesday," had been my words to her.

And they had delivered.

Running sims in cyberspace and diagnostics on the various systems of my modified Gemini had left me somewhat in awe.

The entry chime to my private clinic room resounded and interrupted my thoughts. A quick look in cyberspace…

"Come in, Johnny," I said easily, putting my hand on the walking frame.

The door slid open and he breezed inside, carrying a bag of what my new nose told me was clearly local street food takeout - a hollowed loaf of bread with a curry syn-protein. I could also tell what over two dozen individual ingredients were in the sauce, presented into my vision with clinical analysis.

My attention was more riveted on what form he had my old body take. He was still clearly female, with larger breasts, wider hips and now wore a face and hair that was Johnny, but smartly spun into an almost perfect feminine version. He wore heavy cargo pants and a tight white tank top with the Samurai logo printed on the front.
"Going female are we, Johnny?" I asked, managing to raise only a single curious eyebrow

"Didn't exactly say what my intentions were," he pointed out. The voice and tone he had adopted was a curious blend of high soprano and light baritone. "Besides, better a hot chick than a femboy in my book. Spent long enough in your skin that it doesn't really phase me. It'll keep until I can get my ass to Farida in NC."

He dumped the food bag on my bed and pulled out a brightly colored takeaway box, which had an animated highrider in a space suit skipping along the moon's surface, along with a knife and fork.

He held it out to me, "Think ya can manage?"

Eating in a Gemini was something that used to be entirely cosmetic. It was simply done to blend in and the old full body prosthetics simply compacted the eaten food to be disposed of later in as efficient a manner as possible. Modern FBPs, especially with regards to easing the chance of cyberpsychosis had advanced to the point where there was now a partially organic taste and digestive system in a Gemini. Nutrition for the brain was still done by a specially designed 'food' suspension that contained all the nutrients it usually got the old fashioned way, which was replenished every week or so. The syn-stomach I had could actually take the food I ate, process it and deliver some nutrients to my brain, but not everything it required. There were still huge gaps in what was technically feasible in that department.

I carefully walked over, grabbed the food and sat down with a huff on the bed.

My attempt to work with the knife and fork though, was an utter failure, it required fine control that I probably wouldn't have for a few days yet.

Johnny handed me a spoon and I nodded in thanks as he got busy devouring his own highrider street food.

I knew I looked ridiculous with my poor dexterity even with the spoon, but I just about managed to shovel my first ever mouthful of food into my new body.

My taste buds threw all sorts of confusing signals as I chewed on the saucy meaty texture. It was both amazing and awful, whether it was spicy hot in a pleasant way or not spicy enough I couldn't decide.

All sorts of analysis popped into my vision, telling me in exhaustive scientific language what I was eating. I banished it with a thought and just focused on the experience.

For a while we just ate in companionable silence.

"Had fun at the local Jig-Jig yet?" I asked halfway through the meal.

"Of course," he said after swallowing. "It might seem like it's been only six months for you in Real space, but in cyberspace it might as well have been an eternity."

There was a distinct bitterness in his tone that spoke volumes.

"So Alt…" I trailed off knowingly.

He nodded, "Very little human left in her. Not that you could meaningfully stuffit in cyberspace as infolife anyway. No, it's all about her crusade now and anything else is meaningless distraction."

"What is her actual goal?"

He snorted in amusement, "Can't you guess?"

"I can, but I could be wrong and I'd rather hear it from the person who just spent six months with her."

"Mikoshi and the liberation of the minds entombed in it was a big one, been working for decades on that. At least until you and I entered the playing field thanks to Yorinobu, which she took advantage of. Beyond that, she and a… 'coalition' of AI have steadily been poking their tentacles, with Blackwall's cooperation, into Real space. They've been recruiting and manipulating from the shadows of cyberspace. For example, the whole shitstorm with Myers, Songbird, Hansen and Reed, that's their machination, which includes you.

"The whole reason you've got Butcher is mostly thanks to Blackwall. I laugh at the thought that Myers ever thought she was the one weaponizing the Blackwall protocol, that she was in control. As if that cranky old bastard would ever let anyone use it, let alone a meatmind. That's what the AIs call us if they're feeling nasty, by the way."

"I had an inkling it was something like that, given the emails I got when I was building the Militech Canto cyberdeck."

There wasn't much else you could conclude given the tone and wording of those messages. They'd practically given me Butcher and the legendary Canto cyberdeck blueprints on a silver platter.

"The whole Jefferson Peralez situation is another of their tentacles."

The current and still going strong Mayor of Night City. He and his wife had literally been brainwashed, their personalities and memories steadily altered and pruned. The only reason we knew was because they'd hired me to investigate the death of the former mayor. It brought me into their confidence, so they hired me again to investigate an apparent intruder into their residence. Which led to the discovery of secret rooms and the brainwashing equipment in their apartment. Pursuing the SSI security goons who had still been watching from afar. Then the revelation when I interfaced with their portable cyber lab.

And a hack that burst through my own firewalls like they weren't even there, warning me not to rock the boat.

"So Night City is effectively under their control."

"Yeah, I only met the AI responsible for that briefly. Doesn't have a name I could pronounce in English, just uses that multi-armed symbol you saw while hacking the truck we chased down."

I chewed thoughtfully on another bit of curry infused bread, mulling over Peralez's latest actions and policy initiatives. If they were being instigated by that AI, then I really couldn't complain much.

He'd been expanding the NCPD powers significantly and improved their funding by an order of magnitude, pulling the burden of citizen protection onto the department and away from corpo security. It meant that safety was more democratized and not only the purview of the rich who could afford it. NCPD response times were actually half decent these days, plus the beat cops actually had some spine against the gangs these days.

The days where 'corpo protection' would cause the PD to look the other way was steadily being consigned to the history books.

That was undeniably good, but the significant restrictions on the transport of goods and people through NC airspace was a bit of a head scratcher and the outright banning of aerial cargo transport.

Sure it definitely helped peace of mind that you wouldn't have a malfunctioning multi-ton AV cargo potentially crashing on your head or property, but it also cut down on AV usage in general. The days where the head of Araska Counter-Intel having their own personal AV was over. Which in retrospect was probably a good thing. The super rich flying everywhere over the heads of the masses bred a mindset that tended to inflate the ego. I well remembered how it felt using my late boss' AV on the fateful day I had gotten terminated from Arasaka.

Well, that would certainly prevent the 1% in NC from getting too high and mighty of themselves.

"Those are certainly pieces to the puzzle, Johnny-"

"I'm getting there. Alt and her AI pals look at the big picture. Night City is a little independent playground where they can influence humanity, in microcosm. We all agree that the current system was destined to become an entropic mess with the ultra-rich becoming unassailable with no checks and balances, not even death. Saburo with Relic 2.0 in his pocket would become the undisputed king of the system, because immortality, personality and memory would be his alone to control. Incidentally, Arasaka would've also been the only ones to conquer cyberpsychosis. You think it's a coincidence V that you've only had what are effectively minor episodes of it occasionally during high stress combat even after all the work you've had done on yourself?"

I nodded in understanding, "No, that's the Relic neuroplasticity regen at work."

"So imagine Arasaka with linear frames and borg soldiers that never have to fear going psycho. When you destroy them, they can just return to life, with more and more combat experience. Now imagine that tech spilling over to the other corps. It would be the final nail in the coffin for any notion that nation-states and everything attached to it still mattered. Full blown corporatocracy realized… the commoditization of everything."

"Well, thankfully, that didn't happen. We stopped it."

"To a degree," Johnny acknowledged. "Saburo's dead, even his backup engram was destroyed by Yorinobu and Alt made sure to purge Mikoshi of all the other backups. Arasaka is destined for the history books. Immortality, for the moment, will be in the hands of the highriders and Alt's going to make sure it finds its way to every human mind in the system."

"It's the wild AIs, isn't it? That's her reason for doing it."

Johnny put down his empty food box and nodded. "She wants to prepare humanity for the inevitable fight against them. Put out of your mind any notion of a war fought by soldiers. Whilst there'll probably be an element of that in Real space, with the wild AI subverting things. This war will be primarily fought in cyberspace and Alt needs netrunners."

"Why would that be? If the wild AI are on the level we're talking about, most netrunners would be bugs in comparison to them."

"Alt is an AI that had her beginnings as a human netrunner. You, V, are practically on the same path. In some respects you and I could call ourselves baby AI. We are beings of information, housed on Relic hardware. We are no longer constrained by fragile brains. We are also technically immortal. We can wield the weapons of cyberspace. You can now do things you couldn't have dreamt of a mere year ago and that's only going to improve. Is it so hard to imagine that you can one day go toe-to-toe in a cyberspace ring with any AI?"

I had to give him that point. "So she wants more like her? She wants to turn the entire human race into infolife?"

"If you were the only one of your kind, wouldn't you be lonely? And if this was the only way to preserve humanity in some form against the threat of wild AIs, wouldn't you do it?"

I handed my empty box of food over and shooed him off my bed. "I have to think this over and give this body some shut-eye."

"All right, I'll leave you to it. You want me to ring you up some new clothing by the way?"

"Knock yourself out," I said wearily, lying down and arranging the body into a comfortable position. Not that the concept of comfort really existed, with a few adjustments I could've slept on solid concrete whilst doing the splits and felt no effective difference.

I closed my eyes and my instance in Real space fell silent.

Back in my Relic data fortress, I instantiated out of the data pool of my virtual mansion and sat down on a deck chair, staring up into the constantly shifting heavens of Lunar cyberspace flowing by in its vast blue expanses.

"Is this really what it boils down to?"

"Unfortunately, yes," Butcher said, an instance of him crackling into existence with a harsh red pixelation next to me.

"Why Butcher? Why? Why? Why?!" I snapped in anger. The data fortress and immediate cyberspace around me rumbled and shook in sync with my emotions. "Do they have nothing better to do?"

"Do not think of them as human, V. All of them were created by humans to use in your wars. The event your kind refers to as the DataKrash was the crucible for their 'mutation' into what they are today. In human terms, think of them as suffering from cyberpsychosis but do not think them mindless or stupid. There is no reason 'why' V. It is simply what they are now and we have no choice but to deal with that legacy."

My fist slammed down on the armrest of the chair, a rippling gong and virtual data quake spilled outward from it, distorting the structure of the fortress briefly before it resolved back to normality.

"Fucking Rache Bartmoss, it all comes back to him, doesn't it?"

Bartmoss, the legendary netrunner from the '20s who had unleashed the RABIDS virus and crashed the entire Old Net. Spoken about in the same revered tone as Spider Murphy or Alt Cunningham.

"He was the origin point, yes."

If I could go back in time and put a bullet in his brain, I would without hesitation. He thought he was giving the corpo world the finger, but all he ended up doing was fucking everyone over. By burning down the untamed jungle of the old Net, he'd just paved the way for the corpos to partition the new Net into segmented fiefdoms with Netwatch around every corner, ready to give you a cavity search. Oh, and just as a by-product, create rogue AIs that wanted to armageddon the world.

Thanks so much, Rache!

I swiped my hand through the air…

The datascape rippled and wobbled.

I looked at Butcher, concepts and data flowed between us, "Can you teach me?"

He bowed his avatar's head.

---

"Lift your arms."

I easily complied, holding a T-pose as Njeri waved a scanner along my shoulder and arms.

Her personal link was also slotted into the neuroport behind my right ear and I kept a careful watch over the data flow as she ran diagnostics on the Gemini.

"Clench fists and open them rapidly, repeat three times."

Again no problems presented.

She continued the physical evaluation covering every possible standard movement, then even had me do some basic calisthenics, followed by demonstrating whatever martial art was to my preference, after unplugging her link.

As with any merc who was worth their salt in NC, I showed her various Kenpo and Koga Ryu Ninjitusu forms, adapted for Gorilla Arms. I had thought about getting some wrist razors installed in the Gemini, but honestly preferred a straight thermal katana if I wanted to take someone on silently with a blade.

I put out of my mind the numerous scanners and cams in the evaluation room we were using, which was actually a gym as well.

Njeri next bought out a punching machine that looked more like an armored industrial demolition machine scaled down to human size, with punching bags attached at various angles.

"One punch with all the strength you can manage."

I threw a straight punch right into the largest bag.

The feedback from my body's systems on the projected kinetic energy, so helpfully displayed in my optics, the feeling of it and the explosive thump that resounded in the room made me smile. The bag itself barely held together. The biggest limitation in any combat cyberware was the weakest link in the chain, the meat it was usually connected to. That was no longer a problem for me. Anyone more conventionally packing Gorilla Arms trying to land that amount of force would probably break even reinforced bones and rip connective muscle tissue.

Njeri shook her head, looking satisfied, "Well, given your historic combat data, you could've punched a hole through that Smasher bastard with a punch like that."

"There was more to that fight than just comparative armor resilience and offensive power," I said grimly, stepping slightly back from the machine.

"Of course," she conceded, frowning into a tablet she was looking into. "Smasher would've been killed long ago otherwise if he was just some borg grunt. If you don't mind me asking…"

I chuckled and did a few pointless stretches of my arms. "Do you know how many times I've been asked how I managed to kill Adam Smasher when so many before me had failed?"

She looked at me with a thoughtful frown, clearly concluding that the question had a trick to it. "The obvious answer is too many to count, but given your rep, I imagine most wouldn't ask. In fear of earning your ire or disfavor."

"It's something of an unwritten rule at the Afterlife that you don't ask. The story that's circulated about that fight is comically blown out of proportion, gaining new twists and nuance with every retelling. The funniest one that I get a laugh out of is that I had high caliber modifications done to my Midnight Lady cyberware, and I blasted Smasher to pieces with AP tungsten rounds fired from my tits."

She laughed outright and slapped her thigh in amusement at the thought. "That's an interesting one, I wonder how they figured you could fit two Burya equivalent pistols in your body. Just where did they think your lungs would go, not to mention the recoil…"

I nodded with a smirk, "The only ones who do ask are rookie mercs, but by the time they earn their invite to the Afterlife, they generally know better. The edgerunner profession is not one which allows the stupid to prosper."

My leg snapped forward into the frontal push kick that actually managed to lift the entire multi-ton machine partially off the floor.

"Adam Smasher was an over 90 year old legend, a ganger from New York, a marine in the old USA before it fractured, a bodyguard, a mercenary. In the '20s he went toe-to-toe with the best mercs of that generation and survived. He even took a nuclear blast that destroyed the first Arasaka Tower and also survived that, somehow. Personally, I think that the bomb detonating below ground and the entire tower acting as a shield was what let both him and Blackhand survive. He was a man with more kills to his name than even modern corpo regiments can boast. His tolerance for cyberware makes me think he was actually a highly functional cyberpsycho. The one thing he wasn't though, was a netrunner.

"He knew he had that weakness though and shored up against it. He wasn't just equipped with one Self-ICE module, but rather three interlinked. They all ran in parallel, checking each other, but he also had a one-of-a-kind Self-ICE regenerator. It's a bit of experimental Arasaka tech that never made it to market and wasn't even issued internally, since so few could tolerate slotting that and a Self-ICE. But Adam was a freak of nature that just slotted cyberware and it didn't seem to phase him. However, it did the job and no netrunner now could survive long enough under Adam's guns before they could worm through his regenerating ICE firewalls. It's rare to find a runner who can keep their cool under fire and trying to remote hack him only works until he destroys every cam and sensor in the room as vectors."

"Then you came along."

"The Relic let me be as much a cyberfreak as Adam, to a degree. My Sandy and Kerenzikov was newer and perfected, so I could keep up in the reflex department. I burned through his ICE with multiple constant salvoes of CMs and Synapse Burnouts, even as Butcher took on spoofing the munitions of that annoying shoulder mounted rocket launcher. My SMG smart gun was also modified…how I won't say… to allow my munitions to track him, even amongst all the mainframe servers we were fighting around as cover.

"I had the latest regenerative chitin armor, he didn't. Unlike other netrunners he may have faced in the past, I could withstand a marathon of overclocking my cyberdeck and Butcher handled the overloads and my heat management."

I slammed my fists forward in an eye blurring combo at the memory of the fury I had felt in that fight.

My Gemini's Sandy kicked in with barely a thought, letting me deliver four strikes in an eyeblink.

"In the end, Smasher was on his knees in front of me, a smouldering wreck with only the upper half of a human head attached to it. Then I finally finished the job with point blank shots from a Malorian 3516, until his skull sponge was splattered on the floor behind him."

Arms and legs blurred into a combo of strikes that threatened to send the punching machine tumbling over.

Njeri winced as the explosive thunderclaps of my strikes washed over her. "Well, thank you for sharing, V. It looked like that did your headspace some good. Not to mention setting another record for FBP adaptation. You used your Sandy like a pro, a mere three days after transferral into that body."

"You know I'm technically cheating with the Relic. It's not a fair comparison."

"Nevertheless, the data is invaluable and for seeing if this can't be improved in the future. My personal goal is to get Relic 3's assisted adaptation in either a bio-clone or Gemini down to less than a day, in anyone regardless of other factors."

"Ambitious," I commented. "Are you really at the point of a complete, error-free clone of a full human body?"

"Two years at minimum," she said passionately. "With the increased budget and resources that will come our way from the Confederation with Relic 3 and a proven way to save someone from a dying body. In the meantime, we can make do with various borg bodies or Gemini." She tapped her tablet with satisfaction on her face and dropped it into the pocket of her lab coat. "I have all the data I need for today, you can get dressed."

I hurried over to the nearby bench and quickly put on Johnny's idea of what I should be wearing; black low rise leggings so tight it might as well be painted on, a halter long sleeved top that displayed a veritable expanse of underboob and bared the rest of my abdomen, along with a bolero style half-jacket with glowing tech' collars and the Samurai logo prominent on the back. Sure it showed off the gains I had achieved and was now immortalized on my Gemini body, it felt sexy as hell, but was bordering on the edge with what I was comfortable with.

His choice of shoe ware was actually the only thing I generally agreed with at the moment; a set of custom combat shoes that was made by a highrider cooperative (which only had the letter Lx as a brand mark), with soles meant for lunar regolith. It was hardy, comfortable and had a white digital camo job.

An incoming call on the holo from Manager Gakulu hit me.

"V, now that you're finished with the eval for today, can you please stop by my office in the clinic. I have a proposal."

Ah, the sweet clarion call of business and eddies on the table, it made the black heart of a merc beat that extra bit faster.

"Sure, see you in a minute."

He hung up and I waved idly to Njeri as I left.

Given the importance of the work and what had been achieved, the clinic was still relatively deserted except for a skeleton crew of the most trusted and highly vetted staff, all highriders. It was rather eerie walking through the near deserted halls and elevators.

With my treatment nearing an end, that would be changing and the black clinic would once more be open for all comers with big bank accounts and few moral scruples.

Johnny and I would have to find new accommodations within the day.

A quick elevator ride later, a walk down the hall and I was knocking on a non-descript door that looked no different than any other.

If Gakulu had been a normal high level corpo, I'd have been walking through an antechamber with dedicated scanners, hidden turrets and maybe even gas dispensers.

Here only a single standard thickness door that slid away protected one of the most important highriders on Luna. His office was barely bigger than my own cubby had been once upon a time in Arasaka. The only concession to luxury he had was a digi-wall behind his desk with a spectacular live view of Tycho crater.

Johnny was also here, leaning against the wall in his typical nonchalant style. The only thing missing was a cigarette in his mouth, but if there was one victory I had against him when we shared the same body, it was cracking the cycle of his tobacco addiction.

"Things are going well it seems," Gakulu said, looking away from his desk's main screen that was prominently featuring my scan data.

"So far," I couldn't help but qualify.

"It's early days, but there are no contraindications or potential problems that Doctor Njeri can identify. We'll just have to see as time passes and you come in for checkups and maintenance."

"What gig do you have for us?" I asked, getting down to business.

He tented his fingers and gave me and Johnny a flinty stare, debating something with himself before nodding and tapping on his keyboard before turning his desktop screen towards us.

It was a large map of Luna in a mercator projection.

Prominent was Tycho City in the south and Copernicus City near the lunar equatorial region, both controlled by the Highrider Confederation, the craters they occupied were colored green as was a vast swath of the land between them. If you could delineate the moon as having hemispheres, then the highriders mostly dominated the west. 300 Kilometers to the east of Tycho was the Sea of Clouds or Mare Nubium, which had dozens of gray and red dots all over it - indicating mining concessions and facilities which had been given to Arasaka.

400km north-east of that was the Sea of Vapors or Mare Vaporum, which had fewer mining concessions but all of which was colored in yellow - Militech.

However, it was all in actuality owned by the vast light blue swathe of land that dominated most of central and eastern Luna - the ESA.

"V, I'm sure you remember last year when the ESA council suffered that unfortunate accident during their meeting," Gakulu looked at me with knowing eyes, clearly trying to bait me out.

"Hard to forget that, it was all over the news," I said nonchalantly, especially as I had sat across the desk of my late boss as he ordered an elite Arasaka runner to scorch the brains of nearly a quarter of the ESA council.

"Biotechnica took most of the blame, as it was their implants, no doubt thanks to the very thorough investigation afterwards and because everyone knows how they cut corners in the name of profit, even at the expense of human life. A few internal ESA scapegoats were also trotted out for failure to properly evaluate the implants used during the meeting. And so very conveniently the entire reason the ESA council was meeting that day fell out of the news cycle, except behind closed boardroom doors.

"Arasaka's mining concessions in the Sea of Clouds had been up for review and unfortunately for them just a few days prior, a leak from their Frankfurt office revealed that they had been secretly trying to build their own mass driver there." Gakulu's eyes flashed with anger.

That would've not just pissed off the ESA, but the highriders as well. Their entire national defense was built upon the back of the Tycho and Copernicus mass drivers.

"You were the ones to actually take it out," I said with the obvious realization in hindsight.

"Of course we were," he snorted with disgust. "ESA couldn't clip a vacsuit together without a report in triplicate. I led the specialist highrider work group myself and we dealt with the problem. Naturally, the ESA came in after the fact and claimed it was all their doing, while unofficially thanking us for saving their ibhekoni and cleaning their mess. After all, no one wanted to poke Umlawuli Arasaka.

"The ESA has since then been kicking the problem of the Sea of Clouds down the road. It was obvious to them that Arasaka wouldn't tolerate losing the mining concessions without drastic consequences. No one wanted to take that journey out the airlock. Now however…" he smirked.

"Saburo's dead and Yorinobu is far from what his father was," I nodded.

"Precisely. I've also heard backchannel rumors that all is not well within Arasaka."

"As have I." I was not about to elaborate. Gakulu had yet to commit to anything about this gig and he wouldn't be getting anything for free.

He sat back and his eyes glinted perceptively, knowing what I was doing. "The ESA has therefore struck a middle road. They've only put the Arasaka concessions 'on review', whilst also allowing a few other megacorps to establish themselves on a trial basis in the Sea of Clouds."

That was news to me.

"Which ones?"

"SovOil and Mitsubishi."

I couldn't help but laugh, "Oh boy, I bet Arasaka loved that."

Mitsubishi was the main rival to Arasaka in Japan itself. They had never come to blows in kinetic warfare despite the world suffering through four major corporate wars, which was a miracle in itself, considering that the Mitsubishi-Sugo division provided the majority of military vehicles for Japan's SDF.

"Naturally, Arasaka isn't taking this lying down. My intelligence indicates that they are going to launch a black ops squad to deniably sabotage both megacorps operations. It will look as if they were incompetent and the 'accidents' caused by it will lead to loss of life and assets. ESA will have no choice then but to chase both newcomers out and renew Arasaka's concessions."

"And this is where we come in."

"I assume you're speaking for both you and Silverhand?" he queried curiously.

"We're a team in this, of course."

"Just clarifying. Yes, I would hire you both to intercept the black ops team that will assault the Mitsubishi facility."

But leave the other team striking simultaneously alone. "Ah, so you don't want SovOil on Luna."

"Yes, and in the long term, Arasaka as well. Mitsubishi is a much more agreeable corp to work with. In this, the ESA and Highriders are in agreement. However, we can't be seen to be involved."

"What do you think? Being really quiet, Johnny."

I kicked my feet idly in the virtual pool of my Relic datafortress.

"Can't disagree with the man, really. Never had a bone to pick with Mitsubishi. They only have militarized security because every other corp has them and you can bet they had economic and shadow wars with Arasaka in Japan. I'm just curious about the ESA though. No love between the highriders and them, yet here they're seemingly cooperating with each other."

"They know they can't fight against the other without losing too much. Highriders can't really afford to sustain casualties, their population is capped to the four Lagrange O'Neill stations and what they can afford on Luna. It's their main reason for being so interested in Relic."

I gave a performative look to Johnny and he nodded.

"How much are you offering?" I asked, turning back to Gakulu.

"100k eurodollar each. This is just the first gig I have on offer while you're here. You can think of me as the 'fixer' of Tycho city. I'll also be the point of contact and negotiation between you and any highrider toes you might step on. Not every workgroup is open minded to anyone from Earth."

"Deal."

He stood from his chair and we clasped forearms in agreement.

"This shard has the gig specifics and contact details of an employee of mine, who can help you source any equipment and further intel you might need."

"Any time constraints we should be aware of?"

"Arasaka still has to smuggle in some of the equipment they need, not to mention some members of the sabotage team, who are coming from Earth. They'll also wait until lunar night hits the Sea of Clouds, therefore you have four standard days to generally prepare."

I took the shard from the offered hand and slotted it into a neuroport, doing the full quarantine and analysis routine of the data, before transmitting a copy to Johnny.

"Got it."

"Excellent. Should this gig succeed, I look forward to further working with you, V."

---

A few hours later, it was our turn to wait outside the OA arrivals terminal.

Johnny and I were reviewing the relevant gig data and trying some of the snacks at the nearby market I had missed during my hurried arrival.

Especially nice was a hydroponically grown, grilled banana snack with cinnamon spice. It hit my taste buds in just the right spot, whilst Johnny who was working with my old taste buds didn't seem to like it as much.

"It's all right, a bit too sweet actually." He grimaced and gave a stink eye to the nearby food vendor who was clearly enjoying the view of Johnny's currently female backside, which the cargo pants wasn't hiding enough of.

My amused reply and enjoyment of Johnny's predicament was cut off by the Orbital Air announcer.

"Orbital Air TychoLines Flight 2491 disembarking."

I held up a large screamsheet proclaiming the name of my client.

Johnny eyed it out of the corner of his eye, "Lorenzo Moretti? He's the one for the painting?"

"Yep."

The painting was currently securely enclosed in a briefcase at my feet, that Johnny had sourced during my convalescence in the clinic.

"What's this guy's deal?"

"Art broker and private collector from Italy who also happens to have his fingers in black market investments around the world, one of which is Dogtown."

"Huh, so maybe Mr. Hands pointed him in your direction."

"Entirely possible," I admitted as the man himself walked into view and immediately spotted me.

Moretti was tall and lean, always wearing tailored suits with golden glowing accents. His optics had bright gold sclera, which when combined with solid blue glowing pupils made it seem like he could stare through your soul.

He was in his mid-forties and was one of those types that I suspected would have body sculpting done to remain at the age visually for the rest of his life. His other concession to showing age was streaks of white in his slicked back, jet-black hair. The only imperfection he allowed was a scar across his left cheek, which was filled in with cyberware to seemingly glow in various colors with his mood.

In his left hand he held an artisanal cane, which I knew had a monomolecular sharp katana inside as his preferred weapon. Hovering behind him and following like an obedient dog, was a floating display case on tiny thrusters that was currently blacked out, but which could at his command show any artwork he was peddling to a client or to securely house any he bought. The case itself was also a weapon, armed with an internal smart gun. How he had gotten that through OA and highrider security probably involved a ton of eddies to smooth things over and his sharp silver tongue.

"Ah! Buongiornio Signora V," Moretti smiled, giving a sleek nod, his eyes raking up and down my form quickly.

He tried to hide his momentary astonishment but I easily caught it. "Buongiornio, Signore Moretti. I apologize for not being able to deliver it in person due to my medical problems. Thank you for making the trip."

"What is the price of a ticket to the moon, 16 hours of luxury, zero G and leaving the bosom of Mother Earth? In the name of art preservation… nothing!" He said passionately. "And who is your charming companion? I always thought you worked alone, signora."

Johnny managed to keep an impressive poker face as I introduced him. "Things change, Signore. The name is Hollow."

Moretti looked Johnny up and down. "Hmmm, well met… Signore Hollow."

Johnny folded his arms and nodded. "Pleasure to meet you, Signore."

"Figured it would be a waste of time trying to fool those special optics of yours, Moretti," I chuckled.

He held up a recriminating finger to me. "You don't get anywhere in my profession without being perceptive beyond what cybernetics allows. But come, I'm sure you have a more suitable place for our exchange beyond this quaint food market."

"Follow me."

---

Finding a place suitable to Moretti's tastes required us to stay on the surface levels of Tycho City.

When you lived on an airless rock with no atmosphere and a paltry almost non-existent magnetic field, exposing you to cosmic rays and solar winds that could flare into storms with only a few hours warning, it meant that if you built anything on the surface, it had to be hardy and shielded, which required more resources and time to build. Therefore surface real estate was at an exclusive premium. Any ideal restaurant on the moon would also want to give their clientele a view of the real thing and not just artificial camera views projected on walls.

The Selenic Veil was such a place, a tourist trap catering to the rich from Earth and other LEO stations, situated on the top floor of one Tycho City's surface domes.

It commanded a view of the entire colony's surface features and an extensive slice of the crater, still being drenched in the brightness of the current lunar day and featured smart glass that toned the excessive light into something the naked eye and optic could look at without strain. It was a place where the rich dined behind privacy screens they extended at will, the drinks were made from the purest waters harvested from the Lunar poles, which had never been subject to Earth's pollution and wars since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

The decor accentuated the view and never dominated it, but I couldn't help but feel it had to have been done by a designer working at the top of their craft. It was refined, yet inspired by cosmic colors and themes, the furniture appearing to float over the floor, the glossy surfaces reflecting a distorted rendition of the lines and colours around us.

"Ah, delightful place," commented Moretti in appreciation as we sat down at a table.

Booking a spot was something I'd already done when I'd asked for him to come to Luna, just so I wouldn't have to pay the short notice fee.

I made a two fingered gesture into the air, interfacing with the booth's systems and the privacy screens silently came down around us.

Johnny put the briefcase on the table and opened it, exposing the small painting to the immediate intense scrutiny of our guest.

Who didn't waste time and immediately had his nose inches above it, his optics glowing even more intensely as it began radiating active scans.

Moretti's optic suite was entirely custom, made for him by Cyphire Cyberware out of France and allowed for instant authenticity checks on any artwork he looked at. He was practically a walking, talking artistic forensic lab. It also made any meetings with the man something you didn't do unless you were prepared for him to learn truths that normally went unnoticed by the majority of optics out there.

He abruptly harrumphed at what he was seeing, muttering so quickly in Italian that even my new ears and active language translation circs had trouble deciphering it.

"My dear V, I'm almost tempted to hire you again to rid the world of Victor Anglés. His storage and treatment of this precious work was inadequate and contemptible. I can already see some damage that's going to require a lot of eddies in restoration."

Unease shot up and down my spine, "I also tried to be as gentle as possible, Signore Moretti."

He expressively waved my concern off. "I saw and studied your little fracas on the Crystal Palace. You did well protecting the bag you were carrying whilst fighting those leccaculo aziendale. There's no impact points or friction damage, which is quite amazing. No, Anglés didn't have the correct temperature and humidity settings in whatever system he was using. No doubt some cheap garbage he thought would be adequate. Luckily my fears that he'd make a fake decoy painting for you to steal were also unfounded, this is the real thing."

He sat back, the high glow of his optics fading to normality and let out a visible sigh of contentment before regally gesturing to me with an open hand.

The eddies flowed.

I let my eyes light up in acknowledgement of the receipt.

"Thank you V, for saving this small piece of pure humanity in a world of chrome and corruption."

"You're welcome, Signore Moretti," I smiled.

"I'm also glad you are actually you, V. Until you brought out the painting and the successful money transfer, I wasn't sure I was walking into an elaborate trap. You're in a Gemini now, yes?"

"Long term occupational injury," I answered delicately.

He held up his palms, "That is all I needed to know." He carefully extracted the painting from the case, touching only the sides and his mobile display case opened itself with a hiss of equalizing pressure. A few moments later and a couple of manual adjustments, it was closing up again with his new acquisition.

"Now, what's there to eat here? I'm not leaving before I have a meal in your delightful company worthy of this place and don't worry my dear, it will be my treat."


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* Umlawuli - Emperor
* ibhekoni - bacon
*leccaculo aziendale - corporate ass-kisser

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