CHARTER_HILL
The tinted windows of the loft gazed out towards the jewel-glow of the glittering spires of Night City, which speared from the ground like a reverse chandelier. The cityscape stretched out along the shore, the waft of the street lamps nestled amongst the peaks and curves of the coastal hills. Off in the distance, beyond a thick screen of fog, gentle blooms of light rapidly escalating in brilliance made small sunrises at the rim of the world for a few minutes at a time; shuttles from NCX, just off the coast—rich corpos going on holiday to the moon, or Highriders heading up to the colonies in Low Earth Orbit. Anything to get off this planet. [1]
A view that would astound the bottom feeders that could never make it up off the concrete streets. One that Ramses disregarded each day.
He emerged from one of the closets, a thick oat-colored blanket made out of synthetic fur in his hands. He walked down the suspended staircase from the loft's upper level and quietly stole across the room to the lone couch that sat facing the large wall monitor.
Unfurling the blanket, which had a small battery so that it could generate heat, Ramses knelt down next to the couch and gently wrapped the woman in it from the neck down after removing the coat that covered her, who had been deposited there by the merc immediately upon entering the condo.
The woman was in an overtaxed state, making only the faintest noises, fatigue and exhaustion having knocked her out. He made sure that the netrunner was completely covered and tucked the blanket underneath her body so that she could warm up quicker.
As he put his coat back on around his armor, his helmet took a quick readout of her body temperature. It was reading 96.2. Hypothermia set in around 95, but he needed to get her warmed up before her nervous system would be irreparably damaged. The human body was not designed to operate at such a low temperature.
How long had the netrunner been submerged in that ice bath? There was a reason that the corps used netrunning suits and synthetic coolant to regulate heat generated from these deep dives—ice baths were an inefficient way to drop a person's body temperature and frequently resulted in more nervous system damage during long-term use. NetWatch had to have known that, otherwise they would have outfitted their 'runners, like the one lying on his couch right now, with the proper equipment.
The netrunner softly sighed, eyes remaining closed, as the heated blanket began performing its job. Ramses watched the bulge where her toes were under the blanket stir ever so slightly. Movement in the extremities, that was good.
Ramses gently turned the 'runner's head and found the shard ports down near the base of her neck. No telling if she was loaded with NetWatch viruses or not—his firebox would take care of that by acting as the first line of defense. Using the connection, he plugged himself in and accessed the 'runner's BIOscreen. Her blood results were worrying. Metabolic derangements and dehydration. This woman had been practically neglected over there, if not outright abused.
At the same time, he also produced a shard of his own from a metallic case in his pocket. It had a flared end on it from which a lone LED could solemnly blip. Gently, Ramses slotted the shard into an open port onto the woman's neck. The network lock could only be removed by him and would prevent the 'runner from accessing her quickhacks if she decided to leave here by force. No sense in trying to rip it out—it had physical grooves that latched itself into a port. It could not be removed without disabling the entire cyberdeck or unless he gave it the proper command signal.
He jacked out the cable from the first port and pocketed the firebox. He then headed over to the bathroom where he kept a medkit. The kit was comprehensive and contained enough tools and medicine to sufficiently treat a NUSA military squad. From the container, the merc took out an IV bag and tube, a folding metal stand, along with 500 milliliters of saline solution. The solution he poured into the bag and hung it on the stand after he erected it with a few precise movements, the thin metallic linkages snapping into place.
He returned to where the netrunner was in her torpor, set the stand with the IV bag dangling next to her head, and gently pushed the needle into her inner elbow after extricating the 'runner's left arm from underneath the blanket. A thin line of blood wept from the entrance and tricked down her skin—Ramses wiped it up with a sterile patch.
The woman was no good to him dead. He needed to understand the full scope that was in play and where they both fit into it.
He paused, noting the discrepancy. He was trying to justify his own actions to himself. Justify. As if he thought he had possibly made a mistake?
The netrunner before him stirred in her sleep, body faintly twitching, tiny moans escaping her throat.
No, he decided after a moment's thought. He tucked her exposed arm back under the blanket, careful not to disturb the IV line. This was not a mistake.
Then what, pray tell, is it?
Retrieving the medkit from the bathroom, he set the red and white plastic case on the completely pristine kitchen island, just in the next room. He had a clear line of sight to the netrunner from his position.
Ramses took two syringes and drew out dosages of ampicillin and gentamicin from the provided bottles in the kit, separately. He also prepared a vitamin shot, which contained vital electrolytes to get the 'runner's strength back up.
Returning back to where the netrunner lay on his couch, Ramses administered the shots to the port in the IV tube, one after the other. Watched as the medicine slowly dripped down the plastic channel and past the skin barrier. Intermingling with the blood to reverse the damage that NetWatch had caused.
He checked his watch. The medicine would start to go to work in the next ten minutes. The netrunner's body temperature should be back to normal within two hours. That still left the malnutrition, which could be solved with gradual care.
That still left checking the woman's hardware for any surprises that NetWatch might have left behind. It would not be beneath them to implant their workers, whether voluntarily or by force, with surveillance programs or even bio-control chips that could hijack a person's entire body. Ramses had heard the stories—Afterlife was rife with them—and while he could not confirm such tales for himself, he knew that even the most outlandish rumors could be based on a small kernel of truth.
Ramses dug back into his pocket and brought out his firebox again. He also had brought out a PDA, which was isolated from all networks, that contained a portable firewall and multiple debugging scripts. If there was a suspicious program located within that netrunner's skull, this device would snuff it out and eliminate it, no problem.
He jacked the firebox into the netrunner's shard ports again and, with the PDA registering a good connection, initiated the program suite.
An hour to sufficiently scan whatever was in that woman's head, he figured. The 'runner would be cleansed, inside and out.
Enough time for him to get a little rest. He had been up for more than twenty-four hours, propped up on uppers so that he could do his last job without fail. Through his HUD, he tabbed for a small hit of dex, felt the analgesic pulse into his bloodstream, the hammerblow of sleep pounding at the back of his eyes. Yes, he certainly needed this.
Beginning to head up the floating staircase, the merc turned back, taking stock of the sleeping woman one last time. He considered cuffing her, but decided that would be a wasted effort. The woman was in a bad way, physically, and her access to the Net was disabled for the time being. The place was also sealed tightly shut, so there was no chance of escape, either.
Ramses should have been more worried, but for some reason (and perhaps it was the lack of sleep playing a part), he disregarded all the warnings.
He reached the top of the stairs and went to his room. Darkness here. Curated, purposeful darkness. He would have wanted to sleep in his chair on the story below, just so that he could keep an eye on his new guest. But he did not feel a hundred percent confident that she would not try to strangle him while he slept. Besides, he had wired the house to alert him if anyone other than him progressed from room to room. IR cameras and network trackers and the like. Here, he would be able to defend himself far better.
Without undressing, he carefully oriented himself until he was lying flat atop his thinly sheeted bed, armor and everything. The pillow seemed to wheeze when he set his helmeted head down upon it, nearly depressing it in half. He folded his hands carefully atop his chest, the timer in the corner of his HUD ticking down from an hour.
How's that getaway looking now?
Fuck off.
Sleep came soon after, in very anticlimactic fashion.
His alarm woke him, a soft ringing in his ears. He immediately sat up, swinging his legs so that they touched the ground. A practiced maneuver—he never languished in a prone position immediately after waking. Taking a moment to stretch and crack the vertebrae in his neck, Ramses then rose, adjusting his coat and checking the weapons strapped to himself, as he headed out of the room and onto the upper landing. [2]
From his position, he could immediately see that the couch was no longer occupied. But before his heartrate could spike to an uncomfortable threshold, Ramses quickly spotted the netrunner over by the window, standing rapturously silent, her back to him.
She was not wearing a stitch of clothing on her, the heated blanket having been pooled on the ground midway between the window and the couch, right next to his disconnected PDA, which was displaying a green "all-clear" message. Her bleach-white skin seemed to glow in the dull light. Faint lines of dermal cybernetics spiderwebbed down her back, running along her inner thighs. Bare feet dug into the thin carpet. She had laid a hand upon the glass, looking down at the tendrils of lit traffic and the crystal gleam of the megacorps' skyscrapers on the other side of the river. Her other hand hung limply by her side, the IV tubes still connected to the bag, which had been pulled, along with the stand it was perched on, so that it was just trailing behind her.
Even from this distance, Ramses did not need a medical scanner to know that it was too soon for the netrunner to be up and walking in her condition. He headed down the stairs, his gait quiet.
The woman did not turn around, not hearing the merc approach. She just remained in rapture to the canyons of neighborhood blocks where the holograms of color swung across Japantown to the north, an exodus of light that flowed ceaselessly. She just kept staring out the window until she saw a shadow float across a reflection in the glass, followed by the hardened visage of a helmet's eternal stare. Breath catching, she whirled.
They stood apart, staring at each other for a while. The taller merc tilting his head down towards the more diminutive woman, who made no motion to cover herself up. Perhaps she was too frightened to think about that, seeing as her temples were pulsing rapidly and her body was trembling.
He had to admit that it would be unnerving for most people to look upon a completely armored man in such circumstances, hiding every inch of himself beneath layers of ablative material. The fact that the woman was completely naked would only add to the intensity of her fear—nothing to protect herself with, no secrets to hide.
It was not difficult for Ramses to avert his gaze—he was focused on her eyes, how blue they were, that they reminded him of how the oceans must have looked in the last century. But the blue was too vivid—Ramses zoomed in and spotted a serial number near the edge of the woman's eyelid. Optical cyberware. Kiroshi make.
Ramses briefly bent down, not breaking eye contact, and retrieved the heated blanket from where it had been deposited on the floor.
He held the blanket up, movements slow to show he was not a threat, and walked forward. On instinct, the netrunner backed up until her bare skin met the window.
At this distance, Ramses noted that the woman's skin was slightly translucent. Veins made a dark webbing behind outer layer. More vitamin deficiencies. How long had it been since she had seen the sun?
Had she ever seen the sun?
He approached with as much gentleness as he could muster. The netrunner kept hyperventilating, but her eyes just studied him intently. Ramses made a gesture for her to step forward slightly—she obeyed after a couple of seconds—so that he could drape the blanket over the woman's shoulders, covering her back up again.
"Your body is still adjusting to the long-term effects of the ice bath," he spoke, voice soft but scratchy through his vocabulator. "The only reason you're able to walk around now is because of the compounds I gave you. Without them, you'd still be in a state of nutrient deprivation, but you're not yet fully healed. Not close, to be precise."
Ramses swept his hand back to the couch. "Hypothermia won't wear off completely until you follow the treatment. You need to stay warm. And, careful with the IV tubes when you walk. They're annoying to reattach."
The heated blanket combined with Ramses' calm direction ended up mitigating any hysteria that was manifesting in the woman. She just pulled the blanket tighter around herself, breathing in and out, but eventually she shuffled back over to the couch, bare legs pale and wispy as her lone covering flapped around them.
She sat down. Ramses took the cushioned chair adjacent. He leaned forward, hands clasped together, the thin diodes in his helmet burning a path through the air.
"It will take a few days before you're ready to leave under your own strength," he said. "That is, if an infection doesn't take hold, which is what the antibiotics will be mitigating. NetWatch didn't spare any expense in taking care of your basic needs, from what I could glean, but that was as far as their budget took them. It's impressive that you already have the strength to stand, but needless movement like that will just cost you in the long run. Your systems need to be brought back online. Digestive. Immune. Everything except your nervous system, which was apparently the only muscle they had you flex."
The netrunner tilted her head, firered hair spilling out from where the blanket constricted around her neck. She made a soft noise and twisted her eyes shut.
Ramses caught that. "Headache? Capillaries are still trying to gauge the proper bloodflow, which is why you need to keep getting warm. Frostburn migraines are common for netrunners doing long deep dives. You'll get something to cope with that once the first stage of meds wears off."
He straightened in his seat, his coat parting slightly to expose his armored chest, warning labels on the obsidian covering seemingly glowing like ironhot branding.
"I'll admit that the circumstances are a little disorienting for you, so I'll try my best to allay any fears you have." He noticed that the netrunner's eyes were peering at the gun holstered at his hip. Ramses made a point of buttoning the leather strap, anchoring the gun in place. "Don't worry. If I wanted you dead, I wouldn't have bothered with all this. To bring you up to speed, I didn't take you here to settle anything that relates to you or anyone tangentially connected to you specifically. I'm still piecing everything together. A few gaps remain, but that's where you'll come in. Eventually, once you've recovered. But the only way this works out for the both of us is a little cooperation. I've allotted perhaps too much of my trust for this. I wouldn't suggest making me regret my decision."
The merc returned to his leaning position, templed hands in front of his helmeted chin, elbows on his upper thighs. His pistol dug into his hip, out of sight from the netrunner.
"Names, right." He mechanically waved a hand in the air. "Sometimes I forget. Conversations like these don't come frequently. My name is Ramses."
He paused for a bit to let that sink in. She kept staring up at him with those lobed and perfectly blue eyes.
Ramses then tapped his helmeted temple. "When I scan you, it doesn't come up with any identification, you see. 'No data available.' NetWatch tradecraft, I would assume. What name should I call you by?"
The netrunner's lips pulsed, her eyes scrambled in all directions as if she was reading from a congested scroll, and she clutched the blanket tighter around herself.
She coughed. Hoarse. "J…" she whispered, voice deathly quiet. Her vocal cords had probably not been used in quite a while. She swallowed and then spoke, each syllable torturous as if it pained her. "J… P… 4… 2… 2… dash… 7… C."
Ramses kept himself still. "JP422-7C," he repeated.
The woman nodded, a hint of ruddy color in her cheeks. A scant sign of life.
The merc just squinted at the netrunner. "A serial number. NetWatch really did take everything away from you, didn't they? Do you even remember what your real name was? Not a number—a name."
The view outside the window seemed to be drawing the netrunner's attention again. JP422-7C looked out towards the magnificent cityscape, watching the crown jewel of the Pacific glow like a totemic icon. She shivered, shut her eyes, as if trying to access a file buried deep down in the core of her RAM.
"F-Fiona." Her eyes snapped open. Crimson threads registering a good connection. "My… name… is Fiona."
Pleased, Ramses nodded. "Good. That's good, Fiona." He briefly rose so that he could head over to a nearby fridge in the kitchen. Returning, Ramses grabbed a water bottle, broke the seal, and handed it to the woman. "Drink. The IV keeps you hydrated, but you still need to put your digestive system through the rigors."
Fiona's slender hands poked through a gap in the blanket and took the bottle. She took several gulps and coughed, a hand covering her mouth. Water had gone down the wrong pipe.
Ramses watched Fiona drink some more before he spoke again. "Your memory will improve as well with the treatment. I imagine you must have questions, as do I, but first, do you even know why you're here at all?"
Gulping more water, Fiona finally lifted the bottle away from her lips. Her chin dripped and her hands shook. Then, as if it took a herculean effort, she turned her head until she was looking directly at Ramses, her mouth moving without breath again.
Her voice finally caught. "You. I saw you… in the system. NetWatch's datafort. Past the ICE layers in the pyramid. You—the Solo."
The merc nodded. An immediate action, no trace of denial. "First contact. It had been a rather… interesting encounter, wouldn't you say? I had my icebreaker programs. You had yours. The only difference is that I pushed you out in the end. For a second, I thought my ICE wouldn't hold."
Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, or ICE, were self-evolving programs that protected valuable corporate data. Generally, the wealthier the corp, the more advanced R&D they could put into their ICE. Trouble was, a vault door like ICE was like catnip to the netrunners who wanted a peek behind it. A constant war of attrition had been waged for decades—a virtual arms race—between the ICE software writers, and the hackers who devised the counter to the ICE: icebreakers.
Fiona's mouth twitched. The raw beginnings of a smile. "Almost… had you."
Bravado. That was good. Meant the treatment was working. Synapses were firing like normal again, an engine warming up.
"You did," Ramses said after unleashing a singular chuckle. "It was a good attempt. A very good attempt. No one had ever gotten that far in breaching my ICE before. Suppose I had gotten sloppy—spent too much time in NetWatch's LocalNET before I could bolster my defenses. They had you monitoring the HQ networks, no doubt. Patrolling until you saw my avatar in a restricted area."
Fiona nodded.
"And here I thought I had been careful. Tell me, in the building, did I unintentionally trip some hidden security program?"
The netrunner sipped water. Slow, so as not to choke again. "You left… deviations."
"Deviations?"
"Hitches in… search patterns. Locks disengaging irregularly. Security cameras… altering their sweeps. Only could have been the result of… someone tampering with surveillance."
Ramses just stared at Fiona. "Those types of actions are all non-intrusive. Background. Not enough RAM for those to be detected. You're telling me you noticed?"
"There are… signs," Fiona mustered out, her chest heaving, each word an effort.
"Miniscule. How could you be so sure?"
"Because…" the woman said as she lifted a hand helplessly, "…I was looking."
There had to be the possibility that Fiona just was not talking sense. To Ramses, it felt like they both were speaking different languages. The only way someone would have truly detected his presence back at the NetWatch building was if someone was in the code directly. They would need to have had hundreds of monitoring programs running simultaneously. Thousands. All focusing on different levels of the data fortress, looking for brief moments when the sequence of esoteric letters and numbers briefly jumped out of alignment in the billion separate lines that made up the datafort in the first place.
For Fiona to be performing such monitoring effectively, she was even more gifted at netrunning than Ramses could have realized. If she was telling the truth.
Ramses observed a trace of trepidation. "You're trying to figure out just how personal this all is. For me, only slightly. But for you… nothing but biz, right?"
"Why…" Fiona covered her mouth as she coughed again. "Why… would this have been… personal?"
He supposed that was his answer right there. A vocal pattern analyzer had been running simultaneously as he talked—it detected no variation in her inflections. She was telling the truth about that, at least.
Her hand was shaking again as she placed the half-empty water bottle down on the nearby coffee table. She pulled the heated blanket tighter around herself.
It almost seemed that Fiona had become a torrent of static to Ramses—a vague reflection in his mind. Trick of his optics, a digital ghost. One reset cycle and he would be alone in his apartment, alone, left to pore over such strange thoughts without any leads.
He finally looked away, as if noticing the city outside his window for the first time. Then he glanced back. Fiona was swaying where she was sitting on the sofa, eyes half-open, as if she was about to come apart at the seams. No sense in trying to interrogate the woman further—she still needed a lot of rest in order to properly heal.
Rising from the chair caused Fiona to snap out of her fugue. She looked up at the merc that towered over her, knowing that he could break her neck with a simple twist of an arm. She had probably seen him do it, too, while she had been monitoring the feeds with him at HQ.
"You're going to need some food," he announced. "Vitamin supplements can only do so much."
"Okay."
"How long has it been since you last ate?"
When Fiona couldn't come up with an answer within five seconds, Ramses just waved it off.
"I'll take that as a while. Will get something up here within a half hour. Do you have a preference?"
She just looked at him like he spoke gibberish.
Ramses tried again. "Food. What do you like to eat? I'll order it for you."
"I…" she shivered and her eyes swept the floor in front of her. "I… don't know. No one's ever asked me that before."
True to his word, the food arrived half an hour later to his apartment, delivered by one of the building's staff, who remained blissfully unaware of the tenants that lived behind the door.
Empty cartons of Japanese food sat upon the counter, having been collected by Ramses, while Fiona dozed on the couch. The food itself, despite being ordered by a vendor in the next neighborhood over, was just using ingredients supplied by All Foods. The dumplings were made with synthetic eggs, the pork in-vitro grown. The vegetables were just approximations of their real-world counterparts—they were actually shaped collections of sea algae infused with artificial flavorings.
None of the food was five-star, but Fiona had wolfed hers down like it was. The poor woman had been starving. Ramses had been worried that Fiona's enamel had been loosened from disuse—NetWatch had probably placed her on a liquid nutrient regimen, which limited the use of her teeth—but apparently the calcium in her bones had been supplemented enough that there was not any atrophy, thankfully.
Ramses waited until Fiona had gone to sleep, courtesy of all the blood rushing to her stomach, before he took one of the cartons to his soundproofed armory. He ate quickly, finding the meal to be particularly average, and exited from the room, resealing the atmospheric tubes that connected his helmet to his armor.
He walked out from the kitchen to what used to be a terrace, but Ramses had completely encased it in tinted bulletproof glass, having ripped up the planters and the hot tub installed by the previous tenant for a little extra space. The morning sun created a yellow ring as it burned through the layers of smog, lighting up the room with an amber aura.
Out in the corner, where he could look out towards the badlands to the north, Ramses had become engaged in a vidcall with one of Night City's many back-alley ripperdocs. Not someone that Ramses could exactly trust, but one that he could let his guard down enough to carry out a conversation or two each time they crossed paths.
"It's a fishing expedition so far," he was saying to the icon in the top left corner of his HUD, his helmet muffling his words to everyone else. "No telling how much heat is out there. Figured I'd check the rumor mill before counseling the pirate paradises."
The avatar of Viktor Vektor seemed unruffled by the request. 'Vik', as his regular customers called him, was an ex-boxer who found a second career as a ripperdoc. An unlicensed doc, of course, considering that Vik did not have the time or the eddies to enroll in medical school, but he had built up a reputation for being just as good as any corpo doc, with his rate of successes in chrome installations racking up a very devoted userbase. Rogue herself used Vik as her ripperdoc of choice and she, in turn, sent clients his way.
The doc's avatar was familiar to Ramses. Thick, square-rimmed glasses. Small-gauge gold earrings. Blue button-up shirt stained with old blood. Right arm sleeved with the tattoos of women's faces. Precise cutting glove swathed around his left hand with the tools glittering like diamonds. And a trusty stethoscope hanging around his neck like a tie.
"You could have connected via Berlin," Vik responded to Ramses, his voice graveled like he had just taken a shot of gasoline. "The university subnets there are rife with the underground movements collecting info on this shit. They give it out for free, just to screw with the corps."
"I'm not looking to leave any sort of trail, Vik," Ramses said. "I'm just looking to see if anything has made the rounds on your end. Idle chatter, a stray shard left behind, or just insider knowledge. If I exhaust those avenues, I'll give the academic grids a shot."
Vik grunted, finding no fault in Ramses' logic.
"Very well. Keywords being 'NetWatch', 'netrunners', and 'abduction.' One moment."
Ramses could hear the tapping of fingers on a keyboard—Vik loved to use outdated tech. Vik's avatar did not move whatsoever. Vidcalls weren't intelligent enough to correspond directly to a user's actual movements. They tended to adopt the standard "arms-crossed" pose during calls. Any other poses typically were locked behind paywalls.
"Anything?" Ramses asked after a minute had passed.
"One sec. Trying to filter through all the crap. You get more ads than useable info on the Net these days."
Files filled Ramses view, represented as blocks of red text before a blurred background. More links appeared, directing him to news articles, blog spheres, and various Net boards. Notices of missing children. Users on message boards pleading for help, describing the distinguishing features of lost loved ones. Biohazard warnings emanating from the corpo megabuildings and various chop shops on the outskirts of town.
"Where there's smoke…" Vik murmured through the call.
Too many correlations. A precis of data set to the parameters that Ramses had dictated. The print records had scrolled by too fast for Ramses to read, so he had to save some of them to a separate bookmark for later study.
"I doubt there would be a smoking gun amongst the lot," Ramses noted.
"With NetWatch, that's unlikely." Vik's voice sounded slightly strained. He was probably lighting a cigarette. "Every so often, we hear about such things, and it's not just NetWatch. There's always a story going around about one of the corps—be it Arasaka, or Militech, or who cares—snatching kids off the street for experimentation purposes. Not that it doesn't hold any water; just five years ago there was 60Prex over in London that was shut down because they were harvesting the lungs of children to test out cancer medication so that they could fulfill their human trial quota. The kids came from poor families—they were either sold to the corps for vital eddies, or were snatched off the street, knowing that no one would come looking for them. Some of the kids were as young as five years old. Maybe younger. Hard to believe that was the only case of that happening. If it proved to be a benefit to their bottom line, why wouldn't the corps repeat what 60Prex had done?"
Ramses turned around slightly. He couldn't see where Fiona was sleeping from his position, yet he looked all the same. "Only illegal if they get caught," he said, repeating an old mantra. "But you're right. The incentive is there. NetWatch would be foolish to not consider it if it had brought financial success in the past. Training netrunners from the regular job pool is a time-consuming and expensive process. But if the netrunners were indentured, or better yet, abducted from a young age to serve the corps, it would be a simple affair to retain their own private army on the Net. Cheaper, too. Much cheaper."
One thing potentially derailing that theory was the fact that Ramses had found Fiona in a location that was in dire straits. NetWatch should not have had to resort to such back-alley methods, but that merely bolstered the fringe explanation that someone in NetWatch had setup such an operation completely unsanctioned.
But did that mean that this was a case of an employee going rogue at NetWatch? Or was the corp simply testing the waters, keeping this program on the down-low until they could codify it as policy?
"You think you might have hard proof?" Vik asked, shaking Ramses from his reverie.
He swung his head back, facing the city as it glowed under the morning light. Fiona. What kind of a life did she have before he entered it?
"I'll know soon enough. Either way, there's potentially closure for someone in the mix."
"Someone?"
Pausing for a beat to slowly inhale, Ramses responded, "Perhaps I'll fill you in later. But if you forgot we ever had this conversation for now, that would not go unappreciated."
"Playing amnesiac is easy. I'm a ripperdoc first, a confidante second."
Ramses smiled. Vik was popular with the merc crowd for a reason.
"If all goes well, I'll be sending some biz your way. I might be able to relax my information embargo when we next meet."
"Got it. Just send a message when you're ready and you can jump the queue. Not many have that privilege. You're one of the few clients who's not in debt to me at the moment."
"I wish I could say that's surprising."
He waited a couple of hours, until the morning sun had burned through the first thin layer of acid clouds, before he returned to resume Fiona's interrogation. She had eaten a takeout breakfast and resumed her prone position on the couch, trapped in that twilight area between sleep and cognizant, not interested in watching the crap that was on the television, for which Ramses did not blame her.
Grabbing a foldout chair, Ramses situated himself closer to the couch so that he could sit hunching forward, like a stern headmaster about to level punishment.
Fiona seemed to sense this intense vibe that he exuded and sat up, moving slowly so as not to disturb the IV in her arm. As she did this, part of the blanket that covered her fell away, exposing a breast. She pulled the synthetic fur covering back over herself, eventually.
Ramses reminded himself to fetch some clothes for the woman. Later, though. Answers first.
"Progress?" he asked.
"Headache's still there," Fiona yawned as she swung her feet off the edge of the couch. She rubbed at a temple for good measure.
"That's to be expected. Might last another day at this rate."
Fiona groaned and held her head in her hands, fingers rigid as if she were trying to crack her own skull open.
Fiona's head was still in the process of recovering from being turned into scrambled egg. There was a reason most netrunners—especially the hardcore ones—didn't live beyond forty. He considered dangling more meds as a bargaining chip in exchange for Fiona's full and undivided attention, but decided against it. It would not do antagonizing this person who he knew very little about and whom he had saved from NetWatch. At least, he still thought he saved her and was going to continue to do so unless there was evidence that proved otherwise.
To prove that point, he reached inside his jacket pocket and came out with a vial and syringe. He quickly drew a dose from the bottle and, with his free hand, gestured for Fiona to hand him the IV port.
"What's that for?" she asked, eying the dripping point of the needle with suspicion.
"For the headache."
"Oh. Will it make it stop?"
"No. But it will help."
Ramses quickly introduced the dose and the clear liquid zoomed through the tubing. Fiona closed her eyes, as though she expected to feel an immediate burst of euphoria, but slowly opened them again once she realized that nothing had changed. She slumped slightly in disappointment.
There's always a story going around about one of the corps—be it Arasaka, or Militech, or who cares—snatching kids off the street for experimentation purposes.
Vik's words never left Ramses' head. He had a million questions but knew he probably only had time enough right now for a scant few.
He opened his mouth to speak, but Fiona beat him to the punch.
"You're still curious."
Biting back a sarcastic remark, Ramses just nodded. "I would imagine most people would be."
"I don't know what else you want from me, though."
"Understanding. Information. They're all the same thing."
Coughing into a hand, Fiona pulled the blanket closer. "I'm a prisoner here, aren't I?"
"Prisoners typically don't receive such focused treatment," Ramses said, tone more matter-of-fact than reassuring.
The woman's eyes blazed a pale fire. "I don't need to stay here, then. Do I?"
Ramses spread his hands for a moment. A concise shrug. "Where would you go?"
She had no answer. Ramses knew she would have no answer, because no answer would be good enough to satisfy either of them. [3]
"Right, I'm not in the habit of wasting time, so we're going to continue with our round of questions," Ramses said, his vocabulator having the effect of enunciating every syllable to the point where his speaking sounded over-emphasized. "But if you feel that some invasion of privacy has occurred or are just simply uncomfortable with responding, you have the option of voicing your opinion."
"Would it make any difference?"
Ramses slowly shook his head. "I'm going to need to know everything eventually. You can delay, but that will just forestall the inevitable."
Fiona bit her lip, as if she was stifling a remark, but Ramses disregarded that little tic.
"I need to know more about you, Fiona. Your work, your history. Let's begin with NetWatch. How long were you in their employ?"
Something in the woman's stare told Ramses that she would rather not relive those days from her past. But she mustered up some courage from a previously untapped well, scrunched her eyes closed as if drawing the memories out were painful.
"I…" Breath tight. Pink fluttering into her cheeks. Eyes now open again. "Years. It's been… years."
"Specifics?"
She gave the aura that she was about to snap at him, but failed to find the vitriol. Rather, her eyeballs were making that scrambling motion again. An all-too-familiar action to try and search for a hint of recognition when raw muscle failed.
"I… don't know."
Ramses made a mental note. "Okay. You don't know. But what of your life before NetWatch? Your childhood? Anything concrete there? Anything at all?"
He watched her closely. Watched her to see if there was any familiarity registering. Those mutual experiences and memories that most individuals from these nuclear families shared—a flutter of LED sunlight through genetically modified leaves in a virtual garden, the sounds of the first holoparade a child ever saw, the feeling of those heavy headsets at the junior academies as they constricted one's head as they received their next digital lesson.
But there was nothing. She hopelessly scanned the floor, mouth partially open in a silent state of panic.
She really didn't know. Christ.
The merc raised a hand and gently made a diminishing motion. "We'll explore this later. In that—"
Fiona whipped her head over to look at Ramses, the corners of her eyes glimmering from startled shock. She tried to search his face for sympathy, finding only the blank visage of his helmet. "Why? Why can't I remember?"
Because there was nothing to remember, Ramses thought. Whether it had been burned away or had never been provided the chance to take form, it was apparent that Fiona's mind was a series of dark spots. A corrupted drive, partitions fragmented beyond repair.
If there had been any doubt, there no longer was. Ramses was sure that Fiona was one of these troubled kids that Vik had mentioned, torn from whatever dingy origins that had befallen them and forced to work for one of the corps as an underpaid grunt, indenturing them for life until they had no further use for them. They would just dispose of Fiona if she had languished there—her brain would eventually fry after so many deep dives. It was an inevitability with netrunners and NetWatch would only think of the loss as a write-off on some balance sheet.
"We're staying on track," he said, voice even, despite the fact that Fiona was trembling again. "Your role. Assignments. What was NetWatch having you do in those rigs?"
"I… I…"
"Fiona," he spoke a little louder, but it had the effect of getting her to remain still. "Pay attention."
The tears had absorbed back into the membranes. Deep breaths now. That headache seemed to be rearing its head even higher, pounding her into submission.
"They had me… patrol the Net Zones. Connect fragments of the Net. They said that the WWN had been damaged… years ago. They needed me—us—to help put it back. That was… that was what they told me. I would monitor established zones. Recon others."
"Deep dives," Ramses interjected. Then he added, "Beyond the Blackwall."
Fiona's hands had clenched together by this point. Shaking. Unable to stop shaking. Behaving as if she had just betrayed such a grand secret that her life had now been forfeit.
In a way, she had. The Blackwall was the bandage to the flood that had been left in the wake of Rache Bartmoss' final act. A looming and disturbing reminder for netrunners who frequently chanced upon its boundaries while roaming the Net.
Everyone in Night City knew the story. At the time the skilled netrunner Rache Bartmoss had died, a program authored by him had unleashed a cascading torrent of R.A.B.I.D.S. viruses on the Net. Bartmoss had planned the whole thing as an elaborate prank to occur in the wake of his death—the R.A.B.I.D.S. were supposed to have located all corporate Data Fortresses on the Net and crack their security, exposing all of their files out in the open for anyone to access. It had been his idea of creating a complete and anarchic data haven, one where the individual user held just as much power as any of the corps. A place where everyone could co-exist in equality.
Unfortunately, none of what Bartmoss had intended came to pass. His viruses had been too good for what they had been programmed to do and in seconds they had infected more than 75% percent of the Net. The R.A.B.I.D.S. also had the side effect of interacting with any AIs beyond any military and corpo ICE, heavily mutating them, and causing them to become antagonistic to any user in close network proximity.
The AIs were unrelenting and destabilized any data they could get into contact with. They multiplied and gave birth to new machine intelligences, ones which knew no human governance, which were known as either Transcendental Sentiences, AIs that had been created from Net processors, and Critical Pathway Plateaus, which were AIs that came into existence by accident.
It was quickly determined that vast swaths of the Net were beyond repair, occupied by the post-Krash AIs. Human and AI could not directly contact each other in the Net—the rogue AIs, the TSs and the CPPs, would overwhelm any object they identified as foreign, a netrunner counting as such an object, and would proceed to rewrite their consciousnesses or avatars. Anything that consisted as data in the Net, they could manipulate, which made frequent sojourns to these infected areas very dangerous for netrunners, as it was not uncommon for many a foolish hacker to wander into a part of the Net that had been locked away, only for their nerve endings to fry as they sat in their rig, their minds turned into coded data by the AIs that had hijacked and overloaded their systems.
Thus, in the 2040s, NetWatch had an idea. To develop the most powerful ICE the world had ever seen. A firewall barrier that would partition the infected Net from the areas that were still safe to traverse. All that knowledge from the Old Net would be locked behind the program, the Blackwall, but the threat of AI incursion would be mitigated. At least, for a little while.
Ramses remembered the first time he had laid eyes on the Blackwall. A gigantic dam of magma-red ICE, projected as a completely vertical barrier that stretched beyond sight. Many a 'runner had stood before the Blackwall on the flat plains of the deadNet, staring up towards the barricade, atomically thin, wondering what sorts of tech lay beyond its borders that NetWatch had arbitrarily decided that society could sufficiently eject. Billions of eddies of tech was behind that wall, lost to time and the rogue AIs. Hackers frequently made a habit of breaching the ICE to try and gather snippets of the old code, whether to develop their own daemons or sell them to the highest bidder. NetWatch actively discouraged such incursions and it was their job to make sure that the Blackwall remain as impenetrable as possible, lest the AIs find a way through and start the destabilization all over again.
"How long were your deep dives, on average?" Ramses asked.
"Hours," Fiona said, morose. "Sometimes days."
That long, then? It certainly fit with the profile that Ramses had constructed in his head. All that netrunning gear down in the basement—it had been crude, but heavy-duty. Enough power had been allocated to those freezers to put down a 'runner for as long as Fiona had said. Catheterize a 'runner and hook them up to a food tube, they could last for a year in that freezer, as long as they kept their processes running at a high level so that the freezer wouldn't damage their bodies.
"Wasn't your taskwork contrary to NetWatch's mandate?" Ramses tilted his head just slightly. "Only hackers try to skirt the Blackwall. NetWatch just guards it. If a corp wishes to probe the ICE, that's their business, but they would generally leave NetWatch out of it. Something's not lining up, here."
Evidentially, something wasn't lining up with Fiona either, judging from her lost expression and the length of time it was taking her to come up with a response. She just broke eye contact, turned up her palms as if to say, "I'm all out, boss."
This was not unexpected. A 'runner like Fiona, she would just be executing on the changes coming down from the top. She was not part of the decision chain, merely the final link towards its completion.
He noted that the corner of Fiona's eye was starting to twitch. Onset electrolyte crash. He stood from the chair.
"We're not done yet," he told her. "But your regimen can't be interrupted. Get some sleep. You're going to need it soon."
Fiona just dimly nodded, laid back down on the couch, and less than a minute later, was out like a light.
Ramses just watched her doze for a bit. Before leaving, he bent down, grabbed a corner of the blanket, and pulled it up to her neck, making sure that her entire body would stay warm.
"Someone's got their eye on you, Ramses. Request for you came specific. Got a real hard-on for the job. As well as the muscle they want for it."
The call had appeared on his HUD minutes after he left Fiona alone back in his living room. The merc had made sure to retreat to another area, mute his vocabulator for good measure, and Wakako Okada's face had filled the avatar screen in front of his eyes.
"Your client know that I don't execute on request?" he asked. "Better that way. Jobs where the client doesn't know the merc are the ones I take."
Wakako's wizened face splintered into a sly grin. Her snow-white hair had been pressed into a tight bun and she stared at him disapprovingly through large circular bifocals. She wore an expensive Japanese jacket that was lightly sequined with jade—probably cost several thousand eddies. "Yes… I informed the client that you were the selective type. They didn't seem to care, so I didn't press the matter."
"Shame."
Wakako Okada, the Lady of Westbrook Estate, was a force to be reckoned with the Japantown district. A former merc herself, she had gravitated towards the fixer lifestyle, bringing along her no-nonsense attitude and desire for perfection. Ramses had made a few runs for Wakako before, but not often enough for their professional relationship to be described as regular.
Ramses had mixed feelings about the elderly woman. She was a demanding fixer who did not suffer fools lightly. Her opinion of the jobs she managed was that her assignments would come at the expense of everything else, because the mercs she relied on were considered "lucky" that they got to work with her at all. While Ramses appreciated the dedication to the work, he did not subscribe to the belief that Wakako's work should take priority. Nothing truly took priority in Night City except looking out for themselves.
A couple of months back, he had done a job for her that she had indicated was "most urgent." It had involved klepping an expensive roadster from a corpo's garage out in the hills. The corpo had hired private security, so Ramses had to hotwire the roadster in the garage after sneaking over the walls of the compound, drive it through the garage door and as well as the gate of the estate, and drive into the city while taking fire from the pursuing hired hands.
When he had finally lost his chasers, he delivered the car to Wakako, which had been riddled with bullet holes, and then she had told him what she intended to do with the car: it was going to be a gift for her granddaughter's sixteenth birthday. Ramses had been so infuriated that he had been used for present detail that he had spitefully firebombed the car right in front of Wakako's eyes. With the flames leaping from the roadster next to them on the side of the road, Wakako could have easily ordered a hit on the merc, but this was the one time where they both knew she had screwed up by taking advantage of Ramses by sending him on such a shit task. Wakako promised to utilize Ramses more effectively in the future and Ramses promised not to disparage her on the Net, both of their reps remaining intact. They had kept each other at arm's length for a while after that.
"The client," Ramses said as he slowly paced a circuit in the room. "They mention how they know me?"
Wakako just clucked her tongue. "Now, Ramses. You know that you never ask a fixer for the whom. Rest assured that they're the type that prefers discretion. And if it eases your mind, even I don't know the whom. Besides, the work is good. Assassination. No restrictions. Can be as clean or as messy as you like. They'll pay the same either way. Most mercs don't get that good a deal in their futilely short lifetimes."
If Wakako truly didn't know, then she had unknowingly provided Ramses with the answer in her response.
A client who prized discretion and who asked for him directly. Not to mention, deliberately concealing their identity with the fixer.
Michiko, it had to be.
Ramses frowned, knowing that Wakako would not see. When he had told Michiko to get in contact with him through a fixer for the proverbial "next time", he had not anticipated that she would take him up on that offer so soon, if at all.
It also made sense why Michiko would keep her identity hidden from Wakako. After the fixer had lost a granddaughter to Arasaka a few years back she had fostered a burning hatred of the corp ever since, refusing to associate with them no matter how tangential. Michiko was wise to leave out a few minutiae.
What are you up to now, Arasaka? What's the grand design for this house call? He nearly considered rebuffing Wakako, which would lead to a problem seeing as their relationship was already on thin ice. A merc who refused calls such as these tended to have word leak out about them being "difficult" to work with. A difficult merc didn't get jobs, or biz avoided them outright. Not a risk he was willing to take to his reputation.
"Fine," he grunted, no longer caring how much of his disdain bled into his voice. "Send the details. I'll get this taken care of."
And before Wakako could remind him about executing the job in a prompt manner, her usual parting words to her contractors, he hung up.
Playlist:
[1] Injections
"I Put All That Away"
Max Richter
Ad Astra (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[2] At the Window
"The Road"
Jed Kurzel
A Writer's Odyssey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[3] Realizations
"A Fatal Tragedy…"
James Horner
Southpaw (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 (JP422-7C): Netrunner, formerly in the employ of NetWatch. Early twenties. 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.