The Net burned.
Auroras raged and glitched across the digital sky. Each neon scar marked a trail among the ten thousand rampaging Netrunners tearing through Night City's networks.
Nix wished the army of out of towners luck. They'd need it to find anything worth the bandwidth after he and his fellow NC natives had gone to work ahead of them.
He would be feeling that work for at least a day. Phantom fevers and nerve jitters would make him useless for any real 'running, and miserable besides. But where most of his digital brethren had struck out, Nix had struck platinum.
Working with a full crew of the Afterlife's best had let him punch deep into an Arasaka data fort. As news of what the Flesh Architect had done had swept through the city, they'd ridden the wave of that confusion straight to the motherlode and he and his helpers had left not a single stray byte behind.
So the chaos that was unfolding? The carnage being wrecked on any system still dumb enough not to have gone offline and posted guards to shoot anyone with a deck? Nix saw it as celebratory fireworks and took a long sip of his drink while he enjoyed the show.
Unfortunately an alert ping broke him from his pleasant reverie and forced him to lift his VR visor and return fully to meatspace.
His door gave testament to how well situated he was in the Afterlife, by way of requiring him to approve a request before it slid open. The lack of any break in the fixer queen's stride gave its own testament, but he tried not to dwell so much on that one.
Rogue Amendiares -one time solo, full time fixer, and all time hardass- favoured him with a nod before she settled onto the purloined bar stool he kept across from his far grander chair. Nix sat up and offered her a shard with a copy of his haul. For as long as it had been since he'd been dumb enough to test a fixer, she still took the time for a full scan before she slotted.
As hot as proper op sec was, he kept his mind on business.
The door slid closed and he engaged the room's shielding and a field jammer before he opened a call. Rogue answered immediately, "What have you got?"
Any other day, any other debrief, and he would have built up to the prize. He'd made off with plenty of lesser gems alongside the crown jewels and he appreciated the showmanship of a good reveal. Any other day.
Not this one though. Nix opened the most important files out of his haul and pinged her agent to do the same with her own copies. Everything he had found on the Flesh Architect crowded out his vision in layers of reports, speculation, and panicked memos. The handful of files containing anything concrete were lonely islands amidst it all, and that was counting a file he had only halfway decrypted and could not make any sense of yet.
Rogue jumped on that one immediately, "What's this?"
He knew better than to waste her time with a crack about the time remaining until it was readable. "Metadata says it was stored with the other files on him before they tried to delete it."
"We'll circle back. Compress the rest for me."
"Less than I'd like to have gotten, but more than anyone else has. 'Cept for 'Saka."
"Highlights?"
The dossier he'd found was frustratingly incomplete, but revealing in the precise information that Arasaka didn't have.
"He's nothing close to local." That earned him a dim look. "I mean not even this hemisphere. There's no links to other files, not even hidden tags for a higher clearance to attach them. If they have anything beyond this then it's in the kind of datafort that they bury in a wasteland and retire everyone who knows about it below the Board."
"Not an experiment that got loose then."
"Not one that got stolen either, not if the guy wasn't on anyone's radar before he got it."
Nobody good enough to steal the Flesh Architect's toy from a Mega Corp was this unheard of. The files didn't even have a name he was known by, let alone anything real. Not to mention, "There's almost as little on the tech he's using."
Files flew by as he flagged the relevant portions as he spoke.
"It's the same for R&D and Counter Intel, they have nothing beyond theoretical work and none of that's even concrete. Whatever this tech is, Arasaka doesn't have it and they don't know who does."
"What do they know?"
"That he's dangerous, and for longer than I can find any reason for them to know. The oldest warnings out to their security are older than anything he's done in NC."
"Definitely about him and his?"
"Vague, but yes." He highlighted a section detailing the symbol the Flesh Architect's people wore. "None of them have anything on them at all, same as their boss, but the warning mentions a polar bear exotic and describes a few others we have footage of."
"That says attack, which either means he has a grudge or they started it, and Arasaka know when someone hates them."
"Could have fooled me."
"I didn't say that they cared."
Nix was no crusader, but he knew the Corps enough to smile at the conclusion that suggested. "Might be their mistake this time."
Through the mess of data he saw Rogue shaking her head before he finished talking.
"No. They would have files, low clearance ones. And the tower." She didn't need to say which one. "That's not personal. That's a message. He's telling them to back off." Rogue let silence fill the digital space as she kept the rest of her thoughts to herself, then she asked. "What about his patients?"
Everyone the supposed doctor had grabbed was singing like a kid at an open Media Corp audition. But it wasn't Nix's job to dig through all of that info, and he thanked all the gods and spirits for that. It wasn't something Rogue was likely lowering herself to either. That was work for lesser fixers, and she'd simply claim a portion of their harvest when it was done.
What he did have was more interesting then anything those gonks would know anyway. He pinged the report, and marked the key passages amidst the corpo SCOP.
"He rescued one of them?"
"They hadn't even paid him." Nix added to the insanity of it. "Just appeared and cut through a Militech snatch squad. Surveillance report says the poor fucker made a call to some old landline, he must have had someone redirect it, and then he was there. Eight minutes later he added the heads to the tower. Along with the middle manager who ordered the op."
"Another message."
Nix was considering a crack about subtlety being another thing they could rule out when a proximity alert ping drew his attention briefly away. Any large enough group approaching the Afterlife would set it off, though he must have missed the early warning alerts since it was the door tone he'd heard. Just in case he called up the camera feeds in the corner of his eye, already halfway back into the job at hand-
Then he froze.
Then he swore so violently that he almost bit his tongue off.
Rogue was already checking the feeds on his monitor before he could tell her what she was about to find on them.
The Flesh Architect, flanked by five of his jumpsuit clad huscle, was standing outside the Afterlife.
For a moment, one that he would eventually calm down enough to blame on his absolute terror, Nix would have sworn that the man was looking right at them through the camera feed. Then he turned and walked into the building like he owned the place.
Nix started flicking through the feeds to keep eyes on them, Rogue already out the door and halfway to her booth without a word. All while the newest NC boogeyman strolled down the stairs and along the corridor that led to the most exclusive merc bar in the city, nodachi held propped against one shoulder while his men followed behind him with ridiculously carefree grins.
Again his eyes flicked to each of the cameras in sync with Nix focusing on that feed. It wasn't an impossible trick for a good enough Netrunner, or even a hard one, but his Pings all showed a single device per man, all with heavy ICE and no active connection. It had to just be his imagination.
Emmerick actually had the balls to step in front of him, or all the Juice had melted the Animal's sense of self-preservation. Either way the bouncer did his job and asked if the unfamiliar face was there for work or to offer it. That face quirked an eyebrow the camera could barely see under the brim of his ridiculous furry hat, then he said, "Hiring."
The relief dawning on Emmerick and every guard Nix could see would have been funnier before he saw the videos of what their visitor had done to Arasaka. Instead of dwelling on it as the man entered the bar, Nix distracted himself trying to identify the man's accent. Normally he had an ear for them but it was like nothing he'd ever heard before.
No sooner had he entered then his gaze snapped to Rogue, sitting in her booth and nursing a drink like she'd been there all night. She was already looking at him, inscrutable and hard eyed and gesturing to the seat opposite with the gracious air of the Queen that she was.
Nix saw through the act. He'd seen her make too many powerful clients wait not to see what it meant that she wasn't even trying to play those sorts of games. The Queen of the Afterlife, undisputed top dog among Night City's fixers, was rattled. Severely.
The nightmare that now loomed over the waterfront flashed across his mind's eye again.
Arasaka had erected a scaffolding around it within hours and the screams had stopped not long after they obscured sight of the tower. He could still hear it. Overlapping screams and sobs and begging from hardened soldiers of the Corp. The taste of street meat fading as he dropped his snack and fumbled for his car door so he could get the fuck away from the area he'd been scoping for a job now abandoned. He could still hear it.
"Fuck."
As ever, Rogue activated her security ahead of potential business and he lost sound and visual of her booth. Nix was left to watch four of the five men in custom jumpsuits settle around the bar without another look at their leader, while the last accompanied him into the dead zone that was Rogue's domain.
Out in the bar he would be close to fully visible still, with just a slight haze in the air for anyone with 'ganic eyes and not much worse for anyone with normal optics. Through the cameras, Nix could pretend that the manticore's scan had swept over him and it had stomped on to kill someone else. He could finally admit that his hand was shaking, now that it had stopped.
Claire was tending the bar that night, and she had seen too much shit to let the threat of death or maiming slow her down. As he focused on the bar Nix overheard the tail end of her sales pitch, only for them to beg off any alcohol and her to pivot instantly to their wide range of soft drinks.
One of them spoke up when she began listing Nicola variants, scratching at the heavy collar of the jumpsuit before he said, "I've had that already. It tastes like expired medication."
She didn't falter. "Bottle or can?"
"Can."
"Ah. There's your problem." She turned from the bar and crouched to unlock, open, and relock a particular fridge in a single smooth motion. When she stood back up it was a small bottle in hand, cool enough to be dewy with condensation and with a label Nix seldom splurged to see. "This is the good stuff. Original recipe Nicola."
"How much?"
"Fifty times what the cans cost. Seventy if you want Nicola Fire. That's hard to get in NC."
The four of them exchanged glances, then one man pulled out a roll of eurodollars that would have guaranteed him a mugging attempt if he'd walked in with anyone else, and peeling off a small fortune.
"Keep them coming. We'll be here a while."
The bartender grinned at them and traded eddies for overpriced soda. Then received a few more after she shared a 'secret recipe' and all four affirmed that they would like a dash of bitters in their Fire.
After that it was just a steady stream of delighted noises and not much else. Claire was one of the best faces Nix had known behind the Afterlife's bar, but more of the listening type than the sort to tease information out of anyone. Normally that was a positive, given the Afterlife's clientele, but right then Nix would have killed for Gina and her easy manner of gathering intel over drinks.
Unfortunately Gina had gathered the wrong information years ago, and none of the faces that had followed her were worth calling in to swap out with Claire.
All four men kept to their drinks. None of the mercs or clients in the bar were dumb enough to come near them, and Claire was content for a chance to offload something the bar normally only kept for the occasional high end client slumming it with an in person meeting.
The jumpsuits didn't hold to any fashions he recognised, though they also weren't weird enough that he'd have looked twice at them on the street if they didn't have that fucked up emoji stitched over their hearts. Zooming in let him spot the signs of expensive clothing, or at least expensive materials, but the only other clue Nix could see was how relaxed the fuckers were.
Sat in a bar full of killers who would turn on them in a micro-cycle, the four men might as well have been on a low-g lunar beach. They sipped their drinks and looked around with idle curiosity like tourists following an NC tour guide into a blind alley.
The vids of them helping their boss to meatjump Trauma Team clients was old news at this point. Everyone who dealt in information had seen it from every angle that had had a camera recording, Nix included.
Still, being able to tear apart metal like they had wasn't anything unheard of in Night City. It was their boss who stood out, not them. So why were they so chill?
Nix wanted to dismiss them as gonks relying on their boss, and that didn't feel wrong…but it didn't quite feel right either.
His chance was gone before he could figure it out. Rogue dropped her surveillance countermeasures and the jumpsuits hopped to their feet as their boss stood up and walked out of the bar without another word. They barely made it to the parking lot before they vanished, something Nix caught live this time.
Rogue stayed in her booth for a while, eyes bright with calls that he wasn't dumb enough to try and listen in on, then she got up for another drink and headed his way.
He opened the door ahead of her without prompting this time. Then watched quietly as she sat down with a touch more weariness then he was used to her letting on.
"Was he recruiting?" Nix asked, more to break the silence then in expectation of Rogue sharing any information she didn't think he needed. It was another piece of old news that the Flesh Architect had recruited a Medtech who sold chrome to a few crews, Maine's lot foremost among them. Looking to upgrade to someone more experienced was one reason he could think of to darken Rogue's door.
Instead of an answer, Rogue opened up the files they had been going through and pulled up the dossier. Then she entered a name.
"Law Trafalgar? That's French, right?"
"Not how he pronounced it, and he said it the other way round."
"Trafalgar Law? So we're looking in Asia?"
"Not just Asia." Rogue said it with a distracted tone, but he didn't get the feeling she had any real idea where Law had been before he became their problem.
Again an alert interrupted his thoughts, but this time Nix was glad of it. "File's finished decrypting. Looks like video mostly, some data packets attached."
Rogue didn't hesitate. "Run it. Clean it up as we go."
He set the file running on his monitor and grabbed his visor while wishing he had another dive left in him. It made work like this a lot easier when he could set his mind to it properly.
Lucky him, the file was in good condition and didn't need much smoothing.
Unlucky him, the file was not a docu-vid on Law's early life and time spent building teleportation and matter manipulation tech in his basement.
Instead they were skimming through hundreds of hours of surveillance feeds from a lab. Not even a top secret one with experiments on Law's tech. It was a low-security facility with a lunar address and was mostly taken up by what the data packets identified as astronomy gear. The rare kind of lab put together by a researcher with parents willing to fund research with no clear return on investment.
"Deep space unknown particle research?" Rogue asked, buried in one of the data packets and making no more sense of it then he was. She didn't say that it might have been a junk file or that the real data might be hidden in deeper encryption, but she had to be thinking it.
Then again…Nix brought up a Net page and played a hunch.
Sure enough, "It's definitely meant to be a secret. This researcher doesn't exist."
Rogue looked to the screen and slowed it down on a stretch of the woman running the place busily uploading her work to a personal Net page, with a single digit view count, and said, "Double check. Look for signs of Arasaka 'runners."
He got to work on that while she kept going through the endless hours of useless unprofitable 'science'. It did take much to find signs of hasty deletion, even with them having the advantage of nobody caring about the work the astronomer had tried to spread as far as she could. He sent Rogue a confirmation and got back to work on the files.
The data packets were one of the only places any of that work survived, and they were a bare summary of it. Something about a new particle that might have been useful for ftl comms and sensors, if it wasn't completely impossible to generate artificially. All it was good for was looking at the distant reaches of space, though the occasional surviving notes from the astronomer talked about everything from time travel to infinite energy to spatial manipulation.
He dismissed it as nonsense spun out by a sadsack wasting their life and pretending that their niche meant anything…then the image of the tower flashed across his mind and he sent Rogue the entire excerpt.
She paused the video to scan it, then set it going at a slower pace as she shared her thoughts. "That could be why they've grabbed this. If they have no idea how he's doing it then even a hint of a mechanism would be enough for them to move." She didn't have to say how disappointing that would be for them. Knowing that Arasaka was doing what every Corp was obviously doing right now barely even counted as intel, especially with no way to confirm if the astronomer was right.
Still, they kept watching the video and digging through the data packets, though all that was left for Nix to check was the actual raw data and he lost ten minutes just figuring out the basics of how to read it.
He'd just about determined that there was some giant planet that was emitting a particularly strong signal to the astronomer's equipment, one she was obsessed with, when he noticed Rogue had paused the vid and was scrolling back through it.
He matched his feed to hers and watched at normal speed as the astronomer saw something and went absolutely wild, dancing around her lab and throwing everything she could find into the air. Nix was already digging for the data to match the timestamp before Rogue even asked for it, and…
.
.
.
"That can't be right."
"Show me." Normally he would have had a moment's worry at her tone, but what he was looking at was too…it was too crazy. He didn't have room in his head for fear and the thought of it at the same time.
He flagged the file to her, explaining what they were looking at as he showed Rogue the data on the exo-planet, and a particular chunk that was highlighted in the raw data itself. Then he showed her the part of the file concerning a much lower accuracy sensor that had been pointed down at the Earth.
The exact same data was highlighted in both.
The exact same pattern, on Earth and on a planet beyond the edge of the observable universe. A planet that the astronomer estimated to be seventy sextillion times further away than the furthest conventionally observable point in space. A planet she ranted in her notes might not even have the same laws of physics or progression of time as Earth.
The exact same pattern.
Unheeded by either of them, the feeds showed the astronomer's celebration becoming feverish work. Right up until the last few seconds, where a team of 'Saka ninjas burst in and blew her brain out when she lunged for a panic button.
The last image showed her body slumped across her equipment, one of the team rushing towards her.
Nix wanted to make a wry comment about how that probably wasn't what they'd planned. He wanted to examine the final still and confirm if the ninja had been going for medical equipment or just a blank shard. He wanted to go back and not learn any of what he'd just learned, because he had a strong feeling that when he took off his visor he would find Rogue with a gun to the head of the only other person who knew some of the most valuable information on the planet.
On two planets, maybe.
There was a shake in his hand again as he lifted the visor clear, but there was no gun to greet him.
Instead Rogue was offering him her drink.
He drained it without a thought to how little he cared for whiskey. Then he looked her dead in the eye and asked, "What now?"
She was as rattled as he was, not even trying to hide it, and then with one deep breath it was gone and the Queen of the Afterlife was back.
"Now you get some rest Nix. I've got a job for you, and the downpayment alone was, well you're going to have the budget for whoever you want on this one."
"A job? For…?"
"Yeah. You get to be the first Netrunner in Night City to have an alien for a client. Might be the first on Earth." She looked away, a considering look on her face, "And knowing what we do know, I think I have an idea of what he's looking for."