ENROUTE: NIGHT_CITY
The TorcWing jet, despite being a prototype, had been outfitted with all of the standard accoutrements as befitting a chariot of luxury. In addition to the leather seats and the plush carpet, it had a fully-stocked minibar over in the galley. Clearly there had been some priorities handed down to TorcWing when building the plane.
Falco was the one who had made the initial observation of the bar and had thus gone on a scavenging expedition, returning with a bucket full of tiny airline bottles that were filled with the finest alcohol that could be sold in the world.
He returned to the jet's presidential suite, where Fiona was sprawled across a couch in the corner and Ryo was sitting in a soft chair behind a desk made out of real wood. The ex-Tyger Claw had kicked her feet up onto the desk, scatting chips of burnt concrete upon its surface. To think that the president of NUSA would have used this very room at some point in the near future—Ryo was no doubt thumbing her nose at the implication.
Kross was in the adjacent room, alone with Tobin's body. The former Maelstrom had wanted to be by himself after losing his friend today. He had still accepted a bounty of alcohol from Falco when the wheelman had stopped by, but had locked the door after that so that no one could see the humanity still inherent within him.
Fiona craned her head, looking at how clouds were spitting by just out the window, the dim circuit routes of highways and cities below a prison of stars. The jet was taking a roundabout way to get back to Night City in order to throw off any pursuers from TorcWing or the emplaced militia. If they had simply headed there as the crow flies from Silicon Valley, they would have been back in Night City airspace in less than thirty minutes. But seeing as their route was taking them over the Sierras and the Rockies to evade any fast-attack fighters, they had some time to kill and some liquor to drink.
An hour in, a collection of empty bottles had littered the floor of the suite. Ryo had been chugging tiny bottles of Laphroaig while Falco pounded smooth California vodka. No one had spoken in that time. They had understood that there was just a moment to let the thoughts stew. To let drink temporarily invade in more than one sense.
Fiona drank slower than the others, as she sipped bourbon that had gone lukewarm by now. Her head was swimming, regardless, feeding the righteous anger that had been scorching her gut for the entire night, most of it reserved for Rzhevsky. It was a good thing that the cyborg had kept mostly to herself in the cargo bay rather than deliberately trying to goad Fiona on for the duration of the flight. Another bottle or two and the netrunner would be liable to engage in a bout of fisticuffs with just her bare hands against the Arasaka bot if she tried another surge of superiority.
There was a crackling sound of another cap bursting its seal. Fiona looked over and saw Ryo cracking open another airline bottle.
"How many does that make?" she asked, tongue heavy, her voice faint and ragged from not being used in the past hour.
Ryo passed the neck of the bottle under her nose a couple of times, smelling the contents. "Number seven. I think." She noted Fiona's raised eyebrows and drew herself higher in riposte. "TorcWing spared no expense. They've got bottles of even the limited releases here. And I'll be damned if I'm going to let Arasaka be the only ones to help themselves to this trove."
Fiona was not one to judge. There had been many nights where she had to be practically carried home herself after spending too long bar-hopping around the city. She at least knew now that it was pointless to try and match Ryo drink for drink, for the older mercenary had years of bad habits accumulated that had manifested into a firm tolerance—she would not be making that mistake again.
Invariably, Fiona would reach into her pocket, come out with the shard that Rzhevsky had given her—her payment—and just turn it over with limber fingers. She did not slot it into her deck. Not yet. For some reason, it did not feel like the time. Maybe she was still going through the adrenaline withdrawal after flighting from a heavy combat zone, or simply she was scared to turn the next page, knowing that things would be permanently different after doing so. She would have a new direction, a new purpose.
And potentially, she would better know herself.
Ryo saw Fiona playing with the shard and lifted her head. "That your reward?" Her words were faintly starting to slur.
Watching the gold-plated contacts of the chip glitter in the light, Fiona slowly nodded. "It's why I did this stupid contract in the first place." She pocketed the chip again. "Worthless to everyone else except me. Yet worth the weight of a man's life, all the same."
"You can't beat yourself up over Tobin," Falco spoke up where he lounged in his chair, a half-empty bottle clenched in a fist.
Fiona sat up on the couch. "Am I not allowed to take some responsibility from this? Someone needs to have the blame assigned and there's only one person that fits the bill. And dying wasn't the end goal for him, so don't make that mistake with me. 'He knew what he signed up for?' 'You couldn't have known this would happen?'" As if disgusted to say the words, she shook her head and made a point at not looking at anyone. "He didn't die from his own mistakes, that's for certain."
Falco opened his mouth, as if to offer a rebuttal, but was too tired or too drunk to make any sort of statement that he wanted to support. That, any he could probably sense that Fiona was too headstrong to change her position anytime soon.
To clear the air, Ryo made a loud coughing noise from behind the desk. "So… Falco," she said. "What are you going to do with your share after this is all done and we presumably never see each other again?"
A small smile peeked out from behind the wheelman's bushy mustache. "Presuming that far ahead, are you?"
"It's a big city. Plenty of places for people to get lost in."
"A big country, too. Big continent. Big world. Still a lot that I need to see."
Ryo took another sip of scotch. "Not planning on sticking around?"
Moving his head from side to side, Falco made a noise of indecisiveness. "I suppose you could say it was… always the plan. Life ended up throwing a few more curveballs my way than I had anticipated. Seen too many friends get killed, not to mention my van got all smashed to hell in the past year. Spent nearly all of my last payout trying to cover my tracks so that I would slip under the corpo net." Acknowledging Fiona, he sarcastically gave her a salute with his bottle. "Thanks for ruining that, by the way."
Fiona returned the salute with the same acerbic bite. "You elected to come. The blame's not all on my head for stepping back into the limelight."
"Anyway," Falco continued, "Arasaka's pay is already in my account. I'm going to use it to buy a decent rig and then head north as soon as I can."
"Where to?" Ryo asked.
Falco thought for a bit. The jet shuddered with the first sign of turbulence since taking off from Moffett, shaking the liquid in their bottles a bit.
"Alaska, probably. Skagway, Alaska. The ocean is supposed to be far fresher up there—I've heard that people catch fish straight out of the sea and eat them, no treatment required. Mountains with snow still on them. It's a good place to just… disappear. Or become someone else entirely. Who knows, I could become a seaplane pilot. Take rich tourists about the inlet, that sort of thing."
Fiona was nodding along. "It sounds like a good plan, Falco," she said, and she meant it. She had not known the wheelman for long, but she could sympathize with the desire to leave Night City—for millions of people, living there had brought along nothing but pain and heartbreak. It was not a place to leave roots, lest the roots would become tainted and corrupted, withering away to nothing. Perhaps Falco understood that and had realized that the only way to truly survive Night City, was to stay far from it.
One day, Fiona reckoned, she would have to consider such a scenario. But not until she had gleaned every last drop of information and use out of the city as she could. The stone still had blood to draw.
Falco knocked his vodka back, made a face, and shook his head. "What about you, Ryo?" he asked after he had recovered. "What are you going to do with your eddies?"
Now it was the ex-Tyger Claw's turn for her face to transform into a slightly wan expression, though there remained a faint waft of hope in the small smile that refused to leave. "My brother, Toda, is over in Osaka, in a state school. I haven't seen him in… years. Five years. Maybe more."
"How old is he?" Falco asked.
"He'll be seventeen this year. I didn't want to bring him here when I emigrated to Night City. Not when I was still finding my feet, my housing situation constantly in flux. But now, with this payout, I can finally get a nicer place in the city. I can pay for my brother's visa and begin the emigration process for him. He doesn't have any other family and he's just going to be thrown into a corpo datacenter in Tokyo once he comes of age. At least here, he'll have a chance to be something other than a Net analyst, plugged into the architecture day in and day out. I want to give him that chance, so that he has more control over his life, like it was for me."
Smiling sympathetically, Fiona raised her half-drunk bottle, knowing that the smile was reflected in her eyes.
"To Toda," she said.
Falco and Ryo also raised their glasses.
"To Toda."
CENTRAL_COAST_AIRSTRIP
The jet landed upon the dusty tarmac with a smooth bump, specialized hydraulics taking the force quite handedly. To the passengers, it probably felt like landing upon a cloud. The jet blew up a long scarf of dust as it taxed to the end of the runway, where just a ramshackle building of aluminum siding had been erected. Parked next to the structure were two black Arasaka vans, with several suited corpos standing watch outside, arms crossed as they watched the jet rumble their way.
A gray mist clung over the desert floor, a blade of orange sun razing across the mountains to the east. To the west, Night City, roughly thirty minutes away, hidden by the garbage-covered hills.
The engines whined once as they briefly rotated on full, then slowly died down to idle. The rearward ramp of the plane opened and Fiona and the rest of her crew descended, followed by Rzhevsky.
"Check the barn," Rzhevsky called after the group. "Transportation has been arranged. Don't leave together—make sure to wait in two-minute intervals. Take separate routes back to the city. Wouldn't want to attract any attention."
Kross was already starting ahead, his face morose, pushing past the corpos as he headed towards the barn. The businessmen did not seem to care, for they were too focused on the plane to take offense.
Falco slowly turned, as if he expected any one of the corpos to suddenly draw a weapon in a very predictable betrayal. He eyed Rzhevsky. "What's going to happen to the plane?"
"Why do you care?" the cyborg rasped. "It's not staying here, out in the open, I can tell you that."
Fiona was following Kross in the direction of the barn, trying to put as much distance between herself and Rzhevsky as possible. No love lost between the netrunner and the cyborg if she could help it. The job was over, the contract closed, and now Fiona would never have to see Rzhevsky's synthetic face ever again.
The transportation that Rzhevsky had mentioned turned out to be four motorcycles parked facing outward in the shed, each of varying make and model. Kross had selected a softail-style cruiser, the engine throaty even at quarter-bore, and was already zooming away down the windstreaked road towards civilization. Fiona watched him leave and round the bend until he was out of sight, with just a blue haze of motorsmoke marking the path he had traversed.
There was an Arch superbike among the lot. [1] Glossy paint the color of pitch. Gold exhaust pipes feeding into carbon fiber tubing. Key already in the ignition. Fiona clambered aboard, making sure that her coat was flowing neatly behind her. She turned the key until the engine caught with a roar. Twisting the throttle, she looked to her left, caught the solemn face of Ryo as she waited near the front door of the barn. The Japanese woman nodded to the netrunner, who nodded back. Another time.
The road leading away from the airport was a single lane in either direction, partially brushed by sand that infiltrated from the desert. Fiona drove until she reached a crossroads and followed the signs to the highway, making sure that she was always headed west.
The bike hummed and purred as she rode it, wanting to go faster. Machines like that, they broke down easier if they weren't let off the leash. They were designed to go fast, to take things up to that razor's edge. Always goading, never forgiving.
She obeyed the bike's desires and cranked the throttle further. Fire streaming from the exhaust. The feel of the road sucking her closer. The prickle of adrenaline beckoned, but it was never a full tap. She had run her reserves dry during the contract. She drove down the borderless road, the sun seemingly motionless as it warmed her back, the sand of the desert glowing an unearthly orange.
The turnoff to the 1 was soon in sight. Fiona slowed down to make the turn—she now had a straight shot towards Night City.
When the gleaming skyscrapers were visible past the cleft in the valley wall, Fiona breathed out a slight sigh of relief. She had only been separated from Night City for a few hours, but it was simply the familiarity of the skyline that finally allowed her to relax. The wind tearing at her frame, she put on an extra burst of speed as she headed towards downtown. Towards home. And Ramses.
But that gnawing feeling around her spine was returning. A hollow sensation that needed to be filled.
She thought of the columbarium, where Rebecca's hologram was blazing in front of the nook that held her remains. She thought of David and his crew, how they had gone from flying so high only to come crashing back down to earth. It was almost as if even the best were doomed to die young in this city. That she was already damned to repeat the mistakes of the past—the mistakes of others—and fill her own niche in the columbarium, the same as everyone else.
Long blue shadows narrowed at her eyes. An interchange was fast approaching.
Yanking the handlebars, Fiona savagely turned north on the ring road, heading towards the 101.
No, she could not return. Not just yet. She needed to sate her curiosity, fate be damned. This was her weight that she had promised she would carry. If this was the freedom that Ramses had earned for her, then this was the consequence of his generosity.
Clouds from the sea had begun to choke the sun, which tried to break through the parched cotton ceiling. Fiona drove and drove until she was back in the outskirts, near the bone fields of the wind farm, the infrastructure smashed to bits, sticking from the ground at all angles. The dead hopes of a city once filled with them. The ground dark with spilled oil, the gas flares pale in the morning, the fires that had been burning for years.
The road began winding uphill. Fiona followed it until she reached a small turnoff. She parked the Arch, the moon the color of a skull beginning to fade into the china blue sky overhead. The city and the ocean next to it different pieces of colored glass, gleaming where the scattered light hit and refracted across them.
No one around for miles. Peaceful. Serene.
Fiona swung off the bike and walked to where a stone obelisk near the lip of the cliff's edge sat. It was the right height for her to sit upon it and watch the gleaming veins of traffic stir and churn upon the freeways down below.
Reaching into her pocket, she revealed the shard one last time. She turned it in her fingers, as if searching for a reason not to go through with this.
Not one came, because Fiona was intently staring at the behemoth of Night City when she finally pushed the shard into the slot at her neck.
Her overlays ignited immediately, dark red text over a now-blurred backdrop. A file explorer popped up—the shard only contained a single document in a flat filetype. She selected it and it opened up for her.
A dossier. Her dossier. It was not complete, nor was it a dossier in the traditional sense, as it was mainly a collection of email messages, transcripts, but there was no regular flow to the assembled data. Some of the attachments had even been blacked out entirely—not even Arasaka had been able to obtain the material there. Hyperlinks in bluetext popped up sporadically upon the file, but Fiona ignored those for now, for her eyes clung to the top of the document, honed in on the very first words just below the NetWatch logo.
Fiona Merrick
B: 08/01/2056, St. Merced Hospital, Night City
She furiously read everything else after that. [2]
Note to: D. Renzer
Re: Group Beta – PDB
November 15, 2061
Dan—I'm sending the details of this latest venture over to you. Check your terminal, it will explain everything. The candidates for Group Beta have been observed and catalogued. We can proceed with Project DAMBUSTER at any time, once we get the go-ahead. Obviously, because we need to position to the board that our project has been rigorously trialed in various UAT sessions, I have provided metrics from our nonexistent Group Alpha that should help our cause. (Say what you want about that bastard Larry Ellison, but he was shrewd in his early years!)
I know you are just as excited as I am. Very interesting times are ahead. Looking forward to having you on this project.
Regards,
Bill
Note to: B. Ackerman
Re: Board Meeting – PDB
November 25, 2061
Bill—the board is comprised of idiots. You know it and I know it. They shot down your pitch without even understanding the broader implication of Project DAMBUSTER. They're fools who can't think in the long-term and couldn't imagine a broader strategy that did not come from within their little cadre.
When I used to work back in the NCPD, I frequently ran across this self-imposed ignorance. All this red-tape crap. What I did learn from that, was how to circumvent it. I'll come by your house sometime over the weekend to draw up a plan. Who's to say that we can't proceed with Project DAMBUSTER anyway? Better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission, is how the saying goes, I believe.
In the meantime, lookup "Chewco Investments, L.P." and "Joint Energy Development Investments." Those are company names. I'll explain when I swing by. You'll like it.
-Dan
Note to: D. Renzer
Re: Cheeky Bastard
November 27, 2061
Dan, you're a piece of work. "Chewco?" "JEDI?" Way to take a cue from corporate America's biggest success story: shell companies—right under NetWatch's nose, it's perfect!
Now all we need is the capital. Fortunately, NetWatch has many unused assets in Night City that we can start back up without the board being all the wiser. I have some contacts, fixers, that can help with the accounting and know some people in IT that can create separate personas for the both of us. We can get equipment, personnel, and all the tech we need, as long as we're smart and keep things quiet. We'll also need to vet the people we bring on for loyalty. If they blab a word of this to the board, we're finished.
Group Beta is still a go, by the way. Once we establish a permanent foothold in the city, I will initiate the project. We have over two hundred NetVats in cold storage, ready for occupants. We're about to make some major headway.
Regards,
Bill
SAVEFILE_AS: Ackerman Manifesto
DISTRIBUTE_TO: NC Import Staff Alias; Chewco Alias; JEDI Alias
March 2, 2063
Dear [INSERT NEW HIRE NAME HERE],
If you are reading this message, then that means that you have been selected to partake in a project that will change the course of history. Your qualifications for being discrete, along with your skillset, have made you a prime candidate to be selected to participate in Project DAMBUSTER.
Project DAMBUSTER is the lifeline that will usher in the dominance of NetWatch—for decades, we have been fighting for control over the Net, warring with the gangs who have been running in their illegal Data Regions, but we were looking in the wrong place all this time. Instead of scrapping over this disconnected data archipelago, the future of this company lies not in the partitioned segments of the Net, the specks of knowledge we fight with the wastelanders over constantly, but in the realm that has been quarantined away, its knowledge forbidden and locked away.
Beyond the Blackwall…
When Bartmoss brought the DataKrash down upon the world, the Blackwall was assembled to stop the uncontrolled flow of damage that radiated out from the source. Now, Bartmoss may be gone, but his original work remains and continues to grow out of control to this day. And every Net architecture contains a record of every piece of code ever initiated. This includes the key to our domination over the Net: the source code to the DataKrash.
Many in NetWatch believe that what is behind the Blackwall is a snapshot into an Old World, lost forever. But even an ancient civilization could still teach us much.
With the source code in our possession, we could have the potential to open the infected Net zones back up at our complete discretion. No more would rogue AI harass us. No more would antagonist gangs be able to offer any resistance against us—if we controlled the Net, we could kick all of them out at will. And the combined knowledge of our forefathers will return to our libraries so that we can profit from our newest re-discovery.
It will be a trial that will require many personnel in order to attain our goal. As proof of my ambitions, I can rightfully state that over two hundred netrunners have been procured to conduct systematic sweeps of the Net behind the Blackwall, with more arriving every day. Finding the source will not come easily, but I know that, in time, we will be able to plunder the Blackwall's greatest secret.
Join me in this righteous journey. Join me in controlling the Net.
Faithfully yours,
Bill Ackerman
Sr. Director, Operations
Note to: D. Renzer
Re: Operational Troubles
June 17, 2065
Dan,
By now, you've heard about the mortality rates that have befallen Group Epsilon. With 85% of the group now deceased, we may have to bring Groups Zeta and Eta online sooner than expected. Too many of our netrunners are flatlining behind the Blackwall, no matter how many precautions are being taken.
The problem has to do with all of the rogue AIs running rampant around the place. Whenever our runners break into the dead Data Fortresses, the AIs seem to sense their presence and come scampering. Any AIs of SA or TS type can easily be dealt with, but it's the CPPs that have everyone worried. CPPs were not created by any human hand and thus were not programmed to even remotely think like a human. While benign contact has been made at some points, the CPPs rapidly turn hostile without any input from our runners. Dozens of the runners have been roasted alive in their links, their brains deep-fried.
We just need to get more bodies through the Blackwall. Pull a St. Petersburg on these fucking machines. My old mentor, Spider Murphy, was afraid of the Blackwall when she was still active. And that was after she had been shacked up with that fucking traitor Bartmoss. But now, I'm going to make the beyond safe again and prove her ghost wrong. I just need more runners.
You need to find some. Wherever and however possible.
Regards,
Bill
SAVEFILE_AS: CONVERSATION 224A-U6
FORMAT: Transcript
October 28, 2070
PARTICIPANTS:
Bill Ackerman
Dan Renzer
RENZER: They're promoting you?
ACKERMAN: Vice President of European Operations.
RENZER: Congratulations are in order, then.
ACKERMAN: The hell they are.
RENZER: It's a step in the right direction, isn't it?
ACKERMAN: If it was, they'd send me to London HQ. Instead, they're positioning me in Rome. Fucking Italy. It's a dead end, Dan. They're sending me to Italy to plant my flag, for that's the furthest they see me going.
RENZER: It's not over, sir. You still have DAMBUSTER.
ACKERMAN: The tech that's been recovered from the abandoned dataforts is not enough to convince the board otherwise. They still believe that DAMBUSTER is still in the conceptual stage, if they haven't already forgotten about it. Seven years. And we have jack shit to give them. To set me free of this path, I need to give them some proof that DAMBUSTER works. Claw back some of the condemned Net, perhaps. Or bring back something from the Old Net that we could reverse-engineer, prove that NetWatch can profit from the plundering of what the Blackwall has been holding back. How many runners have we lost from DAMBUSTER?
RENZER: This year or total?
ACKERMAN: Total.
RENZER: Fuck… I'd say… between six and seven hundred.
ACKERMAN: Percentage of those indentured?
RENZER: Would be a long shot if it was anything short of ninety.
ACKERMAN: Damn. Be nice if the salaried ones would get roasted more and lower our expenditures. When's the latest batch due to be processed and onboarded?
RENZER: Within the next week. But, sir, you should know, discontent is starting to grow among the handlers.
ACKERMAN: Oh? How so?
RENZER: They're a bit disgruntled at the fact that the average age is decreasing from batch to batch. Speaking accurately, we had someone as young as four in the last batch. There was a lot of talk that was picked up when that body had to be removed from its chair.
ACKERMAN: Spineless in the face of true progress. Get me a list of names who showed discontent, Dan. We'll submit them to interrogation, find out who is loyal among them.
RENZER: It will be done.
ACKERMAN: We're going to keep being systemic about this. If a subject is able to meet the parameters of being a netrunner, then we are going to continue targeting them for selection, no matter how old they are. Besides, they're just gutter trash. Their parents—if they even have parents—sold them to NetWatch for their next batch of drugs. What would have become of them if it weren't for us? Better to die in service of progress with a roof over your head and food in your stomach than from starvation after exhausting every shred of decency in order to survive. We're doing these kids a favor, Dan, even if no one else can see it.
RENZER: Never a doubt, sir.
By the time that Fiona had backed out from her overlays, the sun was now blazing higher over the city and the bay. The colorless glare in her eyes flashed with lightning, her breathing deep and powerful, raked by anguish.
She stumbled away from the cliff's edge, trying to parse over what she had just read. A hot fire in her head, black with confusion.
She didn't know what to think. It was not as if she had been deluding herself that NetWatch had perceived her, as an individual, as special, but to simply read the scale of it all was sickening. All those children, taken off the streets and from their families, just like her, thrown into the meat grinder that was the Blackwall. There had indeed been a purpose to her life, but as she had feared, that life had meant basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Worthless. NetWatch had seen her as worthless.
Without her noticing, a red digital fire began to brim in the deep recesses of her eyes while her hands clenched into tight fists, as though as she could explode into a heatless flame at any moment. A thick haze clouded her mind and she grimaced underneath her half-mask.
Ackerman. Renzer. Two names that she did not have until today. Corpo bastards, playing their typical games with human lives without any regard for what they were destroying, like children carelessly breaking their toys.
It was hard to tell from her dossier if she had any associations with them personally. For all she knew, they had never met in person before. But what was a near certainty that she had been part of one of Ackerman's many "batches," scattered all throughout Night City with the goal of strip-mining the tainted portions of the Net at risk to her own life.
All for the source code to the DataKrash. For some stupid algorithm.
That was how much her life had worth to NetWatch.
Fiona leaned against her motorcycle, a sick feeling in her heart. She was committing the names to memory, already assembling a kill list of her own, a scattered plan barely formulating in her head. What she was going to do, she had no clue. But she knew what she needed to do, that was for certain.
She was going to get even.
Mounting the bike again, Fiona turned the engine over again and was about to kick it into gear when she decided to scan the file again for posterity. In seconds, her overlays indicated that there was a slight portion of the dossier that she had missed completely.
She scrolled down to the passage. The highlighted section that she had missed just contained a few scant lines, headed by a name.
Sinead Merrick.
A birthdate older than Fiona's.
And a current address, with a waypoint.
JAPANTOWN
Fiona parked the Arch motorcycle in a drizzle-soaked alley, steam hissing upon the wet pavement from burst pipes nearby. Sharp echoes of neon reflected upon puddles on the ground, which disintegrated into ripples as Fiona's boots trod upon the liquid mirrors.
Smoke filled her optics as she headed out of the mist and rounded the corner. She was now in the red-light district of Japantown, the cadres of joytoys and their potential clients all clamoring for attention within the choked haze of carcinogens and light. A few of the joytoys attempted to approach her, starting with their standard sales pitches, but all backed off once they were close enough to see the savage glare that was in her eyes, realizing that she was hunting other prey than pleasures of the flesh. She pushed past the crowd as though she exerted her own gravitational force, a snarling growl buzzing in her brain.
She walked past a small and ill-kept terrace, the ferns here having seen better days, ringed by square loops of neon yellow tubing. If she were to glance up, she would be able to see the multi-story strip clubs in which dancers gyrated in the corner windows of a building, one atop the other, each trapped within a prison of security red light. Multiple arrows of the same neon that buzzed from the electrical discharge fought a frantic war to claim the attentions of the passing patrons as they walked down the graffitied streets, for when everyone in town wanted an excuse to let loose, the establishments here needed to stand out from one another.
There was an outdoor laundromat here, right next to the stall that sold urn in imitation Chinese pottery. Hungry amputees crowded around vending machines for their Burrito XXXL. Others sat on tiny plastic chairs at tiny plastic tables as they chugged beers.
Fiona's waypoint led her past all that. She stopped in the middle of the street and turned on a heel. The building in front of her blazed Inhibition in blinking blue holo-light, a wavy cursive. The prerecorded sounds of moaning from hidden speakers accompanied the soundtrack of the street, but Fiona had no doubts about what she was looking at, even before she headed inside.
She pushed aside a curtain comprised of strings of cheap purple beads and was thrust into a dimly lit room that smelled of cigarette smoke. The walls had been painted over repeatedly, Fiona noted, most likely to hide the tobacco stains. A defibrillator was behind the desk in a yellow plastic case, but it was already open, the wires spilling from the opening.
A bored-looking young woman was behind the desk, wearing a skimpy leopard-print top and a mini-skirt. She frowned a bit when she saw Fiona enter—with her trench coat and half-mask, the netrunner did not look like the kind of client that would seek out the services of a place like this, but the hostess remembered her training and provided a faux smile of welcome. Always treat each guest with equality. To a point.
The hostess opened her mouth to perform her usual greeting, but Fiona was speaking before her. "I'm looking for Sinead Merrick."
Confusion flitted across the hostess' face. "I'm sorry, who?"
"Sinead. Merrick." Fiona's brow tightened and she took a slow glance around the place. "I was told she works here."
So, this is where you ended up, huh, mom? Do you even know I'm still alive? Do you have an excuse ready to justify your actions for what you did to me?
The hostess looked flustered and she fumbled around on the little console that was at the desk. Then she looked at Fiona. "Wait… is that someone's real name?"
Fiona slowly blinked as if this woman was an idiot. "Yes."
"Oh, we only have stage names on file here," the hostess sighed. "But, let me see if I can find that information out for you. Were you looking to reserve a private room with her?"
The implication itself was problematic, but Fiona did not see any other choice to get a word in with this woman in private. "What time blocks do you offer?"
"Ten minutes. Thirty. Or an hour."
"Put me down for thirty. If you can find her in the system."
There was a clicking of keys and the hostess sucked in her bottom lip. Fiona saw, in the reflection of the woman's eyes, that she was accessing financial records to tie the multiple names of the staff here to what was on file.
"Okay, here we go. Ah, so Sinead is known as Fata M. over here. Older lady. Might even be twice your age."
No shit. "Is she available or not?"
"Looks like she just got off break now. It's fifty for the half-hour session."
Fiona wired the money over, hoping that the static effect in her eyes did not diminish the contemptuous glare she was providing.
"Room nine," the hostess said after she confirmed that the payment had gone through. "Up the stairs and follow the signs. And we hope you enjoy yourself."
It was deeply tempting to comment that the latter was quite unlikely, but Fiona just took the shard to the door by sliding her hand across the countertop.
The nearby hallway led to the staircase that the hostess had indicated, but standing at the foot of the steps was a middle-aged balding man whose face was lined with cybernetics, swaths of skin replaced by synthFlesh that had not been entirely tone-matched. He wore a smoking jacket the color of amber with golden dragons emblazoned upon it. Looked almost like a pit boss, but a quick scan from Fiona's optics indicated that this man was the club's co-owner.
"All good, baby?" the man leered at Fiona as she passed him by.
Fiona did not respond as she flicked her gaze at him for a split second, trying not to think if he was looking at her in a manner that suggested sexual interest. Plus, the fact that he called her 'baby' sent danger endorphins rampaging through her system.
At the top of the stairs was a dim club where a pulsating synthetic beat slithered and hummed to the tune of concussive pyrotechnics. Fiona imagined it was the sound that someone would be hearing if they got hit in the head repeatedly. Sleek couches ringed around circular stages, where greedy patrons sat forward as they watched dancers in various stages of nudity perform. Fiona stopped and stared for a moment, watching where the lack of light highlighted the curves along the precisely-cut synthetic skin of the dancers. Their breasts tight against their bodies, stomachs finely muscled.
She worked her way down the middle of the room, passing by waitresses that were ferrying watered-down cocktails on fancy silver trays. A couple dancers slunk around the floor, completely nude, one of them brushing a hand over Fiona's coat to draw her attention. The netrunner slowly pulled away, making eye contact with the woman that had touched her, and found surprise and confusion resonating within the artificial eyes of the younger girl. Backpedaling, Fiona finally looked away from the dancer and headed towards the back, where the private rooms were located.
There was a hallway outlined in crimson upon deep purple, like data transmitting through a circuit board. The doors here had numbers stenciled in black upon their red faces. Fiona passed them all by until she reached the one marked "9."
She stood in front of the door for what felt like an hour, blood singing in her ears. It would be a simple affair to just reach up and tap the button to enter. Fiona did not do so. Not yet.
There was just a terrible lull, the kind where she was mulling about a dozen possible futures. If she went through that door, everything had the potential to change.
It was her mother in there. Her mother. Even her own memories could not conjure a face that should have been familiar to her.
This is what you wanted. Now you get to reap the consequences.
She palmed the lock and entered the room, the door sliding shut behind her.
There was a single lamp on the nightstand, which had been positioned next to a low bed. The bulb was barely enough to light the room, which seeped a pathetic golden glow past the plastic lampshade.
A woman was sitting on the corner of the bed, looking over at Fiona. She was wearing a shiny slip-on dress in a deep plum color, one of the straps having slipped off a shoulder. She was barefoot, her high-heels dispersed somewhere else in the room. She had been on-call for a while tonight, apparently, judging by the state of her ruffled appearance.
Fiona walked closer, the music from the club behind her now a dull thump in the back of her mind. The hooker—her mother—had short, curly hair. Deep auburn with graying roots. There was a tired beauty in the woman's eyes, where the crevasses of age and some other gestalt raptured upon her face.
She was not very old, as Fiona soon realized. Somehow, she thought that Sinead was not even in her forties just yet. A young mother, thrust into an impossible decision at an inappropriate age.
But as Fiona's optics became attuned to the slow light, she realized that the darkness had been hiding aspects that she had not noticed at first. Bruises on the woman's arms. Puncture marks in the crannies of her elbow. Dark streaks in the corner of her redrimmed eyes where the mascara had smeared. Pupil dilation not in accordance with the level of light in the room. Her relative youth had been stolen away from years of physical, drug, and mental abuse that had heaped on her like an avalanche, stealing away her life.
And, just in this very moment, Fiona spotted the glint from a needle as Sinead took it away from her arm, the rubber tubing around her skinny bicep snapping away into the darkness. The woman leaned back upon the bed with a sigh, a muffled thump as the needle slipped from her fingers and hit the carpet.
"Well?" Sinead sighed as she spread her arms across the silk bedspread, shuffling it like she was making an angel silhouette. "Come over into the light, baby, so that I can see you…"
Her words were slurred, the drug already taking effect. Either that or she had been under the influence for hours already. Fiona kept moving forward but walked past the bed, instead bending down to retrieve the needle where it had been dropped. There was still a bit of residue on the tip of the syringe. Fiona scanned it—synthetic endorphin. Combat drugs that had been circulated onto the street for its painkiller effect.
Sinead watched Fiona study the syringe, misunderstanding that for interest. "You want some? There's a bag… underneath the bed. Help… yourself."
Slowly, Fiona turned and stared at her mother. She gently placed the syringe down on the night desk and stood upon the side of the bed, hands clasped together in front of her as if in prayer.
Unable to help herself, she scanned Sinead. She found a body in pain. Trapped in a drug dependency, those eyes pits of bare need. Whatever personality she'd once had was now gone, fragmented like a broken window pane, replaced by the mechanical addiction. Her skin was nearly translucent at her throat, the membranes weakened from years of drug abuse. Her fingernails were long and untidy. Her veins deep black lines in her legs.
Something turned within Sinead and she was clutching her stomach in pain now, trying to remain calm as the drugs dispassionately ate her up. "Look… at you. Such a serious lady. Come here. I'll make you… comfortable. There's still… time for one more…"
Problematic overtones aside, Fiona just ignored what her mother was saying, knowing that she was just speaking nonsense, and knelt down so that she was eye level with the older woman.
She knew that Sinead couldn't recognize her. Even if she removed her half-mask, there would be nothing there to jog the woman's memory of her at all. They were both strangers in this room, as if they were meeting for the first time in their lives. Her hard stare met a groggy one. Anger and pity flashed in a swift battle in her head, unable to decide if her hatred for Sinead was worth it for losing her connection to her daughter, or if there was no point in despising a body that was not much long for this world anyway.
Withering in a tired breath, Sinead continued to lie on the bed, blinking sonorously.
"What's your name… sweetheart?"
The earnestness of the question felt like a stab to Fiona's heart. It was a question that only a mother could ask and have it be both blanket and weapon.
The entire room fell out of focus. The beat of the music outside warped into her own distorted heartbeat.
"Fiona," she could not stop herself from whispering.
There was a sigh from Sinead as she pressed herself deeper into the bed. Her eyes had closed, weighed down from the drugs. "Fiona…" she repeated. "Fiona. Such a nice name. My… my daughter's name…"
Kneeling by the bed, Fiona's hands closed into fists. She looked at her mother, but she was teetering on the edge of consciousness.
"Where is your daughter now?" she asked, voice and mind unbearably hollow.
Now a sob wracked from Sinead's throat. Her eyes had opened again, swimming with tears that burned through the pain. Burned through memories. "I…" she swallowed, voice so quiet it was as if she was losing the strength to speak. "I… lost her."
Fiona leaned forward. "Lost her? Lost her how?"
Was I taken from you? Stolen? Did you sell me for drugs? Tell me, Sinead. Tell me!
But Sinead was just shaking her head again, eyes clamped shut, squeezing the tears out. "I… lost her," she said again.
The netrunner nearly stood, aghast. She wanted to shake Sinead until she had ripped the answer from her lips. How had this all happened? What had caused the two of them to have been separated? Was it negligence on her mother's part, or had it been NetWatch's scheming that had pried the two of them apart?
Lowering her head, the half-mask held in Fiona's own disgusted sigh, one that Sinead could not hear.
Through shut eyes, she heard her mother again. "Doesn't… matter… I guess. Held on… as long… as I could. I had hoped that… I would be seen this way by… someone like you. Someone who would understand." Fiona saw Sinead grit her teeth. "Oh… my baby…"
The roar from her heart returned as Fiona got to her feet. She grasped Sinead's hand, touching her mother for the first time. The skin was cold and clammy. The temperature alarmingly low.
"Mom?" she whispered, her hands now encasing Sinead's, hoping to breathe back some warmth into her mother.
The word did not register with the woman, whose eyes now started to roll up into her head, her body becoming rigid. Her breathing became more laborious and proceeded at an irregular tempo. At some points, a faint gurgle could be heard from her throat.
Fiona released her grip on the woman. Something was terribly wrong here. She looked back around and saw the syringe she had previously set aside on the nightstand. She grabbed the canister and held it up to the low wattage bulb. A trace of liquid was still clinging to the max line—she had not noticed it before. Sinead had injected four times the normal amount into herself all in one go before Fiona had even arrived in the room.
This had been planned. For how long, she couldn't say. There was a breaking point in everyone that could be reached, and Sinead had just passed hers. Just an inordinate amount of guilt weighing down on Sinead, crushing and crushing her, until she could take it no longer. An escape from her wretched life beckoned and she had finally made the plunge.
Fiona could not even bring herself to berate the woman, even as she started convulsing on the bed. With all of the strength her mind could exert, she sought to squeeze an ounce of compassion for the dying woman, her own shaking hands perhaps the key to bringing her back. But no matter how much she tried, there was no connection to be made. She was simply staring down into a shell of flesh, the only tie they had being of blood, a tenuous connection at best. It was like she was trying to connect a protocol to a device with a broken receiver.
There was no one there.
Nothing to save.
Sinead was now jerking heavily on the bed in the throes of a seizure, a milky white liquid streaming past her lips. Her eyes had turned almost completely black and sweat poured off of her skin. She had lost the capacity for speech and was spiraling down, down, the clock clicking towards that inflection point. The last bell.
Fiona opened her mouth, watching the woman die, but said nothing. She could take no more of being a witness—a scan of Sinead's body revealed that she had a pacemaker installed. A cheap model. No security. Barely anything to protect against an outside intrusion.
Grabbing for her mother's hand, she caressed Sinead's face with her other. "I'm sorry," she whispered to the woman. Sinead, face slack with convulsions, just groaned.
Then, from her cyberdeck, she sent the fateful command.
The pacemaker fired one last burst and was silent.
Five seconds later, Sinead fell still on the bed, her face trapped into a relaxed expression, grateful that it was all over. She could have been glass, anxious and delicate, in that posture. As if she were sleeping.
The next breath that Fiona took felt like someone was tearing her throat open with an icicle. It was almost a sob, but not quite, the violent emotion battering at the gates of her psyche but not allowed to penetrate. She stood from the bed, her hand slipping away from her mother's dead grasp, and backed into the corner, shivering, the deathmask of Sinead permanently embedded into her mind.
More time. If only she had had more time. Maybe then she would have been able to know enough to judge her mother accordingly. She would always be in that purgatory, neither guilty nor innocent. Just a face in the crowd, to be glossed over without a second thought.
There was a commotion from outside and suddenly the door opened. The balding pit boss—or owner—that Fiona had seen from downstairs was now bustling in, red-faced and sweaty. Sinead must have had her biorhythms wired that would send out an alert if she or any of the other prostitutes flatlined in the building. The large man hustled over to the side of the bed, grabbed at Sinead's face, turning her head this way and that. His eyes were flashing with scans as he tried to link to her deck, but found no feedback to pick up on.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," the man was saying, rounding upon the body with extreme hatred. "Oh, you fucking bitch. You're going do this to me? Die like a piece of fucking trash? You… cunt! Fuckin' night was going on perfect. Fuckin' night was fantastic. Six figures we nab in an hour, fuckin' VIPs, and you go and do this…?!"
Suddenly, violently, he open-hand slapped Sinead's dead face, sending spittle and sweat flinging through the air. Fiona, unnoticed by the owner, jerked in surprise, a savage feeling creeping at her spine.
"Oh, you think I don't fuckin' care?" the owner was still shouting at the body. "Of course I fuckin' care. You were bringing in your typical percentage and now this… this is going to fuckin' cost me. Cost. Me. Obviously you ain't got anything that you got to fuckin' say. Just lying there, a wrinkled cunt. A dead wrinkled cunt. Fuck! They were still coming into you, you stupid bitch. What was I supposed to know if you were still fuckin' depressed or not?! Middle name of 'ungrateful', is what you are. Stupid fuckin' cunt. Probably thought you were so smart, doing this to me. Fuck."
He slapped Sinead's body again and this time also pounded her chest. This was too much for Fiona and she stepped forward from the shadows, a halo from the lamp ringed in her eyes.
The pit boss wheeled on her, apparently noticing the netrunner for the first time, shoving a finger in Fiona's face. "And you! Were you fuckin' blind the whole time? This bitch is flatlining on you and you don't call for a medic? Now look, she's bleeding all over my bedspread. I'm going to have to throw the sheets out, along with the body, and make sure none of the other clients see so that—"
Fiona blinked, right before a filter of red overcame her. She lashed her fist forward and drove her first two knuckles deep into the pit boss's throat. She smashed his trachea, caving it in in an instant with an explosive rush of air. The pit boss's eyes bugged out, nearly about to pop from their sockets, and his own hands shot up to his neck, as though he could throw off the invisible noose that was strangling him. Blood burst from his mouth and he made a painful sound, the noise a high-pitched whistle that only keened higher and higher.
Bringing her arm back, Fiona hit the man again and he fell to the ground, on his back. Fiona was atop him in an instant, stomping on his head with her boots. She had to grab onto the nightstand to steady herself as she stomped again, and again, and again.
Someone needed to be hurt. Needed to be killed. For what they did to her mother.
This pit boss would be a start.
Even as frightful crunches could be heard underfoot from her blows, she did not stop. Blood and sweat misted the air, and Fiona was growling as she savagely brought her foot down. She could feel his skull splintering, shifting with each blow. The skin of his face sliding off of his boneplate as her steel-reinforced heels peeled it away. The sounds of her stomping turning more liquid as blood soaked into the carpet, the shattered bone shredding the organs it protected as she obliterated it with her blind fury.
The cloying light formed a nebula about the netrunner, her own tears added to the mist as she ground the pit boss's head to pulp. Sound washed out, lost in her own world of violence, she became a machine of motion, her shins glistening with gore.
She did not know the exact time that she stopped deforming the man's skull. Something inhuman burned in her eyes and she was suddenly outside the room, stumbling through a service entrance, down a brightly lit hallway, nearly tripping down an industrial stairwell, and then she was outside again. Back into the cold dark of the city, to be swallowed up into the crowd she had been trying so desperately to flee.
A/N: Cranked this one out quicker than expected, all things considered. Not too easy when you're doped up on painkillers after an operation.
Playlist:
[1] Back to Night City (Fiona's Theme)
"Her Broken Smile [Instrumental]"
DEADLIFE
Dark Nation
[2] Emails and Transcripts
"Phazon Mines"
Kenji Yamamoto
Metroid Prime (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
[3] Sinead
"Norman"
Steven Price
Fury (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
THE CAST (so far):
MAIN_CAST:
Ramses: Night City merc. Solo. Unknown age. Unknown origin. Adept in: precision weapons, infiltration, assassination.
Fiona Merrick (JP422-7C): Netrunner, formerly in the employ of NetWatch, now an independent merc. 22 years old. Unconfirmed origin.
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.
Wakako Okada: Fixer in Japantown. A former mercenary. Known for her brusque manner and high (sometimes unreasonable) expectations with the contracts she holds.
The Extremaduran: Assassin. Hails from Europe. Under NetWatch employ. No Night City identification. DECEASED.
Rogue Amendiares: The so-called Queen of the Afterlife and former partner of Johnny Silverhand. Night City's best fixer, highly sought after by mercs due to her lucrative payouts and all-biz attitude.
Ryo: Merc. Former Tyger Claw. An avid collector of BDs from the Edgerunner crew and a friend to Fiona.
Tobin: BARGHEST commando. Based in Dogtown. Moonlights as a merc during rare opportunities of shore leave. DECEASED.
Kross: Ex-Malestrom turned merc. Retired from the gang but quickly got bored of life without the action. Went independent for the juice, not the cash.
Falco: Ex-mercenary. Formerly worked as a wheelman for David Martinez's crew. Prior to contact with Fiona, he was laying low in Night City, having thought he was out of the game for good.
Bill Ackerman: NetWatch director. The individual responsible for Project DAMBUSTER, Ackerman's goal is to find a way to restore the area beyond the Blackwall at any cost.
Dan Renzer: Ackerman's right-hand man. Once a member of the NCPD, Renzer was forced to flee to NetWatch after the NCPD attempted to have him killed by not going along with the corruption of the organization. Now at the mercy of the corporation, Renzer will do anything Ackerman tells him to do.