"Night City. A diseased corpus two seconds away from bursting. A modern-art cesspool of crime and corpo-thuggery. It's capitalism's ultimate testament. The place where the criminal and the suit can co-exist. At least, for a while. Fuck it, choom. I'm going to die in this city, I know it."
—Johnny Silverhand
2076
CORPO_PLAZA
The violation of glass and metal upon the land, jagged and bold, rippled with a sea of red and white color. Strobes in their alternating pattern. The windows reflected this artificial fire, extending it towards the heavens, where the stars that were not stars basked in their mimicry of solace. [1]
Corpo Plaza. A monument and a taunt to times long past. A place where even the surrounding skyscrapers held fealty, allowing a cylinder of open air to remain unobstructed in the heart of the megalopolis. The massive ring road around Memorial Park, congested with stalled vehicles stuck either from a series of minor fender benders or outright vehicular carnage. Reactions in the wake of events much bigger than the drivers of any of the machines down on the ground. No one in Night City of import drove, though. They left that up to the help and the various Delamains that prowled the alleys at all hours. The peons behind the wheels were the poor fuckers that would forever be barred to the C-suite levels, or would be damned to serve synth-fleshdogs from a battered stand on the street for the rest of their lives.
The topmost level of the plaza was crowded with the aerodynes of the corporations, the red and blue lights turning the city twoscale. Trauma Team. NCPD. Arasaka and Militech together, in some solidarity for once. The sirens that resounded were so endless that they all blended together into one tone, almost as if they cancelled each other out. Down by the entrances to the plaza, cop cars barred the way. MaxTac at the ready. Each and every weaponized corp drawn to their highest readiness, as though they all had been itching for an excuse to break out the heavy gear from their armories.
The plaza's ceiling was crystal glass, encrusted with rolling groves of RealGrass for visual effect. A gigantic hole had been bored in it, decimating the once pristine façade. From within, darkness, twisted rebar, and broken glass. The trees atop the cylindrical terminal had been snapped like twigs, woodchips splintered in all directions. It was like a meteor had slammed down to Earth, drawn to the void of citizen animosity and corporate apathy that had both enraptured and enraged people for decades.
The city glowed.
Hoses hissed and scummy water, tinged with red, rivulted across the flat expanse of the plaza's glass roof. Techs at a pair of Arasaka trucks held the intestinal tubes, which shot water upon the massive cyborg that they flanked. A humanoid full-body-conversion, a Dragoon cybersystem. Monocrystalline composite armor, several inches thick. A walking tank. The only evidence of the owner's identity was a pale faceplate in a simulacrum of a human skull. Sensors like glowing coals served as the cyborg's eyes.
The water dripped from Adam Smasher as he stood, motionless, in the spray. The water carried off blood that had clung to the cyborg's chrome, which descended in dark strings from the metal, beading off his metallic fingers.
The cyborg did not bother to glance behind him, the results of his handiwork. Smasher could always be counted to leave a trail of destruction during a job—the hole in the plaza was just his latest in terms of collateral damage.
Arasaka forensic analysts, dressed in their full body sterile suits, rubbery and inflated, were coming up with the bodies now. Two stretchers so far, both covered. A hand, as pale as the moon, had lolled out from under the sheeting of the second stretcher and hung palm upward, limp. An analyst eventually noticed and shoved it back under the sheeting.
More Arasaka agents prowled around the perimeter of the breach in the ceiling. Various items of curiosity had been tagged and documented. Another body lay further from the hole, the sheet that covered it unable to hide the bloodstain that had gravitated beyond the fabric's borders. NCPD kept the curious crowds back, their jurisdiction severely limited in this part of Night City since Arasaka had claimed the turf restricted to all but those that held the corpo badges.
Corpo Plaza did not belong to the elected officials, but by the ones who never made any claim to residence. Just how the city lived, is all.
Through the crowd, one person watched more intently than everyone else. Past artificial lenses, he just stood amongst the throng and studied. Waiting.
He stood with his hands in the pockets of his Swedish shearling and leather coat, which was minimally upholstered with the exception of the burgundy-stitched interior. The helmet and armor that encased his body produced no sounds of breathing. The armor itself was South Korean, custom-made. Foamed metal and ablative layers, the outer shell was polished to a mirror sheen, with orange warning labels clustered around every plating edge and joint.
Life support hoses and hydraulic tubes snaked from beneath his arms and his abdomen up to the base of his neck, where his helmet seamlessly integrated with the rest of his armor. The jaw was a gray-yellow, barely masking a small vocabulator. The eyes were nearly parallel bolts of goldenrod LEDs, thin and around four inches long. He could have been mistaken for a cyborg himself, but the man who the armor hid away still considered himself very much human.
Ramses stared at the scene, looking at the corpo dogs trying to clean up their mess. He caught snippets of conversation from the people around him. All of them marveling at what they had just beheld: two chromed-up individuals just going at it, one of them being Adam Smasher, legend of Night City, and the other a bulky cyberskeleton, mano a mano, the tremendous clang of metal filling the plaza. Several had actually witnessed Smasher hurtling through the air, having presumably jumped from Arasaka Tower, crushing a shotgun-toting belligerent underneath his several tons of armor. That had been when the roof had caved in, depositing Smasher and his combatants into the interior of the plaza, several stories below. The sounds of gunfire and the whine of grav-controllers had continued to emit from up through the breach until they had inevitably ceased. When Smasher had emerged from the opening he had created, there was no point in trying to guess if anyone was still alive down there.
Movement to the right. NCPD, relegated to pedestrian control, telling everyone to move off. This was a crime scene, after all. Ramses moved with the flow for a bit, no one sparing him a second glance, until he simply stepped out from the throng, hands still in his pockets as he made his way across the glass ceiling, in the direction of the massive hole in the glass.
No one stopped him. No one particularly cared. One advantage of Night City—it was easy to blend in. That, and the cyberdeck that integrated with his cerebral cortex. It passively emitted false ident codes that would cause corpo scanners to tag him as a friendly. Whether it was an Arasaka or NCPD frequency, he would show up as a green contact, as though he was always meant to be here.
Friendly. He was anything but, as was everyone else.
To him, everyone was an enemy.
It was a mantra he had adopted over the years, part of a code that he had assembled from trial and error. Everyone in Night City needed to have a code, in his opinion. The ones that didn't tended not to last very long. At the very least, no one would remember them.
He checked his Omega Speedmaster watch. Digital, quite expensive. He was still within his allotted time window.
Pausing for a moment, he lazily looked upwards, spotting where the various choppers and aerodynes were hovering near the massive hole that had since been punched into the side of Arasaka Tower. That must have been where the cyberskeleton had emitted from and had caused all this ruckus. That also explained the Smasher connection—the cyborg only accepted Arasaka jobs because they were the only clients that were willing to entertain his bloodlust.
Ramses scanned the area. Finding solace in the confusion and the blinking lights of the authorities stirring all around him. He had not seen such a response like this in years. His fixer had apparently had a stroke of omnipotence when he had last talked to him this morning.
"Your window will be long. There'll be a terrific distraction at the tower tonight, you'll see!" Faraday had promised him. "You'll know when it happens—might as well stick around for the show. You'll have all the time in the world to close out the contract, don't disappoint me!"
Faraday had not been wrong. The display of pyrotechnics and general mayhem this night had been quite unusual, and potentially handy. Window dressing for the job that Ramses was paid to do. His fixer had come through.
The only thing not part of the whole plan, Ramses figured, was when Faraday had taken a swan dive out the open door of a disintegrating Trauma Team gyro, strapped to a gurney. For all of his fixer's promises and bluster about moving up into the big leagues, it appeared that Faraday's grand scheme had taken a little bit of a snag that had ended up with his entire body being turned into a paste when it had hit the top of Corpo Plaza. Betrayal by Arasaka? Or did Faraday not have as much control over the situation as he had thought? The freefall must have seemed like forever to the fixer. Ramses wondered what Faraday had been thinking during the trip down. He wouldn't be surprised if the chromed man had many regrets that he got to live out before the majority of his body became the width of a piece of paper in an instant.
Typical Night City. Die of old age here, you become a legend on the spot. Everyone flamed out early in this place. It had a habit of eating the young.
Ramses checked his map. Considered for a moment, then placed a marker. He set his timer for half an hour. He guessed that the corps would be making quite a scene for that long and would not completely finish up their investigations here until dawn broke.
The merc kept walking across the roof of the plaza. A discarded shotgun lay directly in his path: a modified Budget Arms Carnage that was garishly painted with green and pink. He kicked it into the nearby grove that sprouted from the plaza like moss, hiding it from view. He had no need for such an inaccurate weapon. Shotguns just made a mess. He didn't make messes.
He continued to make his way across the plaza until he reached the body on the ground that had been lazily covered by the tarpaulin. No one had even thought of accosting him, still. Ramses knelt down and yanked the sheeting away.
Behind the mask, Ramses scowled at what remained of his fixer. There was nothing to identify Faraday by sight anymore—he was just a smear on the glass, the bloodspray of his impact spread out in a perversely human outline. His intestines looked like plasticine outside of his abdomen. His skull was smashed bone, the brain inside a quivering glob of shapeless jelly. The man's four cybernetic eyes had popped from their sockets upon impact and had rolled several feet away, trailing spiderwebs of blood. Strangely, but not completely unusual, was the fact that Faraday's maroon Neokitsch suit remained completely intact after the fall, preserving the shape that his form had once taken before gravity had assisted in its devolution.
"No one gets away clean, Faraday," Ramses spoke to the smear. "Thought you knew this."
Reaching down, the merc's gloved fingers found the formless remains of Faraday's brain and began to sift through the ruined flesh. The blood and juices from the skull cavity turned his grip slippery. He dug through the spongey material until he found something hard and pried it out, shaking his hand after he had fully withdrawn.
Luckily, Faraday's cyberdeck was still intact. The man's biochips and ident codes were readable—Ramses quickly ran a filescan on his newest acquisition after jacking in thanks to his suit's cyberlink. He copied the files he needed to his own deck, jacked out, and smashed Faraday's deck to pieces with a heavy boot, no longer needing it. The ICE on Faraday's files was robust, but not foolproof. Ramses had a German worm file that cracked the deck's contents in seconds, the encryption eroded away like the morning dew.
He looked up, confirmed that he had remained unnoticed, and headed for the ramp downward, his business upon the plaza's roof finished.
Now he could start his job. Fixer or no, the client was presumably still waiting for results. There were eddies to be made. A rep to maintain.
The cops had cleared most of the civilians from the building by now, but Ramses walked down the ramps and steps like he owned the place. He crossed the street, which was still in complete gridlock—the drivers certainly weren't getting home anytime soon. A couple of fistfights had broken out among the stuck commuters, most likely borne from the stress of not being able to move their cars an inch. Ramses ignored them—they were distractions—and headed for the building adjacent to Arasaka Tower.
Now, if Ramses had an appointment, he could just stroll into the lobby, no questions asked.
Ramses did not have an appointment. Instead, he took the ramp that led to the underground garage, keeping his hands in his pockets. Casual. What was there to worry about, anyway?
A gate barred the way to the garage—his HUD highlighted it and he commanded it to open. It rose on well-oiled gears, rising high enough to let the top of his helmet scrape past. He deactivated the hack and the door slid shut behind him. [2]
The noise of the city washed out behind him as he headed deeper and deeper into the cold garage. Relief washed over him like a wave.
People. He couldn't stand them. Too many variables. Too many opportunities for his advantage to be yielded.
Cameras tracked his movements, but his deck's abilities were constantly cycling, feeding junk packets into the building's LocalNET, scrubbing his image from the recorded feeds. If security was watching, they would not see him at all. Like he was a greenscreen object passing across a realtime set.
He opened the brief again. Reviewing his objective. His target: a Darren Kahl. 51 years old, 175 pounds. Why someone wanted this man dead, he had no idea. Jilted lover? Spouse vying for health insurance? Just regular corpo-tradecraft?
In the end, who really cared? It was not Ramses' job to ask questions. It wasn't what he was paid to do. Besides, if he started to care about the work that he did, then he would not be in this sort of career for very long.
Emotions were baggage one could not bring to a job. They were just distractions.
He reached the elevator bay, but walked past the lifts and headed for the stairwell. Elevators were prime areas to be trapped. He knew a merc once who had done a bag job on this rich bastard who lived in a penthouse not far from here. The target's huscle were netrunners offsite and had caught the merc in the act. They had boxed the klepto in the elevator when he was trying to escape, long enough for the actual huscle—independent contractors—to arrive on-site and forcefully remove him by throwing him off a balcony.
Stairs would be just fine.
Ramses climbed slowly, timing himself so that he spent the same amount of time from one step to the other. He did this until he reached the twenty-seventh floor. He was not even winded after all that.
He reached for the door handle, but stopped. This door was different than the twenty-six that he had passed on the way up. It was darker, made out of stainless steel. An advanced FOB detector had been placed above the handle.
Tilting his head, Ramses scanned the door with his optics. Turns out his intuition was correct. The door was packed with enough explosives to blow him clear of the building. Wires spiraled every which way and a thin electrode layer was sandwiched between the frame and the explosive material to prevent anyone from cutting their way through.
Ramses frowned. This was not in Faraday's brief. He would have expected his fixer to let him know that his target was someone on the spectrum of paranoia. Little use in castigating the man, though, seeing as someone did the job for him already.
He unleashed his German program again and it cut through the door's defenses without incident. The door opened with just a touch.
The next room was an antechamber between the stairwell and the offices beyond. A logo had been applied to one of the walls. Ramses could not miss it. He just stared at it and sighed.
NetWatch. The closest thing to the Net police that one could think of. They were the premier organization for anti-cybercrime and were responsible for patrolling the borders of the Blackwall, the firewall that clawed back a small portion of the Net after Bartmoss had unleashed the DataKrash upon the globe. They had free reign from governments to use the latest in Black ICE tech and were not beneath utilizing their own AIs to wreak havoc on gangs they found unsavory. Not a very nice enemy to make.
Ramses considered turning back. Who was to say that NetWatch had only leased a few floors in this building? For all he knew, he could have wandered into their regional HQ. NetWatch kept a lid on where their ops were based, for good reason. Even the best netrunners thought twice about running afoul of these guys.
If Faraday had still been alive, he would not have been so for much longer after this complete debacle of reconnaissance. Ramses would have hunted that four-eyed bastard to whatever pad he chose to retire to, put a bullet into his brain, and would have been inclined to burn his ex-fixer's rep on every blog for good measure, letting everyone know about the man's sloppy work.
He was a professional. The least he could ask for was professionalism in return.
He checked his icebreaker program. It was still registering full strength. NetWatch still had no idea he was even in the building.
Can you still make a clean getaway? he asked himself.
He knew he could truly never answer yes. Not today, at least.
Tick-tock. Seconds are slipping away. So's your advantage.
With a gruff noise, he palmed the lock to the next door and slipped inside.
The next room looked like a rendering of what someone imagined an office looked like. Cubicles. Console stands. Not a scrap of paper out of place or even an overturned paper cup of BlitzCarafe. The lights had been dimmed and the place was empty—everyone must have evac'd after the chaos from Arasaka Tower had spilled into the street. According to his intel, his target would have to remain on-site even in the event of full-blown evacuation. The captain who goes down with the ship.
The thin carpet masked Ramses' footsteps as he headed through the bureau, hands still pocketed. He quickhacked items as he walked, sending out a bevy of pings, his overlays picking up zero warm bodies on this floor. Cameras still watched his every move, but the lack of alarms that he could detect indicated that his microsoft was performing its job to the letter, continuously scrambling the feeds. Germans. He'd have to write a five-star review.
At the same time, he was in the camera system, which was wired to his left optic. He scrolled through the multitude of camera positions, finding nothing but empty conference rooms, break rooms with just droning fridges, and cubicles with no one in them.
Where the hell was this guy?
Just then, his optics blurred and derezzed for a split-second. Imperceptible to most people, except Ramses. He froze. He had the latest tech—it would not just malfunction like that. Not here, of all places.
Someone was trying to crack his deck. There was a presence in the LocalNET.
"Fuck," Ramses breathed. He stole into a shadowed corner and devoted his full attention to the coded rain of cyberspace.
His firewalls were registering attacks in nodes B26 and ZA-c9. Ramses bolstered those nodes and cycled the security on his ports, blocking out the intruding actions. NetWatch? Who else. Hard to tell if he tripped some alarm or if this was just a random netrunner viewing him a simply a wanderer at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The presence withdrew, held, then pounced on his subnet. They were trying to copy his root processes to gain access to his registry code. His own ICE was having a hell of a time just keeping up.
Damn, this guy is good.
Ramses walled off the infected area and forced the domain to separate, splinting the netrunner's hack away from its target. They would have to restart their efforts all over again.
As the presence cycled out, Ramses' own anti-program Black ICE modules sprung into action. They sent out several data spikes that latched onto the intruding code's own ident data, siphoning the information and sending it to Ramses' own databanks. The presence, its tentacles now ensnared by Ramses' trap, mustered a full logout retreat, which was only elongated as Ramses kept on devoting more and more RAM to his processes until the connection was finally severed on the other end.
Defense scans bolstered his own internal firewalls. Observation packets scanned any open ports, sensing for signs of further breaches. Everything came up empty.
He released a breath that he had been holding too long. That was too close. If he stayed any longer there were bound to be more attacks like that.
Still, his tech should have been enough to have warded off any netrunner for a good five minutes. He had invested thousands upon thousands of eddies to obtain the latest in military ICE. And this 'runner would have cracked it in less than a tenth of the predicted time. They must have been running some prototype equipment, wherever they were. Ramses could find no other explanation for how he had almost gotten caught with his pants down.
The summarization from the data he had stolen from his attacker flashed at the bottom corner of his HUD. An IP address, along with the registered duration of the hack. He smiled—the IP address would be his trophy. Any netrunner worth their salt would be completely ashamed to have been so thoroughly trounced in a bout like that, especially a NetWatch netrunner.
Ramses returned back to cycling through the various feeds and his overlays eventually settled on a red outline situated in a server room in the back corner of the floor. Looked like he was directly hooked up to NetWatch's data stores on his portable. He zoomed in the feed—Darren Kahl. His target, all right.
The stale air of the office absorbed his footfalls as he headed in the direction of the server room. Ramses noted the threadbare trappings—no posters, indoor plants, or other accoutrements to even attempt to give this place a lived-in feeling. Almost as if NetWatch expected that they would be forced to pack everything up on short notice and vanish, leaving no trace behind. The cold strobes from the outside windows filtered in like digital snow, casting his shadow in spasmodic flashes against the nearby wall.
He reached the door and slid it open. The server room was cold—fifty degrees. Had to be that way to keep the components from overheating. Mist clung to the floor, which glowed green or blue, depending on which bladestack was illuminating which hue at that time.
Ramses waited behind a shelf of databanks. He did not need to peer around the corner—his ping still illuminated Kahl's outline.
Now, he needed to make this next part simple. There were a number of ways he could go about this, but Ramses was always in favor of the less complicated path.
Kahl's back was directly situated towards one of the datastack screens. Ramses connected to it with a few haptic feedbacks and set a timer on it to overload. Five seconds later, the monitor frayed out with a fizzing noise before it suddenly belched a spray of sparks that caused the mist on the floor to glow with a golden heat.
The noise caused Kahl to whip around, distracted from whatever he had been doing on his own screen. "What the hell—?"
He did not get much further than that, because Ramses had walked around the opposite side of the stack, behind Kahl. The merc wrapped one arm across the man's neck, nestling the crook of his elbow against his target's windpipe. He gripped Kahl's jaw with his other hand, and gave a brutal yank with that arm. There was a snapping noise as the cartilage in Kahl's neck gave way. Thick and hollow, like medical-grade styrofoam being trod upon. Ramses let go and Kahl crumpled to the ground, his dead eyes staring at nothing, veiled by the mist.
Ramses waited for a moment, letting everything settle. The data servers continued to hum as though nothing had gone wrong, a serene white noise that flooded the room with its drone.
The thing about snapping necks is that the films portrayed it all wrong. A quick tug, perhaps, and it was over. A cheap special-effect, or just laziness. Reality was different. Ramses had learned the hard way that, no matter how far you needed to rotate your target's neck in order to break it, you needed to rotate it even farther. Sometimes they didn't even flatline right away. They would just be lying on the ground in some form of paralysis, twitching, maybe even foaming at the mouth, the nervous system not completely destroyed. Not as clean as one might think.
Fortunately, Kahl had expired bloodlessly. Not that it mattered to Ramses much. The contract did not specify that he had to make it appear that Kahl had died of the measles, but Ramses was not in the habit of leaving much evidence for the corpos or the NCPD to utilize. A snapped neck left little in the way of DNA, and with his full body armor, the cops would be lucky to pull even a scrap of usable genetic material.
But Ramses was not done in the server room just yet. Kahl was just half of the job. The other half concerned his console, which as luck would have it, he was still logged into, the screen patiently waiting for its next command.
That was the thing with NetWatch employees, they always airgapped their networks. Ramses would have preferred to hack in from the outside in order to steal the data, but the sad reality of NetWatch's adherence to good data governance meant that he had to actually be here in person to take what he had been hired to klep.
The merc withdrew his firebox, a little device that automatically parsed out inborne viruses on a network, jacked into the port of the device, and then jacked the firebox into the console. In less than a minute, Kahl's work files had been copied to a separate shard that Ramses had installed on his deck, the firebox having protected him from twenty-three separate automated attempts to take control of his system.
As far as he was concerned, both objectives had been completed to the letter. Time to delta the AO.
He headed back to the stairwell the way he came. Kahl's body would be discovered in the next few hours by the morning shift. Of course, they would have their suspicions, but without any evidence or motive, the trail would grow cold in a matter of hours.
Upon getting back to the stairwell, Ramses turned towards the door he just utilized and locked it again. Obfuscate the areas of infiltration. It was just good discipline.
A sound from the level above caused him to freeze. He looked to the left, up to the most immediate landing.
A woman dressed in a tight, white NetWatch dress clung to the railing, one of her hands covering her mouth in shock. An analyst, not an exec. Considering the fact that she had just watched a heavily armored man—not in uniform—emerge from a NetWatch office floor, there was little chance for misinterpretation with this encounter.
Ramses didn't think that he'd be able to convince this woman that he was part of the building's security. A shame.
The NetWatch analyst briefly looked up to the next landing, as if she was pondering an escape. Ramses made a point of slowly shaking his head to get her attention. He then withdrew one of his hands from his pockets and made a "come here" gesture with a finger.
The analyst already had designs on what this was going to entail. "Oh no…" she moaned, her knees wobbling. "No, no, please. You can't… I didn't—I'll say I didn't see anything—"
Ramses repeated the gesture again. With his other hand, he slowly reached inside his coat and came out with a heavily modified Constitutional Arms Unity pistol. He had swapped out the sides and grips for magnesium inserts, attached a laser module, and manufactured a custom silencer that could muffle even the sound of a .45 round. He did not point the pistol at the analyst but kept it at his side. A warning.
Now the analyst seemed to be on the verge of passing out as he eyes widened upon seeing the weapon. "Please don't… oh god. Oh god. Oh god help me…"
Though masked, Ramses' expression never changed. Everyone always seemed to think that this moment could not be happening to them, even when it was happening. They thought by trying to make their case to whatever savoir they could conjure in their heads that they would make it out alive. How many times had he heard this before?
To quiet the analyst's now-incoherent pleas, Ramses raised a finger to his vocabulator in the universal sign for "shut the fuck up." Once the woman had complied, he then swept his arm to the staircase below, indicating the route was open. The analyst stayed in place, uncomprehending. Ramses indicated the stairway again, his arm movements more direct and choppier to indicate his growing exasperation. Get out of here, was his signaled intention.
The analyst's face brightened, the fear chiseling away. "Oh, thank god," she whispered as she slowly made her way down the steps. Her feet were shaking, she had to look down to make sure she didn't misstep on any of the stairs.
She reached the landing, slowly moved past Ramses, her breathing short and quick, and began to walk down the next staircase. "Thank god. Thank god. Thank—"
As soon as the analyst had passed Ramses, he raised his arm, pointed the barrel of his pistol at the back of her head and fired.
The silenced pistol sounded like someone coughing into a pipe. A dark smear appeared on the cinderblock wall of the staircase. The analyst pitched forward, tumbled down the steps, and folded in a heap on the landing below, her neck at an awkward angle. A dark pool began to spread from her head underneath the buzzing of the cheap halogen lights.
Ramses stowed the pistol back into his hidden holster. The spent casing had rolled to a stop at his feet—he bent down and pocketed it. He headed down the steps and spared only a second's glance at the body. The woman was lying face down, completely motionless.
Everyone is an enemy. Even if they don't know it.
He left the body on the landing.
The sliding door to the underground garage rose up once again to allow Ramses to exfiltrate the premises. The cold air of Night City battered uselessly at his armor. The cops and corpo security were still casing the plaza, the roving band of red and blue lights creating a warring flame that the encircling buildings merely magnified.
His pistol was in hand, the silencer having been removed and pocketed. He worked the slide back, extracted the barrel, and dropped it into a nearby storm drain. He had acid-washed the barrel beforehand, so if discovered, there would be no serial numbers to identify the culprit weapon.
Upon getting back to ground level, Ramses took a cursory glance towards the front of the building he had just exited. No cop cars or unmarked vehicles were parked under the porte cochere.
Ramses did not relax. A perfect getaway did not exist. Even if things looked good on the surface, who knows what was lurking beneath?
He walked for a few blocks, just to put some distance between him and his AO. Once he was comfortable with how far he had traveled, he brought up the files he had copied from Faraday's deck. He accessed the list of his ex-fixer's most recent calls. Most of them were unidentified numbers. Typical. There was one particular number that Faraday had been in contact with on three separate occasions before his untimely demise, if the timestamps were correct. Ramses decided to take his chances—he copied the number to his own deck and initiated the call, which was visualized by his optics as an unrecognizable icon in the upper left corner of his vision.
The recipient picked up on the second ring. No digital avatar, no face. Silence for a couple of beats.
"You're not Faraday," a voice, the pitch digitally altered, filtered into Ramses' ears.
"If you were expecting him, you would inevitably find disappointment," Ramses replied, sotto tone.
"Flatlined, I take it?"
"Took the express way out of a high-rise."
"I see," the person said. They sounded unsurprised. "And your relation to him is…?"
Ramses was now at a crosswalk, waiting for the icon to shift. Dissolved once more into the sea of bodies around him. "You commissioned a contract in Corpo Plaza that Faraday accepted. I'm sure he mentioned that he would leave the honors to an 'interested party.' You can consider me that interested party."
"Let me guess. You want to close out the contract? Get your eddies in order?"
"Seeing as the contract was completed to the exact terms and conditions, that would be the least I could expect."
"No doubt. So, how would you like to proceed?"
He thought for a few seconds. Usually, whenever he was hired to perform a klep job, he would just take his repatriated items and put them in a dropbox for one of his fixer's hired hands to pick up. He never met the clients out of principle. The fixers usually filtered the raw emotions out, providing him with just enough details for him to do his job. It was best, that way. People were emotional creatures and, in Rames' experience, the clients for his contracts were not the best examples of pure objectiveness.
But seeing as his fixer now had a wider surface area than a human typically could survive, Ramses' professional network had dwindled. Without a middleman, there was only a direct route available.
"The item you want," Ramses said. "It's currently in my possession. Can't trust the delivery networks on this one. Face-to-face, that's how we conclude this. A place of my choosing."
The merc expected the client to negotiate with him on this. Everyone always angled for an advantage. Looked for a way to fuck someone over. It was just Night City biz. Nothing personal about it.
But, to his surprise, the client responded: "Where did you have in mind?"
Ramses knew just the place. "Afterlife. One hour. No retinue. No huscle."
"Two hours. My own biz takes priority. And I'll bring a plus one. Security—it's mandatory."
He sensed there would be no use in trying to prolong this any further. "Fine. But the huscle keeps their distance. I'll send you the details when I arrive."
Cutting the call, Ramses suppressed a shiver. Cold ice down his spine. As he called for a Delamain, he could not shake this feeling that he should have just walked away when he had the chance.
Everyone is an enemy. Everyone.
A/N: And there you have it—my introduction into the world of Cyberpunk 2077 fanfiction has commenced.
It's fair to say that the recent combination of Edgerunners and Phantom Liberty has stoked the interest of the video game (and the franchise as a whole) to levels of critical and audience acclaim to its highest points. Concrete Bushidō was an idea that took its roots from a recent playthrough of the game, one that I found myself enjoying quite immensely after all the QoL improvements, more than I had expected. And obviously, I found myself wanting to explore more of that universe, hence we come to where we are now.
So, what the hell is Concrete Bushidō supposed to be about, anyway?
Well, I'll try not to delve into spoiler territory, but to give you a sense of where my inspiration came from, I've always been fascinated with films that depict steeled, well-disciplined, professional assassins that are challenged from events that have resulted as a consequence of their actions (or inactions.) Think films like Drive, Leon: The Professional, The Killer, and Le Samouraï, to name a few examples.
The two visual depictions we've had of Night City thus far are of individuals who gradually become professionals/legends in their own right. I figured, why not start a story out where the protagonist is already a professional? Why not craft a plot about how even such a trained and patient killer is transformed and challenged by the violent megalopolis he inhabits?
I would love to reveal more, of course, but I'll let the story do the rest of the talking for me. I'm not promising updates on the regular. In fact, they may come at a rather slow pace, but rest assured that the entirety of the story has been outlined in full, including complete character arcs and other scenes that I'm itching to depict.
Oh, and along the way, you may encounter little superscripts like [1] placed within the story. As I like to have my stories paired with music/soundtracks for emotional effect, those superscripts mark the spots where anyone who is listening along should start the indicated tracks for the best effect. This is completely optional, though, and is not required for full enjoyment of the story (though it is recommended). You should be able to find most of the tagged songs either on YouTube or on Spotify.
With this first chapter, I'm looking forward to seeing what you all think of it. Constructive criticism is very much appreciated. I hope you enjoy Concrete Bushidō.
Playlist:
[1] Opening (Hosedown)
"Entrance"
woob
Lost Metropolis
[2] NetWatch Contract (Theme of the Solo)
"Cortex"
woob
Overrun Exe
THE CAST (so far):
MAIN_CAST:
Ramses: Night City merc. Solo. Unknown age. Unknown origin. Adept in: precision weapons, netrunning.
SUPPORTING_CAST:
[NO DATA AVAILABLE]