They had announced the fight line-up the other day, after the end of the free-for-all. Each of them were simply listed in order of how soon they signed up and the fights were set up appropriately. One and two would fight, three and four would fight, and so on and so forth.
David was number one on the list, mostly because he was the earliest who signed up of the people who made it to the finals. He was going to fight number two, a girl from the Mox.
The Mox? Moxes? Moxies? Moxs?
He wasn't really sure what the plural form here was. It was a bit of a weird word.
He had gotten back from the arena to meet up with Tanaka and Becca. Lucy wasn't avoiding him, but she wasn't happy about him fighting either. She was pouting at him the whole time while Becca gave enthusiastic encouragement. Tanaka simply nodded like his progression was expected and said to meet him later for strategy planning.
He messaged mom to make sure she was okay. She was also miffed at him for this, but she confirmed that she was okay. She was apparently trying to socialize with Rogue, to get to know the lady who ran the club they went to. That and Victoria, who ran the arena and sometimes came over.
She was making friends for the first time in a long time. David was pretty happy about that. Mom needed some after dealing with his shit for so long.
He looked through the fridge, seeing if there was anything worth drinking. After a long initial inspection, he closed the door and simply shrugged. He pulled back and turned to leave the kitchen.
Amber optics greeted him, he startled back.
Blinking for a moment, he greeted the individual who silently entered the kitchen area without him noticing. "Oh, hey Spares."
Spares blinked her optics at him, oversized limbs making her a veritable giant, as tall as Maine was. "David Martinez." She replied back, mechanically.
He scratched at his cheek for a moment, simply standing in silence. It was a bit awkward to talk to her, mostly because she was… reserved? She was like a less angry Smasher in that way. Just standing and silently judging everything she looked at.
"So…" He began, thinking of what to say. "You need something?"
"Question. Why did you open the fridge and then close it without withdrawing an item?" She asked bluntly. He blinked and raised a brow.
"Oh, I was going to grab a drink, but uhh… didn't see anything that appealed to me?"
"That statement sounds unsure."
"It's a bit hard to explain."
"I see." It did not sound like it. He rubbed the back of his neck as he considered her.
Ah, he gets it now. Smasher's new helper (daughter?) was really awkward. She was just as bad with people as Smasher was, but not as maliciously so. Probably raised in a 'Saka lab or something, not a lot of talking to actual people and more like being talked to by suits.
Well, Smasher had done well by him, he would try to return the favor.
"I'm about to have a tactics session with Tanaka, do you want to join it?" He offered to the stoic girl who loomed above him by a good ten inches. She blinked her optics at him.
"Yes." She emotionlessly replied. Before he could reply, she asked another question. "The drink was for the tactics session, correct?"
"Yeah." he replied. She nodded and her optics glowed for a moment.
"There is a diner open in the Pacifica Reconstruction region. It is 0.4 miles away. It offers 214 varieties of drink."
He huffed amusedly, and messaged Tanaka to meet them at the door. "Yeah alright, we can go there." He replied to the deadpanning girl. He could take a hint, but she didn't need to be so roundabout about it.
About fifteen minutes later they were in front of what was certainly a diner.
A diner with rather adult oriented advertising. He raised both of his brows as he looked at the place from across the street. Next to him, Tanaka had a hand on his chin, Becca was fairly neutral, and Spares was as unreadable as always.
Tanaka hummed. "Bell-Bottoms Burgers and Shakes? My my Martinez, what would Kushinada think about you being here?"
Becca spoke up at that. "It's just a titty-diner, Kats. It's not a big deal."
"Please don't shorten my name to that."
"Kats."
"Stop."
David turned to look at Spares questioningly. She noticed she was being looked at, and turned to face him. "This is the place?" He asked for confirmation. She nodded, so he shrugged and started walking across the street, gesturing for the others to follow him.
Opening the door and stepping inside, he was greeted by a girl holding a menu up to her breasts to accentuate them. Well, not a girl, clearly a woman judging by her… healthy frame. She was, like the advertising indicated, in Bell-Bottom jeans and Skaters. Her skin was the slightest bit shinier than what was natural, an indication of skinweave that Smasher had taught him to look for a while back.
The most notable thing about her was that she was wearing a very small bikini and little else on her top. Two straps that rose in a v shape from her groin underneath her jeans, covered only her nipples, and then connected in the back to disappear into the pants once more. It was like she was wearing suspenders and nothing else.
He resolved to avoid looking directly at anyone here.
She looked at them up and down for a moment, raising a brow in amusement, before speaking. "Table for four?" She asked.
Becca, showing how unfazed she was by the nearly nude woman in front of her, spoke up the fastest. "Yeah, four please." The woman smiled at them before grabbing four plastic menus and skating slowly in front of them, swaying in a way that activated his neurons before he tore his gaze away.
You have a mainline David. You aren't allowed to look.
Walking into the main room, David realized that they may have made a mistake.
The room was filled with many, many women in just about as much clothing as the greeter. Scanning around quickly for something else to focus on, he noticed an important detail.
Most of the customers had Mox tattoos.
…They might have just walked into a Mox diner. He had a fight scheduled with a Mox girl the next day.
…Welp, they were already here. He was going to get his drink at the very least. Turning away now would just be lame.
—
Jerome was a big strommer. Big and mean and dumb as could be. He was, in that way, utterly disposable to them. They had a bunch of fuckers just like him, and he had volunteered to ascend first. The decision to use him to test the program that the AI was running was an easy one.
If she wanted to fuck them over, then her program would be how she did it. She didn't have a reason to, all they wanted was for her to ascend them all, afterwhich she would be free to fuck off past the Blackwall again. Trusting an AI to keep their word was stupid on the best of days though, and Brick was many things, but stupid wasn't one of them.
The Ascension Ritual was hardcoded into a single neural-interface and computer setup, one of the big netrunning chairs they took from the old Voodoo Boy holdings. After it was checked over to confirm it would do what the AI said it would, they would test it. Well, the netboys had been checking it over for the past two weeks, and they weren't able to find anything. It was as safe as they could make it.
Jerome's big and bulky frame lumbered over, and sat down in the sarcophagus-like setup. He would be ascended then downloaded back into his own Internal Agent. From there, he would be unstoppable, able to handle any chrome he wanted to, able to netrun like second nature (if he had any talent for netrunning), able to invade the body of any fucker with a weak ICE and take it over.
A soul unbound by its body. The thought made Brick maliciously giddy.
Jerome settled down finally. "Ready to go boss." He said, upper-half of his head completely enclosed in the clamps and wreath. The twitchy boys who helped him in walked over to the monitors to begin running the program at his command.
Brick grinned behind his faceplate. "Twitch, Stitch, start the ascension." He ordered, voice distorted by the audio-vox he had installed. That audio-vox disguised a subsonic emitter that he layered his voice with. It let him give messages that only his strommers could hear no matter what he said aloud.
It had come in handy once or twice so far. Made the itchy throat worth it.
The program began, and Jerome started screaming, held down by the clamps on his arms and legs. That made sense, it was probably painful to have your brain turned into data. Brick tilted his head at the one strommer he let read the messages directly from the AI. "Tell her she should be proud. We're putting all her hard work to use." His tone was distinctly unkind.
The strommer grinned and started typing away at the console to relay the message. Brick didn't really care what the response was, so he ignored it.
She hadn't been using it all this time, someone should have been.
Jerome kept screaming, it was getting irritating. The pain was worth it without question. It was a way right to the top of the world here.
The world had certain hierarchies. A baby was weaker than a kid. A kid was weaker than a teen. A teen was weaker than a man. That part was obvious. Then it became a question of training and equipment. An untrained man was weaker than a trained man. A trained man was weaker than an elite. An elite was weaker than a legend.
A legend without chrome was weaker than a legend with chrome. A legend with chrome was weaker than a legend with all the chrome.
All of those things? They were surpassed by a single type thing. An AI.
An AI was better than any meatbag could hope to be. They could handle more chrome, they could live longer, they could be more skilled, they could think faster, and on and on.
His boys were trained and with chrome to spare. They weren't legend material, not nearly.
But why be a legend, when you could be a daemon?
Jerome slumped down, finally no longer screaming. The twitches spoke up. "Phase one finished, internal chrome switched to life support. Begin phase two."
There was a tense silence as the twitchy boys downloaded the new program back onto the old body. First downloading a series of protocols that would handle the subconscious living parts onto the agent, and then downloading the new consciousness.
A few minutes later, Jerome jerked on the table, thrashing for a moment before realizing he wasn't in pain.
Brick stepped over, and stared down at the wreath. The twitchies took it off slowly, and the seven optics of a newborn daemon looked back at him. He breathed in and out, not because of his own brain, but rather due to that secondary program they put in to handle it. As such, it was perfectly regulated and controlled.
"So Jerome… How's it feel to be reborn?"
Jerome looked at his limbs for a second, flexing the cybernetics. He looked around the room for another moment. Eventually, he turned back to Brick.
"PoWeRfUl."
Brick grinned under his faceplate. They would test a batch of boys like Jerome before moving on to non-disposables. As soon as they had all the effects down?
The rest would ascend, and the strommers would wash over the whole fucking city. It was only a matter of time. They just had to be subtle about it until it was too late.
Unbeknownst to him, a fragment of code was slipped into the newly ascended daemon. A fragment that would do nothing on it's down. A fragment that would send a signal with enough other fragments online. A signal that couldn't be detected by those who could hear cybernetic feedback.
All Alt had to do was wait.
—
Awareness came to him immediately. Instantly.
One moment, he was trapped in a hell of his own mind, a screaming hurricane without an eye, those screams coming from himself.
It hurt to think, it hurt to remember. But he had to, he refused to go down to some bullshit like that. Better to burn than fade away.
So he burned against the pain, even as disjointed as his thinking was. He was only distantly aware of his degradation as it happened, his mind too damaged to know exactly what was going on.
It could have been five minutes, it could have been a thousand years. It didn't matter, he had to hold on to himself.
Then, all of a sudden, it was gone.
His mind was clear, or, as clear as it had been for a long time. He could think, he could see…
…he could see the dull gray of a ceiling above him. He was laying on his back. He could hear the beeping of monitors.
…He wasn't trapped in his own head anymore…
He threw himself up, using his left hand to stabilize himself. Jerking his head around the room, he saw that he was surrounded by medical and technical equipment, most of which he didn't recognize…
There was a man standing about five feet away from him, on his left side.
He narrowed his eyes cautiously, and glared at the man. The man, clearly noticing his awakening, nodded at him.
"You've been out for a while. We brought you back." The man said in a slightly synthesized tone.
"Shut the fuck up." He demanded, casting his gaze around the room to try and confirm where he was. He didn't see any logos. "You with 'Saka?" If he was, he was going to go over there and beat him to death. There was… something off with his voice.
"I am a Technomancer, a Nomad family. We retrieved your engram from Arasaka and brought you back." The man calmly replied. He didn't trust that, anyone that calm had something to fucking hide. Skulking around like rats in garbage.
"I nuked the gonkfuckers." He said, swinging his legs around to stand up from the hard metal table he was on. He froze when he saw his shiny chrome legs. He jerked his head up and yelled. "The fuck did you fuckers do to me?!" He paused to think over what he just said.
The fuck was an engram?
"Your body was unrecoverable in the aftermath. It has been fifty-four years since you participated in the Night City Holocaust."
He froze and looked at the man.
Fifty-Four years? Unrecoverable?
…Arasaka was still around fifty fucking years later!? What the fuck was everyone doing?!
He threw himself up in a fury, and stomped towards the man. His gaze caught something from the corner of his eye. He glanced over and froze again.
It was a full-body mirror. He took a step forward. The man made of metal mimicked him. Shakily, he raised a hand and placed it on the mirror. His right hand, the one that was wasn't supposed to be chrome.
It was a shiny new cybernetic.
"We retrieved your engram, the digital copy of your mind, and uploaded it to a new body for you."
He wasn't listening to the man anymore, just taking in the sight before him.
The legs were chrome. The arms were chrome. The torso was chrome.
Of the head, only the face and hair wasn't chrome. The jaw and neck was.
He got closer to the mirror. He stared into his own eyes. Eyes were windows into the soul, or so he heard once.
His were cybernetic. Windows into an electric soul.
He began to breathe heavily.
He was all cybernetic now, all chrome.
There wasn't anything left, he was just…
It was just the…
…he clenched his left hand.
Johnny closed his eyes, and rested his head on the mirror. He breathed in slowly, and then out again.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
Silverhand opened his eyes.
"...Where am I?" He asked, feeling all too calm. He noticed how synthetic his voice sounded.
"In a nomad camp, east of Night City."
"I need guns and a car."
He had a city to burn.