The Brink and Back - Tinker of Fiction

[MetaBettaOmega]

I didn't miss my old life.

My old life was crap, honestly. A dead-end job with no respect. Barely making ends meet no matter how much overtime and second gigs I took. I had no time for friends and no energy to enjoy what little free time I had. I was stuck in a life that was becoming all too common for people my age. My only claim to success was that I had seen college for the scam that it was, and so I didn't have any college debt. I was still working the same jobs as everyone else who had gone to college, getting screwed out of my money just like them. I just didn't have a guillotine hanging over my head.

My old life sucked. Still, as much as I didn't miss it, I would have been tempted to go back to it if it had been an option.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I fantasized about adventure and power as much as the next guy… but actually getting my wish? Getting sent to a world that was a psychopath's wet dream? Not exactly a happy moment.

A streak of movement caught my eye, and I watched as the noon Metrorail streaked past my window, surprisingly quiet despite being so close. I could still hear and feel it, but it wasn't nearly as loud as I would have thought.

When the yellow streak was gone, I turned back to my apartment, focusing on the blue crystal I was fiddling with. It was surprisingly hefty for something the size of my thumb and gave off a faint blue glow. I knew in this state, it was harmless, even if it was warm to the touch. I closed my eyes for a moment, leaning back on the low couch, feeling the small, warm stone in my hand.

I didn't miss my old life, but this one was much more dangerous. It made me wish for something more boring, less lethal. The nine-to-five grind might have been brutal, but at least people pretended to not want me dead.

Two days ago, I woke up in a bed I didn't recognize but was somehow still familiar with. I could feel the knowledge of my new world, just enough information that I wouldn't be bumbling around like an idiot, separate from my own memories. I knew I would have them because I was told I would get them by a bunch of unspeakable eldritch entities. The less said about them, the better.

I had died, and they had offered me a new life, one where I would have access to great power. I, being the idiot I was, agreed without much thought. Who doesn't want great power and a new chance at life, right?

I realized how dumb I had been when they finished upgrading my intelligence, stuffing some basic info about an alternate Earth, and linking my brain to a multi-universal databank. I wasn't an idiot before, well, not really, but I definitely wasn't this smart either. It made realizing how dangerous this world really was a lot easier.

See, I knew this world. Not too well, but well enough to recognize it. I looked out my window again. I could see buildings, the street below, the Metrorail, and to the right, the corner of an overpass. Further away, I could see two towering buildings that I knew looked very similar to the one I was in. Megabuilding H3 and H4. Which put me at Wellsprings 708, Megabuilding H2.

I was in Cyberpunk 2077.

Well, Cyberpunk 2077 and three quarters. It was June, after all, which was important because the Arasaka heist that V and Jackie orchestrated was in April, and while I didn't know what happened in the DLC, or even the later three-fifths of the game, I did know Vik gave V a month to live, so several months meant they were definitely… well I didn't actually know how it ended, but it was way past the point that I could help.

See, I played Cyberpunk shortly after it came out. It was buggy, broken, and fell far short of what the company had promised, so I stopped playing it. Then, over time, they fixed the game. When Edgerunners came out, and when Phantom Liberty was released, everyone said it was fixed and that it was great. So, I tried to play it again, only to find out that a significant portion of the game's systems had been radically changed. The leveling, perks, cyberware, and more had been completely redone, leaving me feeling lost. I decided that I would have to restart to get a better feel for the systems and so I could appreciate it properly. But for some reason, I just never got around to it.

Looks like I'm getting around to it now.

I was stuck in a morally broken, murder-happy world where self-mutilation was the cool, hip thing to do. It was only one or two steps away from fucking Borderlands, for fucks sake!

I mean, don't get me wrong, as a videogame concept, chopping off your weak bits and replacing them with cool, shiny chrome is kinda cool. In real life, though? Not so much. No fucking way am I letting some random ripperdoc get even remotely close to me. I knew I could trust Vik not to screw me over or anything, but the idea of implanting something inside me that someone else could hack? That is so unacceptable it makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.

And let's not forget about the constant worry of Cyberpsychosis floating around. Cutting off perfectly good parts of your body and slamming on robot bits of questionable quality could not be good for your mental health. Mix in the very real possibility that the corporations that ran the planet were perfectly willing to do just about anything for profit, including release stuff that fucked with your head, maybe even drove you crazy...?

Safe to say, I was staying organic until I could either make my own cyberware or equivalent. Stuff I know is safe and unhackable. Truth be told, I had always been a bit iffy about limb/flesh replacements, even before they became a very real option in my life. The Adeptus Mechanicus always gave me the heebie-jeebies, too. I think, personally, I was more about enhancement than replacement. Just my luck that I get shoved into a world with a hard-on for replacement.

Luckily, the beings that put me here didn't stuff me with a neural link or cybereyes, which the in-world info that was downloaded into my brain knew damn near everyone had. Hell, I knew that if I left my apartment, I would need to carry a special device as sort of a security pass, or basically nothing would work for me.

I tossed the blue crystal into the air and caught it, my eyes going wide when what I had just done reached the conscious part of my brain. I very carefully leaned forward and placed the crystal on the coffee table, next to the device that made it, which was already busy making a second one.

I listened to the machine hum and vibrate for a moment before leaning back on the couch, sans crystal to fiddle with. I had spent the entire previous day making the device, and the day before dragging in deliveries of parts and materials. So far, the only good part about being in the Cyberpunk world was skipping the first part of being a tinker, making your first tools. I would certainly end up using those tools to make more, better tools, but at least I was able to skip the first part.

Plus, no dumpster diving for parts was nice, too. Not that that might not end up happening anyway.

Of course, I wasn't really a tinker, at least not like a tinker from Worm. I was a Tinker of Fiction, and the vast majority of what I could make was reproducible, solid, not black-boxed tech. The only exception to that was certain exotic materials that cropped up in some realities.

You see, across the multiverse, which I now knew was much more than a fanciful theory, different realities had unique materials. Those materials were often at the core of most, if not all, of that reality's most high-tech toys. Most of the tech from Mass Effect wouldn't work without Element Zero, and plenty of Star Wars tech wouldn't function without several exotic gasses, metals, and fuel sources.

So, according to the entities, I would basically tinker up a way to make those materials. Even materials that were supposedly impossible to synthesize, like the small, thumb-sized chunk of Elerium, Element 115 from XCOM, that was sitting on my table. I couldn't really explain exactly how the microwave-sized crystallization device on my coffee table worked, but it did. Even better, if anyone tried to repeat my process, it would fail, potentially catastrophically. But that was only a fraction of what the Tinker of Fiction was.

Basically, my brain was attached to a massive database. Every week, or two weeks if I held onto the specialization hard enough, I would "roll" for a new branch of tech. My current branch, as far as I could tell, was the human side of the XCOM, an amalgamation of the two modern XCOM games. The Elerium generator, which turned about four hundred dolla- eddies of chemicals and solvents, as well as a small, pin-head-sized industrial diamond, into Elerium crystals, was black-boxed. That meant that only I would be able to build a function version. Everything else beyond the specific material generators would be perfectly possible to reproduce.

The database itself was hard to describe. The best metaphor I could make was sort of like fog of war for an RTS game like Starcraft but in a slightly different order. At first, the map is completely black. I could push that black fog back by mentally exploring the tech tree, starting from my "base," the lowest levels of the tech tree, and working my way up. All I was doing, however, was revealing what I could build and a vague outline of its construction. Once I actually started to really focus on it by building the item, it was like placing a unit down into the grey fog. The details of that tech started to reveal themselves, and the further I went on the project, the more details I got. The exposed area wasn't just for that specific creation either. I was learning how it worked, which meant that once I re-rolled to a new branch, I would remember all of that information.

Technically, I could skip ahead in the tech tree and attempt to start building plasma weapons, but just from what I could see on the surface, through the grey fog, I knew I wouldn't get very far before I stalled out. It was too advanced, to the point that I didn't even understand the basic info I got through the "grey fog." I would need to work my way up to the higher branches of the tech tree.

Later, when I had a few trees under my belt, I would probably be able to skip ahead pretty far and immediately start working on more advanced things. Over time I would probably become the most powerful inventor on the planet, with knowledge from dozens of realities working together to produce advanced technology.

But that was far, far down the line, after I had time to learn and build myself up. Until then, I needed to survive first, and I needed resources. The body I had dropped into, which the entities had insisted wasn't a real person that I was taking over, had a surprisingly good chunk of eddies saved up. They would last for a bit, but not nearly as long as I would like. Which meant I would need to engage in the world at large. Even worse, my purchases would eventually get someone's attention.

This world had the same level of privacy as a public bathroom made of glass, which is to say, absolutely fucking none. I knew for a fact that any one of the several companies that held sway in Night City would have no issues swiping me up and "hiring me" to make tech for them. Sure, some of them would offer cash first, but if I said no…? Well, then, all bets were off. Most of them would kill me outright if it came down to it, just to keep me out of competitors' hands.

God, this world was fucked. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror version of my old world, where everything that was bad, corrupt, and broken became the new norm. Companies ran this city and the world at large, and their greed was consistent enough that you could set your watch to it. If I got on someone's radar before I was ready, my best chance would be to swallow my pride and hope I found an opportunity to escape later.

I couldn't even calm down and veg out by watching TV, because it was all shit! I don't know what the hell happened to this Earth, but their TV was like watching the most erratic and random TikTok video ever made, except it just kept going and going for a full TV episode. I hadn't had a chance to watch any movies yet, but I wasn't exactly confident they would be any better.

A muffled ping echoed through the apartment, startling me from my downward spiral. I took a deep breath and stood slowly, leaving the Elerium generator going but grabbing the already completed shard. I walked out of the sitting area, over to the door that led to the small side room, tapping the controls to open it, stepping into the only enclosed room in the small apartment.

In the game, V had turned this smaller room into an armory, but mine was a small workshop. There was a 3D printer tucked into the corner, a fabricator along the back wall, two tool chests, and a host of other tools, as well as a computer that was networked with the fabricator and 3D printer. There were even some basic supplies in various containers and drawers. All of it had been in the apartment when I first woke up here, and the fabricator and 3D printer had been essentially working nonstop since then.

Or at least they had been after I confirmed that they were not connected to any extra networks or the internet. Apparently, the entities responsible for my new life shared my paranoia because none of the equipment or tools had any logos, markings, or internet access. All of it was at the normal Cyberpunk level, but none of it seemed to be made here. As far as I could tell, they were snapped into existence the same way I was.

A quick inspection showed that both the fabricator and the 3D printer had completed their last jobs for my next project. I carefully extracted the chunks of metal from the fabricator and heavy-duty polymer pieces from the printer, carrying them to the workstation. There, separated and organized, were several dozen other parts, ready to be assembled. I grabbed a bag of screws, connectors, a soldering iron, and a pile of other parts before getting to work, sitting on the low stool and hunching over the table.

At this point, after spending so much time building the pieces and prepping the other parts, I knew this project pretty well, and I had learned quite a bit about how the laser weapons from XCOM worked. At least the human-made versions. The primary outstanding component was the power generation, which used Elerium. Essentially, the mysterious blue crystal released more energy than it took in, so charging it with a slight burst of radiation resulted in a substantial energy release. That's why it glowed. The radiation from the visible spectrum caused it to release more energy than it was absorbing. The XCOM specialists had a few theories on how the crystal managed to do that, but it seemed far beyond what I had learned so far.

Thankfully, I didn't need to understand it to use it.

I grabbed the Elerium crystal and a small cutting tool, using it to slowly flatten the edges of the crystal, making sure to capture as much of the dust as possible since I knew it would be useful soon. When I had cut the crystal to the perfect size, I set it aside and started to assemble the rest of the parts. It took about an hour and a half to finally put it together, including sliding the small, shaved-down piece of Elerium into the energy pack. It slid in against a small X-ray emitter, which I was very glad existed in this world because building my own would have been an incredible pain in the ass.

Even better, it was smaller than the one the XCOM plans fed my brain.

I finally screwed in the last part before turning over the new laser pistol in my hand. It looked extremely similar to the laser pistol from the first modern XCOM, but a bit slimmer since I was using a variety of parts that were technically more advanced than the XCOM reality. After a final test to make sure everything worked and I hadn't just made a fancy, shiny bomb, I flicked on the activator switch. The pistol hummed, and the transparent aluminum glass tube that functioned as the barrel gave off a deep red glow, lighting up the room like a glowstick. I knew I would cover those up with east sinks, both to increase the fire rate and block the light from giving away my position, but I couldn't deny it looked cool.

Even better, I could feel my understanding of its construction, the ins and outs of how everything about it worked, solidifying in my brain. It wasn't anything too advanced, mostly just a bit of material science, a chunk of knowledge about radiation, and some details about energy direction. The extent of XCOM know-how was the process of using X-Rays to stimulate the Elerium into releasing enough energy to fire a laser blast, but it was still something. It was an anchor to further knowledge, and with any luck, I would be able to push that even further over the next week and four days.

For now, it was time to work on the next step.

With my pistol completed and, more importantly, with the Elerium generator now working, it was time to get to work on the next big project, the second stage of material generation for the XCOM human tech tree.

Alien Alloy.

An alloy of several elements, three of which didn't exist on Earth, anything more advanced than the general level of my new sidearm would require the durable, multipurpose alloy. Even just the next step up from the pistol, the laser rifle, would require the alloy in order to redirect the considerable increase in energy output. I would need to set up another black-boxed generator, this time an alloy smelter, to produce what I needed.

Putting my pistol down on my workstation, I turned on my stool to face my computer. My Cyberpunk CAD program was already open when I activated the desktop, and the final designs for my pistol were on display. I quickly saved the blueprint to a palm-sized external hard drive, so I could grab it and run if necessary, before clearing it out completely from my computer. I then started a new file, quickly labeling it as the "Alien Alloy Smelter" before going to town.

The plans for the device, a tower about a foot wide, a foot deep, and four feet tall, was already clear in my head. I had spent the last hour contemplating it, resizing it a few times to better fit my workshop. It wouldn't be able to produce a ton of alloy, but since I was only producing stuff for myself, I really didn't need that much. Plus, the Elerium generation would be a solid bottleneck anyway. If there was anything I needed to scale up, it was that.

It took me about thirty minutes to fully plan out the metal skeleton of the device, then another twenty to work up plans for the ceramic plates that would line the inside of the smelter, as well as the receptacle for the finished molten alloy. When I was done, I selected the first part, stood up from the chair, and fed the fabricator a plate of metal. I quickly sealed the metal inside before activating the fabricator, watching through the see-through barrier as it got to work, cutting and trimming the plate.

When the fabricator was all set, I got to work on the forge internals, preparing the heating element, testing the thermometers for the smelter internals, as well as several other bits and pieces. If this were a general-purpose smelter, I would include nobs to adjust things, like the heat and maybe a timer, but as it was only going to be an Alien Alloy generator, there was no real reason to. A small programmable chip would control everything, and there would only need to be one setting.

The next few hours were spent browsing the internet for more materials, mostly parts and metal stock, ordering a batch for future projects since I already had everything I would need for the smelter. Occasionally, once every ten to fifteen minutes, I would need to pull out something from the fabricator or 3D printer, but that was it. After I had spent another three thousand eddies, my shrinking "savings" taking another hard hit, the fabricator finally got to one of the more intricate pieces, which would take a lot more time. Plenty of time to go and get something to eat.

With a groan, I stood up from my stool and stretched, my back cracking as I did. While I had plenty of what qualified as food for this world in the fridge, I knew that sitting inside for such a long time was going to start affecting my sanity eventually.

I grabbed the laser pistol I had just finished making, looking at it for a moment before shaking my head and deciding that, as much as I would like the extra firepower, I couldn't just show off my tech randomly. Instead, I walked out of my workshop and headed to the door, grabbing my belt holster off of the hanger. I pulled it around my hips before grabbing my Unity pistol, which came with my new apartment and life, and slid it to the hoster.

Suitably armed, I grabbed the little keyfob that acted as my stand-in for the basic neural link and stuffed it into my pocket. Then I stood in front of my door, just staring at it. After a few seconds, I let out a long sigh. Honestly, the fact that I was hesitating so much was concerning but expected. This world was so incredibly different from the one that I knew, and my only exposure to it was a hyper-violent video game.

"It's just down and out the front of the building, Jackson," I mumbled to myself. "There is always a police team down there. No one is going to try anything."

I let out another long breath before finally tapping the controls for the door, which slid open. I could feel my keyfob vibrate as it recognized I had left my apartment, the door sliding behind me as I stepped out, finally leaving my apartment for the first time in a few days.

I let out the breath I was holding, looking around the familiar space around me. As far as I could tell, every megabuilding's general shape was the same, which meant that between the extra memories I got from the eldritch horrors that sent me here and the hundreds of times I ran from V's apartment down to the first floor, I knew my way around alright.

I walked forward, ignoring my neighbors as I leaned on the concrete railing that ran along the inside of the megabuilding. I looked up and down, taking in the sights of my new home. Surprisingly, it wasn't as terrible as I had expected. Still not good, but I suppose the fact that this massive arcology was built in a slightly better area than the one V lived in counted for something Though, if I'm honest, that might be subjective, I've never really liked boxed in areas with towering building surrounding them.

I pushed off the railing and made my way down to the floor below, weaving in between people as I cut a path to the nearest elevator. I could already smell several vendors around as I worked my way through, but I ignored them. As bleak and broken as the environment was on this planet, I wanted to see the sky. It hardly counted as getting out of the house if I don't really leave the building anyway, right?

Besides, I knew there was a noodle vendor out by the front entrance who seemed to put actual value in keeping his small shop clean. It was far from perfect, but I knew these days that beggars can't be choosers.

When I finally stepped out of the massive building, I had to shield my eyes for a moment as they adjusted to the bright, shining day. It was hot, but not horrifically, so I made my way down the steps of the entrance. The plaza was populated but had far fewer people than I had expected. I noted a cop standing by a large mechanical monstrosity, which I was pretty sure was called a Minitaur, off to the side. Focusing on my goal, I kept walking, going down two sets of stairs, until I reached a well-kept, mostly clean noodle shop. I sat down on one of the chairs and ordered a simple bowl of noodles with synth-beef, swiping my keyfob to pay for the food.

"Aye, I recognize that. That's one of those 'ganic chips. Never actually seen one before," Someone said from behind me, causing me to tense up.

"Uh… yeah… My parents were one of those religious nuts you hear about," I explained, something poking at the back of my mind. That voice sounded so familiar.

"For real? That's loco, man," The nosy man said. "Never thought I'd meet someone with so little chrome."

"Yeah, well, congrats, I-" I finally looked over at the man who had sat down at the vendor just as I did, and my brain locked up.

There, sitting two seats away, was Jackie Welles in all his glory, months after he should have been dead.

---

Hello everyone! I hope you enjoyed the first chapter of The Brink and Back! This story will be posted every Wednesday and, for now, will be about 4.5k-5k words per chapter to compensate for its limited schedule.

There are a few things I want to note:

• This story is AU. Basically, I took V out of the story and massaged the rest so that their not being present doesn't cause any issues. I want this story to be about Jackson, the MC, not about V and what they did.
• I love the setting of Cyberpunk, but it would be impossible to remember and work in every tiny bit of relevant content from the game. I apologize if you skip your favorite character or handwave away your favorite gig. The setting is what's important to me, not the nitty-gritty details of the game. That said, as you can see from my cliffhanger, it's not a complete empty canvas.
• THIS IS A TINKER FIC. Building, planning, crafting resource gathering, and talking about how tech works is going to be a large part of the story. There will be plenty of other stuff going on, too, but tinkering will always be an aspect.

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

I was silent for a long moment, staring at Jackie, my brain trying to spin up and figure out what was going on. I was silent long enough for the large, muscular man to notice. He turned to look at me, raising his eyebrow.

"Something wrong?" He asked, looking down at his shirt. "Didn't make a mess, did I? I got a date later, going back home to change would be a pain."

"N-No, sorry. You… just remind me of someone," I finally said, shaking my head. "Sorry."

"No harm amigo, must have been a handsome friend," He said with a laugh before slurping up another string of noodles.

I shrugged and continued to eat, doing my best to seem casual, looking over at the rather built man again.

"Names Jackson," I volunteered, reaching over to shake his hand.

"Huh, how about that, mines Jackie," He said, reaching over and taking my hand after wiping it off on his pants. "Good to meet you."

"You live around here?" I asked after a moment, flicking my chopsticks at the Megabuilding. "I'm new to the building so…"

"Not here, but I live around in Valentinos territory. Moved back in with Mama. She likes having me around," He answered with a shrug. "Saves on rent, and you can't beat home cooking."

"Yeah… not much better than that…" I said, a memory of my old life flashing in my mind for a moment. "You a member? Of the Valentinos."

"Used to be, left to keep Mama happy when I got hurt. Still close with Padre, though," He responded with a shrug. "What about you? Got any connections?"

"No. I'm new to Night City," I admitted. "New to a lot of things. The family kept us pretty close…"

"Right, right, crazy 'ganic family," He nodded, and for a moment, I felt bad for lying to him. "You looking for work? Lots of people come to Night City looking for a fresh start… Doesn't always work but…"

"I… I'm a techie," I explained with a shrug. "Build stuff mostly, inventor, innovator, stuff like that."

"Really? A techie who isn't chipped out? Pull the other one. It's got bells," He said with a chuckle, looking over to see that I was serious. "For real? Well, maybe you can help me then. Mama Welles has been pushing me to get some subdermal, but my lady doesn't like the way it feels. Gotta keep the output happy, ya know? You got any recommendations?"

"Body armor," I respond easily. "Cheaper, no recovery time, replaceable. Just gotta remember to put it on. In fact…"

For a moment, I focused back on the XCOM tech tree, feeling my mind searching for a moment before eventually finding what I was looking for. I focused on the idea, making sure that it was possible with what I had access to.

"I've had an idea bouncing around for a new type of protective vest. Something you can wear under your clothes but should still protect you," I explained. "I can build it just fine… but I don't have a way to test it."

"Are you suggesting I wear it while getting shot?" He asked, his expression all but openly questioning my intelligence.

"What? No, I just don't have any guns, and I don't really have a place to shoot it," I explained, not mentioning that I was scared to go somewhere I could shoot it by myself. "All I have is my Unity."

"Right, okay. What's in it for me?" He asked, his noodles momentarily forgotten. "I appreciate helping your fellow man as much as the next guy, but bullets ain't cheap choom."

"Yeah, sure. If the vest works, I'll sell you one at a discount," I said, thinking for a moment before adding. "If it doesn't, I'll pay you a couple thousand eddies for your time. Say two?"

I was pretty confident in the armor I had in mind, but everything I knew about it was measured in terms of the XCOM metrics. I would need to test it on the local scale to really be sure. Plus… I wanted to know what was going on with Jackie still being alive, and the best way to do that was to spend some time with him.

"...Alright, I'm starting to see the benefit," He said, nodding with a smile. "What kind of firepower you lookin to throw at your stuff? I can get my hands on some higher calibers, but I'm only a solo, can't magic up anything miraculous."

"Just the kind of things you're worried about running into," I explained. "You're the expert there."

"I can do that. You need a fireline, too, something out of the way… How do you feel about the badlands? Should be a quiet spot somewhere under the wind farms."

"Uh… you think it's safe?"

"Should be, but no guarantees around Night City," He pointed out. "Don't worry, I'll get you back safe and sound. When should we do this?"

"Not tomorrow, but the day after, Sunday afternoon?" I suggested. "I need some time to put everything together."

"Alright, done deal choom. I gotta say, I got a good feeling about you, did the moment I sat down," He said with a laugh. "Glad to see my instincts are still top-notch."

I chuckled and nodded along, taking another bite of noodles. We talked for a few more minutes, mostly about what was going on in the neighborhood and what sort of places were good to go for, like food and shopping. He had plenty of good things to say about Coyote Cojo, the bar his mom owned. I promised I'd consider going, but personally, I was wary of going anywhere so blatantly owned by one gang. The Valentinos might be a gang that focused on honor, loyalty, and family, but they were still a gang.

Eventually, my keyfob vibrated, an alarm going off that my latest piece on my fabricator was complete. I quickly finished my noodles, which by now had gone cold.

"Sorry, Jackie, but I gotta go. Got a project going that I need to get back to," I explained, reaching out to shake the larger man's hand again. "I'll see you on Sunday. Just knock on my door."

"'Bout time for me to get going anyway," He admitted, standing with me. "Need to get going if I'm gonna pick up my girl. Good luck with your work."

I nodded and headed back to the entrance of the Megabuilding, climbing into the elevator, my mind already spooling up. I had no idea how he was still alive, and seemingly no worse for wear. It was possible that V and Jackie didn't get involved with the Arasaka job, but even that seemed unlikely. At the beginning of the game, the montage of V and Jackie working together made them seem thick as thieves, the kind of partners who did everything together, so I couldn't imagine he wouldn't mention getting some protection for them as well, which made me think that they weren't partners at all. Unfortunately, I didn't have nearly enough information to draw any conclusion beyond now knowing that this reality was not the canon reality.

Like I needed any more excuses to be paranoid.

I shook my head and did my best to put aside the new mystery because, without more info, I wouldn't make any progress cracking it. Besides, I had work to do, especially since I just set a deadline.

I stepped back into my apartment, the door opening for me and shutting behind me. I made a beeline for my workshop, only stopping when I realized that the status light on the Elerium generator was blinking green. I walked around to the coffee table and cracked open the top of the crystalization chamber, using a pair of 3D-printed tongs to reach in, grab the new blue crystal, and gently replace the seed diamond inside. I topped up three of the chemical reservoirs before closing the lid and sealing the chamber, pressing a button to start the machine back up.

I detoured to the bathroom to wash the crystal off before finally heading back into the workshop. The first thing I did was restock the fabricator before sitting down at the work table and spinning around. I let out a long breath, frowning as I watched the fabricator work away in the corner.

The machine was incredible, blowing anything that the humans in XCOM out of the water. It did a hilarious number of different metalworking tasks almost completely by itself. It was a bit on the wasteful side, but the real problem was that it was still only one machine. I was on a time limit with this tree, and if I wanted to get to the few things worth knowing, I needed to escape this bottleneck. The problem was that even with several impressive things dotted around, the human branch of XCOM didn't really offer any solutions.

The XCOM program managed to push human tech, especially military tech, to a whole new level. The problem was that most of that advancement was due to integrating alien tech with human thinking. Even worse, most of the stuff they were making was handmade. Engineers would be given alien salvage, and they would strip it down of anything useful, refine anything that needed it, and then use it to make stuff almost completely by hand. Sure, there was some minor automation, but nothing really beyond the standard tech of the time, which would be around 2015 in my old world.

The human XCOM branch had some shiny stuff, sure, but a lot of the other stuff useless, and almost all of the background tech was pointless. Hell, I wasn't even sure how the mag weapons would stack up against the tech weapons here.

The more I worked with it and the more I explored the options, the more I realized that there would only be a few things genuinely useful from the human tech tree. Everything else could be beaten by the standard Cyberpunk tech.

"Which means I need more Cyberpunk tech," I muttered to myself, shaking my head. "More fabricators, more printers."

I turned back to the computer and pulled up a calendar app. I marked the day I could switch, which was four days away, then I marked the day I had to switch, which was four days, one week away. I marked the testing meeting with Jackie. Then I leaned back. After a few seconds, I added 'Alloy smelter' on Friday, today, and 'Nanoscale vest', then 'Plated vest' on Saturday.

Alien Alloy, as you might expect, was a strange substance, so learning how to work with it was paramount. I had always planned on working on the two vests, both to familiarise myself with the material and to make some protection for myself, but making a bit of dough off the top wasn't a bad thing either.

My quickly dwindling funds were another problem that I needed to solve.

I shook my head and focused on the calendar before closing my eyes and looking back on what sort of options I had in the tech tree. Psionics was obviously something I wanted to investigate for no other reason than to keep it as an option. I couldn't think of many universes where making psychics was as easy as locking people in a room for a few days. Unfortunately, I barely even had to focus on the tech used to unlock psionics for a second before seeing that it was far beyond me.

There were several things I needed to build before I could tackle that, not to mention the resources and time.

I started filling out the calendar, trying to find a way to make as many of the interesting parts of the tree as possible. It wasn't just about solidifying the tech for future work, but also about the knowledge I gained for each finished project. I learned quite a bit about energy transference from constructing the pistol, enough that building the laser rifle seemed well worth it. I also wanted to tap into the mag rifle tech, if nothing more than to understand it for future improvement. Then, between what I would learn from the mag rifles and the laser weapons, I was hoping I would be able to tackle plasma weapons.

I was also interested in the higher-level armors, like the Warden and E.X.O Suit. I'm not sure how difficult getting to them might be, but using them as a platform to understand and build the W.A.R. suit would be a decent end-of-rotation project if psionics continued to be an unreachable goal.

I would have to explore the options more later. It had been a while since I had played any of the XCOM games, so I'm sure there were more than a few hidden gems tucked away in the corners of the tree. For now, I needed to focus on getting my Alien Alloy production up and running. Which, unfortunately, for now, relied on me waiting for parts to finish.

About an hour and a half later, mainly spent working on blueprinting on the CAD program and feeding metal and ceramic stock to the fabricator, I could start putting everything together, starting from the ground up. The smelter was a lot more robust than the Elerium generator, with layers of heatproof insulation, ceramic tiling, and several cooling and heating elements, as well as agitators and several ingredient distributors that would mix in chemicals and several other ingredients at specific times. If I had been dropped in a less advanced time, I would have likely been doing this over a large furnace, timing and weighing ingredients by hand. Luckily, I could skip that step with a few dozen purchases online.

Essentially, I was burning money to advance myself further and in less time. I wouldn't be able to do that for long, but I was desperate to get my hands on better ways to protect myself.

Putting the smelter together took four hours in total, during which I pulled out another small crystal of Elerium from the generator, which was good because the previous one went into the building of the smelter. When the smelter itself was complete, I filled up the compartments with several different materials and filled the primary crucible with several bars of titanium. The last thing I did was very carefully crush up the latest Elerium crystal, as well as the waste from the last few projects, into as fine a powder as I could, before adding it to the final distributor.

Now I knew that, in reality, there was no way that the aliens in the XCOM universe were using Elerium to make Alien Alloy. But then again, they weren't using titanium as a base, either. This was all black-boxed, and tinker-magicked to the max, which was frustrating but understandable, considering I had no way of getting my hands on the real materials.

I spent a minute or so double-checking everything, making sure the smelter was all set. The materials going into this batch cost about four hundred eddies in total, including the small portion of Elerium it would use, so fucking up wasn't an option. After making sure everything was set, I finally activated the smelter. I could hear the heater kicking on, and after listening to it for a moment, I left the room. According to the plans I had in my head, the system should put off some heat, but not so much that the room's climate control wouldn't be able to keep up. Part of me doubted that was possible, but I decided to trust it for now.

I made my way to my bed, sitting down at the edge. I set my alarm for three hours, which was when the next Elerium crystal would be done, and laid down to catch some sleep. I was out pretty quickly, though it hardly felt like any time had passed when my alarm woke me back up.

For the rest of the night, into the next day, and all the way to Sunday morning, I slept and worked to the beat of my machines. I would wake up to change out the Elerium crystal, add more metal to the smelter, and give the 3D printer and foundry a new project. When I was done trying to sleep, I started feeding the fabricator Alien Alloy, which the smelter could produce in thick ingots or in thinner sheets. The lack of variety meant a lot more waste, but luckily, I could feed almost all of it right back into the smelter to recycle.

I also spent a lot of time programming, repeating programs verbatim from the XCOM world, each one increasing my knowledge just a bit more. While I wasn't ready to start dabbling in AI, the VI that the XCOM program had access to, like the Gremlins and Spark units, could really come in handy. It would take a few days of programming random stuff till I got to that point, but it was easy progress since I was essentially just rewriting the code on my computer.

By the first hour of Sunday, about two pm, I had converted all of my ingredients into Alien Alloy and Elerium, though not much of it was left at that point. My first project was a nanoscale vest that followed the plans I had in my head exactly. Upon completion, I could feel a surprising amount of information about how the XCOM program worked with Alien Alloy put into my head, as well as how a lot of their protective vests worked. I could confirm that even without changing the overall design, my vest was better than the original simply because the bullet-resistant fabrics available blew past anything XCOM could get their hands on.

When the first vest was done, I immediately converted it into a plated vest, which wasn't quite as easy as just welding on some Alloy plates, but it also wasn't far off that. As I finished it, I could feel the knowledge of more advanced armor techniques flowing into my brain as I finished, as well as more general knowledge of metalworking.

With the designs solidified in my head, I completely disassembled the vest, rebuilding it from the ground up to cover more of my body. I have no idea why XCOM reserved the nanoscale part of the vest to just the chest area, but my version would cover my arms just above my elbow as well. I also made a pair of nanoscale undershorts, which covered down to my knees. I then added platting to the chest and crotch area.

My final version was a mix of the scale and plate vests, designed to give maximum protection to vitals while still being as material-effective as possible. I used almost all of my Alloy to make three of these. One for me, one for Jackie should he want it, and one for testing. The test one would be melted down when we were done so that I could re-use the Alloy.

While I spent a lot of my time putting together the vest, I was also using the 3D printer to work on a laser rifle. The original plans used a surprising amount of plastic in the design, and other than the Elerium charging chamber, the containment unit, the central barrel, and a few other small parts, the advanced polymers that the Cyberpunk era 3D printer was capable of using were more than sufficient. The end result felt more like a well-made nerf cannon than a powerful weapon, but what mattered was that it counted as completing the tech, and I got a whole dump of information about exotic energies, Elerium charging systems, and high-temperature materials.

Once again, it was all derivative of alien tech, especially the Elerium and Alien Alloy, but it was still important information.

When I finally called it a night, I set up the fabricator and 3D printer to run while I slept, giving them two of the larger, more complicated parts of the mag pistol. I crawled into bed, sleeping uninterrupted until the following morning. I was halfway through making the rest of the mag pistol parts when there was a knock on my door.

"Jackie, hey. Good to see you," I said, greeting the mercenary with a handshake. "Let me just set up a few things, then we can go."

I walked back into the apartment, and Jackie followed behind me. I stepped into my workshop and sat down at my computer.

"Nice little setup you got," He commented, leaning against the doorframe as I tapped away on my computer.

"Small is the problem," I said, shaking my head as I fed the fabricator a new plan, before feeding it a bar of Alien Alloy. "Bottlenecks suck."

"Eh, don't be too hard on yourself," Jackie said with a shrug. "Gotta walk before you run."

"Don't have the time to learn, unfortunately," I mumbled, mostly to myself.

It took me a minute to strap on my gun and finish getting dressed. Thankfully, I was already wearing my copy of the armor. When we finally left, I was carrying the test copy, as well as the one for Jackie.

As we left the apartment complex, Jackie led me to an older-looking car. My in-world knowledge told me it was a cheap model almost as old as I was, the kind that people kept updating to keep it usable. I put my bag in the back seat before climbing into the passenger seat.

"So who did you borrow this from?" I asked as Jackie sat in the driver's seat, starting the car started with a press of a button.

"That obvious, huh?" He asked with a chuckle.

"You strike me as a motorcycle kind of guy," I responded with a smirk.

"Damn, good guess," He responded as we pulled away from the sidewalk. "A choom of mine owed me a couple favors, lent me the car and some iron. Should have plenty to test your vest."

I nodded and looked out the window, watching as a few buildings. As we drove, I found myself switching between recognizing some patches and not having a clue where we were going. I was pretty sure the city itself was mostly like it was in the games, but I had a feeling that some areas, like the slums or certain apartment blocks, were significantly larger than they had been. It made sense, all things considered, but it also was just another thing on the growing list of differences between the game and my new life. I looked over at Jackie, another thing on that list, shaking my head.

"So, how did your date go?" I asked, the muscular solo smiling at the question.

"It was preem. Misty always knows how to make me slow down and relax," He responded. "She is one of those mystic types, all about the soul or chakras. I try to understand, but it honestly just all goes over my head."

"I know the type," I admit. "I don't like the idea of living my life on the terms of spiritualism or what my sign is, but there is something to some of those beliefs. The hard part is seeing what's for gonks and what's real."

"For real?" he asked, looking over at me surprised. "Didn't think techies believed that kinda stuff."

"Worlds filled with crazy shit, Jackie," I said, thinking about my own experience. "Hard to dismiss it all as chance and science."

"I won't argue with that," He said with a shrug. "Anyway, I took her out to dinner. I know this great place, not far from her shop."

We continued to drive, eventually pulling out of the city to the badlands. Part of me realized that I was taking a rather big risk, letting someone I just met bring me out this far into the desert, but I found myself trusting Jackie. Plus, I didn't think he had it in him to lie or act that convincingly if he did plan on taking me out here to shoot me.

Eventually, we pulled off the main road and onto a back road, eventually pulling under a large windmill. Jackie parked directly under the shadow of one, before we both climbed out.

"Alright, I got a mannequin in the back, snagged it from a dumpster behind an old shop. We can set the vest up on that," Jackie said as we walked around to the back of the car, popping the trunk.

It took a minute and a few strips of duct tape, but eventually, we stepped back to the car to admire our work. The mannequin was about thirty feet away, supported by a cactus, wearing the shorts and the vest. Both were taped in place, making the whole thing look like the kind of hack job you see from one of those gun channels on Youtube.

"You want the first shot?" Jackie asked, crossing his arms and sitting on the lip of the trunk. "You do know how to use that Unity, don't you?"

"I know well enough," I assured him, turning toward the target and drawing my pistol.

I took a second to line up my shot before pulling the trigger, the .45 caliber bullet splitting the air until it slapped into the plated part of the vest. Not satisfied with just testing the strongest part, I fired three more times, hitting the arm, the chest again, and then the thigh. None of the bullets went through.

"Well… it beats a .45. That's a good start," I said, pulling out the magazine from my Unity and trading it for a full one, before sliding the pistol back into its holster.

"Don't get to cocky, amigo, I've seen .45s get stopped by sturdy leather jackets," He said, turning around and reaching into the trunk. "Let's try something with a bit more power."

He reached into the and pulled out a Liberty, a slightly heftier pistol firing a slightly bigger round. He stepped forward as I stepped back, firing off several rounds. When he was done, we both walked to the armor to examine the damage.

"Damn, not even a dent," He said, running a finger over the mark left by the bullets. "And scale is intact too, not bad."

We walked back to the car, testing out several more weapons. The vest held up incredibly well, only starting to struggle when we started pulling out rifles and a shotgun. Even so, it held up pretty well, with scales only failing after a few hits and the plated sections taking repeat and accurate fire. It only lost outright to a chunky-looking precision rifle I didn't recognize from the game, one that fired a big old round.

When we were done testing, we pulled down the vest and shorts to take a closer look. Jackie ran his hand over the last hole, the one from the high-powered precision rifle.

"I gotta say, Jackson. I came out here 'cause I figured two grand for a drive and some range time was a sweet deal," He admitted. "But this is impressive stuff. No offense, but… you sure you made this?"

"I did, it's made of a new alloy I came up with," I explained.

"Well… Mama Welles would smack me blue for passing up a deal that could keep me safe. How much do you want for it?"

For a moment, I frowned, wondering exactly what something like this was worth. It was about six hundred eddies of material, most if it from the Alien Alloy. I was tempted to just say a grand because I wanted Jackie to have a little extra protection if he didn't have V watching his back… But I honestly couldn't afford to give up the money.

I made a lot of progress over the last few days, but I burned a lot of eddies to do so. It was going to get a lot harder to keep up that momentum if I didn't make some cash back.

"Let's say… two thousand five hundred," I said, about to open my mouth and add that we could take some off for his discount, but he beat me out.

"Seriously? That's it?" He asked, looking surprised. "Damn, I expected a lot more. I appreciate you cutting me a deal, Choom."

Before I could say anything, his eyes glowed orange, and my keyfob vibrated. I pulled it out to see two and a half thousand Eurodollars had been added to my account.

"Well… listen, you want me to spread the word a bit?" He asked, before spotting my wince and continuing. "I could keep it down to a few people I trust not to talk, could even run the deliveries for you if you're not keen on showing your face."

"I… yeah. Keep it slow at first. I have a lot of projects of my own to keep up with, but a set of vests and pants every few days would be fine."

"Perfecto! We could charge at least three and a half gees for this armor, choom, and I'll take a small cut, from their side, of course," He assured me, despite me about to offer him a cut anyway. "C'mon, let's get something to eat to celebrate a new opportunity!"

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

Jackie treated me to a small pizza shop on the outskirts of Valintino territory. The pizza tasted like cardboard, and I had to threaten physical violence to keep him from putting crickets on it. I was also pretty sure I spotted a few people eyeing me up, but when Jackie called one out by saying hello and asking how they had been doing, they stopped sniffing around. It was still nerve-wracking, though, and closer to gang contact than I really wanted.

Mind you, I wasn't naive enough to think I would get what I wanted. Dealing with gangs was a part of Night City and, as far as I understood it, the Cyberpunk setting as a whole. It didn't matter where I went, some sort of gang would call it home. It still made me nervous.

Still, hanging out with Jackie was fun. I definitely understood how V ended up trusting him so quickly. He seemed to have a way of drawing you in and making you feel comfortable. Eventually, when we were done eating, he took me back to the megabuilding, dropping me off as close as he could get with his borrowed car.

"I'll be in touch, maybe even later today," He said. "Depends on when certain people respond to my messages. Don't worry, I'll keep your name out of it."

"Alright Jackie, you've got my number," I said as I climbed out of his car, turning around and leaning back into the open door. "If I don't pick up, just try again. I might not have my keyfob on me."

"Sure thing, Jackson."

I gave him a lazy salute and shut the door, slapping the hood as I stepped back. The older car pulled away from the curb, leaving me standing on the sidewalk. I looked around, paranoia already rising now that I was alone. When I was certain I wasn't about to be ambushed, I turned back and made a beeline towards the building entrance, heading straight up to my room.

All in all, the test had been very encouraging, and not just because the Alien Alloy held up very well to quite a few of the basic weapons used in Night City. When I completed the original version of the nanoscale and plated vests, I learned an awful lot about them. While at the time, I had been most interested in how to best manipulate Alien Alloy, I also got quite a bit of info on how durable the nanoscale and plate was. The only issue was that this information was primarily in terms of weapons from that reality.

With a live demonstration, I could now compare the damage I saw with my own eyes with the damage I knew XCOM weapons were capable of. From there, I could extrapolate how Cyberpunk and XCOM weapons compared, at least in general.

As far as I could tell, the normal ballistic weapons from XCOM were equivalent to low-end weapons from Cyberpunk. Laser weapons generally equated to the middle tier, though there was something to be said about the perfect precision and heat transference of the system. Mag weapons were mainly in the middle to high tier since they could penetrate plate armor with a few shots, putting it on the same level as the high-powered rifle Jackie had gotten his hands on.

That just left plasma weapons, which, as far as I could tell from my general perspective, were a complete upgrade from mag weapons, combining the best aspects of laser and magnetic while adding a substantial amount of secondary damage from heat. I was pretty sure that all of the plasma weapons from the XCOM universe would match or beat the best that this world had to offer. I'm sure there were some secret weapons that Arasaka or Militech were working on, but I couldn't imagine they were nearly as polished, stable, or reproducible as the plasma tech that I could access.

Assuming I could build them before my specialty changed.

The second I got home, I set the fabricator back up, getting it working on the next piece of the mag pistol. I then stripped all of the Alien Alloy from the test armor, dumping it back into the smelter. I would get a nearly one hundred percent return on smelting Alloy scraps.

Once the smelter was going and the fabricator and 3D printer were moving, I sat down at the computer and spent every eddie that Jackie had paid me, then a few hundred more. My "savings," which were really just a chunk of eddies that the entities who stranded me here had given me, were getting lower and lower. With the last batch of purchases, I finally sank below ten thousand. It wasn't a small amount, especially considering I was used to living on a much smaller buffer in my home world, but I still knew that wouldn't last long. I was dreading that my second "specialty" would end up being something money-intensive but extremely potent, forcing me to struggle and miss out on some worthwhile stuff because I had spent everything.

Within three hours of arriving home, the parts for the mag pistol were finished, and I could assemble it. I had to say, the mag pistol, and I assumed mag weapons as a whole, were fascinating. The barrel, parts of the receiver system, Elerium charge chamber, and the energy diffusion bank were all built out of Alien Alloy, meaning it took significantly more resources than the laser pistol. As a bonus, though, it also made critical portions of the weapon substantially more robust.

The charging system could hold much more energy, and the strange properties of AA meant barely any of a fired projectile's speed was lost to friction despite still engaging with the barrel's rifling. As I built the pistol's Elerium charging chamber, rather than use one of my whole shards, I took apart the power generator of the laser pistol and used the Elerium inside that.

Once I finished the new pistol, I basked in the deluge of information I got from it, enjoying my new understanding of the technology. I then removed the pistol's ridiculous skeletonized shell and replaced it with an aluminum one with built-in heat sinks and a much more complete frame. This would not only better protect the sensitive tech inside the frame, but it would also serve to hide how the pistol was built.

Between going out to lunch and finishing the mag pistol, it was starting to get late. I spent the last few hours of the day building the CAD blueprint for the mag rifle, before calling it a day.

----------------​

The following morning, my sixth day in the Cyberpunk word, I woke up to an express delivery of materials being dropped off by my door. It was a rather large bundle of stuff, and I was excited to get it into my workshop. Most of the delivery was materials and ingredients, a portion of which went immediately into my Elerium and AA production.

There was also a single industrial robotic arm, the kind that you would see in an automotive factory back home, only around the size of my own arm and significantly more advanced. Now, technically, I could have built something similar with my own hands. I had the parts and tools after all, and the XCOM universe did have several models that I could have used. But here, in the age of cyberware, a simple robotic arm was amazingly cheap. The model I bought was essentially a glorified learning aid, and it was already stronger, more flexible, and had several more points of articulation than anything the XCOM universe had access to.

It took me about an hour to bolt the arm to the side of the fabricator and another two to whip up a basic program that allowed me to feed simple directions to the arm, specifically to remove and feed materials to the fabricator. It would be useless for new, unique things, but now I could go to sleep and leave the fabricator running to produce simple, repeatable things, like the scales and plates for my brand of AA under armor. It would make keeping up with any orders I got from Jackie much easier. I was still looking forward to getting better systems in the future, but this was a step in the right direction.

I spent the rest of the morning and start of the afternoon building my mag rifle and preparing the base fabrics for another set of AA under armor. That turned out to be a good idea because Jackie called me at about ten PM with some news.

"Good news, Jackson! I showed some of the footage I got-"

"Footage? What footage?" I asked, talking into my keyfob, mentally cursing the idiot who decided not to make it more like a smartphone.

"I recorded some of our testing yesterday," He explained. "I got some Mk. 1 Kiroshi's from a ripperdoc friend of mine. They record preem footage, self-stabilize, the whole shebang. Anyway, don't worry, I didn't show anything with you in it. They were interested in grabbing a few sets of your armor."

"Jackie, my production cycle isn't really set up for mass production," I explained with a wince. "I don't-"

"I know, compadre, I explained that, but get this. They thought I was playing hard to get, so they offered fifteen thousand eddies for three sets. Thought they were paying a premium to cut ahead in line, I couldn't bring myself to correct them."

"Well… I might be able to make three by… Wednesday afternoon…" I admitted, going over how long everything would take in my head. "That's if I can get a delivery of stuff in by tomorrow."

"What if I did some shopping for you?" He asked. "I can play delivery boy for a day if I can get an extra grand."

I chewed my lip as I considered the possibility before nodding to myself. I had no issues paying Jackie a bit more, and getting the order done quickly was a solid plan.

"If you can pick me up a few things from around the city, I could get it done Tuesday afternoon, maybe a few hours after. But that's an all-nighter."

"You can crash after we make some eddies," He said like I was being dumb. "I'll stop by in an hour, so have a list ready for me."

"Wait. Who are these people?" I asked. "How well do you know them?"

"...They are Valentinos," He admitted after a long moment. "They watch the block that Coyote is on. They are good people, Jackson."

"...Don't take this the wrong way, but I need to ask Jackie because I'm new to this city. The Valentinos. They sell people?" I asked simply.

"What? No, that's bad business, cabrone. They might help people cross some borders occasionally, but no selling people, I promise."

"Do they sell to kids?" I asked, this time noting a slight pause.

"Not pulling your punches, eh choom?" He asked. "Padre's official rule is that kids don't get anything, any the Valentinos follow it. But pushers aren't exactly asking for detes. And who knows if some corner gonk follows the rule anyway?"

I let out a long breath, trying to parse out where my limit was, where I would draw my line. How far was I willing to bend to survive? In a world like Cyberpunk, that is exactly what was on the table.

"Alright, Jackie, stop by soon. I'll have a list for you."

"Preem, see you soon."

My keyfob went dark, and I continued to stare at it for a moment before letting out a long breath and tossing it onto my workbench. I ground my palms into my eyes for a second before looking around. I needed to fill up the smelter and restock the Elerium generator. By then, the part the fabricator was working on should be done, so I could queue up parts I would need for the first AA under armor.

I stood and got to work, quickly getting everything set before sitting back down and getting to work. I was just starting to affix the first batch of scales to the upper torso armor when Jackie came knocking on my door. I let him in quickly before returning to my workshop and using my keyfob to send him a list.

"There's a list of places you should be able to buy that stuff from," I said, already working on the armor again. "Try to spread it out so it's not all coming from only a few places."

"I know the drill choom, not my first shopping gig," Jackie assured me, his eyes glowing orange as he read through my list. "Gonna need eddies to buy all this…"

"Right, sorry," I said, grabbing my keyfob and sending him the eddies, before returning to work.

"Alright, I'll get- Jesus, Jackson, what is that?"

I whirled around to see Jackie lifting the mag rifle, putting it up to his shoulder, and looking down the sights. To his credit, he wasn't facing anywhere near me, instead aiming the empty weapon at the apartment's exterior wall. He even had good trigger discipline. It looked good without the skeletonized structure, which I replaced with the same sort of aluminum plating I had used on the mag pistol.

"Where did you get this from?" He said, looking over the rifle with wide eyes. "This is preem iron, Jackson."

"It's a prototype Mag… Tech weapon," I explained, turning around and watching him. "I don't really have any ammo for it at the moment. I was just sort of trying it out."

"Seriously? You're just throwing together guns too?" He asked, still looking over the rifle. "What's that one?"

As he asked, he placed the mag rifle back onto the couch, hand already reaching out to the finished, and very much armed, laser rifle.

"Don't touch that one!" I said loudly, Jackie freezing in response. "That one is charged and not safe to be showing off indoors."

"...what is it?" He asked, pulling his hand back.

"A prototype," I explained. "No use bragging about it yet."

He seemed to accept my explanation, though I couldn't tell if it was cause he actually believed me or if he just didn't care enough to call me out.

"Right. Well, I'll be back with your stuff soon," He responded. "Few hours tops."

"I'll be waiting," I responded without turning around, still focused on the vest in front of me.

I heard my new business partner leave, my front door sealing back shut and locking automatically. I let out a long breath and got back to my work, slowly affixing the AA scales to the first layer of the bullet-resistant fabric. The fabric was shockingly easy to work with, especially with how much knowledge of how to stitch, bind, and make sturdy combat gear and clothing I had from making the original version of the nanoscale vest. I was pretty sure I would become a world-class seamster eventually.

By the time Jackie returned from shopping, I had finished the first pair of Nanoplate shorts and had started on the first shirt. I immediately started filling the AA smelter and Elerium generator while Jackie sat down on my couch, eating a burrito he had bought. He had even gotten me one. I would try to stomach it when I was done... it would be rude not to.

"This is some real mad science shit, eh choom?" He asked, leaning in to watch as I gently put the seed diamond into its brace. "How has a Corp not snapped you up yet?"

"Because I've only recently started really building stuff," I admitted, closing the generator up. "I want nothing to do with the Corps."

"Well… you came to the wrong city then," He said with a wince. "Arasaka owns Night City. And whatever scraps they don't own, the other corps fight over."

"I know… It wasn't exactly my first choice," I admitted, plopping down on the other side of the U-shaped couch, grabbing the burrito that Jackie had gotten me, unwrapping it, and taking a bite.
It tasted like someone tried to cook a tire mexican style, gave up and stuffed it into a cardboard tortilla. It was horrifying and made me miss Chipotle. If I ever made it back home, I would never complain about low-quality food ever again.

I did my best to choke down the food, trying not to reveal how horrible it was, focusing on the fact that someday, if I was very lucky, I might get a tech branch that included a way to make food. Maybe a Star Trek branch.

"You have any plans past making armor and guns?" Jackie asked, sounding genuinely curious as he leaned back on the couch, his food done.

"I… have a few ideas," I admitted. "Nothing concrete yet, though."

In all honesty, I was waiting to see what my next tech branch would be. I was desperately crossing my fingers that whatever I rolled would have some sort of automation, something I would be able to put together and would work similarly to how the fabricator did. Even if it was a lesser version, having a few of them working while the fabricator handled the more detailed work would be fantastic.

After we finished our food, Jackie left me to my work, promising to come pick up and deliver the AA under armor the following afternoon. I quickly got back to the process of attaching the AA scales, finishing that, and starting to attach the plates. It was boring, mind-numbing work that poked and prodded at my patience, wearing it thin. By the time the afternoon had turned into night, I was cursing Jackie's name and heavily regretting letting him win me over.

When I was finally done putting everything together, it was early Tuesday morning, and the sun had risen over the city, light peaking in from my window. I now had three sets of the AA armor complete. I would have been done sooner, but I decided to spend an hour double-checking that everything was done right. As frustrating as it was making three of the exact same mind-numbing things in a row, with no time to work on other projects or even take a prolonged break, I still wanted to deliver a quality product. The big corps might not understand the importance of having a product you can stand by, but I did.

When I finally finished the job, I barely stayed awake long enough to crash into my bed. I wasn't really good at pulling all-nighters or staying up extra late, something I had learned the hard way as I got older. I could do it as long as I was keeping busy and working hard, but the second that stopped, I was out like a light. I slept for four hours before Jackie stopped by to pick up the delivery. I was awake just long enough to let him in, hand him the three sets of AA under armor, and shoo him out the door before I collapsed back in my bed. This time, I set an alarm for three more hours. I felt like I could have slept all the way to the following morning, but I had work to do and a time limit to do it in.

I woke up to the sound of my alarm and an extra thirteen thousand eddies in my account. Jackie had already taken his cut, and it was still by far the largest amount of money I had ever made in such a short time. It completely replenished what I had spent so far, plus an extra grand. It was a heady feeling but also quite nerve-wracking. I had just put a two or three dozen pounds of unique, blackboxed metal out into the wild. Sure, it was a simple, unassuming use, but it wasn't hard to imagine someone getting their hands on it and realizing what they had. Or rather, realizing that they didn't know what they had.

Yes, I was still paranoid, but at this point, I was embracing it, because the corpos, if they knew I existed, would definitely be after me.

When I finally got around to sitting in front of my computer, I opened up my schedule. My first week would be up at midnight that night, so I wanted to take a look at what else I could get done with my remaining time.

From what I could tell, I would probably spend two whole days on plasma weapons simply because I wanted to make every form I could so I had a firm grasp on how they worked. I also wanted to take some time working on the warden armor, especially because I was pretty sure I could skip over the predator armor and start making the warden armor with what I had learned from making the plate vest. On top of that, I wouldn't have to learn how to make and then produce the synthetic muscle fiber that made the armor a "power" armor. I could just buy it by the box online. Even better, I could get it relatively cheaply since I didn't have to buy top-of-the-line.

The only issue was that, from what I could tell, developing the enhanced, heavy version of the warden armor, called the W.A.R. suit, was heavily reliant on the E.X.O. suit, the enhanced version of the predator armor. Of course, as one might expect, the E.X.O. suit seemed to be heavily tied to the predator armor, and since I planned on skipping that, it meant I wouldn't be able to make the W.A.R. suit. I tried to focus through the confusion of the E.X.O. suit, but when that failed, I decided to move ahead anyway. The warden armor system would substantially enhance the wearer's speed, strength, and durability already. Besides, while the W.A.R. suit would have been a nice addition, the more I studied the tech tree, the more I realized that building my way up to the W.A.R. suit would have taken up too much of my time.

With my next project decided, I closed out the calendar app and started adding things to my shopping list, filling my online cart with dozens of things, including more materials for Elerium and a lot of Alien Alloy. I spent a significant amount, once again burning eddies for quick progress.

With my supplies set to refresh sometime the next day, at a premium for quick delivery, I reopened the CAD software and got to work. By now, I was really starting to get good with the interface, making the design process go much more smoothly. When the first batch of parts was finished, I got the fabricator running.

This project would probably take the better part of two days, mostly because I would be waiting for each part to finish, even with the fact that I would be waiting until tomorrow to receive a lot of the smaller parts. In the end, I actually got very little done for the rest of the day, save finishing the CAD files and printing out about a third of the parts before running out of materials. I spent the rest of the day designing the parts, feeding the two generators the last of my ingredients, and feeding the fabricator the last of my Alien Alloy before going to bed early.

Exactly at midnight, I woke up gasping for breath. I could feel the knowledge of XCOM pulling away, slowly as if to show I had a choice. For a moment, I honestly debated letting it go, tempted by the chance of getting something new. But common sense won over eventually, and I mentally held tight. After a few moments, or maybe minutes, the sensation dissipated. I idly realized that I was absolutely drenched in sweat and that my heart was racing. Eventually, after washing my face and calming down a bit, I attempted to return to sleep. Unfortunately, any sleep I got was light and fitful.

The next morning, because of the poor sleep, I woke up annoyed, which was annoying in itself. I ended up spending an hour going outside and getting some food since working on delicate equipment and parts while agitated was a recipe for wasted money. When I got back, I immediately dove back in, stopping only to accept a few deliveries.

The rest of Wednesday and Thursday was spent in a blur of building and crafting.

The warden armor, as complicated as it was, basically broke down into three layers. The first was an inner skeleton of Alien Alloy and body-hugging material. This tight bodysuit and skeleton was the primary anchor for the second layer, the synthetic muscles. These were what gave the wearer enhanced strength and speed, working with the wearer's natural muscles incredibly well. The muscle fibers were an interesting material and had a lot of potential, so I was glad that completing the warden armor would give me a much better understanding of how it worked. Or, at least, the vaguely inferior version that XCOM used.

The artificial muscles were controlled by a central control system housed on the back. It was the suit's brain and required a lot of heavy programming. Luckily, I had spent plenty of time learning a significant portion of the programming XCOM was capable of, so whipping up the program and fitting it into a system nearly half the size of what XCOM used was pretty easy. This system also monitored the four Elerium power nodes that provided the synthetic muscles with the energy they needed to function.

The third and final layer was the Alien Alloy outer shell. The shell was attached both to the first and second layers, making the suit surprisingly flexible.

Completing the armor led to another large wave of information flowing into my brain, filling my head with knowledge of the entire armor, including the synthetic muscles and the Elerium nodes, which were the first constant energy generators I had made that used Elerium.

I sat back and, for a moment, just enjoyed the sensation of my mind expanding, going over what I had learned with a smile. It was hard to beat the sensation of becoming actually smarter, having large chunks of knowledge just offered to you, downloaded into my brain seamlessly. When I finally recovered, I started examining the final results of two days of work before finally starting to put it on.

The process of putting on the armor wasn't exactly simple. The armor was heavy, and before it activated, which could only be done when all pieces were in place, the synthetic muscle system did not support its own weight, meaning I had to carry it entirely, and it was not light. The armor went on in several sections, starting with the boots, then the legs, followed by the chest, finished by the arms, and then the hands. The helmet was technically part of the list, but it wasn't required to activate the armor.

When I finally clicked the gloves into place, I could feel the suit powering up, the synthetic musculature grabbing and squeezing around me as I shifted. It wasn't quite the perfect connection, as the armor moved with just the slightest delay. It would definitely take some getting used to, but I was excited to see what it could do when I had acclimatized to it.

When I was finally done donning the armor, ten minutes had passed. Clearly, this armor was not for a quick reaction team but rather something made to let one man fight as many monsters as he could and still make it home. It would serve me well until I could make something better.

 

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I spent about an hour moving around the apartment, getting used to the armor system. By the time I finally took it off, I was pretty well acclimatized to it, having worked my way through a long string of stretches, burpees, jumping jacks, and shadow boxing. I could feel the entire system supporting me, speeding up my movements, and when I started doing one-handed pushups, enhancing my strength and stamina. I was far from some of the insane feats of strength that some of the borgs out there, like Adam Smasher, were capable of. People like him could tear a man limb from limb with little to no struggle or crumple a car with their bare fists. Still, I was definitely at least a hair or two above what a peak human could do.

As long as I was wearing the armor.

When I was done experimenting and testing, I pulled off the armor and set it aside. There was a temptation to just remove the outer AA shell and leave the skeleton and artificial muscle system on, but the knowledge I had gained from building the armor told me that prolonged use could result in serious muscle and bone atrophy. It could be countered by regimented workouts that compensated for the increased strength, but even that only lasted so long. Yes, it would take days, even weeks, for that to set in, but there was no reason to set up bad habits.

When I was finally free of the armor, I spent a few minutes inspecting it for any stress or mistakes. I now knew that the AA skeleton was the only reason that this system worked, as no other material was light and strong enough to withstand the mechanical disadvantage that many of the artificial muscle groups functioned under. It certainly explained why there were no compact power armors like this that existed in Cyberpunk, at least non that I knew about. I'm sure there were plenty of bulkier systems around, though.

I sat down at the computer and spun around in my chair, finally looking back at my computer. It was too late to start another project, for no other reason than I was exhausted from working nearly nonstop. I had five days left with the XCOM human tech tree, plenty of time to work with the plasma weapons, and two or three other smaller projects.

At this point, I had well and truly written off Psionics. I just didn't have the resources to tackle a whole room, not without doing a whole lot of stupid shit. Stupid shit that would probably get me killed. As much as I would have liked to have the ability to create Psionics in my back pocket, letting it go was my only realistic option.

For a moment, I considered pushing through my fatigue and starting on the plasma pistol, or at least the CAD design process for it, only to shake my head. I hadn't seen the outside of my apartment since going out with Jackie, and I was starting to feel the stress and tension coiling around my spine.

Before I could change my mind, I grabbed my keyfob and called Jackie, the only friend I had made here.

"Jackson! Good to hear from you, choom. What's up?" The familiar accented voice asked once the call went through

"Not a whole lot. I just got finished with another project and wanted to see what you were up to," I explained, leaning back in my chair. "I need to get out of the apartment."

"Aye, sure thing! I was thinking about heading to the Coyote tonight, you want a ride?"

"On your cycle?" I asked skeptically.

"It's fine, it's a short trip," He assured me. "I'll meet you out front in an hour."

"Alright, fine. See you then."

It took me a bit to get cleaned up, dressed, and ready to go, but I still ended up killing time by doing some online shopping. I set up an express delivery for the next morning before heading down to wait for Jackie. I was armed, of course, but rather than bring my rinky dink Unity, I strapped my mag pistol into a slightly modified holster. Its non-skeletonized casing made it seem just like any other pistol, though any aficionado would be able to tell it was custom. It was loaded with AA-tipped steel slugs that should be able to punch through any armor or subdermal I could reasonably run into at a dive bar.

I was also wearing my AA under armor, but honestly, I really only took that off when I showered.

I wasn't waiting long before Jackie showed up, his famous red Archer loud enough to hear him coming plenty far enough away. I winced when I saw how little room there would be for me. Not to mention the lack of a helmet.

What kind of idiot rides an organ donor generator without a helmet?

"You know what, I'm just gonna grab a cab," I said as he motioned for me to hop on.

"Ahh, don't be a gallino, hop on," He said. "I'll take it slow, promise."

I let out a sigh, realizing that, apparently, I was that idiot before hopping on. I put my hands behind me, using the back lip of the seat to keep myself on. After a moment, he nodded, the motorcycle rumbling as he gave it gas. Thankfully, he was telling the truth and kept the ride nice and slow, though I assumed that was for his own safety as it was for mine.

When we finally arrived at the bar, we pulled around to a long alleyway. We both got off his bike and walked it much further in, leaving the well-loved and maintained motorcycle at the back of the building. He then led me inside through a back entrance.

The interior of the building looked pretty much like how I remembered it from the game. It wasn't the worst dive bar I'd ever been in, but it was definitely in the running.

As we stepped into the main open area, I could see maybe about twenty or so people, some at the bar, but most scattered around the various sitting and standing areas. Nearby, there were two people playing pool while a third leaned against a game cabinet and watched, a beer in his hand. One of the people playing spotted Jackie and smiled, giving him a small wave before focusing on their game. Jackie waved back but led me to the bar, plopping down on one of the seats.

"Pepe, we'll take a round when you got a sec," Jackie said, nodding to the bartender, who smiled and nodded back but continued talking to a different patron. "So, how's your work going? Anything interesting genio?"

"Just exploring some of the basics for now," I said vaguely. "Still pushing against that single fabricator and 3D printer."

"Well, invest in some more," He said. "I could find more people looking to buy some of this armor."

As he offered, he tapped his chest, the sound of tapping metal audible, though muffled by his shirt.

"That's the thing. The more I focus on making things to sell, the less time I have to develop new stuff," I explained.

Before I could continue, the bartender, who I vaguely remembered had a quest involving debt or something, dropped off two beers.

"Jackie, Mama Welles was looking for you," He said, before giving me a smile as he leaned on his side of the bar.

"She was? Where is she?" He responded, turning around in his stool to look around before stopping after looking up. "Never mind, Pepe, I see her. Put these on my tab and then start one for Jackson. I'm gonna go see what she wants."

Pepe nodded, and Jackie stood, patting my shoulder before walking out of sight. When I spot the bartender staring at me with a frown, I realize he is trying to connect with me. I reach out and pull out my keyfob to swipe.

"Sorry, all 'ganic," I explained with a shrug.

He nodded, looking surprised but generally indifferent, connecting my tab to my account before walking away to another customer. I made a mental note to change the settings on my keyfob to let money transfers in from now on. I sipped from my beer for a few minutes, letting the tension from nonstop pushing myself slowly leave me. After a few minutes, Jackie returned, this time accompanied by his mom.

"So you are the man who got my mijo to wear some protection?" She asked, leaning against the bar on the other side of me. "It's not as good as getting some subdermal, but it's better than nothing. Gracias m'hijo."

"It's no problem, Ms. Welles. He helped me test it out and sell a few pairs of it," I explained. "Small price to pay for good help."

"And polite, too. Just call me Mama Welles. Everyone does. Mijo, don't drink too much, si? I know you've got a job por la mañana" She said, giving me a smile and a nod before walking away.

"I won't Mama, thank you," Jackie responded, watching her leave before leaning heavily on the bar top with a long groan. "I need to move out."

"You know, hearing that would break her heart," Pepe said, having stopped by when Mama Welles did. "She loves having you around so much."

"I would still be around," He insisted. "But she is treating me like niño imaduro. I can't even bring Misty around 'cause she doesn't approve of her. Likes my ex more."

"She means well, pendejo," Pepe reminded him, shaking his head. "Just remember what's important."

"Aye aye, I know," He responded, waving his words away. "So, how's the little one?"

We sat at the bar for a bit, chatting with Pepe, before eventually making our way to the pool table when the previous group of people left. After setting everything up, Jackie hit the break and ended up with solids.

"So, güey, what's your next move?" He asked, leaning over the table. "We made some money, you know what you're doing next?"

"I need to up my production abilities," I explained, watching him smack the cue ball. "My fabricator is impressive, but it's slow. I need a few more production tools, maybe another 3D printer, another fabricator…"

"Sounds expensive."

"It is, especially when I'm spending a lot of money on materials too," I explained.

With XCOM's extreme reliance on AA and Elerium, I was forced to constantly invest more and more money into material production, making everything I made more and more expensive. The warden armor cost more than every weapon I had made so far combined. It had nearly three times as much Alien Alloy as my AA under armor. At this point, I was really looking forward to having a tech tree that was built from normal materials.

"Well… there are other ways to get what you need," He pointed out after missing his second shot. "Plenty of ways we could earn a little money on the side."

"Like what?"

"We could always roll a few Scav dens," He explained with a shrug. "Flatlining them is practically a public service, even includes a bounty usually. They won't even care as long as we don't hit too many."

"'We'?"

"Yeah, choom! I told you I had a good feeling about you, and we made a good bit of eddies already," He said, slapping my shoulder. "I'm the muscle, you're the brains, genio."

"You realize I have no combat experience," I pointed out. "Not even shard simulations."

"Everyone's gotta start somewhere," He answered with a shrug. "I'll keep you alive until you can keep yourself alive."

For nearly a minute, I was silent, Jackie leaving me be so I could think. Morally, I had no issues killing Scavs. No level of 'down on your luck' or 'I need to survive somehow' could excuse openly murdering people and tearing out their cyberware to sell. I had no idea how I would react to actually killing someone, but from a distant perspective, I had no issue dealing out a little justice.

That said, it was definitely a step in a direction. Good, bad, dangerous, safe, I wasn't entirely sure. But it was definitely a step, one I wouldn't be able to take back. I let out a long sigh, before finally nodding.

"Okay. You find us a target, we can hit it," I said. "Keep it small…. And give me a few days. I want to make you some armor and some guns for myself."

"I don't need armor," he said, waving me off before leaning over the pool table and taking a shot. I didn't comment that he had skipped my turn.

"Really? You want to go into combat wearing just the under armor?"

"That's what I got it for, güey," He responded with a smirk. "Can't cover myself up to much, how will the ladies admire me?"

I shook my head, but ultimately gave up trying to convince him. He was an adult, and I couldn't force him to do anything he didn't want to. When he finally took the shot he had been lining up for a few minutes, I tapped up on his pool cue with mine, causing him to hit the cue ball wrong and completely miss. When he pointed at me, and I laughed.

"I seem to remember you having a girlfriend already," I reminded him, the annoyed expression he had morphing into a chagrined shrug. "And you skipped my turn."

We continued to play pool for another hour or so before I called a cab home, since Jackie had been drinking. I was barely comfortable on the back of his Archer when he was sober, never mind four beers and two shots later.

When I arrived home, I restocked the generators before dropping down into bed. The combination of relieved tension and just enough alcohol to feel a bit of a buzz put me to sleep almost immediately.

----------------------

The next morning, I finally got to work on my plasma weapons, starting, as I had with every weapon level, with the pistol. Once the design was finished and the fabricator and 3D printer were running, I started working on the internals. First, I prepared the parts, starting with magnetic field generators, which were essentially a series of powerful electromagnets. Each generator would be directed and contained by Alien Alloy.

Essentially, the system used all of the accumulated knowledge from previous weapon systems, working them together in one final design. For starters, like in the laser weapons, an Elerium shard was agitated with high levels of energy. The shard would absorb and magnify this energy before releasing it as a plasma-esque energy pulse. Rather than converting that energy to charge a laser or a battery, it was directed and fired out as a high-energy beam. The beam was directed by a line of magnetic field generators, just like the mag rifle bullets. Technically, plasma was a bit of a misnomer, but it was close enough.

This system was simple in design, but complicated in execution. Everything had to be precise and reinforced to withstand the high stress and heat put out by the energy released by the Elerium shard. The amount of energy in play energy was a higher concentration than was used in any other weapon. Because of this, Alien Alloy made up a much more significant amount of the weapon frame. Essentially, everything but the outer protective covering, the sight, and the trigger system was Alien Alloy. That meant that not only was each of these weapons going to be more expensive, but I would also have to modify quite a few of the parts off the shelf parts, replacing significant portions with AA.

Thankfully, that also meant all the weapons would be very durable, even the sniper, which looked particularly fragile. In fact, the plasma weapons were overall much safer than the laser and magnetic weapons since they held no charge save a small battery used to generate the agitation energy.

Plasma or Beam weapons, as they were sometimes called, were superior in every way, save cost, to all of the other weapons I had made so far. In fact, the only thing that slowed down the plasma weapons was the charge and energy release time of the Elerium, and a need to cool down after consistent shooting. There was a warning light system that would warn the shooter of overheating before the gun shut down to prevent a critical failure.

It took most of the morning and into the afternoon to finally finish my pistol. When I was done assembling the pieces, I spent a few minutes inspecting it for any issues before turning it on, the subtle whine of charging electronic coming from the grip. Satisfied that my new weapon functioned and armed with a much better understanding of how the pistol worked in much greater detail, I immediately dove into making the rifle.

Unfortunately, I didn't have nearly enough time to finish it that day, so once I was done putting together the CAD files, I set the fabricator up with a specific piece I would need quite a few of, a casing for the magnetic coil. The robotic arm would remove finished ones and insert new stock material as needed. Satisfied that a chunk of it would still get done, I ended up going to bed early.

It was late in the afternoon of the next day when I put the finishing touches on the plasma rifle. I turned it on to test it, and the weapon powered on with no issues, though it whined quite a bit louder than the pistol.

As I gained even more information about the plasma weapon system, I realized I could probably build the plasma lance without the actual mental blueprint. After a quick check of the tech tree in my mind, it showed that the same was true for the laser sniper and mag sniper. Either completing plasma weapons had somehow filled in a few blanks, or all of the sharpshooter variants fell under the concept of "more power=better." At the end of the day, it didn't matter. I could now focus on other things rather than rushing to cover all weapon types.

I had no interest in figuring out the shotgun variants. The rifles were more than adequate at close range, and having a weapon that stopped being effective past fifteen meters was beyond stupid, no matter how much more powerful it was at close range.

When I was done mentally studying what I had learned and what it meant for my tech tree, I realized I had a new problem. This was all a lot of gear, gear I didn't want people to know I had. Eventually, I wanted a place to live and work that wasn't a heavily populated arcology. Unfortunately, for now, I needed a way to get my armor and weapons out of the building so I could use them without showing all of my neighbors what I had.

It only took me a minute to remember that in the game, Jackie had a garage where he kept his bike. The fact that he didn't live out of it was odd since, by the time he had died in the game, he was.

Rather than call him directly, I sent him a message, using my computer to contact his neural link to ask if he had a place I could store my stuff, someplace easier to use than my apartment. It didn't take long for him to respond back and confirm I could use his garage. He even offered to help me move it, saying he knew a guy he could borrow a van from. After a bit of planning, he agreed to come by in a few hours since it would take him a bit to borrow the vehicle.

I settled down on the couch, my brain more than a little fried from working nonstop for two days… again. Still, even if it was a bit rough on me, I realized I was enjoying myself immensely. I could feel my knowledge expanding with everything I made. It was a heady, worryingly enjoyable feeling. I was already looking forward to what kind of secret, other reality knowledge I would get from the next tech tree.

I sat alone for a while, contemplating what I could possibly get, before shaking off the daydream. I was unlikely to get something perfect on my second draw, especially considering that, if my current tech tree was any hint, the trees would be divided up beyond just one entire universe. I was not looking forward to getting something like the Zerg.

Besides, I didn't really want to hit the jackpot so soon. If I unlocked something outstanding, I would end up fighting my limited resources to make anything exceptional. The idea of getting something like Star Trek and not getting to the matter replicator, the holodeck, or the transporter, because I was trying to make a power generator strong enough to support those things, hurt my soul.

Not that I would ever use a transport on humans. Teleportation was fucked, and there was no way I was going to mess around with Prestiging myself in real life.

Eventually, Jackie showed up, knocking on my door. I opened it to reveal him standing there with an old shopping cart filled with broken-down boxes. He pushed it in past me, and I shut the door behind him.

"Really? Do you know a guy who deals in shopping carts, too?" I asked as he stopped at my workshop door.

"No pendejo, just paid a homeless guy out front a few eddies for it," He said with a shrug. "Sounded like you had a lot to move."

I snorted and nodded, tapping the door controls to my workshop and grabbing some of my armor.

"No mames! What the hell is that!" Jackie asked, his accent getting deeper for a moment. He continued in a string of Spanish that was too fast for me to even parse out.

"It's power armor," I said with a shrug.

"Are you serious? How did you get this! This is preem, better than preem!" He asked, taking the chest piece and examining it closely.

"I made it," I explained with a shrug, Jackie's growing tirade halting immediately, his eyes looking to mine. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find it.

"I might have underestimated you, compadre," He finally said, eyes going back down to the armor. "I can see why you want to get this out of your apartment. Gonna catch a lot of eyes wearing this around."

"Exactly. Would rather keep what I'm making separate from me for a while," I explained, and he nodded in understanding. "At least until I can take care of myself,"

We spent a bit packing up the various armor pieces, really just using the boxes to cover up everything rather than actually boxing everything up. When I finally brought out the rifle and pistol, Jackie went wide again, though this time I stopped him from taking them from me.

"These are powered weapons, Jackie. No messing around with them," I explained, waiting for him to nod in understanding before handing him the pistol.

"Dios Mio, Jackson, is this what I think it is?" He asked, turning the weapon over in his hand.

"That depends. Do you think it is a high-energy rifle?" I asked. "Cause that's what it is."

"You made a laser gun?"

"Yeah, it's over there," I answered, gesturing back into my workshop to the laser rifle I made a couple of days ago. "These aren't laser weapons. It's closer to plasma, but that's not really right either."

For a long moment, he looked down at the pistol in his hands, then at the rifle I was holding. After a full thirty seconds, he finally spoke again.

"... Jackson, you can't use these," He said, sounding very serious. "I'm no expert, but I know this kind of shit is a big deal. If you start shooting these off, you're going to have a corpo strike team on you before you can blink."

I cursed and chewed my lip, looking down at my rifle in a new light. I had considered the fact that these weapons would get some attention, but I had assumed there would be some leeway, that as long as I didn't use them completely in the open, any rumors would get dismissed. But Jackie was by and far the expert here, for obvious reasons. If he thought using them would be stupid, then using them would be stupid.

And after I spent so long getting them ready.

"Fuck… well, there goes my trump card," I said, shaking my head. "Alright, fine, I can deal. What do you think about my mag guns. Are they fine?"

"I… think they would be," Jackie said with a nod. "They are definitely unique, but they don't come off as being crazy high-tech corpo shit. How powerful is the rifle?"

"Mid to high range," I explained. "At least as good as that high-powered rifle you got for the armor testing."

"Really? That's pretty powerful… Still should be fine, though," He assured me.

We spent about ten minutes securing everything before I walked him out of the building and helped him load it into the back of a different vehicle, this one a van. When everything was all set, he slapped me on the shoulder and said he would be in touch before jumping into the van and driving away. I shook my head and made my way back up to my room, where I got the fabricator working on the more steel and AA rounds for the mag rifle and pistol, before getting the 3D printer going on the mags that would hold them. The only other thing I would need was a spring, which I had plenty of.

Barely a few hours passed when I got another call from Jackie.

"Hey Jackson, I just got word from a netrunner friend about a scav den. She found it scoping out another gig, so she only charged me a small favor," He explained. "Its a bit sooner than we planned, but you up for a scav hunt?"

I let out a long breath before nodding. Then I spoke up because I realized he couldn't actually see me.

"Yes, let's do it,"

"Great! I'll drop by and pick you up in an hour. We can go back to the garage and get you into that a more."

"Sounds good, Jackie. See you then."

I spent the free hour preparing my ammo, stuffing three rifle mags and two pistol mags into a large utility belt. The warden armor had magnetic latch points on the back for my rifle, but I needed a holster for my pistol. Luckily enough, I could remove the holster I was using on my empty belt and affix it to the utility belt. When I was done getting everything set, I threw it all into a bag and made my way down to the first floor.

I only spent a few minutes waiting before I spotted Jackie's borrowed van. By this time, the sun has set, and the city is going dark. There are still plenty of people walking around, but the normal bustle had faded. I made my way to the van and climbed into the passenger seat.

"What's in the bag?" Jackie asked as I shut the door and put the bag down at my feet.

"Ammo for my guns," I explained. "I only had ammo for the pistol, not the rifle, so I machined out some more.

"You can just make more?" He asked, looking over at me with a surprised look. "Damn, now I'm really jealous. I don't usually fuck around with tech weapons, but they sound pretty good."

"Just wait till you see them in action."

We arrived at Jackie's garage, the larger man lifting up the door into the smaller space. His motorcycle was already there, and in the corner was my rifle, my pistol, and my armor. I double-checked that everything was in order before putting on my armor. When I finally felt the last piece connect into place, the artificial muscles flexing and shifting around my body, I shook myself a bit to settle the suit in place.

"Fucking hell, you look like a borg, choom," He said, watching as I picked up my utility belt and fastened it around my waist, then slid my rifle over my back, letting the magnets grab it firmly. "You look like a fucking borg!"

"Well, I don't think I would be able to go toe to toe with one, but the armor does give me a bit of a boost," I responded. "Stronger, faster, tougher, the whole nine yards."

For a moment, Jackie stared at me before he started to laugh, full belly laughter that had him wiping an eye after he was done.

"And you were worried about getting into a fight? 'Borgs scare people, compadre! They might off themselves when you walk in!" He said, shaking his head with a smile. "C'mon pendejo, get in the van. We got scavs to kill."

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

Hey everyone, I'm here to say that I have a Patreon! Being a supporter has a lot of benefits, like early chapters and access to my original content. You could get up to four chapters early from this story and eight more for each of my other two. Board Members even get to vote on story beats, interludes, names, and more!

If you are interested in those benefits or just want to support my attempt to become a full-time writer, stop by and show your support. Every dollar helps!

---

We quickly found out that, with my armor on, I was just slightly too big for the passenger seat of the large van. Jackie joked about me running alongside him as he drove, but I just climbed into the back. I was worried I would be taking up room for the loot, but he assured me he had it covered. The van was just in case we found something either of us wanted to keep.

I climbed into the back and sat down against the outside wall of the vehicle. Thankfully, it was relatively clean.

"So, where is the den?" I asked as I shut the van's back doors and sat down. "Nowhere near here, I hope?"

"Ah no, never stir up shit where you eat and sleep, genio," Jacke responded as if he was giving sage advice. "Plus, I don't want to upset the balance between Valentinos and the scavs. Heywoods got enough trouble without mixing in agitated scavs in."

"Thought you said they won't care if we only hit a few?'

"I mean, they will notice, choom, but they aren't gonna come hunt oy down," He explained. "Might be agitated for a few days. They may work vaguely together, but trust me, scavs don't care about anything but themselves and their profit. Long as we don't move deep into their org and start cutting into their eddies, they won't really care."

I nodded in understanding before busying myself, checking over my weapons for the third time, making sure they were fully loaded and charged, ready for combat. After that, I just focused on keeping my breathing steady and calm. Luckily, the helmet of the warden armor was full of fans and cooling systems, keeping me surprisingly comfortable, considering it was a fully military design.

"Ey, choom, we're here. You ready to rock?" Jackie asked, startling me from the slight meditative state I managed to sink myself into.

"Yeah, I'm ready."

He nodded at my simple response, watching as I climbed out the back of the van, standing tall, feeling the musculature of the suit work around me. I had to admit, it was hard to not feel confident wearing so much armor. I scanned the area, with the armor giving me just enough of a height boost to look over the van.

Jackie climbed out of the driver's seat and started making his way to one of the many buildings along the street. It was heavily graffitied, and its doors were nearly hidden by several large mounds of trash. I took a moment to mentally thank Lily Shen that the original warden armor had built-in air filters before following after my new friend.

"According to T-bug, there shouldn't be more than ten of them here," Jackie said, leading the way into the first door. "The first floor is all garages, but we should clear it first. Just follow my lead… What should I call you?"


"Uh... what do you mean?"

"I gotta call you something if I can't call you by your name," He pointed out as he stopped, his hand on a solid inner door just a few feet from the main entrance. "How about Alloy? You said your stuff is made of a special alloy, right?"

"It is… Really, though? Alloy?"

"Trust me, choom, borgs love giving themselves names like that. Just look at Adam Smasher. You think his mama named him that?"

"I… Well, it will do for now, I guess," I said with a shrug, looking over my shoulder at the door we had just come through. "Should I call you something else?"

"Nah, Just Jackie. I'm not trying to be someone else," He pointed out with a grin before pulling out a single pistol, checking its magazine, and giving me a nod. "Alright, Alloy, let's do this."

I nodded and pulled my rifle off of my back, the electromagnets keeping it in place fighting me for a second before releasing the weapon. I flicked the high-tech weapon on, smirking as the whine of the charging capacitors filled the small entry room. I set the weapon to fire with a three-round burst before giving Jackie the thumbs up.

"I'm ready, lead us in,"

Jackie nodded and pushed the door inward with his shoulder, his pistol held out and ready as we walked in. I couldn't help but notice that while the large man clearly had experience, he also just walked into the room, crossing a clear, open space. Once he had crossed a three-meter clearing, he finally took cover behind the side of a large truck. Clearly, while Jackie had more experience than me, both with the people we were fighting and with violence as a whole, he was far from a strategic genius.

Still, I would rather have him here than anyone else I could think of, to be honest.

It just meant that I would need to take over V's job of being the brains when I got more experience under my belt. At least, I would if we continued to work together like this.

As I followed after him, I tried to scan around as much of the first floor as I could. Most of the space was taken up by three large parking spots, with two rows of storage along the wall behind them and three garage doors in front. Two of the parking spots were taken, with the large truck Jackie was taking cover behind, and a much smaller car on the opposite side of the room. The spot between them was filled with a cargo crate, sealed with a sturdy-looking lock. Across the building, a single set of stairs disappeared upwards, leading to the second floor.

As I looked around, I could see dozens of clues as to what kind of place this was. Blood spatter on the ground and along the back of the vehicle we were now hiding behind, and random personal belongings were thrown into a corner like trash. There was even more blood leading from the back of the car to the stairs.

"Alright, looks like ther-"

Jackie cut himself off and brought his gun up as someone came out from between two rows of the shelves that ran along the back of the room. The scavenger was rolling his one organic shoulder, a dark blue cyberware arm scratching his side as he yawned, almost as if he had just woken up. I could see glowing implants on either side of his face, and blood spattered along his shirt and pants. His eyes went wide when he spotted me, locking on and hardly even noticing my partner.

It seemed like Jackie was right. Borgs really do freak people out.

Seeing as though neither Jackie nor I had any silent options, something that I was already mentally noting to fix, I raised my rifle and squeezed the trigger. The sound of my weapon charging and launching three rounds of solid metal slugs broke through the relative silence of the garage. Jackie raises his pistol as well, firing twice.

Both of Jackie's much more experienced shots hit the scav, center of mass with a surprisingly tight grouping, especially considering how startled he was. Two of my shots went wide, but the single shot that did connect blew the man's orgninic arm clean off. Blood splattered against the floor, shelving, and even the low ceiling while the man dropped to the ground, already stone-cold dead.

"Puta madre ay güey! What the hell are you shooting out of that thing?" Jackie yelled before noticing the commotion our gunfire had generated upstairs. "Go around that way, take cover behind the crate so we don't get sidelined!"

Jackie pointed down and around the car he was hiding behind, and since his request made sense, I rushed around and managed to just make it into cover before a burst of bullets sparked off the floor behind me, chipping the concrete.

Shouting in Russian echoed from the stairs, and I peered around the corner, spotting three people of various fits and levels of augmentation making their way down the stairs. I pulled the trigger on my rifle twice, sending two bursts of AA tipped steel their way. Every single shot went wide, slamming into the stairs, wall, and door behind them, throwing up shrapnel but ultimately not harming anyone. I cursed, pulling back as all three of them focused on me, firing a barrage of automatic weapons fire that peppered the cargo container I was hiding behind. A few even slammed into my armor, denting several plates and rattling my left shoulder. Much of the impact was bled off from the artificial muscle layer, but at least one of them felt like getting slapped with a bat.

I cursed, rolling my shoulder despite the already spreading soreness, before hearing Jackie return fire, using the distraction I had made to take out one of the people firing at me. Cursing myself for not practicing with my mag rifle, I stepped out of cover the second there was a lull in the incoming bullets. I raised my rifle as the two remaining scavs looked at me in shock, seemingly just realizing what they were shooting at before they opened up.

My first burst slammed into the highest scav, obliterating the woman's gun and removing her left hand before putting her out of her misery by blowing a fist-sized chunk where her heart was supposed to be. I kept pulling the trigger, blowing chunks out of the stairs until I finally managed to control my aim to stitch three shots across a man with two replaced arms and glowing blue eyes. He collapsed into a bloody mess, like a broken puppet with its strings cut.

"You good?" I called out to Jackie as I pressed the mag release on the side of my rifle. The mostly empty mag dropped to the floor before I slid a new one into place.

"Yeah, I'm good," Jackie shouted back, making his way to the stairs between the shelving and the parking bays. "You got a fucking cannon, choom. Now I wanna know what your other toys do."

"Me too. I think I might have been underestimating them," I admitted.

In truth, I was relatively certain the extra power was a combination of me comparing the weapon's effectiveness against more armored targets and that I had made the mag weapons out of parts that were actually better than what XCOM had on hand. The mag coils, capacitors, and several other bits rated far above what XCOM used. I had restricted a lot of those parts and done quite a bit of extra math and programming to make sure it all still worked.

Looking at what the rifle was now doing, I might have miscalculated. Still, I couldn't have been too far off, as it had counted as close enough to the original design to confirm its creation for the tech tree. I was still learning how finicky that process really was, but it still seemed like a decent confirmation that this rifle wasn't that different from the original. I-

"Eh, focus up, Alloy, we got more to deal with," Jackie called out, waving me closer. "There are probably more upstairs, I will-"

"No, you're not wearing any armor, I'm going first," I said easily, surprising myself as much as I surprised Jackie. When he gave me a look, I just shrugged. "Next time, wear armor if you want to be the heavy."

"Fine, whatever, you can go first," He said, gesturing up the stairs. "Make it fast, though!"

I nodded, and after checking my gun one final time, I charged up the stairs. I shift my body as I move and slam my shoulder into the frame, crumpling the door around the lock area as it struggled to hold me back before finally bursting open, all in a split second. Part of me wanted to leap into the room in a combat role, but luckily, I had enough sense not to embarrass myself. I didn't even know how to do a combat roll normally, never mind while actively enhanced.

I was starting to realize I may have really jumped the gun on this.

As I burst into the room, I also realized I wasn't the only one going for the door. My impact had knocked someone back, a leather jacket-clad man with a submachine gun held in one hand, the weapon off target from the impact. Rather than try and shoot him, I just kept running, shoulder lowered, until I slammed into him as well. I crashed into him with enough force to drive him back, partially lift him up, and slam him into a concrete wall. I could feel his chest give in, sounding like bending metal rather than cracking bone, which told me he had some sort of bone replacement.

Despite the impact, he was still moving, raising his weapon just enough to aim it at my legs, pulling the trigger, and dumping his mag into my thigh and waist. None of the bullets made it through, but it still felt like dozens of light punches to my leg.

With a curse, I slammed my fist into his mechanical shoulder, the one holding the gun, feeling the cyberware there buckle under the blow. I hammered it again and again until it was a sparking mangled mess, the limb hung limply. Finally, I stepped back, brought my rifle back up, and wasted a three-round burst to finish him off.

Needed to add a knife to my list of things to make.

By now, Jackie was at the door, taking cover against the frame. I turned around slightly to look for cover as well, only to feel something slam into my side hard enough to spin me around. I could feel a deep dent in my armor on my right side, deep enough that it was already restricting my movement. Jackie popped out of cover and fired his pistol, giving me time to recover and take cover. As I moved, I saw a scav wielding a double-barrel shotgun drop his weapon and slump to the ground. He must have been shooting slugs, judging from how much damage it did.

"You good?" Jackie asked as we stepped further into the first room on the second floor.

"Yeah, armor stopped it…" I said, reaching down to check the large dent before adding. "Barely."

Jackie didn't have time to comment because a pair of scavs burst out of a nearby door, screaming in Russian, immediately opening fire. I saw Jackie take a pair of shots to the chest before I raised my rifle and opened fire. The first three rounds ruined a woman with some sort of projection implant on her face, punching through her chest, stomach, and neck. The second burst missed the second person completely, letting him fire his pistol at me over and over. Finally, I managed to pull my shots tight enough to punch two rounds through his shoulder and chest.

Through all of that, I was shot several times, all of them leaving only streaks of lead and copper on my armor. It seemed my armor was more than enough to handle smaller rounds.

With the current threats terminated, I turned to check on Jackie, only to find him already standing, rubbing his chest. I could see holes in his jacket and shirt, as well as the armor underneath.

"Maldita Perra!… Looks like your armor works, amigo," He said with a pained grunt, shaking it off and reloading his pistol. "The plate took it easy, but the scales sting like hell!"

"Would hurt a lot less if you were wearing some armor," I pointed out in a sing-song voice, getting a slightly annoyed look in return. "I can't force you, but I can definitely pester you about it."

He chuckled and shook his head before motioning to go around a set of chests and boxes in the center of the room. Now that we weren't being shot at, I could better appreciate our surroundings. The room was simple enough, with a couch along one wall, a desk and computer nearby, with containers, shelves, and other stuff around the room. So far, save the occasional dry bloodstain, it looked pretty ordinary.

We crossed the room on opposite sides, eventually converging on the last door in the room. I couldn't be sure, but judging from how big the building had looked from the outside and how the garage had looked, there was only really enough space for a medium-sized room on the other side. As we approached it, I caught Jack's eye, who gestured for me to go ahead.

"By all means, compadre, do you thing," He said.

I nodded and lined up with the door, spartan kicking it just next to the lock. The door, which wasn't the most impressive-looking fixture, caved in immediately, slamming open with a surprising amount of force. The sound of some random song, with way too much bass and set way too loud, filled the room, getting even loaded as I moved forward. I stepped into the new room to find a scav cowering in the corner, trembling with Unity in his hand. His apron was covered in blood, and only a few feet away was a DIY operating table, complete with a "patient." Between the amount of blood collecting on the table and the pale blue tinge to a lot of "patients" skin, it was obvious that they were dead.

As I stepped into the room, the last scav fired at me, their Unity going off as quickly as they could pull the trigger. More than half the shots didn't even get close to me, hitting the concrete walls, cabinets, and crates stacked around me. The few bullets that did impact my armor barely did anything but cosmetically mark it.

When the scavs gun clicked empty, I took aim with my rifle, flipped it to semi-auto, and damn near blew their head off.

After a moment, I looked around and used another shot to scatter chunks of the radio all over the right side of the room.

"You good?" Jackie asked, coming in from behind, noticing that I had obliterated the radio. "Not a fan of music, Alloy?"

"Just couldn't hear if we were alone," I responded, stepping further into the room, checking around the corners and behind a few crates. "I think we are clear."

"Yeah, I think so too...." Jackie said, watching me closely. "You feel okay? You said this was your first gunfight…"

I took a moment to collect myself, taking a deep breath and letting it out. My adrenaline, which had been pounding in my ears, was slowly fading into the background, leaving me feeling drained and uncomfortable. I looked over at the corner of the room, where the scav lay dead, blood and brains splattered against the wall. I felt… fine. And even more, the fact that I felt nothing didn't phase me either. These lunatic's murdered and killed people, and I wasn't going to waste perfectly good guilt and emotional trauma on them.

Especially considering it was likely that I would have better reasons to feel guilt or be traumatized eventually.

"Yeah, I'm good," I responded. "Like you said, these guys are scum. Killing them is practically a public service."

"Aye, it is. Good to see you can hack it."

"So, what happens next? We fill up the van or…"

"No, I got some cleaners coming, just gotta give them a call," He explained, his eyes already glowing. "They come in, strip a place of anything useful, and give you a cut of the profits. Even help you take out any chrome you might want from people you kill."

"I… I really shouldn't be surprised something like that exists in Night City," I said, shaking my head. "What's the cost?"

"Five thousand eddies or twenty percent, whichever is higher," He explained.

"... I don't know enough to know if that's fair or not," I said after a pause, Jackie snorting at my admission.

"It's steep, but it's to keep punk gonks from calling them in for dumb shit," He explained, waving away my concern. "But for things like this… it's worth it. As long as you're not working for a fixer. T hey tend to dislike people messing with their work."

I nodded, and after another run-through of the second floor, we made our way back down to the first, then outside. Jackie stayed out front, just inside the first door, to wait for the cleanup crew while I did a quick sweep around the building. I saw some signs of a homeless camp and a dumpster that smelled a bit too much like rotting meat for it to be anything other than where the scans threw their "waste." Other than that, there wasn't anything worth noting. When I was done, I quickly joined Jackie back at the front.

"We should claim one of the vehicles," I said once we settled in to wait. "Whichever is in better condition."

"Would be useful," The usually bigger man agreed with a nod. "But I don't have anywhere to store it without coughing up a chunk of eddies."

"I can keep it at the H2 parking garage," I explained. "Only five hundred eddies a month."

"Good deal, I'm running out of favors for cars and rides."

I chuckled, though I kept my eye on the road that marked the front entrance. The likelihood that the scavs had anyone coming to avenge them was small, but it could still happen. Much more likely was someone coming to claim their loot, but even that was unlikely, according to Jackie.

After about twenty minutes of waiting, the cleanup crew arrived. It was a team of five people, all hopping out of two vans and a truck. They seemed calm and collected, armed and relatively professional, until they spotted me. Immediately, three of them reached for their weapons, only for Jackie to step into view and hold his hands out. He spoke in rapid-fire Spanish, and after a minute of back and forth, they slowly pulled their hands away from their weapons.

As they moved into the building, they still looked at me warily until they were inside.

"What did you say?" I asked once they were all inside, and we were out front, still keeping watch.

"What? Oh, right, no translator. I said you were a friend of mine, and we were working together," He explained. "I told you borgs make people nervous."

"And you said I was a borg?"

"Yeah. It's a good cover, right?"

"It's good for now. Thanks."

We stood guard for two hours, occasionally walking around to check the perimeter before the cleaners were finally done. They ended up moving their vehicles around to the back and using the garage doors to load up everything worthwhile. There were a few crates of cyberwar, some tools, a few containers of equipment, weapons, and even some of the clothes the scans were wearing. I felt like that was a bit much, but again, I wasn't going to waste time feeling bad for a bunch of psycho-murdering bastards.

At some point, Jackie took a quick look at the two vehicles and ended up telling the cleaners that we would be keeping the truck, which apparently was a Thorton Mackinaw Larimore. They seemed disappointed because, apparently, it was by and far in better condition than the car. Thankfully, they had no choice but to agree since the agreement they gave said we get first dibs on anything we find.

When the cleaners were finally done, our cut was just over sixteen thousand eddies, which Jackie and I immediately split evenly. Watching my account roll up by over eight thousand eddies was the perfect way to end a night of getting shot at.

"Well… I won't say that was fun, but it could have been worse," I said once the cleaners had left. "Well worth the time spent as well."

"Not a bad bit of work, aye? You want to head the Coyote to celebrate?" Jackie asked.

"Nah, I need to get home. I have a lot to do over the next few days. That said… if you come up with anything new for us to do anytime soon... let me know."

"Sure thing, compadre," Jack said, seemingly genuine. "You did well for your first time. I'm looking forward to working with you more.

The truck, which was now linked to my keyfob, followed behind Jackie's borrowed van perfectly as we made our way back to Jackie's garage. The cleaners had done a decent job of wiping away any evidence of the vehicle's previous owners, both digitally and physically, so as far as anyone would be able to tell, the vehicle was mine. I would have preferred to drive it back myself, but I didn't want to take off my armor quite yet.

When we finally stopped back at Jackie's garage, I quickly took off my armor, layer by layer. Once it was off, I surveyed the damage. The worst, by far, was where I had tanked a slug from a shotgun. The divot in my plating was as wide as my thumb and was deep enough that it damaged the artificial muscles underneath. There were a dozen other dents from various other bullets, but only three of them that really needed immediate repair. The others were barely past cosmetic damage.

I quickly removed the panels that needed repair, as well as the entire side chest piece, since the damage was much deeper there. Thankfully, everything was designed to come apart for relatively simplified repairs. Once I was done, I stuffed everything into a duffel bag happily donated by Jackie.

"Alright, I'm heading out," I said, sticking my head into the side room of the garage where Jackie was sitting. "I'm probably gonna be dark for the next few days, probably longer. I have a few ideas bouncing around in my head, and I want to get them out before I start to lose them."

"Sure, no problem," He said, looking up from his phone to stand and walking me out.

I put my stuff down in the passenger seat leg space before climbing into the large truck and closing the door. Jackie leaned on the side of the truck, talking through the open window.

"Listen, Jackson. Your shits impressive, let me know if you need a runner or loan," He said seriously. "Your armor and tech weapon is nova, and those energy weapons sound crazy as hell. I'm all for helping you make stuff like that, just be careful who you show it off to. You'll get snapped up quicker than you can say corpo slave."

"Yeah, I know. Why do you think I've been so anxious about showing my face and sharing my stuff," I pointed out, the solo mercenary nodding.

"Fair enough. See you later, choom. Keep me in the loop if you're looking for anything."

I nodded before starting the truck and pulling away, immediately activating the truck's self-driving, leaning back in my seat with a smile. It was strange to me that most cars were capable of entirely self-driving, and yet people never really sat back in the driver's seat and napped or skipped the driver's seat at all. According to Jackie, it was because they were locked to the speed limit and usually drove far below it, but that just sounded stupid to me. Why would I care if my ride was going ten miles under the limit if I could sit in the back seat and read or watch a movie?

As my new vehicle took a leisurely pace back to the megabuilding complex, I couldn't help but yawn. It was late, and I was tired. The night's action left me worryingly tired. Luckily, I didn't foresee any issues falling asleep with how tired I was, which was great. I only had four full days left with the XCOM tech tree, which meant I had a lot of work to get done and not a lot of time to do it.

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

Hey everyone, just a reminder that I have a Patreon! Being a supporter has a lot of benefits, like early chapters and access to my original content. You could get up to four chapters early from this story and eight more for each of my other two. Board Members even get to vote on story beats, interludes, names, and more!

If you are interested in those benefits or just want to support my attempt to become a full-time writer, stop by and show your support. Every dollar helps!

---

I parked my new truck in the large parking structure attached to the Megabuilding and paid the first month's fee in full, despite the fact that it was more than halfway through the month, before making my way back up to my room. I went through my evening routine of refilling the Elerium generator and the AA smelter before setting an alarm and collapsing into bed.

It felt like I had just closed my eyes when I was awoken by my alarm. I bolted upright and slapped the alarm interface, turning it off. A quick shower and a nasty burrito later, I was sitting at my workroom table, slowly spinning in my chair with my eyes closed, trying to figure out how I would spend my last four days with my current tech tree. I had intended to spend a chunk of the time finishing off the weapons branch so I would have access to everything, but as I had discovered, they were already pretty clear. Between completing plasma weaponry and having a solid understanding of every level of XCOM weaponry, I could pretty much design all of the other weapons in my head without using the blueprint.

Sure, it wouldn't be exactly the same, but at this point that hardly mattered. What did matter was the fact that I could check them off my list of things to do, leaving me completely open to other things.

The first on my new list was the fusion blade. It would be a relatively easy build and surprisingly cheap when it came to Elerium and AA. I wasn't at all satisfied with how it looked or functioned since it was only a one-sided blade that didn't even have a pointed tip, but that would be a problem for later. I would build the original blade and deal with using it until I had the systems in place to make customizing it a short and easy project.

Beyond that, I also wanted to build two of the many explosives on the tree, the plasma grenade and the frost bomb. As far as I knew, neither of them had any equivalent in Cyberpunk, and both were pretty powerful tools in my arsenal. They would also easily be converted to grenades I could launch out the magnetic grenade launcher, which would be even easier to make without a blueprint than the mag sniper rifle. Both of the explosives would take special materials, especially the frost bomb, so they would have to wait for my next delivery to arrive.

The skulljack, a tool to hack into a brain chip, almost made it to the list as well, but I quickly realized it was way too specific to be useful. There were hundreds of different types of neural links alone, and each one would require a slightly different tool. Not to mention, if I wanted to hack into someone's brain, I could just use the access point on their neck. Or tear the link out of their skull if I was really desperate.

So far, I had a list of three things, only one of which I could do today. The fusion sword would hopefully only take me half a day, and the grenades even less. I also wanted to take a crack at the bluescreen rounds, which were EMP bullets. Unfortunately, those two would take some specialized parts and materials, even if I was only going to build them for my mag rifles.

Realizing that I was running out of things from the game that were worth making and that I could feasibly make in four days, I started pushing around the edges of the tech tree, trying to uncover anything that I missed. Then I remembered the Gremlins.

I focused for a moment and brought up what I had on the small flying drone. As far as I could tell, it was a pretty simple device. It was built on a steel frame, mounted with cameras, gyroscopes, a decently powered computer that allowed it to brute force hack some simple alien systems, and a straightforward payload system that could do a couple of different simple tasks. I was also pretty sure I could skip over at least the first iteration, which was basically just an all-around minor upgrade.

Initially, I had ignored the Gremlin because the simple drone didn't solve any of my current problems. I knew in the game they could be used to replace engineers in some of the rooms, but according to everything I was picking up from the basic information I had access to now, that was just gamified crap. They didn't seem nearly as precise or advanced enough to perform any sort of complicated function beyond what they were already made to do. At least not without constant input from a human controller. Which was unfortunate because a few extra drone workers was exactly what I needed to step up production.

Now, on second thought, I realized that the gremlins might be worth the time to build. Not because of what they could do but because of their flight system. They were surprisingly nimble, ridiculously fast, and functioned off completely human tech. Or at least completely understood technology, rather than the half-and-half combination the majority of XCOM tech seemed to have.

Even if the lift system was utterly impossible to upscale in size, it would still be incredibly useful. The idea of a fuelless thruster system was still science fiction in Cyberpunk, and having such a nimble, robust, and simple system in my pocket could be incredibly useful.

My first project selected, I turned back to the computer, quickly opening up the several shopping services that I had been using so far. I had a long list of special chemicals, materials, and parts that I would need for my last few projects, so I wanted to get most of the shopping done as early as possible.

When my shopping was complete and scheduled to arrive over the span of the following day, I got to work on the CAD program, starting to build out the specific parts I would need. I planned on skipping the first level of Gremlin and going straight to the Mark II model since the only difference seemed to be better energy generation in the form of four Elerium nodes and a better computer system and hacking assistant.

I would have tried the mark III, but it seemed to depend on understanding alien systems that I hadn't fully absorbed yet. Fortunately, with some AA paneling and a few more upgrades, which were easy to source in this world, I could make a significantly improved version once I finished Mark II. It probably wouldn't count as the Mark III, and definitely wouldn't be done anytime soon, but I knew it was possible.

It took three hours to finish designing all of the pieces and getting the frame and casing all set. Both my 3D printer and the fabricator were working on parts while I started preparing everything. Funnily enough, the four paddles that were responsible for the Gremlin's ability to float did not actually require any new parts, though I did have to modify some of the electromagnets and a few of the extra X-ray emitters, which I did while watching the parts print out.

The general principle of the Gremlin's lift system was ionizing air. The system used an advanced charging method to ionize the air around each of the four lift paddles, giving it a strong negative charge. The system would then flip, using a strong electromagnetic field to push against the negatively charged air. It would then flip again and repeat the process. This would happen hundreds of times in a second, each flip causing a minor amount of force, which would accumulate into enough thrust to hold up the Gremlin. The constant flipping back and forth was the source of the small drones' easily recognizable sound, the air getting yanked back and forth many times in a second. Even better, the system naturally evens out the ionization with each pulse, meaning it could be used indoors without having to worry about filling a room with ozone.

When all four paddles were finished, most of the metal fabrication was also complete, so I started working on other projects, getting as much done as possible so I could focus on putting everything together as my materials arrived. I spent the rest of the day designing the parts for my fusion blade and getting the fabricator running on it. While that was going on, I started working on the Gremlin's programming.

The next morning, I woke up to my front door ringing and the first wave of materials being delivered. The first batch, the parts for the Gremlin, all arrived between seven and eight-thirty in the morning, and the small drone was assembled by eleven AM. There were some small bits of modifications to the parts that I had to make, but for the most part, everything was smaller and better than what I required. Thankfully, the Tinker of Fiction seemed happy to accept things built that were as good or better as the original as counting towards an item creation. I assumed this was because having to dumb down every aspect of my creations, just so they would count, would be a pain in the ass when my tech got more advanced.

Once I was done with the assembly, I quickly downloaded the programming I had completed the previous night and flicked it on. It took a second for the cute little robot to boot, but when it did, it floated off from the ground. It bobbed in the air, looking around the main room of my apartment, scanning a bit before focusing on me. What little knowledge was left from the process filled my head, and before I could regret it, I immediately grabbed the droid and deactivated it, going as far as to pull out its battery. I quickly unscrewed its shell and started pulling things out.

There was a lot to be paranoid about in this world, but one of my biggest fears was having my tech turn against me. When every gonk could pop down to the store and buy a fistful of premade hacking systems, and AIs stalked the web, any tech open to connection was at risk.

So I would have to make everything closed.

I finished disconnecting the radio system before moving on to the WIFI connection system, carefully removing the small antenna and leaving the small droid completely cut off from the outside world, save its cameras and microphones. I then added a more complicated voice and body language recognition system so it would have an easier time parsing verbal and hand signal commands.

If I couldn't guarantee that my software was strong enough to deal with even the best Netrunners, then I would make it impossible to wirelessly interact with my creations at all. Even if that did drastically reduce their effectiveness for now, it was better to take it slow and deal with the reduction than to open myself up for a massive infiltration. There was no way to hack through an air gap, after all. I still had a way to access its programming and a way for it to interface with a computer, but it was a physical connection only, and it was hidden behind a trick panel.

When everything was clean, partitioned, and reassembled, I flipped the drone over onto its "back," quickly attaching a pair of simple extending utility arms. I have no idea why the original version didn't have some, but mine certainly would.

When everything was ready, I activated the drone again. It booted up, and once more began to float. It ran another scan of me before letting out a curious boop and bobbing in the air, waiting for me to tell it what to do. Even though I knew it was one hundred percent not an AI, it was hard not to immediately personify the cute little thing.

The drone was something the XCOM universe called a Response Program, or RP for short. This was basically a program designed to respond to and answer questions and requests as fluidly, efficiently, and fully as possible, but wasn't intelligent, capable of learning or evolving without direct editing of its program. Early versions of Siri and Alexa would have been considered RPs, but AI image generators would not be since they could learn from image scraping without much input from their creators.

"Hey buddy… let's see, the first version of your model ever created was called Rover," I explained, despite knowing it meant very little. "Let's keep with tradition and go with Spot for your designation. Understand?"

The drone beeped and bobbed in confirmation, shifting and gliding around me with its signature sound. I could just barely detect a hint of ozone as it flew by, but only for a second before it vanished.

"Spot, do me a favor and pick up the trash around the apartment and put it in the trash barrel over there," I said, pointing to the can of trash in the corner.

Another beep and the drone started flying around the apartment, picking up empty bags, wrappers, and other bits of trash, all with its new little gripping pinchers. When it caught something new, it would float over to the trash barrel and drop it in before zipping away to repeat the process.

I watched for a minute, unable to stop myself from smiling. Even with how simple the drone was, it would be able to help in plenty of ways. Already, I could think of a few ways to automate something like the AA smelter or the Elerium generator. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to dabble.

The next project I tackled was the fusion sword. Most of its pieces were already printed, meaning that all I had to do was modify a few parts and assemble it. In all honesty, the weapon was even more disappointing than I would have thought. Whenever you gripped the handle, it automatically turned on, projecting a thin layer of Elerium plasma along the AA blade. There was no on or off switch, it just turned on whenever you gripped it. Not only that, but while the blade was hilariously effective at cutting, it was held in place by a thick, blunt, chunky support brace, which no doubt made cutting through things much harder. I had to assume that the XCOM engineering staff had simply made the blade and then said, "Eh, good enough," because I had only been holding it for a few seconds, and I could already see half a dozen ways to improve the design.

It took a dedicated moment of actual willpower to put the sword down and focus on other things. Thankfully, by the time it was done, the day was more or less over, leaving just enough time for me to set up the fabricator one last time and start up a batch of Elerium and AA. When that was done, I crawled into bed, told Spot to power down, and to wake me up early the next morning.

The following morning was mostly just assembly. Cyberpunk had several methods of generating EMP blasts, one of which matched pretty well with the primary method of EMP generation in XCOM. That meant that creating the bluescreen rounds was as easy as reinforcing an already existing part and adapting it to survive the initial impact. Once I did that, I simply sheathed it in a steel shell and added a charge monitor display on the side. I was definitely not going to do that for future rounds since it was a huge waste of parts. Still, the knowledge of bullets, especially the knowledge of what I could put into the simple steel rounds for my mag rifle, was well worth the hour and a half it took to make.

The plasma and frost grenades were even easier. A metal shell, a trigger mechanism, and a timer were more than half the parts. All I needed for the frost bomb was a short list of liquid chemicals stored in two separate vessels and mixed with a tiny detonation of C-6 explosives.

The Plasma grenade was, surprisingly, even more straightforward. Just a tiny chip of Elerium and an X-ray emitter built into an electromagnetic containment vessel. Throw the grenade, and the emitter starts charging the Elerium, which puts off its plasma-like energy. The electromagnetic field holds it back for a moment before it drops, and Kaboom, plasma explosion.

I made sure to carefully put both of the explosive devices in a small box. Technically both of them were completely safe as long I didn't intentionally fuck with them, but it was the principle. You had to respect the dangerous things you make, or someday they might go off in your face.

At this point, it was about two in the afternoon, and I had already finished my latest list of things I wanted to finish before I lost this tech tree, potentially forever.

Once again sitting in my workshop chair, spinning around with my eyes closed, I explored the vast expanse of my current tech tree. There was a whole chunk of it that I hadn't explored, but all of it was going back in time for that reality, the tech devolving to pre-2000s level almost immediately, which was obviously useless given my current setting. So, once again, I focused on the main chunk of the tree, the one specific to the XCOM project.

There were several things that I wanted to build, but I knew I couldn't, even beyond the Psi Labs. Ghost armor, which was a sort of stealth field, was one, as was its quasi-replacement, Wraith armor, which let the wearer walk through walls. Both of them would have been amazing since I probably could have added at least one to my armor and only activated it when I knew it was safe or in extreme emergencies. Unfortunately, I couldn't make heads or tales out of either of them.

I was beginning to think that higher "leveled" tech wasn't just obscured by my knowledge but by a much more fiat-backed aspect, something that was forcing me to figure out lower-level things before moving on. At this point, I knew plenty about the XCOM universe tech, but I could hardly make heads or tails of even the simple portions of their blueprints.

Either way, I could tell that there was no way I would be cracking either of them in the time I had left, mostly because I didn't even know what I would need to build first in order to start understanding how they worked. From what I could see, I suspected that they lay somewhere on the same path as psionics, strangely enough, but that was all I could tell.

In my exploration of the tech tree, I also managed to parse out the two sub-branches of body modifications that XCOM had access to. I also discovered the reason why I had never mentally spotted it before. Frequently, items all along the branches would refer back and forward along the tree, recalling something like AA metallurgy or production methods or connecting to where a specific advancement would lead. This helped me push around and single out new things to build. The cybernetics and genetic modification sub-branches, however, were completely disconnected, essentially free-floating by themselves. They were also apparently impossible for me to make since both sub-branches relied heavily on the alien tech referred to as Meld, which the tree did not provide a black-boxed production method.

It would have been much more annoying if the reason hadn't just popped into my head when I was taking my cursory look at the first genetic mod. Meld was a collection of cybernetic nanomachines, suspended in a neutral goo, created by the aliens to speed up and simplify their attempts to modify the alien races under their control. It also contained no exotic materials. No Alien Alloy, no Elerium, no special alien materials at all. This meant that if XCOM hadn't been so pressed for time, they could have studied and eventually, potentially, replicated the substance. That meant I could replicate it, which firmly removed it from the list of materials I could create with black-boxed tinker shenanigans. But since XCOM didn't have the faintest idea of how to replicate it, neither did I.

I barely even knew what it looked like!

While this was disappointing, I was glad it happened now with this tech tree. While I remembered a few of the genetic enhancements being pretty interesting, the game had always presented the Meld options as firmly being "but at what cost?" sort of options. The cybernetics were even more brutal than all but the worst cyberware here, and the genetic mods always came off as changing the individual, making them… off.

On top of that, knowing there could be floating sub-branches to my tech tree was absolutely invaluable information. Had I been in more of a rush, I could see myself missing this for multiple tech tree rolls, missing out on who knows how many useful bits of tech.

After spending a while making sure there weren't any other missing branches and making sure there weren't any interesting bits of tech that I could make, I finally decided that I was done with the XCOM tech tree. There was nothing else I needed, and everything I wanted was either too big for me to reasonably put together or too complicated for me to understand. That, or it was being purposely obscured, though I suspected that was the same thing in my case. It had been a decent place to start, but now, with most of the interesting bits made or at least understood, it was time for me to prepare for my next tech tree. I had no idea what it would be, but it couldn't hurt to cover my bases.

I spent the next day and a half preparing. I spent a big chunk of change and half a day on a used circuit board printer. It was an impressive-looking machine that could take circuit board blanks and rapidly lay down circuits before attaching chips, diodes, resistors, or any number of parts onto the board before soldering and finishing it all off. It did so with an absolute flurry of miniature arms and whirring servos. It used a program similar to CAD but significantly more complicated. That said, once I got the hang of it, I would be able to create much more compact and customized systems, something that I had a feeling would become necessary for certain tech trees.

Spot and I spent two hours combing over the program's programming, as well as the CB printer, looking for backdoors and watching programs. While there weren't any active feeds, we did find several back doors that would have made it child's play for Arasaka, the company that made the printer, to tap into its records should they want to. We obviously removed them, but since they were only being attached to my own air-gapped network, it was just a precaution.

Several deliveries, including a basic chemistry kit, were also purchased and delivered. Once again, I was happily surprised by how easy it was to purchase random and potentially dangerous things. As long as money could be made, people were happy to sell me whatever I wanted, even set up express deliveries. Most of my last day with the XCOM tech tree was spent setting up a relatively advanced vacuum hood from that world, hooking it directly up to my air venting, and using several filters to keep really dangerous fumes from escaping. The hood was only about two feet wide, but it would make dealing with any chemicals much safer.

The chunk of information I got about filtration systems and using air pressure to control the flow of gasses wasn't bad either.

By the end of my shopping spree, I had spent everything I earned clearing out the scav den, plus a significant chunk of my remaining funds from selling the three sets of AA underarmor. I was starting to run low again, but hopefully, I would be well-stocked and prepared for whatever my new tech tree was.

When I was done working on my new workshop additions and received all my deliveries, it was about seven PM. Rather than repeat the rather dramatic experience of my tech tree switching happening while I was asleep, as I had seven days ago, I told Spot to wake me up at eleven-fifty PM, before heading to bed. This way, I would get at least some sleep, so when my excitement made it impossible to go back to sleep once I switched, I could start working immediately.

Assuming my next tech tree had anything I could build immediately.

I woke up to Spot nudging me awake, the little drone flying away as I started to sit up and stretch. Unsurprisingly, it was dark outside, or at least what counted for darkness in Night City. With the shifting imminent, I could feel the nervous energy flowing through every inch of me. I tried to sit down on the couch, only to jump up a few seconds later to pace around the room.

The next ten minutes were the longest ten minutes I had yet experienced in my life. I managed to burn a few of them, starting some AA and Elerium going, mostly out of habit, but other than that, I couldn't do anything other than pace around and worry about how I had done with the XCOM branch. I felt it had been a good start, providing me with some decent bits of tech and knowledge, but I couldn't help but question my choices. Should I have focused on psionics? Should I have tried to create a full AI? Maybe tried to make some spark units?

I shook my head and did my best to drive those thoughts out of my head. If I held on to every little bit of regret and spent my time worrying about what I could have done better, I would always be miserable. I looked around my room, seeing some of the weapons I had made, then over to Spot, who was hovering a few feet away. I had made some solid progress, made some really cool stuff, and learned a whole lot. It might not have been perfect, but that was okay.

Finally, after what felt like forever, it was eleven-fifty-nine. I sat down on my couch, closed my eyes, and leaned back, waiting to feel the transition.

Just as before, as midnight approached, I could feel the specialty pulling away. This time, however, I could feel that nothing I could do would stop it. It grew more and more distant until, eventually, the connection snapped completely. On instinct, my mind ran through what I had learned, and, sure enough, the knowledge I had earned stuck with me, but I couldn't feel anything else through the connection to the XCOM tech tree.

With the old connection gone, I took a deep breath and waited for the new one to settle in.

A minute passed…

Then another…

Five minutes passed, and I was quickly falling into a full-blown panic. I anxiously searched my mind, finally stumbling on something. There was a connection, but it was so small I hadn't even noticed.

Rather than any new tech, all I could feel was a mental timer, one slowly counting down. Six days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-four minutes.

A full week. That was how long I had to wait for my new tech tree.

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

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---

It took me about an hour to finally calm down after realizing what was happening.

A solid hour of pacing around my apartment, wondering what I was going to do, chewing my fingernails down, and lamenting and berating the entity that had abandoned me to my new, cruel fate.

Eventually, my own capacity for dramatics outran my mental stamina, and I dropped down onto my couch. I stared up at the ceiling, mind wandering on all the threats that could possibly catch me now. As my panicked spiral slowed to more of a slow, worried rotation, I finally started thinking logically. The threats, the things that I had to worry about, hadn't changed. They didn't suddenly erupt into flurried advancements, and they certainly weren't about to catch up to me, even with my slower speed.

A week between tech branches was, on the whole, not actually that much time. All a week meant was that my meteoric rise to high-tech god was going to be slightly less meteoric.

In fact, after a few minutes of actually thinking it through, while part of me was still annoyed I would have to wait, a break between tech trees was probably a significant benefit. I had been working myself pretty hard for the last two weeks, and while I had really enjoyed the entire process, I knew that kind of pace was not good for me.

With no gap in between and constantly refreshing tech trees, I would have struggled just to keep up with each change. Each new tree would have been a scramble to make the most important and interesting things from each branch before I lost the specialty and had to move on to the next one. It would eventually slow down when my production methods increased, and I could make stuff as fast as I could design it, but until then, it would have been a mad dash.

For each week.

Nonstop.

Even worse, jumping from tech tree to tech tree would have meant I had very little time to work on developing my own creations. Part of what made ToF powerful was the ability to solve limitations in one tech tree by bridging it together with another. With near-constant work, I would have barely had time to do that.

I let out a long breath, letting the last vestiges of worry and panic leave my body. This was not a setback, it was a blessing disguised by a minor annoyance. It made me think that the entities had done it on purpose or at least leaned into something that was already necessary, perhaps some time for the connection to settle or my brain to get used to the next new link.

I stood from the couch and made my way to my apartment window. I opened the shades with the press of a button and looked outside at the city and the river beyond that. I watched as cars drove past on the overpass, crossing across the river. My panic only lasted about an hour, making it just over one AM.

I let out another sigh, pushing off of the window sill and walking around my apartment, heading for my workshop. There was no way I was getting any sleep now, even if I didn't have to deal with the excitement of a new tech tree. I was way too awake at this point.

I sat down at my computer and flicked it on, spinning once in my chair. I pulled up my plans for the mag rifle and copied them, staring at the blueprints as I leaned back in my chair. The mag rifle was the base form of the heavier magnetic weapons, so it made sense that I should start the design for the mag sniper from it.

By this point, I had a nearly perfect understanding of how every inch of the mag weapons worked, so once I renamed the new copy as Mag Sniper Rifle, I confidently got to work. The first step was changing the chambering system because I wanted this weapon to shoot a considerably larger projectile. I had some ideas about altering the design of the bullet to maintain accuracy for a longer range, some of which came from knowledge gained from working on the bluescreen rounds. Also, no more AA bullets. It was a waist, overkill and I already regretted leaving AA lying around at the scav den like that, even if it was only a tiny bit at the tip of each bullet.

It took me about four hours, the sun just starting to shine on Night City, before the design for my mag sniper was finished. In the end, I redesigned almost every aspect of the rifle. I switched the old power source, which was a mag weapon-specific Elerium charging system, for three Elerium nodes wired to work in tandem to keep the weapon capacitors charged. I extended the mag coils along a much longer stretch of the weapon, which gave it a slight front-heavy look, but I compensated for it by keeping the coils lighter to even out the weight distribution. Most of the control electronics were now stored in the butt of the rifle to keep it more streamlined as a whole. It would also have actual plating, a mix of aluminum and polymer, to keep the weight down even more.

Unfortunately, as I finished the main design, I realized that I had no idea how to make a scope. Reluctantly, I left an empty space along the top of the gun, where I could attach any sort of hook-up method I could want, depending on what kind of scope I could get my hands on. It irked me that I had no idea how to build a scope, especially knowing that XCOM had a robust weapons upgrade system that I had ignored because none of them represented anything particularly exceptional.

Still, even without a scope, the rifle looked impressive. I liked the changes I had made, and with the mix of XCOM and Cyberpunk tech, I was also pretty sure it was more powerful than the base XCOM mag sniper, though I had no idea by how much. It did, however, make me really want to redesign the pistol and rifle. After a bit of thought, I decided that I would spend some time working on them at some point.

Once the fabricator started working on some of the basic repeatable parts for my mag sniper, I stood from my chair and stretched. My first instinct was to go out and get some breakfast and a coffee, but any excitement I had about the prospect of an early morning treat died when I remembered just how shit the food was here.

As my back cracked back into place, the tension that had accumulated fading quickly, I left my workshop to grab my keyfob, using it to send a message to Jackie. With my week cleared out, I had an opportunity to focus on making some money to replenish what I had spent getting ready. I told my new friend that I wasn't as busy as I had thought I would be and that if he found any business or anyone who wanted some armor, I would be free for the next week.

I returned to my workshop, working for a few hours as I waited. I was about halfway through preparing the internals for the new mag sniper when Jackie called me back.

"Hey choom, glad to hear you aren't gonna keep yourself cooped up," He said before audibly hesitating. "Listen… some of the cleaners we hired, they might have let slip I was working with a borg. I kept up the charade, but… a friend of the family, a fixer by the name of Padre, asked about it. I told him my new friend didn't feel comfortable being out and about quite yet. He connected the dots about my new armor, my new tech friend, and my new borg friend and asked if he could talk to you. I don't think he would assume you're the same person… But he ain't stupid Jay."

And just like that, my one step in an unknown direction led to another. I knew that starting to work with Jackie on actual jobs, even just scav hunting, would mean my time of hanging out in the back, tinkering away, would be over eventually. I had hoped to have a bit more than two weeks, but at least the situation was under some sort of control, not a burning spiral into chaos.

For a long moment, I tried my best to remember everything I could about Padre, the priest fixer. I remember him seeming to be an alright guy, as long as you didn't fuck up royally or do anything he considered to be against God. Kind of sanctimonious, if I remember correctly. His calls to V always made it seem to me like he was hiding behind the bible to avoid feeling guilty, but all things considered, that wasn't that big of a deal.

"It's alright Jackie, I expected people to come looking eventually. At least he is asking," I pointed out. "Do you think he could keep it to himself?"

"Yeah… Honestly, choom, I think talking to him could help. He has a lot of connections and he is a good man, as good as a fixer can be in this paraíso," He explained. "You said you needed equipment, and he expressed interest in the armor you sold me. I could show him some footage…"

He trailed off, letting me finish the sentence in my head as I considered it. Getting access to steady work, plus a place to anonymously sell my goods… or at least get in good with someone with an ear to the ground and a finger on the pulse, could come in handy. Doubly so since I was currently living smack dab in his territory. If I made myself valuable to him…

"Okay, Jackie, we can meet. Would he show up to the Coyote?" I asked.

"Yeah, he stops by occasionally. Like I said, he's a family friend. He helped Mama Welles buy the Coyote after my dad booked it."

"Alright. Well, let him know I'm interested in meeting him at his convenience since I'm guessing he is a busy man," I responded. "Just give me a few days to work on a few things to show off."

"Really, Jay? I was sure you'd be freaking out about this," Jackie admitted, sounding surprised.

"It's fine. In all honesty, there are advantages to having a fixer you're familiar with, especially when you're trying to sell stuff and pick up the occasional job. It's a risk… but what's not in Night City?"

"Aye, I understand. Alright, choom, I'll drop him a line, tell him you're willing to meet and talk, and that you might have a few things he might be interested in," He agreed, sounding happy. "Just… well, don't bring you A game, 'cause those flashy weapons of yours are mierda loca, but he won't be happy if you waste his time."

"I gotcha, Jackie."

"Alright, Choom, I'll let you know when to come by."

Jackie hangs up after that, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I had a few ideas of what I could make to show off, a couple of basic ideas that would make me an asset, but not enough that he wanted to lock me up for my own good. The AA underarmor was obviously on the list, as was…

I stood in the middle of my apartment, trying to come up with things I could sell and, unfortunately, drawing a blank. Like Jackie had said, my A game was off limits, which meant anything with plasma or lasers was really out, as was the hovering tech from Spot. The hover tech would revolutionize small-scale drones and, depending on how my eventual large-scale testing went, much more.

I dropped down into my seat, Spot flying around me before settling to float around the room. As I sat there, I reviewed everything I had made over the past two weeks, trying to think of anything interesting I could do that wasn't insane or didn't use Elerium or AA. The list was small, but eventually, I had two solid ideas on top of the AA armor. All that was left was to get to work designing and building them.

It was the next afternoon that Jackie reached out to me again, asking if I could be ready by that night. I agreed, with the caveat that one of the things I wanted to show him wasn't tested yet. He assured me it was fine.

That night, I arrived at the Coyote holding a duffel bag, having driven myself in my new truck. Jackie immediately spotted me and waved me over, slapping my shoulder as I sat down at the bar beside him.

"You're here early, Padre is still talking with Mama Welles," He explained, taking a sip from his beer. "So, what happened? You sounded pretty confident you would be busy over the next few days."

"I realized I was spending just a bit too much time in my workshop," I admitted, not entirely lying. I did know I was spending too much time building, I just didn't think I had a choice. "Can't say I won't disappear now and then, but I also need to get out more."

"Took you long enough, choom! I only told you a hundred times!" He said, thumping me in the side, making me shake my head. "You gotta relax, can't-"

There was a whistle from behind us, and Jackie stopped, looking up and behind us. I turned to see his mother waving us up to the second floor.

"C'mon Jay, time to introduce you to Padre."

I nodded and followed after the larger man, still carrying my duffel bag. Mama Welles met Jackie at the top of the stairs with a hug, surprising me with my own after releasing her son. After a short conversation with the older woman, Jackie led me to the corner booth on the second floor, where a man I recognized from the game was sitting, reading a book. As we started to approach, he closed it, revealing it to be a worn and weathered bible.

"Jackie, it's good to see you again, my child," He said, though he remained seated, reaching out to shake Jackie's hand. "Mama Welles tells me you are finally taking your safety seriously."

"Si Padre, mi amigo here sold me some armor," He explained, though something told me that the fixer already knew. "It's comfortable, and it actually works, unlike that corpo crap."

"Interesting. And this is your friend?" He asked, looking over at me. "Fully organic, a rarity in this world, especially in Night City."

"Jackson, sir," I said, reaching out to shake his hand, the older man's grip surprisingly firm for his age. "It's how I was raised. Left me with questionable feelings about cyberware."

"We are all products of our upbringing, but we must not let it tie us down," He responded before gesturing to the seat opposite of home. "Sit, please."

I slid into the seat first, putting my bag on the red faux leather seat beside me, shifting in enough that Jackie could join me. When we were both settled, Padre leaned back in his spot, studying us for a moment before focusing on me.

"Jackie insisted that you are a man who enjoys his privacy," He started, slowly sitting forward and putting his elbow on the table, bridging his hands in front of his face. "I respect that. A man's actions, done in privacy, are his own. But a new borg, suddenly active in my neighborhood, with someone I consider a friend, I cannot just ignore. This Alloy, what is his game? Where did he come from?"

"Father, as a fixer, you know how dangerous information can be," I responded, doing my best to sound respectful. "Every secret I tell is another tool someone could use against me. The more I reveal, the more dangerous my life becomes. I can say, with one hundred percent confidence, that Alloy is not a threat to you, Jackie. He is interested in making money, as am I."

The older man stared me down, eyes boring into my soul. It was odd, but I could feel his conviction, his experience, like a man who had seen it all and wasn't about to take shit from anyone, even the people he liked.

"Why? Why are you so desperate for money?" He asked, still staring me down. "Everyone chases eddies, but not many choose to go to the lengths that you or your borg friend have. So, what is driving you towards the hunt for money?"

Jackie was right. This man was not to be taken lightly. In all likeliness, he had already decided Alloy and I were the same person, and if he hadn't, it was only the idea that power armor as compact and streamlined as the Warden armor didn't exist.

"I… have a gift, sir. For making things. Jackie can confirm, some of the things I make…" I said, trailing off to speak much more quietly. "They would make a lot of corporations very interested. Enough to do things that I would very much not enjoy to get access to them."

The older man looked at Jackie wordlessly, who nodded to confirm my statement. He looked back to me, finally leaning back as if to pull back the pressure.

"God's gifts often come with a burden, a way to prove your mettle," He responded, his face tied in a frown. "And I do not blame you for wanting to stay the tender mercies of the corpo scum that claim this city. I will take your word that your friend will not cause any trouble. But it is your word on the line. Remember that."

I nodded, and for a moment, we sat at the table silently. The older fixer seemed content to collect his thoughts, shifting in his seat before looking out the nearby window. Eventually he focused back on me.

"Jackie mentioned you have things to show me."

"I do. As I said before, I need eddies for my work, and I'm happy to share some of the things I've created," I explained, reaching for my bag.

I could feel rather than see the bodyguard tense as I moved, but Padre waved them off. I unzipped the duffel and pulled out the two parts of my AA under armor. As I slid it to the fixer, Jackie pulled out a small shard, extending his hand to show Padre before passing it to his guard, who inserted it smoothly into his neck once his boss nodded.

"This armor is designed to be worn under your clothes and protect your vitals. It's as comfortable as I can make it and will stop anything short of a high-powered precision rifle," I explained. "The metal I used to make them is my own special alloy, which takes a while to make and then attach to the kevlar material."

"How much would this set sell for?" He asked, his eyes glowing as he reviewed the footage his guard was watching. "It seems to be impressive."

"At the moment, I am making each of them by hand, cutting into my time by a lot. I need four thousand for each of them to make them worth my time."

"Jackie was right. You do not know your own worth," Padre responded, putting down the armor and sliding it away. "I would not have batted an eye at double that price."

"I'm relatively unknown at this point," I pointed out, internally reeling at the idea of selling the armor for eight thousand. "I thought it best to keep my prices low to attract new customers."

"Not unwise," The fixer responded with a single nod. "What else do you have?"

I reached for my bag again, this time pulling two devices and laying them on the table. One was essentially an oversized, slightly restructured bluescreen round, while the other was a completely original design. It was a seven-inch long rod the width of a soda can, fused to the tip of a four-sided pyramid that added four more inches of length.

"This is the prototype for an EMP device, and before you ask, it's not currently armed," I said reassuringly. "Now, there are already several other options for EMP devices available, but, realistically, save the grenade, it's hard to get a hold of anything reliably. And while the grenades sort of work, they are certainly not precision devices."

I held up the device's payload, the upscaled bluescreen round, passing it to Padre when he held out his hand.

"This device, which I've been calling a TEMP for tactical EMP, delivers that payload through low-level armor with precision rather than a random throw," I explained. "Because the EMP blast happens inside your target, the damage is much more severe and can even work on partially shielded tech. It can be activated by hand, but it can also be linked to a detonation device and set off remotely."

"How close to being complete is this prototype?" Padre asked, handing me the payload.

"Very close. I just need to test them a few times to make sure there aren't any hidden surprises that I missed."

I was thankful that the TEMP was cheap, Elerium free, and could be made without AA. It fired using good old-fashioned explosives, and the only Alien Alloy it used was the tip of the EMP penetrator, which could be replaced by something like tungsten. It was designed to be disposable, which meant I wasn't going to be forking over thousands of eddies just to test them.

"And how much will the finished device cost?"

"I'm hoping to keep these under two thousand," I responded, getting a rather stoic nod in return. "They are one-use devices, so charging too much for them is counterintuitive."

He nodded again, and I took the technically unfinished device back, storing it inside my bag and pulling out my last creation. It was a simple, custom-built tablet with a small screen, the device no bigger than a smartphone from back home. Along the side were the same sort of interface plugs that many people had in their palms. I demonstrated the plug by pulling it out and uncoiling it to show it had nearly three feet of range before letting it slowly pull back inside the device.

"This is a G-Hacker," I said, handing Padre the small tablet. "It is capable of hacking low-level security and ICE. Anyone with enough tech know how to read the screen and press the buttons along the side can use it to bypass doors, shut down cameras, unlock and start cars, anything a low-level hacker could do. Just keep in mind that this is not a skeleton key. It won't punch through corpo ICE or get you through 'Saka security. Low-level stuff only. I recommend testing it yourself to get a better feel for its capabilities."

The G-Hacker was a joint effort between Spot and myself. We had worked together to program the interface before copying and pasting his hacking programs and slapping them into the tablet, with just enough of its extra programming to control and direct it. We had also purposely held back some of the inherent flexibility of the original program, restricting it down a few notches of effectiveness.

"And it does so without the user's input?" Padre asked, looking down at the device with something akin to shock. "How powerful is it?"

"It opened my front door and got me a free burrito for lunch," I said with a shrug. "But it's going to take some time to really understand its limits. It's designed to give gonks and solos an option when they don't know anything about hacking. Like I said, it's not gonna get you into Arasaka Tower, but it will keep your guys from being thwarted by a random door."

Padre fiddled with the tablet for a few minutes, exploring some of the menus. Technically, there wasn't much need for the menu, as the system should be able to recognize what the primary security issue was before asking for confirmation. However, people liked being able to tell things what to do, and I wasn't going to deny that to anyone.

"I want them," The older fixer finally said, putting the tablet down. "All three of them."

"Okay, great. How many of them?" I asked, though something about how he had phrased his words tugged at my brain. "I'm not really set up for mass-"

"No, you misunderstand me. You must have plans for these devices. I want them," He corrected, cutting me off. "I will give you seventy thousand eddies right now. I have a few shops that will take up building them for me. Your name won't ever even be attached."

I stared at him for a long moment, wondering whether this was an offer that I couldn't refuse. None of these devices were truly groundbreaking, and save for the AA under armor, they could easily be attributed to new applications of old ideas. The G-Hacker might make some waves, but since it really was a low-level device they wouldn't be very big. That said, I knew they would eventually bring in more than that seventy thousand eddies. A lot more.

But what a hassle getting to that point would be. I would have to dedicate a massive amount of time to just these three things to even approach that number. Plus, the likelihood of my name getting out rose with every deal I made. The ability to make my sale and just walk away… that was worth a lot.

"I came here looking to get on your good side, Father," I admitted. "Someone who could warn me if my name started getting whispered around."

"Continue selling your ideas to me, and I will be very interested in your safety," He responded, picking up what I was saying immediately. "You and your borg friend."

"Even so… I cannot sell you the protective vest. The designs aren't anything special, it's the Alloy that really sets it apart. I came up with myself. It has so many uses, I can't just sell it to you," I said, lying through my teeth since the creation of AA was still heavily blackboxed. "I don't mind washing my hands of these two devices. But that metal, it's not something I can give up."

He considered my words for a while before eventually nodding in agreement.

"Very well. Fifty thousand eddies for the other two designs," Adjusting his price downwards. "Plus sixteen thousand more for four pairs of armor."

"The plans I can hand over before the day it is over, but the armor will take a few days," I admitted. "Making them is a long process."

"Jackie did mention you were looking for equipment. I know of the fabricator device he described to me, I could have a new one at your apartment by tomorrow morning for the cost of three of your suits."

Now, that was a tempting offer. I knew from my own research that new fabricators were worth just over twenty thousand eddies, which was why I hadn't bought another one on my own yet. I considered the offer for a few minutes before finally nodding. I was underselling what my creations were worth, but having them out of my hands, my name removed from their production, and the responsibility removed from me as well… just about made up the difference in my mind. I stood and held out my hand.

"If you cover Jackie's cut for introducing us and making this happen, then the deal works for me."

For a moment, Padre looked up at me before finally nodding and standing up as well, reaching out and sealing the deal with a single shake.

"Pleasure doing business with you, Jackson," He said, his eyes glowing as my keyfob vibrated in my pocket. "I have given you half of your payment. The second half will be delivered tomorrow morning by whoever drops off your new portable fabricator. They will also be picking the plans."

"Thank you, sir," I responded before gesturing to the prototypes that sat on the table. "You can keep the prototypes and the armor as the first of the four."

I stepped away and let Jackie shake his hand next, the older man's eyes glowing again as he paid my partner. Whatever Jackie received, he seemed surprised by the amount, both of us remaining silent as we left the second floor, only stopping to pay our tab as we left the bar.

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

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---

By an unspoken agreement, Jackie and I left the Coyote behind when we were done with our business with Padre. He said a quick goodbye to his mother before we headed out, making it all the way back to my truck. We climbed in, him in the passenger seat, before sitting there silently for a long moment.

"So, how badly did I get washed?" I asked, looking at my friend, who was sporting a shell-shocked look similar to mine.

"What? Washed? Well… If your goal is to stay out of the spotlight, choom, you succeeded. You could have asked for a lot more, but you definitely caught his eye," He assured me. "Plus, Padre was serious about looking after you. You just showed up at his door and offered him three bits of tech that he could make a whole lot of money off of. You're the golden goose, and Padre ain't the type to let that kind of asset get zeroed."

"Right. Well… Either way, I'm glad I don't have to spend much time working on their stuff," I said, already mentally planning out when I would make the vests. "The under armor is bad enough. How much did he pay you?"

"Eight thousand eddies," The larger man said, still sounding shocked. "Thanks for that, choom. I wasn't gonna say anything, not like I did much."

"You set up the meeting, so you deserve a cut," I said with a shrug before starting the truck and pulling out of my parking spot. "I need someone helping me with stuff like that, Jackie. I'm a bit of a mess regarding networking or contacts… and negotiating, to be honest."

"Padre mentioned that. When he sent me my cut, he added a message," He admitted, scratching his cheek. "Said I should stick by you, that you had potential. I'm thinking he was right."

"I hope so," I said with a chuckle. "Otherwise, I've got some serious delusions of grandeur."

As we drove, Jackie directed me back to his garage and told me to wait once I pulled up alongside it. A few minutes later, he walked out with a small box of beers, sliding them into the back seat. He climbed back into the passenger seat and slapped the dash. I pulled away, and we headed off to my apartment, pulling into the parking structure and taking the elevator up to my room.

Once we were inside, I spent a few minutes starting up the AA smelter since I knew I would need a bunch more metal. I had enough for two more AA undersuits, but since I still wanted to redesign my mag weapons and work on a few more things, it was better to get everything working now. When I left my workshop Jackie was waiting, handing me an opened beer, holding out his own to clack together in cheers.

"For our first big sale," He said, taking a long pull from the oversized bottle.

I took a much smaller sip, doing my best not to wince slightly. It wasn't bad tasting, not really. It tasted like someone had set out to take something that wasn't beer and make it taste as much like beer as they possibly could. It was obviously not beer, but the fact that they got it so close was actually more worrying than anything. Before I could sit down on the couch, Jackie spotted the new sniper rifle, his eyes lighting up.

"Jesus Christ, Jay, another one?" He asked, stopping closer to pick up the rifle. "A sniper rifle?"

"Yeah, designed it the other day," I answered with a shrug. "I wanted to use what I learned when I made the normal rifle to make something heavier hitting and with longer range."

"This thing hits harder than your rifle?" He asked, snorting and shaking his head as he examined the weapon. "Damn Jay…"

"I'm probably going to be redesigning my rifle and pistol over the next few days as well," I explained with a shrug. I've learned a bit since I made them, so I want to finish off the design."

"What about your plasma guns?" He asked, putting down the rifle and looking around the room for them.

"In the workshop. I'm probably gonna take apart the rifle for materials," I responded, taking another sip of my "beer." "I want to leave the pistol in case of emergencies."

"Hell of a backup weapon," He said, shaking his head as he made his way over to the couch. As he sat down, he looked around, nodding in appreciation. "You know, this isn't a bad place here. You even got burritos on demand," he said.

"They are free, too," I said, getting a wide-eyed look in return.

"No… you didn't."

He almost jumped up from the couch, heading over to the food dispenser built into the wall. If ever I needed proof this was a cyberpunk hell world, being able to buy food in my own home from a vending machine, was it.

"Press and hold the XXL for three seconds, then quickly press which one you want," I explained. "Just get one for each of us. Too many at once, and the system warning will trip."

He nodded and followed my directions, the three-second press activating a subroutine that Spot and I had inserted while testing out the G-Hackers, making the next burrito free. I would probably take it down in a few days to keep from getting too much attention, but it would be fine for now.

Jackie threw me my burrito before plopping down onto the couch and digging in. He was clearly enjoying it, and I won't lie, the fact that it was free did make it almost not horrible. Everything tasted better when it was free, even if it wasn't enough to save it. When we were done eating, Jackie brought up my guns again.

"So, you're gonna redesign the rifle and pistol… You plan on getting some practice with them?"

"I probably should, my accuracy was way off at the scav den" I admitted with a wince, rubbing it off of my face. "Feel like making a trip to the Badlands?"

"What about Padres order?" Jackie asked, leaning back and relaxing on the large couch.

"I'll get most of the metal cut out tonight," I explained. "Should have time to put two together tomorrow morning. We could go out… the next afternoon? Should have time to work everything out by then."

"So much for taking time off," He responded. "But alright, we can go shooting then."

"Gotta work hard to make it, Jackie," I pointed out. "But honestly, the reason I'm so crammed is that I'm still in my build-up phase. Kind of like… Getting used to new cyberware. Everything is twice as hard and takes twice as long because you're learning every step, working out the kinks, and seeing how your setup works. Once everything settles down a bit, things shouldn't take nearly as long. The fabricator will help with that."

"I'll take your word for it, choomb," Jackie said, standing to grab another beer. "Refill?"

"Nah, not yet," I responded, nursing my beer a bit more.

He sat down on the couch, using the corner of a lighter to pop the top off of his beer. He took a second to line up his throw, only to miss the basket by a few inches. As the cap skipped off the side of the bin and rolled along the floor, it came to rest three or four feet from the trash. Before he could get up to grab it, Spot lifted off from where he was docked by the alcove of my bed, flew across the room, and hovered above the cap.

"What the-!"

Jackie jumped a bit, his hand dropping down to his hip, where he kept his pistol. He stopped just before drawing it as Spot lifted off with the cap in his tiny manipulators. After watching the small drone drop the bottlecap into the trash, Jackie turned to look at me.

"What the hell is that?" He asked, pointing at Spot, who had floated back to its dock area. "I've never seen a drone like that!"

"It's a Gremlin," I explained with a smirk. "I call him Spot. And you've never seen anything like that before because it flies using something I invented."

"You… Dammit, Padre was definitely right," Jackie said, shaking his head, taking a deep drink of his beer. "How the hell does it fly?"

"Ionized air and very powerful electromagnetic fields," I explained. "Totally new idea as far as I know."

"Thats… Holy hell... I really shouldn't be surprised at this point…"

"I don't know, kinda like blowing your mind every time you come into the apartment."

The large man pulled a pillow off of the couch beside him and threw it at me, splashing my beer on me. I cursed him out as he laughed, and after a moment, I joined him.

We drank and talked for another few hours until the big guy fell asleep on my couch, snoring like a freight train. Rather than try and sleep quite yet, I headed to my workshop. The first new batch of AA was done, so I immediately removed the metal plates, which were still hot, and started another batch. When that was done, I got the fabricator going, making sure it had plenty of materials to do its work. It wouldn't get the plates done since that was obviously a different shape, but the scales for the first two pairs of AA underarmors would be done by the time I woke up. When I was done setting that up, I spent a few minutes transferring and labeling my designs for the TEMP and the G-hack, fitting them onto a shard.

I did my nightly routine and started the Elerium generator before climbing into my bed, falling asleep pretty easily despite the sound of a small jet engine coming from my couch.

----------------------------

The next morning, Jackie and I both woke up to the sound of someone pounding on my door. I was up and out of bed before I knew what was happening, and Jackie sleepily drew his pistol, looking around a bit confused.

"You good?" I asked, making my way to the door, Jackie nodding as he lowered his weapon, though he didn't holster it quite yet.

I opened the door to see a man dressed in casual clothes, probably a few years younger than me. Two other people stood a bit further back, and all three of them had several bits of visible cyberware.

"Got something for Jackson?" He said, nodding to a large box sitting on a wheeled trolley. "From Padre."

I nodded, and while Jackie stood idly watching the door, I went into my workshop, grabbed the shard, and slid it into a small container before exiting and handing it to the man. Jackie and I then used the trolley to move the fabricator into my workshop. It fit nicely next to the AA smelter. I could tell that if I kept expanding, I would be running into some space issues soon if I wanted to keep most of my work stuff in my workshop. It wasn't quite a problem yet, but it was only a matter of time before it was. Once I was done moving everything, I thanked the delivery guy with a tip before he transferred over a large chunk of eddies, the second half of my payment.

Fifty thousand eddies, all for a few day's work. I now had enough money to fund my work for a while or to increase my capabilities significantly. But first, I needed to complete Padre's order.

Jackie ended up leaving not long after the delivery, saying he needed to head back home so he could get ready for a date. I reminded him that we would be meeting up in a few days to head out to the Badlands for some target practice as he left.

Once my friend was gone, I got to work. I now had quite a few things to take care of, and while I wasn't under such a heavy weight since there was no ticking clock until I lost access to something, I still wanted to get everything done. My first task was surprise, surprise, a rather large shopping spree online. I knew by now I must be drawing some attention from my neighbors with how much stuff I was buying, but I was really hoping that Night City's systemic indifference towards anything that didn't benefit someone would keep anyone from doing anything stupid.

I was just ordering a second arm to help automate the second fabricator when I realized something. My network, which was what air-gapped from any other network, was connecting to the internet. At first, I panicked a bit, thinking that I had actually been open to cyber-attacks and netrunners this whole time. But the closer I looked at the system, the more my panic faded into confusion. By every metric that I could see, including several scans with some of my tools, my computer was not connected to the net. Yet I was using it to do research and order materials.

After confirming for the third time that I was still very much air-gapped, with no connection to the net, I finally gave up. The only explanation I could think of was that the entities had been even more helpful than I had originally thought when setting up my new digs. Of course, my first thought after coming to that conclusion was if it would protect me if I used my computer to hack something risky. Thankfully, the entities also improved my intelligence since I was able to immediately realize that risking the perfect internal security because I wanted to take advantage of it was beyond stupid.

With my momentary distraction settled for now, I turned to focus on my tasks. First, I set up Spot to review the new fabricators' programming, cleaning it of any back doors or suspicious junk. I would check his work, but since we had already done this for the circuit board printer, I was confident he could do it on his own.

With shopping and Spot all set, I started the original fabricator up to fashion out the plates of the under armor, letting it work as I focused on getting the scales attached. By the time I finished the first two sets of underarmor, the materials to make the third and final one were also done. It was mentally grueling, but I managed to finish the order at around dinner time. Jackie had volunteered to transport the finished product, so I called him up. He didn't have much time to chat, but he stuck around long enough for me to treat him to dinner. I ended up getting some pizza delivered from one of the businesses built into the megabuilding.

When we finished, Jackie headed out with a duffel bag, and I returned to my workshop. I wanted to give redesigning my mag weapons a shot before I went to bed. I was pretty sure that the sniper rifle I had designed, between the ammo and the buff of base parts, was at least slightly superior to the XCOM version. I didn't think it was close to the level of the plasma lance, but better was always better, even if it's only slightly.

As I was digitally disassembling the design and reworking it into something less slapdash and more professional, I considered what the original rifle was built for. My first design attempt looked and would have functioned more like a DMR than an assault rifle. It was too long to be used reliably indoors, especially in high-stress combat. So, I shortened the stock and cut off two of the mag coils from the barrel, reducing the length by a full fifth. It knocked down the power a bit, but the sniper was all I needed for long-range. Besides, despite the reduction, it was still slightly more powerful than the original rifle. The best part of the redesign was the accuracy increase I would get from redesigning the ammo, the increase in magazine size, and the use of two compact Elerium nodes instead of the previous charging system.

Or at least it would be when I finished building it, which I did the following morning, having spent the night waking up periodically to switch out the fabricator jobs. With both of them running, it meant that by the time I woke up and finished modifying the premade pieces, all of the metal, polymer, and AA parts were complete. I also spent some time between installing the feeder arm to the second fabricator as well as setting up a second 3D printer that I had bought. At this point, I had seriously ramped up my production capability.

At around noon, I took a break, heading out of the megabuilding to do some shopping on my own. My primary destination was the nearest gunshop. I needed to buy a scope for the sniper rifle and sights for my rifle and pistol. After looking around a bit, I eventually settled for a simple hologram sight for the pistol and a red dot for the rifle. I was tempted to splurge a bit and get something really high quality, but by cyberpunk standards, my guns were pretty dumb, meaning they had no sensors or data to connect to or send to the telemetry of the more high-end scopes and sights.

Once I had my intended purchases, I headed to a few different shops, purchasing a few bags of materials, mostly stuff to refill the AA smelter and Elerium generator since I knew I would be needing more of that. Once it was all loaded up the back seat of my truck I headed home, lugging it up to my apartment after I parked.

The rest of the morning and early afternoon was spent attaching the scopes to my rifle and sniper rifle before starting on the pistol. By comparison to the other redesigns, the pistol's was relatively easy, as I wasn't really trying to do anything special. Like the other redesigns, using Elerium nodes, only one this time, saved a significant amount of room, which I put to use by increasing the number of mag coils. Beyond that, I really just streamlined everything, focusing on magazine size and power since even if I focused everything on accuracy, there was only so much you could do for a pistol. Better to keep it as a backup that I know will put down any motherfucker who tried to get close.

Between my improved production and my advanced knowledge of the systems, I managed to make the pistol in record time. I was stocking up on ammo and mags when Jackie let me know he was on his way. I told him to park in the garage and that I would meet him down there so we could take the truck.

As we drove out of the city and into the Badlands, me in the driver's seat and Jackie sitting shotgun, he reached out and turned off the radio, which was already on low.

"So, Jay, I know most of that scratch is for supplies and stuff… But maybe you should consider getting chipped," He suggested, leaning back into his seat.

I clicked my teeth, already shaking my head and preparing to shut him down when he held up his hands.

"Relax, pendejo, I know the idea doesn't exactly appeal to you, but there is plenty of meatware and simple stuff that doesn't have much of an impact on you," He explained. "I got a friend, my ripperdoc. He's a great guy, and I can introduce you. He says that there is a whole list of bioware and cyberware you can get that won't interfere with your day-to-day."

"Then what's the point?" I asked, internally wincing at my petulant response.

"They'll keep you from getting zeroed, gonk!" Jackie said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. "He said that there is a whole list of cyberware that doesn't have any shit that can be hacked. You're not the first person to be paranoid about netrunners and quickhackers, Jay."

I glanced over at my choom, who was looking at me with a "don't be stupid" look. I could tell he was just repeating some of the stuff he was saying, but I could also tell he was genuinely worried. I focused back on the road, pulling off the asphalt onto a dirty path, the same one we had pulled down before when we were testing the AA armor.

"You understand how it weirds me out, right?" I asked, stopping the truck under the same wind turbine shadow.

"I know choom, I get it. But I asked about it, and Vik assured me there would be something for you, though real, wet bioware is on the rare, more expensive side," He explained as we both exited the truck.

We walked around to the back of the large vehicle, meeting behind the truck bed. As I unlatched and pulled down the tailgate, Jackie continued.

"Look, all I'm saying is you should go in and talk to the Doc. He knows his stuff, and he won't try and push you any chrome you don't need," He explained. When he caught the side-eyed look I was sending him, he shook his head. "I'm not pushing chrome on you, Jay. I'm trying to keep you from being flatlined by a stray. I got bone and muscle lacing done two years ago, and I haven't regretted it for a second. I got some plates and subdermals on my head, too, to keep from being popped by some punk with a spitball. None of that can get hacked, and it could save your life, certainly saved mine a few times."

I stopped, leaning on the tailgate, letting out a long breath as I looked into the truck bed. I could see my guns, plus three boxes of ammo stuffed into a couple of plastic boxes, but that wasn't what I was focused on. I couldn't argue that Jackie wasn't right. I had done my own research since I first landed here, and I knew the kind of mods he was talking about. In all honesty, the only thing stopping me from getting some of the less noticeable but still useful mods was my own hang-ups and the fact that I might be able to make something better eventually.

But I needed to get there first, so I was only hurting myself.

"Alright, I will go talk to your ripper," I said, reaching forward and dragging the boxes to the tailgate. "But! You have to let me build you some armor. Something that you have to actually wear when you go out on gigs."

Now it was Jackies turn to click his teeth, letting out an aggrieved wounded sound, shaking his head.

"The same argument goes right back at you, choom," I pointed out. "I can make you something basic, something that looks good and will keep your vitals safe."

"Fine, fine. I'm not wearing a full like your Alloy suit, but if you make it look good…"

"Yeah, yeah, I can make it look good."

"Gracias amigo, looking good has its own uses," Jackie pointed out. You saw how the clean-up crew reacted to you looking like a borg. You'd be surprised just what you can get by looking lethal or by being a harmless guy from Heywood with soulful eyes."

He gave me a wide-eyed, innocent look like he was confident in himself but still naive about the ways of the world. I'm pretty sure half of it was his optics, but I also had to admit that if I didn't know him already, it would have been at least partially effective. I scoffed and tossed him a magazine for the new mag rifle before reaching into one of the boxes and lifting out the actual rifle. Jackie let out a long whistle, accepting the weapon from me.

"Choom… I gotta admit, that first rifle was a bit… well it looked like it was made custom," He said politely. "This… It looks like it should still be hot from the assembly line. This is preem shit."

I chuckled and nodded in agreement. Even after replacing the skeletonized shell with something more substantial, the base mag weapons looked like someone had made them in a garage, a symptom of the pressure they were under when they designed them. With as many threats as they were facing, who cared what it looked like, as long as they worked.

"I know. That's why I wanted to redesign them so badly," I said, pulling out the pistol, which really got Jackie's attention. "I think they came out pretty good."

We spent a few minutes setting up a few handmade targets, just a few broken down corrugated plastic boxes with circles drawn on them, set up along and hung in some of the many cactuses growing in the Badlands. When our impromptu range was set up, I hopped up on the truck tailgate and gestured to Jackie, who was now holding the pistol.

"Go ahead, Jackie, give it a whirl."

He nodded, turning to the targets and raising the weapon, firing it off with no hesitation, first in a single shot, then in a three-round burst that was so fast the sonic booms coming off the bullets blended together. Jackie was suitably impressed, firing a few more times before turning back to me, holding out the pistol so I could try.

"Not bad, Jay. The three-round burst is hard to control, but damn, I could feel it packs a punch," He said, making me smirk as I slid off the truck bed and took the pistol back from him.

I aimed down the holo reticule, taking a moment to adjust my stance. In all honesty, I didn't know that much about shooting, save for some range time when I was a bit younger and still in my old world.

I fired the pistol, liking the feel of the single shot but ultimately agreeing that the triple shot for a pistol was a lot to control. What I liked even more, though, was the complete lack of firing sound. Previously, the original mag guns made a very distinct sound as the Elirium charging system cycled and fired, sounding more like an energy weapon than the whip cracking of an actual mag weapon. Now, however, since I ditched the old charge system for Elerium nodes, that sound is gone, leaving only the loud woosh and crack that accompanied a projectile breaking the sound barrier.

With a smirk, I adjusted my grip on the pistol, holding it in my left hand and using my right to adjust a small lever along one side. With a simple shift, I cut the power significantly, slowing down the projectile. After a few practice shots, I scaled the power level perfectly so the projectile didn't break the sound barrier. It was far from silent. The projectile still made a whipping noise that echoed a bit across the empty desert, but it was remarkably quieter than a normal gun with a silencer.

I smirked at Jackie's dazed look before dropping the pistol's mag, checking to see how many more rounds I had in it before sliding it back into place and mag dumping the rest. At the lower power settings, the triple tap was much more manageable, to the point that I could keep all three shots on the nearest target, nearly fifteen meters away. When I was done, I smirked and passed the pistol back to Jackie.

"That worked pretty well," I said, taking the rifle off the tailgate and giving it a quick look over. "C'mon, grab the sniper, I really want to put these things through their paces."

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

Hey everyone, just a reminder that I have a Patreon! Being a supporter has a lot of benefits, like early chapters and access to my original content. You could get up to four chapters early from this story and eight more for each of my other two. Board Members even get to vote on story beats, interludes, names, and more!

If you are interested in those benefits or just want to support my attempt to become a full-time writer, stop by and show your support. Every dollar helps!

---

Jackie and I spent the next few hours testing out all three of my new and improved mag weapons. We burned through just about all of the custom, high-accuracy ammo I had made, putting all three weapons through their paces. By the end of the second hour, Jackie and I were consistently using the mag sniper to tap our furthest target successfully, which was about a eight hundred meters out. We even started spotting cacti, rocks, and trash past that. It was impressive, especially considering how little range time we had with the new sniper rifle or snipers in general.

Jackie was confident that, in the right hands, the sniper would be able to hit targets twice the distance we were hitting. He also guessed that if I invested in some smart tech for it, then it would be triple. Personally, I was happy with what it was already a powerful sniper rifle that couldn't be hacked to jam or overheat.

The basic mag rifle performed brilliantly, and Jackie agreed that I absolutely made the right choice in trimming it down a bit. It was relatively lightweight, easy to fire and reload, and, like both of the other weapons, could be shifted down until fired projectiles didn't break the sound barrier. I spent a while dialing in that setting for each weapon, marking down the settings so I could machine out a guide along the adjuster.

When we were finally done testing the weapons, we piled back into the truck and drove back to Night City, leaving the dead and barren Badlands behind us.

When we pulled into the megabuilding parking structure, Jackie and I agreed to meet up the next day to visit Vik sometime early in the afternoon. After that, we said our goodbyes and split up, with him riding out of the building on his motorcycle while I carried my gear back up to my apartment.

Thankfully, with all the ammo gone and the pistol now on my hip, it only took one trip.

I let out a sigh of relief as I stepped into my room, the chilled air running over me, an amazing feeling after having spent so much time in the hot, sandy hellscape that was the Badlands. It made me wonder how the nomad families could stand living their lifestyle. In my old world, living on the road, outside the rules and stress of civilization, sounded like a halfway-decent retirement fantasy. Here, it felt more like a painful and exhausting nightmare.

Then, the ambient distant gunshots and screaming reminded me that living in cities was just as hellish, if not more so. Still, I spent a few minutes just enjoying the cool air before changing out of my dirty clothes and into something more relaxing. Eventually, after having a quick, barely stomachable lunch, I walked into my workshop.

I sat down at the computer, staring at the black screen for a moment. Eventually, after about a minute of just sitting and thinking, I turned the computer on, opened my CAD program, and got to work.

Ever since I finished the fusion blade, I had wanted to redesign it from the ground up. It was just a straight-up bad design, despite the tech it used being quite potent. Unfortunately, I had put it aside since, technically, the current form was functional, and I had been working on a schedule. Now, though, I had some time, and I want to do it right. Rather than start from my previous design, I started from scratch, working quickly to create the general idea, before fleshing it out completely.

My primary, major issue with the original design was the fact that it was a one-sided blade with a ridiculous-looking and dysfunctional bar and cap on it. There was no way the bar did anything other than get in the way of your cuts, and the blunt cap at the end made stabbing, one of the most crucial abilities for a sword, impossible. These issues were teh result of some pretty undeniable limitations in the tech. Specifically, it had a lot of internal parts that needed to go somewhere. In the original design, almost all of that fit into the bar and cap behind the singular edge.

For my design, I basically took the bar, extended it to the side, flattened it slightly, and introduced a curve. With the extended room, I fit the parts for a second blade, this one on the other side. The only thing that was left was a final, third "blade" that formed the tip. The spine of the blade was a little thick, but between the curve going down to the blades and using superior cyberpunk tech to minimize the size of the parts, it was thin enough not to get in the way when slashing or stabbing at something.

My final design had a two-foot-long blade and was shaped like a classic longsword, even if the spine was a bit on the thicker side. Since pulling out a sword every time I wanted to cut something would get old fast, I also designed a similar but much smaller knife I could carry on my hip.

Because both of the blades would mostly be made from Alien Alloy, they would be pretty expensive to make, more than any single weapon I had made so far. To keep from wasting money and materials, I decided to scrap my old mag weapons, the plasma rifle, and the original fusion blade. Doing so would extend the time it took to make them, but it would also basically make them free. As I started disassembling stuff, I couldn't help but smile at the idea of showing Night City how the longsword would beat a katana any day of the week.

Sure, Katanas were culturally interesting, and the process used to make them traditionally was fascinating, but the romanticized obsession that people had about them was mostly based on crap. They were effective weapons at the time of their invention, but they aren't the end-all, be-all melee weapons, and they take a hilarious amount of skill and training to wield properly. Meanwhile, a standard longsword was easier to make, easier to train with, easier to use, and significantly sturdier. Sure, they weren't perfect, but no one claimed that they were, either.

As it started to get late, I finished disassembling the old mag rifle and the plasma rifle, feeding the AA back into the smelter to work down in more usable stock. I set aside the rest of the parts to go over the following morning before setting up the two fabricators to start making some of the smaller internal pieces. With everything working, I headed to bed, falling asleep almost instantly.

The next morning, I continued to work on my sword and knife, fully disassembling the two rifles and getting the recycled AA into the fabricators. One of the last steps was to use the circuit board printer to make a custom control system for both of the blades. No more activating every time I grabbed them. Instead, there was a toggle switch on the side of each blade. I also added an emergency shut-off that activated if the blade spun around the wrong axis too fast, which could only happen if it was knocked out of my hands. That could also be disabled, as could the shut-off attached to a water sensor.

When I finally assembled both my new weapon and my new piece of equipment, I tested them both, switching them on. They hummed with pale blue energy as a blade of concentrated plasma ignited all around the weapon's edges. I stepped out of the slightly cramped workspace so I could swing the sword a bit, each movement agitating the hum the weapon made, making it louder and somehow more aggressive.

I had to resist the urge to slash as something to test its abilities, like the couch, instead choosing to deactivate it and carry it back into the workshop. There, I set up a bit of a test, a polymer rod held in a clamp. Rather than try and swing the fusion sword around, I turned on the knife, slashing at the newly printed test rod. The smaller blade managed to cut through the thick rod with very little trouble, which honestly wasn't surprising. It was also able to deeply score and partially melt a similar dimensioned bar of steel. It did not cut through it completely, but the fact that it managed to slash into it at all was impressive.

I deactivated the tool and set it aside, taking a moment to debate making a sheath for them both. They were still sharp when the plasma was turned off, but the AA meant that the edge was not going too dull from normal wear and tear. Since the sword would most likely be going on my back, I decided I only needed to make one for my knife. I quickly whipped up a flexible polymer sheath that I riveted to the fake leather of my pistol holster. Now, I would be able to grab it with my right hand whenever I needed it.

With my latest project done, I left the workshop behind, grabbing my new sword on the way out. The ceiling of my apartment wasn't high enough to seriously swing my sword around, but I at least wanted to get a feel for it. I didn't turn it on because I didn't want to lose any fingers, so I would leave that for when I had my warden armor on. For now, I experimented with stabs, slashes, and a few simple cuts, constantly aware of the roof over my head. I managed to avoid hitting it for the most part, and the AA construction held strong the few times I did.

Eventually, I actually worked up a decent sweat, swinging around my new melee weapon. It was light, especially in comparison to what an iron or steel sword would be at that size, but I was still moving around the room a lot.

Unfortunately, while I felt a bit more confident swinging it around by the time I stashed it back in my workshop, it was obvious that I had very little actual skill with it. My strikes were clumsy, my thrusts were inconsistent, and the simple fact that I occasionally hit things I didn't mean to mean that if I ever met someone actually trained in sword fighting, I would be hilariously outclassed, at least in terms of fighting prowess.

Still, it would be useful in some circumstances, I'm sure.

When I was done messing around, I hopped into the shower and cleaned off. My mind drifted off as I went through a delayed morning routine. I could hear Spot flying around in the main room, picking up my mess and straightening up the place. I had updated him twice at this point, just some simple extra programs to help him clean and keep the place neat, and so far, they were working well. His control program was still just a simple response program with no learning methods, but it was still hard not to personify him. Especially when he was so helpful.

When I was done with my routine, I headed to my workshop, not to work but to clean up. While Spot kept the main room of the apartment clean, I didn't want him messing with the stuff I kept around the workshop. This meant I had to clean up after myself, which was another way of saying the room was a mess. I tried to clean up as I went along, but that was hard to do when time was so precious.

I was an hour in to cleaning the room when my door alarm rang out again, and this time I had a pretty good idea of who it was. I dusted off my hands before making my way to the door, opening it to let Jackie in.

"Hey man, I'll be ready in a minute," I said, stepping back to quickly get dressed.

"No rush choom," Jackie responded, surreptitiously looking around the apartment, and I couldn't help but smirk when I realized what he was doing.

"I'm not going to have something new every time you visit," I said with a smirk, tugging at my belt holster to make sure it was firmly strapped on, checking that the fusion knife and mag pistol were firmly in their holders.

"You haven't missed yet," Jackie retorted, looking over at me. When he spotted my smirk, he narrowed his eyes. "You got something genio, I can feel you wanted to show off."

"Go check out the workshop," I said, unable to deny his words.

Jackie nodded and stepped into the workshop, letting out a muffled "Dios Mio" before coming back out as I slid on my jacket. He was holding my sword in a two-handed grip, looking at it with wide eyes.

"You made a thermal sword?" He asked, holding the it parallel to the floor as he looked it over. "It looks cool, but you know you could just buy one at any weapons dealer in the city, right?"

"One, only if I wanted a Katana," I pointed out, my choom accepting the point with a shrug. "And two, it's not a thermal blade. Flick the switch where the grip meets the cross guard. And be careful, it's sharp as fuck."

It took a second for him to figure it out how to turn it on, but when he did he nearly dropped it, the blade coming to life, casting a pale blue shadow along his hands and chest. His eyes went wide and he firmed up his grip.

"Why do I get the feeling that's not mood-lighting choom?" he asked, moving the blade slightly, immediately stopping as its hum got louder. "The hell is this?"

"It's a fusion sword," I explained. "A thin line of plasma is held around the edge of the blade, massively increasing the weapon's cutting power."

"Choom, why do you keep making stuff you can't use?" He asked with a frown.

"I'll admit, I was a bit naïve about the plasma guns," I said, now wearing my own frown "But I can use this. Even without the plasma it's an incredibly sharp blade, since my special alloy holds an incredibly dangerous edge. And you said it yourself, when you don't turn it on, it looks just like a thermal blade."

"Until you turn it on," He repeated, slowly like he thought I was dumb.

"Only in emergencies," I explained. "Until then, it's just a really sharp sword."

"Yeah… alright, that's fair enough," he admitted. "You never know when you might need a little extra. Just how good is it at cutting?"

"Much better than a thermal blade," I assured him, standing up straight and adjusting my underarmor before nodding. "Alright, I'm all set."

"Great. Oh, by the way, Misty, my input? She owns a... well it's like a mystic shop, Misty's Esoterica. It's right by Viks," He explained. "She is kind of like his secretary… Actually, don't tell her I called her that… You'll see."

Technically, I had already seen it, but I did my best to seem like this was new information. I had already assumed we would be stopping by to see Misty, as that was how she was introduced in the game. Thankfully, I hadn't said anything because I had no reason to already know any of that.

"Alright Jackie, lets get going," I said with a smile. "Can't wait to meet her."

We left my apartment after Jackie stored my new sword away in the workshop, heading down to the parking garage. The drive to Viks, or more specifically Misty's shop, was longer than I had anticipated since they were both in Little China, and Megabuilding H2 was down at the bottom of Wellsprings. It was nice driving through a part of the city that I had never seen before. Even if there were reminders of fucked this Earth was around every corner, it was hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale of the buildings.

Driving on plated roads, which most of the central city used, was also very strange. It was the smoothest ride I had ever had, without a single pothole or bump. It was so smooth that I kept looking down at the speedometer to find I was going significantly faster than I had thought.

When we finally arrived at the shop, after driving around for a minute to find a spot to park, Jackie led me in. It was hard not to laugh at the change in his posture, clearly adding a bit of swagger for his girlfriend.

The shop smelled pleasantly of burning incense, a spicy, woody scent that seemed at least similar to cinnamon. I could see lit candles all around the place, alongside several different religious or spiritual statues and effigies. I even spotted a bible tucked into a corner, almost hidden away. It seemed like by 2077, even Christianity, or one of its offshoots, was considered among the strange and spiritualistic. At least in Night City.

Gentle chimes played as we stepped in further, getting the attention of the short-haired blonde girl standing behind the counter.

"Jackie! Good to see you," She said, coming around the counter to give the significantly taller man a hug. "Was wondering if you were running late."

"Nah, Jackson here just needed to get ready," He explained, returning the hug before turning slightly, his arm behind her back, while his other gestured to me. "Misty, meet my new choom, Jackson."

Misty stepped forward and gave me a quick, chaste hug, pulling back to lean against Jackie.

"So you're the techie who finally got Jackie some protection?" She asked with a smile. "Thank you for that. I tried to convince Jackie that I was only teasing when I told him I didn't like subdermals, but the gonk wouldn't listen."

`"No problem. The next step is getting him into some armor," I said, shooting Jackie a smirk. "I gotta make him some since I agreed to come and look at some chrome."

"Is that right?" She asked, looking at Jackie in a way that made him wince. "Well, thank you. It's nice knowing he's got someone working the tech side, though I gotta admit, it strange ta hear a Techie not eager for more chrome."

"It's how I was raised," I said with a shrug. "Parents kept us real sheltered. For most of my life, I didn't even know cyberware was a thing."

"Jackie mentioned that," She admitted with an empathetic frown. "Jumping to Night City after living like that must have been one hell of a transition. If you ever need spiritual help, maybe a chakra realignment, I'm happy to help."

"Thank you, that means a lot," I said sincerely. I may not believe the same things as she did, but it was still clearly an offer to help, which was always appreciated. "I've always wanted to learn how to meditate, to center myself. If you've got anything on that…?"

"I can get some stuff together for you. Have it ready for when you're done with Vik," She said, eyes lighting up as she nodded with a smile. "Are you looking more or less of the spiritual side?"

"Less, for now," I admitted with a wince. "I'm not really looking for anything more at the moment."

"No problem!"

The three of us chatted for a while before we eventually excused ourselves, stepping out the back door of Misty's shop and heading down to Vik's. As the door shut behind us, Jackie thanked me for taking Misty seriously, as it was, apparently, an ongoing issue.

"Last friend I introduced assumed she was pushing drugs and that the spiritual stuff was all just a cover," He explained, shaking his head. "Kept stopping by, looking for cheap glitter. We don't talk anymore."

A glowing green light marked the stairs down into Vik's workspace, and after stepping over a cardboard box or three, we descended downward. The door opened automatically for Jackie, who walked through without hesitation. On the other side were a shelf, some boxes, and a metal gate system, which Jackie tapped and opened with practiced ease. The interior was lit red by several faux neon lights, as well as some more normal lights towards the center of the room. There, in the red corner, was Viktor, sitting on a low chair.

"Vik! How's it going?" Jackie called out, the familiar-looking man spinning to face us before standing out of his chair to greet Jackie with a bro hug. "I brought Jackson with me, just like you asked."

"Jackie, good to see you again," The pseudo-doctor said before looking over at me and extending a hand. "Jackson, it's good to meet you. Any friend of Jackie is a friend of mine."

"It's nice to meet you too, Vik."

I smiled and returned his handshake, looking around as Viktor dropped back into his seat. I turned around to see Jackie pushing a second chair out of a dark corner of the room, pushing it to me before he sat down on the edge of the surgery chair. Taking the offered seat, I turned to focus on Viktor, who had been watching me the whole time.

"I gotta say, it's been a long time since I've gotten a completely organic person your age in here," He admitted with a chuckle. "Usually, it's just kids coming in for their first neural link."

"Yeah, it's a whole thing," I responded. "Parents didn't believe in cyberware, so I didn't even know it existed. Real sheltered upbringing."

"You must be far out of town then," He said, sounding surprised.

"You got no idea, Doc," I said, my voice sounding heavier than I intended. Both Jackie and Vik clearly caught it, but neither mentioned it past a concerned look and a raised eyebrow.

"Well, I don't know what Jackie has been saying, but I'm not gonna tell you you need to get chipped," Vik said, leaning back on his seat. "What I can do is show you some cyberware that fits in around your worries. Whether you decide to get them is up to you."

"Jackie already convinced me that if I'm going to be working with him, I need an extra layer of protection," I admitted, running my fingers through my hair. "I'm not about to hack off a limb or put in anything that can be connected to, but I do need something to give me an edge."

"Well, the good news is we have some stuff like that," He said with a smile. "The bad news is the list is a lot smaller than normal cyber or bioware. It's also more expensive."

"I'm not hurting for cash too much, Doc, so let's see what you got."

Vik nodded and gestured me over to his desk, pulling up a catalog of sorts on his computer. I rolled closer to get a better view while Jackie stood up to look over our shoulders.

The catalog he showed us was broken up into three sections. The first was his own selection, stuff he had on hand or stored at a nearby safe location. After that was a chunk of options that other rippers had, a sort of ripper network. These were slightly more expensive, on average, since he would have to pay for the cyberware, plus a decent cut to the ripper he was buying it from. The network was set up with other rippers he considered to be trustworthy, which meant it was a pretty small list, all things considered. The third and final group was just stuff he could order from other sellers. Most of it was low-grade civilian stuff, but at least a few options on that list were solid chrome. It was also a lot more expensive because he would be buying it from a company, usually new.

We spent close to a half hour looking through the options. Out of everything, I was most interested in the skin weave, bone lace, and muscle lace. All three of them were nanite infusions that would weave fibers into their specific target, increasing resiliency and, in the case of muscle lace, their effectiveness. None of them were cheap, but not only would they greatly improve my survivability, but they were easily removed as well. Each would take a couple of weeks to complete, but all three were extremely tempting. Before I could select one or multiple of them, Vik made a different offer.

"I… also may have a lead on something special. Bioware advanced enough that I wouldn't usually get access to it," He explained. "But a corpo Doc I know from back in the day had a client skip out on him, a corpo who claimed he had the money."

Vik tapped on a few things before pulling up an email and showing off what looked like a pretty significant chunk of an organ. What organ it was, I had no idea.

"This is a bio-nanosurgeon hive," he explained. "All one hundred percent bioware, meaning no batteries, no neural link, and no hacking. The only difference you will notice is a slightly increased appetite… and a supplement you must take once a week or after a major injury."

"I think I can guess, but what does it do?" I asked, leaning in to take a closer look.

"It uses the food you eat to make and maintain a decent-sized swarm of Nanosurgeons that percolate through your bloodstream," He explained. "They will heal minor injuries in seconds and major injuries in a few minutes, but that uses up the swarm real quick. Hence the supplement after any major injury.

"Damn, someone skipped over that?" Jackie asked from behind us. "That sounds preem."

"Well, it's not going to perform miracles, but it will help keep you from bleeding out, cut down your recovery time, and let you keep going from an injury that would normally knock you down," Vik continued. "It is not a replacement for actual medical care or a cure-all. You get stabbed or shot more than once, and you're gonna have a bad time. It also doesn't regrow limbs, obviously. It might fix a fingertip, but beyond that, it's not gonna work."

"That sounds expensive as hell, Doc," I pointed out, and he snorted.

"That's cause it is. Normally this would be near thirty to thirty-five thousand eddies," He answered. "But the problem is that these kinds of Bioware? They have a shelf life. Without someone to carry it soon, it will basically go bad. I put out some feelers for bioware you might like and my friend reached out. Basically, he is just trying to get it out before it's useless. It barely has enough time left to make it here."

I chewed my lip for a long moment before leaning back in my chair. After a moment, I looked at Vik.

"Tell it to me straight. What do you think?"

"I think you are incredibly lucky," He said with a smirk. "If I didn't already know Jackie wasn't interested, I would be offering it to him. This kind of bioware is made on demand, for people with connection I certainly don't have."

"How much?"

"Seventeen grand, plus eight for installation and delivery."

"Jesus Christ…" I said, letting out a long breath. Eventually, I nodded. "Alright, you convinced me. Make the order."

 

[MetaBettaOmega]

Hey everyone, just a reminder that I have a Patreon! Being a supporter has a lot of benefits, like early chapters and access to my original content. You could get up to four chapters early from this story and eight more for each of my other two. Board Members even get to vote on story beats, interludes, names, and more!

If you are interested in those benefits or just want to support my attempt to become a full-time writer, stop by and show your support. Every dollar helps!

---

We stayed at Viks for another hour or so, discussing the bioware implantation process, what I needed to do, and the schedule. On my side, all I really needed to do was not eat anything the day before the surgery. It wasn't technically required, but it would reduce some risks and made Vik's job easier.

Vik also went out of his way to make sure I understood exactly what having the bio-nanosurgeon hive implant meant. He didn't want me getting any delusions of grandeur. The implant could certainly save my life, but it did not make me Wolverine, not that Jackie or Vik got my reference. I could heal a bit if I got injured, but I wasn't going to heal gaping wounds or missing limbs.

With my expectations fully tempered, he did admit that the nano hive would drastically lower recovery time for any more invasive implants. It wouldn't do anything for things like muscle or bone lace or skinweave bioware I had been looking at, but it would help if I got something that required cutting me up. I wasn't planning on getting many more implants like that, but it was nice to have the option.

Once we were done discussing the options and the order was made, I left Vik's shop, cutting through Misty's shop to do so. She happily handed me some information about meditation, including some calming ambient noises and some incense. I was genuinely interested in learning meditation, so I was eager to accept and pay for her help. The process of scanning and looking through my tech trees was cerebral and strange, and I was hoping that learning some mental discipline and calming techniques would help me handle that better.

Jackie stayed behind as he wanted to talk to Vik about boxing and, after that, spend some time with Misty.

I arrived home not long after I left Vik's shop, stopping at a drive-thru to grab a burger and some fries. Honestly, out of all the food I had eaten so far in this reality, the greasy, fast-food burger and its accompanying fries were the closest to the food I was familiar with, tasting like vaguely bad McDonald's. It was definitely the kind of food that becomes more and more inedible the longer you look at it and the cooler it gets.

As I was cleaning up from my meal, I headed into my workshop. I needed to make Jackie some armor, especially now that I had told Misty about it. As I worked through the beginnings of a design, puzzling out how to make sure it was functional and looked good enough that Jackie would actually wear it, I heard the call button for my door. The bell came through clearly in the workshop through a secondary speaker in case someone was sealed inside and couldn't hear the normal one.

I frowned, tapping my computer to turn off my screen before making my way out of the workshop and to the door. I looked through the mini camera, checking to see who was on the other side. To my surprise, it was a woman, maybe a year or two younger than me, with shocking blue hair. It flowed down one side of her face, the rest of it braided into a long, thick ponytail, which ran down her back and out of sight. Her eyes were a pale blue, with irises that were too big and perfect to be anything but cyberware. She appeared to be holding a box, and after a moment of waiting, she frowned, reaching out to press the call button again.

With a sigh, I slid my pistol back into my holster before tapping the control to open the security controls, the thick, dense door sliding to the side.

"Oh! Hey, hi, how are you?" She asked with a smile, her eyes shifting to a pale purple as she did. "I'm your neighbor!"

I raised my eyebrow and followed her finger, which was pointing down the hall to the next door from mine. I looked back to the still-smiling woman, who then energetically thrust the box out to me.

"This is yours, I think. It was delivered to me by accident a few days ago..." She said, trailing off with a wince.

Her admittance actually caught me off guard. It wasn't the fact that something had been misdelivered. That was honestly inevitable, especially with how much I had been ordering. No, it was the fact that she actually made an effort to return it to me rather than just throwing it out or, even more likely, selling it for a few eddies. Honestly, if it wasn't such a blatant, strange, and suspicious thing to do in this city, I would have assumed this was some sort of spying attempt. Even so, I could already feel my anxiety spike.

"Ah, I see. Thank you," I responded, finally accepting the box and looking down to examine it, noticing that the seal had been broken. "And you looked inside?"

I asked, lifting up one of the plastic flaps to look inside. As far as I could tell, the internal packaging wasn't breached, but to a determined person, that didn't really mean anything. I looked up at the woman, who now looked slightly annoyed.

"Yeah, my brother opened it up when he brought it inside," She explained. "Gonk was watching my apartment and thought he could pawn it if it was anything good."

"Yeah… that's about what I would expect," I admitted. "Well… thanks for returning it."

"No problem!" She said with a smile. "Take care!"

Before I could say anything else, she walked away, heading right to her room. Her ponytail bounced and swung as she walked, a particularly energetic bounce in her step. As I watched her leave, she sent me a look over her shoulder, her grin growing to a smirk as she disappeared inside her own apartment.

With a snort, I shook my head, stepping back into my own apartment, my door sealing behind me. As I walked back to my workshop I pulled the parts out of the box, inspecting said box closely before tossing it to the side. I then spent a good five minutes inspecting the contents of the box, checking for any unwelcome guests or tampering. I even had Spot look them over, looking for any tool marks my standard eyes wouldn't be able to pick up. When even he came up negative, I reluctantly concluded that the woman was just actually being a good neighbor. I spent a minute putting the parts away before throwing away the packaging, Spot catching it before it even hit the ground. As he zipped away, I frowned with a sudden realization.

"Huh… didn't even get her name."

I debated going over and thanking her, but between her seemingly innocent and kind personality and my own crazy, potentially violent life, I figured it would only complicate things. If I was going to make friends, my best bet was people like Jackie, people who could take care of themselves and were used to fighting. In fact, networking with some reliable solos was probably a good idea, regardless of any need for friends. I'm sure there were plenty of people out there willing to work I exchange for some interesting gadgets and solid armor.

Shaking my head free of the idea after a few moments of consideration, I instead focused back on my computer. I had three days of free time left, not including the rest of today. Between my surgery and the switch to my next tech tree, my time was limited, and I needed to get this done before we got our next job, which Jackie was hoping to find soon.

Part of me wanted to tell Jackie I wasn't interested in taking any more jobs, or clearing out scav dens, not after making so much money from selling my stuff to Padre. However, I knew that Jackie was never going to willingly give up Solo work, not until he felt he had made his mark on Night City. Despite how little time I had actually known him, I wasn't about to leave him facing that alone. Maybe, over time, I would be able to temper his burning desire to cash in his life for a bit of fame, but until then, I would do my best to keep him alive.

What else were chooms for, after all?

As I worked, I considered what my real goal was for Jackie's armor. While his death in the game would absolutely go down as a genuinely heartbreaking moment, my primary concern was not him getting shot in the stomach, not with the underarmor I made him. Don't get me wrong, whatever I settled on would absolutely add protection to his torso, but the final design was mostly about protecting his head.

I knew he had cyberware protection there, but as any armorer knew, real damage resistance was about layers. Layers were the key to stopping incoming damage, so my armor would be all about layers.

My design for the helmet was pretty simple; well, actually, all of it was pretty simple. Jackie had made his position on full heavy armor clear, so there was no way for me to work in strength enhancement or anything. Instead, I used a miniaturized Elerium node to power a simple cooling and heating system, as well as an air filtration system. Eventually, after a few more tech trees, I was sure I would be able to work in a whole host of things, but for now, simple, comfortable, and effective was all I needed.

When I was finished with my design, both the helmet and the torso, I sat back on my chair, blinking my eyes. A quick check of the time, and I cursed under my breath. It was late, much later than I had intended to work. I quickly set up the fabricators to print a few pieces and got the 3D printer up and working before getting ready for bed. By the time I lay down, my fatigue caught up to me, and I was out like a light.

When I woke up the next morning, rather than immediately starting to work, I got through my morning routine as usual, then switched what the fabricators and 3D printers were working on before heading out of the apartment. After yesterday's barely passable experience with a burger shop, I wanted to look a little harder for semi-decent food. I knew it was likely to be overly expensive, but I also knew I needed some source of edible food, or I would lose my mind.

I made it all the way down to my truck, climbing into the driver's seat and tapping the ignition before finally remembering that Vik asked me not to eat anything in preparation for the next day's surgery. I let out a long groan, slapping my forehead off the steering wheel, sitting there like that for quite a few minutes.

When I eventually made my way back up to my room, I dove into putting Jackie's armor together to distract myself from my growing hunger. The design and assembly process was pretty simple. The armor was a combination of AA, Kevlar material, and polymer plates, all of which were layered and overlapped to shore up any weak points. The eyes of the helmet were anti-fog-treated sapphire glass, reinforced and treated to be bullet extra resistant, which was what I used in my Alloy armor. When I was finally done putting it all together, it was just about noon. I called up Jackie as I tightened the last screws.

"Hey, your armors ready," I said after my call connected. "Just need you to come by so I can fit it to you, make any adjustments."

"Alright, fine," He said, obviously still not happy about the idea of wearing armor. "I'll be by in an hour. Just gotta finish helping Mama Welles move some stock around."

"Sure, I'll be free," I responded before saying goodbye and hanging up.

It took him a full two hours to show up, stepping into my apartment reluctantly.

"Choom, come on, I really don't-"

Rather than listen to him try and worm his way out of the extra protection, I handed him his new helmet. He looked down at it, his jaw hanging a bit as he took it from me. The helmet, which looked like a cross between an oni mask and some high-tech armor, was blood red with gold fixtures and long black straps and bands. The straps and bands were what kept the helmet in place, but at least two-thirds of them were just for show. I reached out and tapped a button on the side of the chin, and the mask lit up, red light swelling up from behind the various seams and plate separations.

It had a vague, loose Asian feel to it, but I was hoping that with the overwhelming Japanese and Asian cultural infusion that Night City enjoyed, people wouldn't immediately connect that with the Tyger Claws.

"Jackson… this is fucking nova," He said, looking back up at me. "It… looks like something from a corpo's nightmare! No mames! I'm going to scare the shit out of people!"

He immediately tried to start putting it on, but before he could, I handed him the rest of his armor. It was just chest, stomach, neck and back armor, made to be flexible but strong, with AA plating and reinforced by Kelvar. I specifically mimicked the metal ab armor type you sometimes see on superheroes, since I figured Jackie would like his armor to be as muscular as him. Most of the armor was red, with gold highlights and black kevlar behind that.

"It's nothing compared to what I wear around," I admitted. "But with this, you're not gonna get popped by some lucky asshole who manages to get their hands on some higher caliber stuff."

"Damn, Jay, this is great! The armor is cool, but fucking hell choom, that helmet is scary," He said with a big grin. "I like it!"

"Well, put it on." I said, pushing the armor to him. "Let me know if it fits right."

We spent about fifteen minutes getting both the helmet and armor to fit him perfectly. When we were done, we put both of the pieces into a box so he could carry them out of the building easily. When we were done, Jackie left to go get some lunch, and since I didn't trust myself not to eat something, I stayed back at the apartment. We did agree that he would come by the next day to drive me to Vik's, since I would likely not be up for driving when I was done getting sliced up.

The rest of the day I spent idly working on my computer. Over the last couple of weeks, I had a few ideas for improving the CAD program I used for most of my design process. The biggest one was integrating a response program similar to a Gremlins. This one focused on smoothing out designs, anticipating errors, and looking out for mistakes that I could miss. It could even foresee potential issues with a design needing stronger materials or heavier reinforcement, though that was hit or miss.

The goal was to speed up my CAD work by preventing me from making simple mistakes without noticing them. Sometimes, stuff like that was nothing, but occasionally, those types of errors cause a whole cavalcade of similar issues, all of which added up to a whole lot of extra work. With any luck, this would decrease the amount of time I spent working on the design process, especially when I was directly transferring the designs from my head to digital blueprints. Spot was a big help during the process, showing me how best to integrate new programming into an existing bit of software.

When I was done messing around with that, I got to sleep early, actually using one of Misty's calming ambient tracks to help. I had decided that for the next two nights of my seven-day break, I wouldn't interrupt the night for anything and do my best to get a full night's rest.

Up to that point, I had been waking up every five hours or so to switch over and restock my AA smelter and Elerium generator, building up a decent-sized stockpile of both materials. Now, though, I wanted to get as much rest as possible, both because I was getting some not-insignificant surgery done early the next morning, and because it was the second-to-last day of my break. I wanted to be able to push myself pretty hard when my new tech tree locked in.

The following morning, after spending some time idly adding some of the upgrades to the CAD system attached to the circuit board printer and desperately trying to ignore the free burritos just waiting for me in my home delivery system, Jackie came to pick me up. He joked about stopping by a pizza place to grab himself some lunch, but by this point, I was a bit grumpy when it came to food.

Jackie dropped me off in front of Misty's shop before leaving to park the truck somewhere. Rather than wait out front and risk getting mugged for my shoes, I stepped into Misty's shop.

"Jackson! Welcome back," Misty said, peeking around a customer to greet me. "Vik should be setting up for you now. It should only be a few minutes. Did you get a chance to look at some of the meditation stuff I gave you?"

"I did, already listened to some of the ambient noise. It was nice, drowned out the sound of the building completely without being overwhelming," I answered with a smile. "I haven't had a chance to look into everything else, I was working on Jackie's armor."

"Oh! How is it looking?" She asked, multitasking as she walked back to a cabinet to grab a few things before handing everything to the customer with a smile. I waited while their eyes glowed, and Misty waved the customer out before focusing back on me.

"It came out looking good, pretty intimidating," I responded. "Jackie seemed to like it. Even better, he seemed eager to wear it next time we go out."

"You really plan on going out again, doing more solo work?" She asked, leaning forward on the counter. "Jackie mentioned you made heaps of money with Padre. Why go out and put yourself at risk?"

"Cause I need a lot more money than what Padre gave me, and working with Jackie will hopefully provide some of that," I explained, before looking over my shoulder, checking to make sure Jackie hadn't arrived. "Plus, he really needs someone watching his back. It's easy to get swallowed up in that line of work, even with someone you can trust. I know Jackie wouldn't even think about giving up his dream of making a name for himself so… I'll back him up."

Misty listened to my words, and for a moment, I thought she was going to tear up. She sniffed and rubbed her eyes, reaching over and giving my hand a squeeze.

"You're right. He won't give that dream up, not anytime soon. But knowing he's got someone backing him up, making sure he's got the tools and equipment he needs… It's a huge weight off my shoulders," She said with a slightly watery smile. "Thank you, Jay."

"Happy to do it," I said, returning her smile.

She pulled back and sniffed again before nodding to the door out the back of her shop.

"Go on, Vik is waiting for you, and I need a minute to collect myself before Jackie comes in. And thanks again."

I nodded and smiled, heading out the back entrance and down into the ripperdoc clinic. As I stepped through into the basement area, I could see Vik had moved a few things around. The cyberware installation chair that normally sat in the middle of the room had been replaced with an operation table. A bunch of equipment sat on either side of it, most of it already on. As I pushed the dividing gate open, Vik turned to look at me, smiling as he saw who it was.

"Jackson, welcome back. Just getting a few more things set before we can start," He said, turning back to what looked like some sort of monitoring equipment. "Delivery came in two hours ago, and everything looks good."

"No problem, Doc. Take your time," I said, sitting down on the spare chair in the corner and watching him work. "Did the delivery go smoothly?"

"Perfectly, much better than usual," He said, tapping a sealed cylindrical container with several blinking lights and a small temperature read-out along the side. "My buddy has access to corpo services, so the guy delivering it was a real professional courier, not some rando nomad looking for a quick buck."

I chuckled and nodded, about to ask how close we were cutting it to the bioware's best-by date when Jackie came down the stairs. He waved to Vik, who nodded before focusing back on his work, before leaning on the wall next to me.

"So, you ready, choom?" He asked, looking down at me. "Not getting cold feet?"

"It's not like I'm scared of it, man," I said, shaking my head. "It's just a new thing for me. I mean, it just took some convincing to get me to take the plunge. Besides, it's a lot less weird to get something extra than it is to get something removed. Not sure I'll ever be okay with hacking off an arm or getting something replaced."

"Just to be clear," Vik said, cutting off Jackie's response. "I will technically be removing and replacing about an inch of your small intestine."

"Yeah, I'm alright with that. You already mentioned it," I said with a shrug. "That's not really what I mean."

"I didn't think so; I just wanted to make sure you understood completely," Vik explained. Well, I think it's time for you to hop up on the table, Jackson. I think everything is all set."

I nodded and made my way to the clean, wiped-down table. I stopped to pull off my shirt, handing it to Vik before climbing on and laying back. It was a sign of the prevalence, even addiction this world had to Cyberware, that he didn't ask me to take off my pants, as if such a surgery was so common and normal you didn't even need to strip fully for it. I tilted my head down to watch as Vik strapped my legs with some sort of sticky, tape-like medical covering, sealing it to my stomach. He then put more of it around my body, covering everything but the area he would be operating on. As he was finishing up, he pulled back and looked over at me.

"Alright, so, from what Jackie says, there's a big chance you've never used a MaxDoc or anything like that. That right?"

"Yeah, never had to use one," I admitted, looking over at Jackie, who smirked. "but we should probably buy some for when we work."

"You think I leave my house without some MaxDocs?" He joked, opening his jacket to reveal a trio of small inhalers.

"Don't rely on them too much, those things don't work so well when you use them too quickly," Vik warned, continuing after a pause to tap a piece of his equipment, pulling down something to attach to my arm. "It's mostly just antifibrinolytics, stimulants, antibiotics, beta-blockers, and an anesthetic. Might keep you from keeling over, but you'll still bleed out if you do something stupid. There is a reason I bring this up now, though…"

Vik stepped away for a moment, out of my vision, before returning, now holding an inhaler, though this one did look less flashy than a MaxDoc.

"I'm going to hold this for you and depress the activation tab. An aerosol of anesthesia is going to be sprayed out. I want you to take a deep breath and hold it," He explained. "It's going to feel a bit strange, but just focus on doing it anyway. You're probably going to feel the need to cough since you're not used to inhaling medicine, but I need you to fight that. It will pass as your lungs and throat go numb, but chances are you'll be out by then. You ready?"

I took a long, deep breath before looking up at him and nodding.

"Yeah, Doc, I'm ready."

He nodded back and held the inhaler for me, depression the button. As the spray started, I breathed in deeply again, this time drawing in the anesthesia. I held my breath, feeling my lungs tickle and prickle as the medicine took effect.

"And.... now, let your breath out slowly and start counting down from one hundred," Vik instructed.

I nodded and released the pressure in my lungs before slowly counting down. To be honest, I'm not sure what number I got to. All I know is that I was counting, and then I was groggily waking up, still lying on the same operation table, my brain feeling foggy and sluggish.

"Hey, hey, take it easy," A voice says, my brain taking a second or three to focus my eyes enough to see Vik. He gently pushed me back down onto the table. "The surgery went well, no complications, not that we were anticipating any."

The next few hours passed by in a bit of a blur, the tail end of the anesthesia working through my body. Vik did some scans, asked some questions, and gave me a few pills to take, as well as another inhaler. Jackie returned not long after I woke up, and when Vik was satisfied that I would be fine, he drove me back to my apartment. I ate a burrito, popped one of the supplement pills, and crawled into bed, sleep taking me almost instantly. I was dead to the world until the next afternoon when Jackie came by to check up on me. I had missed a few messages since my keyfob was vibrating on the counter, which was too far away for me to hear.

He brought food, which I voraciously tore into while he laughed, before I collapsed back onto the couch, letting out a satisfied groan.

"How do you feel?"

"Hungry, a bit sore, a bit tender," I said, lifting up my shirt to poke at the incision sight along my midriff, wincing at the increasing pain. "Nothing I can't handle, nothing he didn't warn me about."

"Good. So, I got a new job for us," He said.

"What?" I asked, turning to look at him. "I'm not- Jackie, I'm not doing anything active for at least a couple of days."

"Vik said you'd be good in two," He pointed out, waving me off when I opened my mouth to complain. "But I figured you'd prefer to stretch that out, so this job has a bit of freedom. Padre wants a 6th street hideout leveled."

"That sounds like something that would bring a lot of heat…"

"Padre will take care of it," He assured me confidently. "He wants the hideout cleared out. We can't bring in any cleaners, but we can definitely fill a few duffel bags full of gear on our way out. Pay is six grand for each, add in what we bring back, which should be… well, eight or nine thousand, depending on what we find."

"What's the time limit on this?"

"A week before he starts looking for someone else to do it."

"Well… alright. I'm gonna need tomorrow, and the day after that off, probably. So maybe the night after that?"

"Works for me, choom."