NIGHT_CITY

Faraday's eddie card had been one of the many hundreds of documents that Ramses had managed to scrounge from the dead fixer's cyberdeck, which meant the merc had no qualms about hailing for a Delamain cab on Faraday's dime, but not after purchasing the Excelsior package and gifting it to himself. Unlike most payment models, the Excelsior package lasted for the client's lifetime and included complete health coverage, a combat mode, and even corpse disposal in the fifty-fifty chance that the passenger was killed en route to their destination. He could consider this as recompense for Faraday's abysmal handling of the job. While it was admittedly bad form to use Faraday's card to fund such lavish purchases, Ramses' mood towards Faraday was only souring the more time went on. Besides, Faraday was dead, so fuck him. Might as well put his money to good use.

Ramses had barely waited two minutes before the modified Villefort Cortes cab had rolled up and had spirited him on his way. The Excelsior package was already paying off—it would normally take fifteen minutes for a Delamain to arrive to pick up its passengers.

Upon entering the cab, the Delamain AI, which took the form of a bald, gray-skinned man with blue lipstick and a posh British accent, booted up its avatar onto the seat screens and greeted Ramses as part of its standard round of introductions when dealing with new passengers. "Greetings, Excelsior Rider! Thank you for choosing—"

Ramses, however, pummeled the mute button into the console on the back of the driver's seat before the AI could finish its sentence. After a chaotic job, he just wanted some quiet. The AI's avatar seemed to shoot him a glare of disapproving, but thankfully it stayed silent.

It was nearly a straight shot from City Center to Little China, where Afterlife was, but Ramses was intent on killing some time before meeting with his mystery client. [1]

"Japantown," he told the Delamain. "Avoid the main roads."

By his calculation, it would take ten minutes to get there, traffic permitting. The Delamain did as it was told and proceeded at a brisk pace throughout the city. Ramses kept his head on a swivel, never completely relaxing as he looked in all directions, watching if there were any cars that were following or had taken pursuit on parallel roads.

The skyscraper fortresses that blocked the night sky and the stars slowly filtered out as the Delamain headed into Westbrook. Gone were the endless labyrinths of megabuildings, skywalks, tram lines, highway overpasses, bars and clubs of every shape and size. Lights slid across the hood of the cab with every tunnel they traveled through. Pedestrians crowded every sidewalk, shimmering from the rain beading on their plastic clothes. Neon and chrome flared together in an ugly burn, a collection of signages and advertisements, each one vying for attention but never quite grasping it. Off in the distance, the pale flares from the gas refineries, an artificial sunrise.

Ramses kept silent until they had passed the subdistrict border. "Pull over here."

The Delamain complied and it pulled up to the curb in front of a noodle shop—an outline of a naked woman had been plastered to the front glass of the establishment, which was lit from within by a ghastly mint-green light. Ramses got the notification of Faraday's card being charged for the trip. You'd do it to me if our positions were switched.

He waited until the cab pulled away before he walked down the alley that divided two buildings. The walls here were coated with several layers of graffiti that the symbolic colors had lost all meaning. Trash piled up at the sides of the alley, decayed so long that it had lost its stink.

Just around the corner, a couple of homeless were hovering their hands over a fire they had lit in a trashcan. Ramses passed them by, ignoring them, and they, in turn, ignored him. Night City hierarchy—never waste time on biz that wasn't yours.

The alley led to an underground garage, much like the one he had just infiltrated over at the NetWatch megabuilding. He walked down a series of scuffed and poorly lit steps, stepping over puddles which reflected the piping and infrastructure above. He was shrouded in darkness now, his natural environment, and headed over to a series of garage doors, each of them FOB-locked. Ramses made for the closest one and sent his ident credentials to the FOB. It opened, revealing a sleek Herrera Outlaw GTS car within, storm cloud gray with heavily tinted windows.

Ramses opened the door to the car and settled in. He had cars stashed all over Night City, each one replete with a rotating license plate feature and a full arsenal in the trunk. The Outlaw was stock, imported from Spain, but with 755 horsepower, it could easily get up to 180 miles an hour in a hurry. It did not exactly convey the image of someone who was trying to lay low, but no one could really hide in Night City. This was a place where everyone was trying to make a name for themselves. If they truly wanted to hide, they were in the wrong city.

Ramses knew he would blend in just fine.

He drove the car out from its little hold, closed the storage door behind him, and then headed out of the concrete structure and back out into the spilling madness of Night City's road network. Ramses gripped the wheel with two hands, multiple cameras around the car linking to the feeds in his helmet, presenting the world in a compound and fragmented format.

The Outlaw may have been one of the fastest cars on the road, but Ramses drove the speed limit. He did not need the extra attention. The car got enough already, particularly because it was one of the most stolen types of cars in the city. Thieves could make bank on scrapping an Outlaw, particularly as the car was hand-built and made with high-quality materials. Ramses had accounted for this by taking the trouble to rig all of his cars with anti-theft measures. Even so much as jostle one of his cars incorrectly without him standing next to it and a whole load of trouble could ensue. It was not an uncommon sight for Ramses to park his car for biz and come back, only to find out some poor bastard sprawled out dead next to it, having tried to break in only to get electrocuted, shot, or flambeed from the multitude of the car's countermeasures that it had at its disposal.

Ramses made sure to never drive on the same road for more than a mile. He used side streets, sat in traffic, jumped onto the highway for a spell, and finally crossed the bridge and took the Little China exit.

The ring road that bordered the river was not crowded at this time of night. It was just at that point where the hangovers of the habitues were starting to take hold. Through the dash, Ramses could see several patrons huddle near street vendors, desperate for victuals that could absorb all of the alcohol in their stomachs. They would go through the same lifecycle the next day, then the next, then the one after that until Night City would inevitably have no use for them anymore, the city carrying its own acidic bite that carved through flesh and chrome.

He passed by a favela with wet tin roofs that dripped bilgewater. Underneath a massive drainage tube, Ramses pulled into a driveway that had tunneled through a building, exited out the other side and parked in a narrow courtyard. After arming the Outlaw's countermeasures, Ramses extricated himself from the car.

He was an hour early, as intended. Ramses hated to be the last one to a gathering—he was also patient enough that he could sit at the bar for another hour and do nothing but wait.

Just off of the main pedestrian pathway to his left, a gap in the building allowed a glimpse of the traffic passing by in the distance past a set of scratched columns. In front of him, a set of double doors. Ramses headed in that direction.

Afterlife had no signage. Not out in the open, at least. A dark stairwell beckoned just past the doors—half-drunk patrons sat on the steps, head between their legs as they tried to groan away the damaging throb of liquor. Ramses had to step around them. The walls at the landing below were covered in vandalized band posters—the merc recognized none of them.

Automated doors to his immediate right hissed open, revealing another staircase, this one about half as long as the other one. Now the bold graphic for Afterlife could display itself in its thin green neon coloration just above the partition that separated the antechamber from the next area ahead. Ramses headed underneath the glowing sign, noting the exposed infrastructure peeking out from the crumbling façade on the sides of the hall.

Bronson, the bouncer, was on call tonight. Even though he was a member of the Animals, Afterlife was where he made his living. No doubt it was providing him with a longer life expectancy. Though his constant ingestion of creatine certainly was not doing his heart any favors.

Ramses approached the towering man, who had cybernetic inserts in the bridge of his nose and beneath his cheekbones. Bronson glanced at Ramses and stepped aside—the merc was a known quantity at Afterlife. Not just anyone could enter the bar. One needed to have some street cred, not a whole lot, but enough to indicate to the city that they were serious about engaging in Night City's true business, the sort of business that didn't require filling out a 1099 form every year.

"Interesting company tonight," Bronson told Ramses as he passed by.

"VIPs?" Ramses asked.

Bronson looked away, telling a story with his eyes. Nervous. It took a lot to unnerve an Animal. "More or less. Your party?"

Somehow, Ramses figured that was the case. He scowled. Already his client was playing tricks on him. Two-hour window, yeah right. Even though Ramses had taken every precaution to get here first, somehow he had been beaten to the punch. That was annoying.

He nodded. "Where?"

"Corner room," Bronson pointed to Ramses' left. "You'll know once you get there."

Muttering a grunt as thanks, Ramses shouldered his way into the bar and was met with a scourge of acid green and ice blue neon.

Swirling electronic pulsebeats pumped through the air. Nothing that one could dance to—Afterlife was not that type of club. It exuded pure atmosphere, the kind that tended to compliment business. It was a place for mercs to talk shop, get paid, and take a load off. If they wanted entertainment, there was a strip club just down the road.

The first Afterlife club had been established in a former mortuary, but the many wars and instabilities over the decades had forced its move and closure several times. The first time that it had been rebuilt was over in the Upper Marina back in 2045, but as the years went by, and the clientele grew larger and larger, it became apparent that another relocation was imminent, if not required. And this came to be, once Rogue Amendiares got her hands on the place, along with the rights to the Afterlife name. She had scoped out yet another abandoned morgue, this one in the wealthier area of Watson, and had moved the bar there. Better foot traffic here, plus greater access to patrons that had more eddies in their pockets.

Ask anyone in Night City and they would say that Rogue was the best fixer around, perhaps in all the Californian states. Once part of the rockerboy Johnny Silverhand's gang, Rogue was the fixer who gave out the best jobs to the mercs in the city. People came from all over just to catch a glimpse of her. She was well respected because of the widespread network she had cultivated, not to mention that she had a more pleasant attitude than most fixers. All biz, little in the way of pontification. Being a straight shooter guaranteed a loyal fanbase, evidentially. That, and the big payouts from the loaded clients that Rogue courted.

As Ramses walked in, he could see Rogue over at the opposite end of the bar, talking with a heavyset black man with dreds. Dexter DeShawn. Another fixer who talked a big game, but in Ramses' opinion, was more hot air than muscle. Another Faraday in the making, he expected. A fixer who would burn his own network in order to save his skin. Ramses avoided jobs from Dexter from this gut feeling, but knew someone was going to make a mistake eventually with that man.

He walked through the bar, armored boots tramping over exposed deckwork, slow moving industrial fans failing to dissipate the alcohol fog that absorbed the colored light that twinkled like some deepspace nebula. Labeled blue barrels of brew had been stacked in the corner. Clear plastic sheeting draped over an unfinished wall near the entrance. Placed invariably around the bar were giant tubes filled with liquid—dancers in bodysuits swayed in an uneven rhythm within these tanks, bubbles searing from the breathing masks that fastened around their faces, hair swirling everywhere.

Parallel to the bar counter, more strips of neon lights. The stools that dotted around the place had been stolen from a diner. Claire, the bartender, was cleaning glasses on the other side. Behind her were the rectangular fridges that kept the liquor, which had once been used to store cadavers. Yellow and black "DO NOT CROSS" tape plastered unevenly across the freezers, giving a ramshackle look to the whole affair.

Ramses headed in the direction that Bronson had indicated and rounded a corner. Soon enough, he realized why the bouncer had seemed more frazzled than usual.

Standing in front of one of the private rooms was a towering cyborg, nearly three and a half meters high, so tall that it had to hunch down in order to prevent its head from scraping the ceiling. Scored black and yellow paint job. Three-toed feet with massive servos. A platoon's worth of weaponry strapped to its arms, back, and even torso—enough to level an entire megabuilding. The head was a thin, flat contraption from which a singular crimson beam exuded like the heart of a volcano. No way that thing had taken the stairs down here.

Ramses had only seen such full-body conversions in the trades. An Arasaka DaiOni. A Mark III, if he was not mistaken. Something like that could take on every merc in the city and still come out on top.

Quickly, he scanned the DaiOni. His sensors were telling him that the creature was 18% organic. There was a body in the beast, but perhaps not a complete body. At the very least, this was not one of those demon machines that was run on a brain in a jar. Someone had to vie for this conversion. Someone who had very little use for their flesh body.

Ramses consulted his scan again. The DaiOni's handle flashed on top of the cyborg. "Rzhevsky," it read.

Sensing company, the head of the DaiOni swiveled in Ramses' direction, a mechanical zipping sound. It made a grinding step towards the merc, who stood his ground.

"You arrived early," Rzhevsky growled. It was a deep voice, female, tinged with the grizzled tones of an Estonian accent and the copper grind of a military-grade vocabulator.

Ramses kept his hands in his pockets, knowing that Rzhevsky could turn him into a scorch mark on the ground in an instant if she so chose. "Could say the same for your boss. Appears neither of us like to wait on anyone else."

Rzhevsky's flat head nodded once. More like a sharp cutting motion. With footfalls that shook the floor, the cyborg stepped to the side, revealing the door that she had been blocking.

"Inside. Don't try anything," Rzhevsky warned, the artificial voice coming out with a static undertone. "At least, anything that necessitates me becoming… unpleasant."

The merc just looked up at the cyborg, absorbing the threat. He then looked away and palmed the grip to the door, heading inside.

She was sitting facing the door on the U-shaped booth, one leg crossed over the other. A golden silk dress that parted down the middle, revealing a pale V of flesh that ended just above her navel—Ramses figured the dress cost as much as his armor. Cybernetic inserts along her chest, as well as a prosthetic left hand which was made with RealFlesh. Gold bracelets, rings, and a necklace. The lady had a preference.

The door shut behind him. Ramses walked next to the square coffee table that the booth ringed around, which had a thick glass insert to support patrons standing on it. He just stood there, looking at the woman.

She looked up at him, extinguishing a cigarette that she had nearly been finished with smoking. At this distance, he could see that her skin was flawless. Her eyes were the color of ocean ice, her lips burgundy with sparse copper accents. She had dyed her hair royal blue, shaved it at the sides and done it up at the top like a rockerboy's quaff.

Sweeping an arm to indicate the U-shaped sofa she was reclining upon, she never took her eyes from Ramses. "You can sit," she said in Japanese so perfect that Ramses almost pegged her for a native, were it not for the slight accent.

Ramses stood still for a moment before he took the woman up on the offer. He glanced towards the door, as though he still had a chance to escape, before he slowly made his way over to the couch and lowered himself upon it, his jacket making a creaking noise from his movements.

The woman spread out her arms upon the sofa, her expression unreadable. "Do you know who I am?"

Ramses supplied a slow, singular nod.

Eyebrows raising in anticipation, the woman made a slight motion with her head. "So," she continued in Japanese, "you don't do this often, I understand. But I had imagined that a man as cautious as yourself would have questions."

"Anyone would have questions when talking to a member of the Arasaka board," Ramses responded in Japanese, which resulted in the woman lifting her chin, impressed. "Much less a member of the family. Especially in Afterlife, where corpos… aren't all that tolerated."

A cold smile lifted the edges of the woman's mouth. She straightened, as though to extend her hand to shake, but kept her hand on her lap the whole time.

"Michiko Arasaka," she said by way of announcement. Now speaking in English, no accent this time, she said, "You are Ramses. Ramses Vogel. Street merc. Solo. Sometimes goes by 'Pharaoh', yet that was a name you never chose."

Ramses also switched back to English. "Streetnames are like callsigns. The bearer doesn't get to decide what people call them." He leaned forward, resting his armored forearms upon his knees. "I wasn't aware Arasaka had a dossier on me."

"I have a side job," Michiko said. "I make it my business to know everything about everyone worth knowing in this city."

"And I suppose I count among those lucky few?"

That hard smile never left. "I never said it was a 'few.'"

Michiko carried with her the same type of self-assuredness that Ramses had only encountered in those with enough capital to buy their way out of the Night City grime. He knew more than the next person about who Michiko was, but her name could still ring familiarity with even the dullest of Scavs.

Of the entire Arasaka clan, Michiko was the one whose public and private life did not completely coincide with the megacorp's existence. She was a regular presence for the televised board meetings, yes, but she always seemed aloof to the corp's dealings, as if she felt that she was meant for something greater.

In a way, she was. Michiko had been born in Night City nearly seventy years ago and had been sheltered from her extended family for her own protection, thus insulating her from the blowback Arasaka had suffered as a result of the Fourth Corporate War's aftermath. This was only known because Michiko had made a televised deposition in DC to plead her case for staying in America, given that she was an American citizen, while the rest of the Arasaka family had been forced out of the United States as punishment for being instigators of the war.

After graduating from Stanford with a degree in criminology, Michiko had become a private detective for rich bastards. She was soon considered a socialite, given that she was a constant staple at the biggest state dinners and galas across the country. Apparently, she had even been seen with Adam Smasher, of all people, on more than one occasion, and not just as a bodyguard. Of course, that had been when Smasher had a habit of using cyberbodies that more realistically resembled actual people and not a junkyard explosion with a decaying mask plastered over it.

Smasher had also been using a soft American Southern accent back then, if rumors could be believed. Everyone had their phases.

Glamorous as her outside life portrayed, Ramses suspected that Michiko's socialite/PI role was nothing but that, a role. There had been quite a few tales passed over rounds of drinks in Afterlife that had detailed someone with Michiko's appearance helping them take down Arasaka operations, and even assisting them during the Night City Holocaust. Michiko held a grudge against the family that had threatened her upbringing, perhaps?

It seemed that she had either gotten over it, considering she was now an Arasaka board member, or she was in deep cover to blow Arasaka up from the inside, or that these were all crap rumors and that Ramses was a fool for taking any of them with a grain of salt.

The corner of Michiko's mouth twitched. She reached for a glass she had set on the table before Ramses had entered. She took a sip and held the glass in her hands.

"You know, I was slightly surprised to receive the call from you tonight. Faraday had given me the impression that he was a careful man."

Ramses tipped his head, knowing that Michiko couldn't read his face behind his mask. "This was your first time working with him, wasn't it?"

Now Michiko laughed. "And here I thought I had been so well-informed." She knocked back the rest of her drink and set the glass back down on the table. "Tell me, how did he die?"

Shrugging, Ramses said, "Something tells me you already know."

"Maybe he wasn't important enough for me to surveil completely."

"That may be the truth, but seeing that he died on the premises of your company tonight, I would expect that you had been informed minutes after it had happened."

Perhaps the death of one fixer's tumble from the roof would not have warranted the board's notice—suicides happened from Arasaka Tower three times a week, after all. There were permanent stains on the concrete from the frequent jumpers. But the clash between Smasher and the cyberskeleton, not to mention the devastation to Corpo Plaza would have caused Faraday's unfortunate death to be lumped into the menagerie of carnage that had scarred the city tonight. If Michiko was going to claim ignorance, it would only make her look like an idiot.

Michiko smiled again and folded her hands on her lap, having realized this fact. "When you look at me, you see nothing but a corporation, don't you? When you hear my name, all you can think about are the atrocities my family committed."

She was trying to bait him, but Ramses' pulse didn't even raise by a digit.

"If you want judgment," he said, "stand in front of a judge. Or by someone holding a gun to your head. If you want a job done, you hire a merc. That simple."

"I can tell you don't trust me."

"I don't trust anyone. In that regard, Ms. Arasaka, you're not special."

Before she could respond, Ramses reached up and removed the shard that occupied one of the slots in his helmet. He gently set it upon the table with a clicking sound and slid it over to Michiko.

The corpo reached for the shard. "The DB was copied in full?"

"To the last kilobyte."

She lifted the shard, turned it in the light, and held it in her palm, as if she had been expecting it to weigh more with proportion to its importance.

Michiko narrowed her eyes at the merc. Suspicion. "Did you look at its contents?"

"No," he answered immediately.

"Why not?"

He tried to not let indignance color his next response. "Because that wasn't the job."

A patient mind tended to last longer on the streets. Wannabe mercs that jumped for the fastest and loosest jobs ended up reaping the rewards of such flimsy contracts. Ramses had observed that by being selective, quiet, and above all else, apathetic to everything but the work, resulted in a clear head and sharper focus. To even consider snooping around the dealings of his clients was… unfathomable. It was almost like trying to reconcil = 2 in his head. Nothing but a big, fat error. Untranslatable.

Still, he was human after all, and the human part of him did have questions with regards to his current circumstance. He was just savvy enough to keep them to himself.

But there was certainly more to this story with an Arasaka family member organizing a hit on a NetWatch employee. Ramses knew that the two corporations were not exactly friendly with one another, but neither had they ever engaged in open warfare between each other. Was Michiko's job part of a larger scheme, or simply personal? He doubted it was the latter—the coincidences kept racking up, which he didn't like. Was that why Michiko had hired outside the organization? To divert responsibility away from Arasaka as a pretext to something bigger?

Michiko now studied Ramses closer, as if she was trying to read all the warning labels upon his armor. She spun the shard between her fingers before it disappeared into a sleeve. Sleight of hand. Then, she reached in her pocket and withdrew a shard of her own. She set it upon the table, much like Ramses had done. He reached over and picked it up with armored fingers and slotted the shard into his firebox. The shard contained a wire access number to an account with a hundred thousand eddies in it. Payment for a job well done.

The corpo watched as Ramses initiated the transfer, only her eyes moving as she studied the merc's movements as he withdrew the shard from the firebox and stamped on it with a heel, ensuring no one else could read it. "No doubt you're trying to figure out why I hired you," she said, as if she could read Ramses' mind. "Or rather, why I hired Faraday. Or are you really that incurious about your predicament?"

"Information isn't always power," he shrugged.

"Spoken like a man who's never tasted what actual power brings," Michiko smirked. "I won't pretend to empathize, but take my word for it, there is a limit to when it all flips in your favor."

"If that's true, then I haven't hit that limit yet. I can't pretend to put myself in that position."

"You're angry at me."

Ramses shook his head. Technically the truth.

"Angry at the job, then."

The helmeted merc gave a curt nod.

"Complications, I take it? A dumb question, as you and I are here instead of remaining blissfully ignorant of one another."

"Mistakes in the brief," Ramses hissed, allowing the fingers of his left hand to slightly curl, as if he meant to strike the nearby wall.

This seemed to amuse Michiko and she lit another cigarette. "Faraday did strike me as a man who was more interested in playing the political game than anything else."

"To the detriment of his job," Ramses emphasized. He straightened upon the couch. "A fixer is supposed to cover all the angles. Value pieces of intel were left out—pieces that could have assisted me in completing the job without improvisation."

"If you're talking about the omission of the NetWatch angle, that was actually my call," Michiko raised an eyebrow, as though she were daring Ramses to keep talking. "I wanted no risk in making the connection between my family company and my own dealings."

Ramses shook his head again. "That isn't your call to make. That's not how biz is done surface-level. The merc gets all the intel pertinent to them so that they can carry out the job without incident. Everything else is superfluous. When word gets out of a client withholding info, fixers tend to refuse their calls in the future. Despite the short life expectancy, everyone tries to not get killed in this city."

"Then it's only fortuitous that the one fixer I interacted with is no longer breathing. Or has much of a solid form."

There was a moment where Ramses felt that he should not bother with giving Michiko the benefit of the doubt, especially since she might have technically threatened him just now. But, for whatever reason, he decided to hold his tongue.

"Screw-ups on both ends, then." The merc stood and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Regardless of the NetWatch connection, Faraday had assured that the tower's personnel and adversarial element had been checked in triplicate. More inaccuracies. This withholding also your doing?"

"Depends," Michiko smoked. She exhaled a thin stream of exhaust. "What did you encounter?"

"A netrunner."

The Arasaka corpo laughed, the kind of laugh that started light before sliding down to a deeper rasp.

"It's NetWatch," she held up her hands, as if she was still trying to conceive of the question. "What were you expecting? Do you know how many netrunners they have on staff?"

"Not to the degree that I came across," Ramses spoke evenly, though his teeth were clenching between every other word. "I was running the latest in military ICE. Most intrusions would take an hour to breach that kind of layer. But this one… they would have sawed through it in less than five minutes had I not gotten inventive. So, either NetWatch had gotten themselves the most cutting-edge blacktech, or they had a bona fide on security for that night. Neither of which occupied even a footnote in the brief that I was provided."

He sensed a sudden burst of tension in Michiko. The woman leaned forward, her cigarette only half-burnt, and stubbed this one out on the table, ignoring the ashtray. "I wouldn't have been able to get that deep into NetWatch's capabilities."

"That was my assumption. But it was Faraday's responsibility, nonetheless. Seemed he was more preoccupied with an imagined coronation over at your family's crown jewel rather than concern himself to the goings on of the people that gave him his rep in the first place. Information may not always be power, but it's better to have too much than too little. And that, Arasaka, is where I'll leave you with for tonight."

He turned to depart the room, but Michiko still wished to have the final say.

"Different than what you'd expected, merc? You may have only come here tonight to get paid, but you're not wondering why I agreed to meet you face-to-face?"

"Bored and looking for a conversation?"

Michiko smiled and dipped her head, looking at her alligator-scaled shoes before taking Ramses in her full attention once more.

"Sometimes… I just need to know what's out there. Beyond the high-rises. Who knows? You and I may even continue to do business in the future."

"Corpo isn't a lifepath I'm interested in," Ramses grunted. He glanced over his shoulder. "I'm not about to involve myself in whatever pissing match your family is interested in exerting with another corporation. That's not the work I do."

That did not seem to disappoint Michiko. "And… if I had just standard business for you in mind? No corpo-work. Just good biz."

Ramses considered the offer. He glanced down at the ground before raising his head, a lime-green starburst scrying around the edge of his helmet. "Get in touch with a fixer, then. How you find another one is your business. Because the second I leave Afterlife, I'm deactivating my number. I don't talk with clients—this is the one exception."

Michiko grinned, showing perfect teeth. "You'll make another exception, merc. I'm anticipating that."

He could feel the steel glare emanating from Rzhevsky boring into his back upon leaving the private room. He ignored the gigantic DaiOni and headed for the exit, blood thundering in his temples. Fucking Arasaka—what were they up to?

Most of the patrons in Afterlife had filtered out by now or had passed out in their seats from fatigue or drink. Rogue was still in her own private booth, nursing a mug of something steaming.

Claire was arranging glasses on the bar counter, a dirty dishrag slung over a shoulder. She saw Ramses and smiled.

"Hey, Ramses."

"Claire," the merc tipped his head in greetings.

It was hard not to like Claire. Her memory for patrons was exceptional—she could name all the regulars that came to Afterlife, plus the entirety of their drink orders in the past week. She also had not a sliver of cyberware in her body, a choice that Ramses ultimately respected. In this chrome-addicted world, to choose to not play the game showcased the ones who had stronger wills than most.

"Closing down?" he asked.

"Yeah, took longer than usual," she wiped her brow. "Had some expats from SoCal come in late—think they were taking a long weekend to go out shooting. They drank nearly all the mezcal I had, even the scop-sludge, so they're helping to keep this place alive."

Ramses smiled, though no one would ever know it. "Financial solvency. We should all be so lucky. Good luck at the race tomorrow."

"Thanks!" Claire beamed. "Championship's in a couple of weeks. I'll bring the rig by so that the influencer-heads can take their pics." In addition to bartending, Claire was a gearhead that frequently participated in streetracing with her husband, though this was a side-gig that she only let a few people in on. "Oh, we have a new drink on the menu now."

"You work fast. This for that cyberpsycho at Arasaka Tower?"

Claire put a hand on her hip and stared at Ramses almost disapprovingly. "He wasn't psycho. 'Least as far as I was told. He was a good kid, too. Had a good crew and everything. Even stood toe to toe with Adam Smasher. For a few minutes, that is."

Truthfully, Ramses felt that anyone dumb enough to try to mount an assault on Arasaka property should be disqualified from having a drink named after them in Afterlife. But he had to admit he was not privy to the details, so he could only assume up to a certain point. In any case, he had no say in how Afterlife laid down its rules. Only legends got to have drinks named after them here, and you could only become a legend in Night City if you died.

Ramses had no designs on becoming a legend.

"What's in the drink?" he asked.

"Ah, just a simple variation. Vodka on the rocks with a layer of NiCola. A drink for a merc who never forgot where he came from. The 'David Martinez.'"

He pushed himself away from the counter. "Already know it'll sell better than the 'Silverhand Special.' Spice in a cocktail is certainly a choice. Anyway, I'm off. Take care of yourself, Claire."

"You as well, Pharoah."

When he emerged from the depths of the building's basement, Ramses headed over to where he had parked his Outlaw. Judging from the fact that a blood splatter was on the ground next to the driver-side door, along with pieces of flesh that looked like fingers, someone had tried to nick the car while he had been inside. Failed, obviously, as his anti-theft measures had done their due measure in deterrence.

Without missing a beat, he quickly slid inside the car, started it up, drove it out into traffic, and headed for the bridge. And home. [2]

It took him twenty minutes to reach his destination. Only two delays due to firefights in the streets between the gangs and the cops, which caused bumper-to-bumper backups in all directions. All in all, an average commute. Ramses just stayed in the queue, content where he was. Some other drivers were considerably more antsy—one got so fed up with going nowhere that they yanked the wheel to their car, jumped the curb, and started accelerating so fast that they clipped the hip of a cop that had stepped out from behind a supporting tunnel column, spinning him around and breaking bones. The cop's fellows had immediately trained their weapons on the departing driver and opened fire—the back windshield frosted over and then shattered, followed by the driver's head slumping over, the interior splattered with blood.

Ramses, having watched the scene, just tapped his fingers on his steering wheel. There was a time and a place to hurry for such thing. This was neither of them.

When he finally did reach Charter Hill, he drove across the wide avenues between the megabuildings and the formidable towers of apartments that remained entrenched in their simplistic brutality.

The tower that Ramses lived in was the second-tallest in the district, right across from the Kiroshi building. It was a safe neighborhood, at least safe as far as Night City was concerned. Most of his neighbors were corpos, anyway. Not execs or anyone of import, but mid-level managers that had put some distance between the lowly analysts and the menial drones that did all the data entry work. Quiet neighbors, at least. Ramses appreciated that very much.

He drove down the slope that led to the underground garage—scanners grabbed his ident code and the door quickly slid upward to allow him admittance. The garage was never more than half-full and always well-maintained. Not even a scrap of rubbish had collected in any of the corners. Ramses chose a parking spot near the elevator bay and exited the vehicle.

Unlike earlier this night, Ramses had no problem with getting into the elevator for his own apartment. He could afford to let his guard down somewhat in the building where he lived.

The elevator deposited him on the thirty-sixth floor. The resulting hallway was thinly carpeted, with wall-mounted lamps that were fabricated to look like cylindrical candelabra. Unlike the tower-apartments over in Watson, there were no avenues or shops for residents to mill about it. The area was completely silent.

Ramses walked down the corridor until he came to apartment 3604. Thin blue beams speared out from where the doorbell was—another scan. The door clicked open and Ramses stepped through the partition, letting the silence ring supreme as the threshold closed shut behind him.

The apartment was two stories, luxurious for anyone in Night City. High black walls and dark-tinted windows (to protect from snipers) offering an unobstructed view of City Center. Charwood paneling in the floors. Lamps exuding golden cones of light. Up the staircase, an entresol where Ramses slept during the day. He had been at this game long enough to have been able to afford this location—he very much wished to forget the hovels he had been resting his head within before coming here in the first place.

Echoes traversed wetly upon the expanse of the loft, courtesy of the unusual lack of furniture. It had all of the usual trappings—low couch and coffee table combination atop a rectangular and vaguely patterened rug, a vidset mounted into the wall, and even a dining table, but there were no decorative items like credenzas, vases, or even mounted paintings to even provide a hint of individuality in this location. Ramses truly had no use for such frivolous materials—the only reason he had furniture in here at all was his own attempt at mimicking a normal household. In his mind, these appliances and property were window dressing, used only to sustain whatever mental picture he had of what kind of life would be left to him once he hung up his merc days for good. In fact, he had spent little time deciding which pieces should occupy his property; he had picked the items out at random from a catalog, going for the ones that he hated the least.

One of the doors on the first floor led to an armory, which Ramses had soundproofed with thick stalactites of foam that splintered from the bare space on the walls. Guns of all shapes and sizes hung from wall-mounted racks. Stacks of ammo crates upon the floor in every caliber imaginable. A locker in the back contained mannequins dressed with two identical copies of the armor he wore. In the wardrobe, a variety of trench coats in a sea of dark colors. Over in the corner, a netrunner's suite had been installed, whereupon a halo of monitors and life support systems ringed around the chair, wires and cables spilling from the technological contraption like vines.

The entire apartment was completely wired with tech and cameras, but no lens centered upon this room. It was the only place that Ramses could be truly alone, lost in his thoughts. He slowly drew his weapons from his holsters and placed them upon the empty mountings in the room, making sure to apply the safeties before he set them aside.

The doorbell chimed and Ramses nearly reached for a machinepistol that he had been modifying on the counter. But upon accessing his apartment's network and booting up a small surveillance square in the corner of his HUD, he merely saw one of the apartment's staff walking away down the hall, a thin plastic bag laying before his door. The scanning software in the door was reporting that the bag's contents were comprised of all edible foodstuffs. There wasn't a bomb in it, if that is what he had been fearing.

He relaxed and walked back to the door. The merc quickly opened it, grabbed the bag, and shut it in the span of two seconds. Ramses had ordered his dinner—or was it breakfast?—on the drive back and it only must have arrived just now. He hardly ever cooked for himself; all his meals were delivered by the apartment's staff, which was a feature that came with the building. Security and discretion.

He brought the food back to the armory, closed the door shut, and inspected the contents. Sushi—raw tuna and rice. It was not real tuna, but SCOP. Ground-up worms grown just fifteen miles down the road in Biotechnica Flats. The only people that could get meat straight off of a slaughtered animal were the ones who lived in the penthouses. Corpos with more money than sense.

Ramses' helmet had a function that could disconnect its jaw wide enough to allow him to eat without removing it, but there was no one watching him in here. The helmet had a multi-step process to remove it, starting with the disengaging of four separate locks in the cowl, the disconnecting of the life support systems, and finally the electronic passcode that deactivated the final lock. With a snapping sound of tubes flapping upon his jacket, Ramses lifted the helmet off his head and set it down on the nearby counter. He then grabbed for a plastic set of chopsticks and dug into his food quickly.

When he finally emerged from the armory after disposing of the plastic waste, Ramses had reapplied his helmet once more, a faceless John Doe.

He walked up to the tinted windows, which were so dark he could easily see the twin yellow slits of his helmet's optics, and looked upon the city below him. [3] He folded his hands at his back, just observing the prismatic gleam of the buildings, the towers of holo-advertisements that rose several miles into the air, and the neverending throb of light from the constant, constant movement of the inhabitants below, because in Night City, biz always equated with hustling. To stop, even for a moment, was to perish among the fumes of the lethargic.

Night City was different than the others that Ramses had visited. Lacking the orderly sheen of the Sprawl, and the fast tech pace of Chiba City, the largest metropolis on the West Coast had the ability to inspire and intimidate. Business on multiple levels, where the few could rise above the many in greater excess. Crime here was excessive—almost double the NUSA average—which was why the fixers had immigrated to Night City in droves. For there was no greater place to leave a body out in the open. What was one dead criminal in the street compared to the millions that ambled around every night?

Ramses also admired the boldness of how corpotized the city had become. Advertisements for the latest in cybernetics in the poorest neighborhoods so that broke bastards would take out payday loans to get chromed up. Endless shuffles of commercials for virtual sex via BDs instead of completing the human biological process naturally. Placards showcasing mouthwatering food even though most people here would never get a chance to eat real meat in their life. But what could one expect in a city whose backbone was funded, in sum total, by corporations?

He didn't know where this was all leading to. If someone had asked him to draw a predicted map of his life five years ago, it would have ended up in a different direction than where he was now. It was a toss-up to determine whether he was in a better or worse place.

Too much uncertainty. A life constantly in turmoil. It aggravated Ramses, gave him pause, to know that he would never be in complete control of his destiny.

No clean getaways. It was his duty to remind himself of that fact. And to constantly try to break that rule.

For what else was he doing all of this for, if not to find that opening to cleanly break off from… everything?

The trick was to not fall into the trap of getting complacent. Taking on more deals like the one he had accepted tonight would only lead to ruination. A patient merc was an alive merc. It was one thing to have a rep of performing any type of job—it was another matter of coming back from those jobs in one piece.

That had nearly cost him tonight. That netrunner had taken advantage in a slip in the brief and he had almost paid the price. Fucking Faraday. He was lucky he was dead so that Ramses would not have been able to garrote him.

He grunted aloud. His frustrations were boiling over. Distracting him. Revenge was a distraction. Only the job should matter. Think to other things.

Except… he could not.

From a tiny inclination, he booted up the IP address he had stolen from the netrunner that had attacked him. He didn't recognize the notation of the first several digits. Most IANA4 protocols started with a 194. This one started with a 201. A Unique Local Address? Burrowing down into the metadata revealed a routing prefix of cb009::/5. He could find no comparable data in his lookup systems, so wherever this netrunner was, they were housed on a private network.

At this point, Ramses convinced himself that he was doing this to sate his own curiosity. He loaded up his IP tracker—a Chinese program—and input the parameters of the protocol he had uncovered into the tool. Most IP trackers were legal in Night City. This one was not, considering the fact that it was foreign-sourced and could track military protocols, a capability that was not available off-the-shelf, for obvious reasons.

The good news was that the program was compatible with DOS commands, something that Ramses was innately familiar with. He was routing his work through a triple-VPN layer, with servers based out of Papua New Guinea, Prague, and Mexico, so there was very little chance that he was being tracked. In the command window, he had typed the following:

tracert
Server: SEN-XX14022-V1D0
Address:
-R source address
Force prefix cb009::/5
-h 4

He double checked his code before typing in "execute." The program spat out a GCS address in the next second. The merc took this information and pasted it into his mapping program.

A terminus point honed itself upon a neighborhood, less than five miles from where he was standing.

Ramses paused and zoomed in on his holo-map. A favela in Japantown, it looked like. Tyger Claw territory, but the place was so dense that the president of NUSA could have a bunker dead center in the neighborhood and the gangs would be none the wiser. NetWatch had their tentacles everywhere, it seemed. Either they were intent on hiding their operations in plain sight, or their hubris allowed them to think that they could park themselves anywhere in Night City as if they held the deed to every scrap of square meterage.

Five miles away. Nowhere close to be considered the length of a Sunday drive. Hell, Ramses could just walk on over and scope the place himself, if he so chose.

He needed to think about this, though. What he was considering was risky, beyond the pale. It was enough that he had gotten out of the NetWatch building without being tracked, but now he was openly courting the idea of heading over to the source of his grievance?

No one fucked with NetWatch and lived to tell about it. At least, no one made a habit of it.

He resisted the urge to scratch his brow, though his helmet would have made such an action difficult. He just could not leave it alone. The netrunner in the system had been good. Too good. Better than Ramses had been anticipating, or could even match. Who knows if he had even rid himself fully of the netrunner's presence in his software? Perhaps he was already a target on NetWatch's dartboard, somewhere.

Risky, risky. He might have been marked for death already, but he had no way of knowing.

The thing was, he had to know.

Ramses glanced at the map again. It was predicting a seven-minute drive to Japantown, without traffic.

"Fuck it," he said, turning on a heel so that he could walk back into the armory.

A/N: The DaiOni was a piece of lore that was featured in the tabletop game and not the video game. Canonically, it was used by Adam Smasher on occasion before he settled with his Dragoon conversion.

Playlist:

[1] Delamain / Route to Afterlife
"Eventually We Find Our Way"
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
The Social Network (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

[2] Apartment Transit
"0.04 内部"
woob
Tokyo Run

[3] The Choice
"Return to the City I - Fragments"
woob
Return to the City (Original Soundtrack)

THE CAST (so far):

MAIN_CAST:

Ramses: Night City merc. Solo. Unknown age. Unknown origin. Adept in: precision weapons, netrunning.

SUPPORTING_CAST:

Michiko Arasaka: Corpo. Head of Hato faction of Arasaka and member of the corporation's board of directors. 68 years old.

Rzhevsky: Unknown age. Estonian origin. Housed in DaiOni cybernetic conversion. Personal bodyguard of Michiko Arasaka.