Author's Note:

Thank you all so much for the support and follows so far! It is a bit difficult to categorize this story since Edgerunners isn't available, but I couldn't be happier that people have found it so far. All of your reviews have been incredibly helpful in getting a solid flow in these future chapters. Been sitting on this chapter for a day or two trying to work out some of the logistical aspects and it gave me a great excuse to bust out some of my Cyberpunk tabletop books again. Had to embellish a little bit of what I thought Militech would be up to in Militech R&D, but in my mind, it makes sense that they'd look more into defensive measures with the surge of cyberpsychosis in their products.

Without giving any more away about this chapter (sorry haha) let's get on with the show!


A fistful of Eddies

Chapter Two

Rising from Ruins


Arggh we're having a moment here! Fuck yo-

Her vision went black; Her body, numb. She felt as though she sank to the lowest depths of the darkest pond. A feeling of absolute weightlessness engulfed her, not sure if she was conscious, or riding the throws of death. With the lack of company, she had a comfortable assumption pass through her mind that she sent Adam smasher to another plain of torture before she got where she was. Destroyed, not an inch of remnants to be found.

Guess I didn't make it, she pondered, could be worse, David's probably enjoying a drink named after me at the Afterlife right now. Lucy's taking care of him… she paused her thought, woulda been better if it was me, but he's crazy about her. She mentally sighed in comfort, she'll find a way to get all the psycho outta him hahahaaa….

Over her thoughts, Rebecca heard a faint voice and the clunky movement of footsteps. The noise was covered in an emulsified fog that washed over her senses; she can barely hear the timbre of a voice.

"Not the client, pull back." She heard sweep across her mind. Her synoptic drive gradually started to reboot, giving her a wave of dull pain through the right side of her body. In that abysmal darkness she found herself in, a display popped up in her eye.

[Synoptic calibration rebooting]

The calibration completed its loading cycle and flashed a glitched view through her brain. A gleaming light shone down above her, with particles of dust dancing through the air.

That light I see is way too on the nose to be a heaven's gate sorta deal, she humorously thought to herself, instead of chariots and horses the big guy upgraded to an AV? Pfft I don't think so.

She tried to move her eyes when the realization she was paralyzed hit her. Her mind raced; she knew that she was alive, of course, otherwise she wouldn't be feeling this odd pulsing pain. She was in a process of trying to get something to move, and the most logical thing to focus on first was naturally what she could focus with. She gave a valiant attempt at moving her eye, but every time she was met with an unknown resistance. In her mind, each time she tried harder than the last. It nearly got to the point where the stress of trying to move her eye felt as though she was being crushed in a vacuum.

Until finally, she moved it.

Her vision landed directly on a Trauma Team member looking down at her, which in her experience was unusual. She obviously didn't have a plan with them, and every other experience in the past was a group of medical mercenaries waving guns in her face. But this one was different, with his gun pointed to the side and head crooked back with an unknown expression hidden behind his faceless mask. The moment she glanced at him, the EMT collapsed to the ground on his palms. Her vision began to blur, with the last thing she saw being the EMT rushing towards her on the ground.

She popped in and out of consciousness. Once was when she heard a muffled 'clear!' and jolted awake from a shock, taking deep breaths that felt fresh as organic water. Another was seeing an EMT in an AV get clocked in the jaw by what looked to be his superior. She felt like her memory was slipping away, forgetting who exactly was going to enjoy a drink at the bar. She didn't know where Pilar was, but she knew she was going to kick his ass whenever she got home, wherever that was. Rebecca nodded off after the altercation between the medical team but heard a much clearer voice next to her.

"Tell him it's V…."

With that, another spell of darkness greeted her once again.


She woke groggily on a hospital gurney, unable to properly see the faces of the two figures standing next to her. The conical vision from one eye helped very little, if not at all. She listened to the conversation as best she could.

"Got her here as fast as possible, choom." A voice panted, sounding vaguely familiar.

The other voice came through her senses as gibberish, akin to eavesdropping on a conversation a room away. The most she could tell is that the one she could understand was right by her side.

"Look you've been field testing life support systems for a decade. I'm in counter Intel, job doesn't center around spreading misinfo without a grain of truth. If you put her in the program, you get a test, she gets an implant. Everyone gets squared away."

More jumbled babble crept into the room.

"'kay choom, I'll sweeten the deal. Got four KGB GRADs, all lightly used, and a 'ganic Komodo dragon. Never going to find another one of those, mistress'll love it."

There was a brief silence followed by a positive hand clasp between the two.

"Deal then. Get the deets to ya in the morning. Get the team to set her up with nanosurgeons, brain took a bad spill on the right side. Thanks again,choomba."

From what she could feel, as most of her pain and feeling were gone, the figure at her side put a hand on her shoulder.

"Dunno if you can hear me, you'll be out of here in no time," the hand gave her two reassuring pats, "might be Corpos, but these are good peeps. Harder to find in Night City every day…" the voice paused before taking the hand away. "Take care, kid."

Rebecca listened to the footsteps gradually devolve into silence and fell into a deep sleep.


She opened her eyes to see a skyline view of the city. Smoke from a rocket in the distance funneled into an ambiguous mass, flared with flickering luminescence from a cone of fire. She was standing in the living room with a man in a yellow reflective jacket sitting on a day bed as the night cast his shadow onto her. He stared toward the skyward rocket, as idle as a statue. She walked to the open seat beside him, throwing her feet in the air as she flopped down. They sat in a moment of silence before she finally spoke up.

"You know where we are right now? It feels like I've been here before." She gazed at the rocket, still soaring through the moonlit sky at a steady pace.

The man chuckled "C'mon choom, I spent a lotta money on this place. Least you could do is enjoy it with me." He took a swig of his Broseph bottle. "You've been here dozens of times, helped me lift my partner out of enough ice baths to fill the badlands. After a couple of jobs, we'd come up here and check out the shuttles skippin' up to the moon."

"And each time, you'd stare the same way," Rebecca laughed. Her joy tapered into melancholy and she turned to her present company, "just like you're doing now."

He had a fixed stare with a small grin on his face. The small shimmer from the rocket's inferno danced across the lines of his face. The look caused an uncomfortable disturbance in her abdomen. Unmistakably, it was the face of somebody that she knew fondly, and whose demeanor before her eyes was far different from a more unsettling recognition, of which, she ironically could not recognize.

"And we're chilled, like really chilled. Chooms for life type stuff," she leaned closer to get a better look at the man next to her "so why the hell does it feel like your name is on the tip of my tongue and not rolling off of it?"

He turned slowly to look at her. Their eyes met and he flashed her a large grin that she remembered clear as day.

"'Course we're chooms, you got my back and I got yours." He grinned at her and let out a small laugh. The discomfort she had in her abdomen quickly turned to flutters.

She came to a realization at that moment. All those feelings of acquaintance, those remembrances in her psyche were so second nature. And yet, she is entirely unable to place names with the faces or faces with the surroundings. Her memory was on the fritz, but lasting ones lingered in her head vibrantly enough that she felt as though she was in the moment and experiencing them. Each memory gave her an annoying pang of something she couldn't describe. A mix between vulnerability and self-doubt. It was a whirlwind of confusion that she had no idea how to deal with. Those feelings of butterflies were quickly replaced by wasps, with a penchant for causing damage.

Rebecca pinched her eyes shut and brought a hand to cradle her forehead, scrunching the scowl forming on her face.

"Agh! Fuck!" She exclaimed with fervor, "feels like I have a shit gonkbrain! Remember all this but I can't place you, this bitchin' pad, or the nova stuff I feel like we did together!" She blurted out in a discontent yawp. "You know who I am, right? Say your name! Tell me who I am!"

The man in front of her with a large grin dropped his face to a soft smile. "You know me like the back of your hands. Know yourself pretty well, too." He let out a dry chuckle, "but do you know who you are?"

"What?" Rebecca asked, confused.

"Do you know who you are?" His image blurred and faded into a blank white slate along with their surroundings.


"Do you know your name?"

She regained consciousness, squinting her eyes at the light being shone on her face.

"Whaa…this a joke?" She groggily asked

"Afraid not," a voice behind the light uttered monotonously, moving the brightness to reveal a doctor, holding a flashlight to her eye, "we need to do this the old fashion way since our software couldn't pick up facial recognition on you after your reconstruction."

"Whoa, you messed up my face? Coulda been sure I wasn't that trashed." Rebecca reached up with her hand to feel the side of her face. The cold metal felt oddly fuzzy to her touch.

"Can't remember my name to save my life, so I hope this treatment isn't banking on that." She brought her hand back down to see a standard cybernetic arm where her more familiar chrome should have been. She turned her attention to the other arm, where there was a matching arm as unfamiliar to her as the right.

"Swapped my chrome too. Huh." She murmured coldly, shocked with disappointment. The connection she had with her previous arms was something else, "those were custom done."

"They were not the most compatible with our tech. As it's still in somewhat of a trial phase, we thought it best to outfit you with standard Militech cyberware until you recover a fair amount," the doctor said, waving in someone from outside her room. "Cyberpsychosis is our primary focus for this, and we would like to expunge any variables."

Rebecca flashed a seething glare at the mention of cyberpsychosis. Her heart rate jumped.

"This experiment you're talking about, all the stuff you did to me, sayin' it might cure some of these psychos you guys have out on the streets?" She snarled at the doctor, "cause if you're planning on making me one of 'em, 'member I didn't sign shit. I'll walk out right now."

The door opened and a woman entered through the door. She had a powerful presence surrounding her. The hair that laid behind her shoulders exuded a feathered executive control, with a possessive attraction to the way she carried herself. She leaned against the wall facing the bed and gazed above Rebecca's head, seemingly uncaring or procured with other thoughts far more important.

"While the department has dabbled in cyberpsychosis treatment, our tests in that category have not yet borne fruit." The doctor admitted as he moved to sit beside Rebecca's gurney.

She moved her eyes from the doctor to focus on the Corpo woman.

"Not too keen on getting acquainted with all these new faces. Some trauma team doc pulls me in and wants me to meet and greet with Corpos." She nodded at the woman in the neomilitarist appearal and shifted back to the doctor, "Since I must be on a trial something like the psycho tests, you get her to be my handler?"

"Oh no no, since she is relatively open about her position in the company, I see no issue in introducing her." He extended his hand in a bowing gesture from his seat, "meet Meredith Stout, our senior operations manager. She will be overseeing your trial." He rolled to the end of the gurney and pressed a button to display a hologram above it, "handler is such an aggressive word, I prefer observer."

"And the trauma team meathead? Gimme a little on him before you tell me what this trial of yours is all about."

"Conscientious objector in all of this," Meredith moved off the wall, switching the hologram projection to a detailed list of the process Rebecca underwent. "Son of the last president is cozy with him, don't know his name, don't care to check. Dixie owed him a favor." She pointed to the details broadcasted above Rebecca's sheets, "better to test on fresh bodies in need of recovery, seeing as that's who we need these trials for."

"Ah, something to do with your soldiers outfitted with Militech gear," Rebecca deduced after seeing the number of aftermath pictures in the file under attention, "never got that chromed up."

"But you do have some combat experience, even sustained a brutal injury. Makes you perfect for this," Meredith moved closer to Rebecca on the opposite side of the doctor, "got most of your brain fixed up with nanosurgeons and some artificial grey matter. Combo of the two should wire up your mental faculties to near normal."

"Near normal?" Rebecca perked an eyebrow.

The doctor leaned in on the chair, "The left side of your brain suffered minor damage from the fall you took, on account of your cranial structure being abnormally dense."

"Coulda just said she was hard-headed, doc." Meredith interjected.

"Aha, right. I tend to get lost in diagnostics," the doctor dipped his head as if he was being scolded, "To keep it short, your right side took a large amount of damage. Half of the skull destroyed, contents hastily collected, lost connections, etcetera. We put a cyberskin around your brain made up of synoptic sensors that help regulate mental function." He glanced up at the hologram and switched slides, "the fibers encase a non-Newtonian fluid that, in theory, should protect against concussive injuries by evenly distributing force, and the regulatory function should, in theory, help mitigate cyberpsychosis in our more cybernetic operatives. However, your memories may have a hard time coming back, due to the damage you sustained on your right side."

"Put even shorter and sweeter," Meredith moved in closer, "you're not out of the woods yet, but when you get there, there's a chance you'll be unstoppable, babe."

"Not lookin' to make any copro rat friends outta this little setback, cool your jets on the babe stuff," Rebecca laughed weakly, "'preciate the help with getting me back on my feet, but after your tests, I gotta delta. Got some history to uncover. I feel my memories there, just have to connect the dots."

"Glad we're in agreement then. To me, you're a million eddie guinea pig," Meredith quipped with a snarl, "and once we get you through training, get the results; I don't give a fuck what you do. I might try to klep some eds off that EMT for throwing you into the first test subject spot, but we know the same amount about him as you do. Not your fault his heart must bleed more than the rest of us."

"Wait, he didn't just sell me off?" Rebecca quizzically asked in confusion, "The hell did he choose me for?"

"Thought I told you, he cashed in the favor from one of ours," Meredith snapped back, "wanna know so much, find him after we're done. Like I said, don't give a fuck what you do."

"Get this training, who's to say I don't come back and wipe some of you out if this implant is so good?" Rebecca took a similar tone to Meredith's, "Corpos like you got me into this mess, now you're giving me firepower to walk with. Think you can handle something like that?"

Meredith's eyes narrowed, "Ooh you littl-"

"On the contrary," the doctor interrupted, standing from the chair, "for this department, it's a win-win, whichever outcome. Though we want to test the capabilities of this prototype, a situation like that would tell me whose specifications I need to tune up, depending on which one of the two participating parties winds up on top. But, to clarify, I neither encourage nor discourage acting out towards Militech personnel you might run into within the splendor of Night City," the doctor leaned forward with a smirk, "as long as you realize your life will get much harder before you are inevitably processed postmortem."

"Wouldn't expect anything less from a Corpo," she scoffed, "typical asset insurance."

The doctor's smile grew, "Well in your case, it's quite atypical," he raised a finger to the side of his head, "which makes me all the more intrigued and invested." He leaned over and grabbed his tablet, turning back to her while heading to the door, "Militech looks forward to seeing your progress, regardless of the finale."

The doctor left and Meredith slowly, but surely, removed her hands from the gurney railing.

"We start rehabilitation exercises tomorrow. Rest or not, you'll be up at 0900 hours." She turned and walked to the door, only stopping to turn in the doorway, "and if you compare us to Arasaka again, you'll get to go through this grueling process without 'dorphs."

Rebecca unwaveringly nodded, "sounds fun, might take you up on that."

The door shut swiftly as Meredith's heels could be heard fading away. Rebecca laid back down on her gurney, staring up at the dimmed overhead lamp. She knew she'd seen worse places of medical repute, just couldn't picture it. The painkillers coursing through her system gave her body a nice, warm buzz. She thought back to that EMT, the last memory she could fully recall.

'Tell him it's V.'

His blank eyes, high-end optical upgrades. No resemblance of eyes, just slate gray circles. The bags under them were stressed and sunken, with a purple hue. His bloodied mouth from the punch trickling crimson down his chin, parallel to the horrendous handlebar mustache sideburn combo. Most of all, the look of determined distress that radiated from his face. Almost haunting with tinges of empathetic understanding.

"Pfft fuckin' gonk." She felt another bout of sleep ready to take her over. "Guess I do gotta thank you, V."