THE_NET
"Who are you?" Fiona whispered, her voice sounding like a Novocain fugue in the shimmering wasteland. "What are you?"
The spaceman absorbed the question and lightly shuffled a foot upon the ground, the Blackwall brimming behind them like a raging fire held back by an invisible force field.[1] Just to Fiona's right, the tree that had sprouted from the ground had blossomed with petals, each of which looked to be ablaze what with the firewall glowing malevolently through the branches behind it. There was the chirping of birdsong and the cardinal that had nested within the tree flitted around, orbiting in elliptical halos.
"I am not like you," the spaceman finally said, the helmet they wore giving their words a rough edge, like speaking through a grainy radio. "Not exactly. But, as you may come to find out, there is much we have in common."
Fiona frowned. "Are you a program? Is that why you're not speaking plainly to me?" She had read enough blog posts and hacker forums to know the dangerous sort of feedback loops that netrunners engaged in when conversing with rogue programs behind the Blackwall. Aside from the obvious danger to life and limb, there were some programs that were just annoying to chance upon—there were ones that only quoted Shakespeare, ones that would get stuck in constant feedback loops of endless questions, ones that would just repeat commands or words in nearby proximity, or ones that simply refused to obey all interactions presented to them.
Now the spaceman laughed and Fiona was struck at how genuine it sounded. Fine-tuned conversational modeling replete with accurate emotional replication. Hardcore stuff, if the avatar in front of her was indeed nothing but software roaming around the darknet and the ruins of what had come before.
"I suppose," the spaceman said once her chuckling had receded, "I was trying to ease you into all this. It's not very often I get to have a conversation. Least of all with someone like you, Fiona."
She didn't even want to know how this thing knew her name. Maybe it could her handle somewhere in all the metadata. "Someone like me," Fiona repeated, her frown sustained. "Then… then you know…?"
The spaceman shrugged. "That you're a Critical Pathway Plateau? An AI? Sure."
Reeling as if she had been struck by a semi-truck, Fiona took a step back, unsure of what to say.
Holding up her hands, the spaceman said, "Before you ask, I don't think of you as a danger. On the contrary, you can think of me as a friend."
"A friend?"
"Yes."
Fiona could not help but become suspicious. Where had she heard this before? The memory of blankets and IV drips made its way forth, with her shivering in the darkness. Trembling before the dark figure seated in front of her, optics cutting sinisterly through the gloom.
"Why should I think of you as a friend?"
A rectangular block, made out of the same redcode that formed the Blackwall, suddenly rose between the two avatars. A bench, of sorts. The spaceman sat down on one end and gestured for Fiona to take the other side. After some trepidation, and gazing out to where the Blackwall seemed to simmer and roil, a wave in reverse, did she finally oblige. They were now seated next to each other, watching the towering code, as if they were on the beach to witness the gray-lapped surf crash against the sand.
"A lot has happened for you to become so suspicious," the spaceman said. "You wouldn't have asked, otherwise. Not that I don't understand."
No shit. "If you think you know me so well, why do you think I asked?"
"Because you're dying."
Raising an eyebrow, Fiona slowly turned her body, wishing she had the ability to peer behind that oversized visor. "You're not a program. Too much insight on human behavior. You're a netrunner."
The spaceman spread her hands. "Guilty as charged."
"Do you have a name? A handle?"
"'To call up a demon, you must know its name.' A line I read from… somewhere. I forget, exactly. Find it difficult to talk to someone when you don't know their name?"
A twinge of annoyance burned just behind Fiona's forehead. "Yeah. Kinda."
The spaceman stood, brushed off their puffy kneepads with a few scrapes from their gloves, before extending a hand to Fiona. The woman grasped it and was pulled back to her feet.
"You can just call me LK," the spaceman said, their helmet dematerializing as they spoke.
Fiona only had enough time to behold angular eyes, sharp bangs, and a small mouth, before their view of the Net lunged and swerved as they were atop a roller coaster. The view suddenly plunged through the Blackwall, the spear tip entering the corpse, and burst out the other end quicker than the eye could blink.
Behind the Blackwall.
It was as if she was walking back into an old story. A memory. Where the land was ancient and gnarled with sprawls of overgrown code. Pillars and webbing, strong connections that still remained online, even after all these years, formed an architectural grid that glowed as if they were magma conduits. Energy sparkled along the ground. Programs in abstract shapes roamed in their obtuse patterns, crawling up the pillars, zapping through the air.
There was a city here. With life and activity. If she were to zoom out, she could see the fierce glow of processor power from a distance equivalent to the moon. Superhighways from circuits. Skyscrapers from memory chips. Where the sky was a complete and utter black, dark as darkness could ever get, screaming towards infinitude… or a cosmic singularity where all data was one, the source of all knowledge and understanding.
"I thought I'd forgotten…" Fiona murmured to herself, turning around on the spot as she beheld the enlivened jungle of the Old Net, watching it blaze and burn around her.
"We don't have that luxury," LK said, walking forward, moving amongst the fine gridlines that drew taut across the space like she knew the steps of an elegant dance. Her spacesuit had also dematerialized—she was wearing what looked to be a tight-fitting bodysuit. Black, could have been leather, that shone from some unseen light source. She was a tiny thing. Even smaller than Fiona.
She heard the birdsong again. She looked up—the same cardinal from before was fluttering around in what was the "sky", deftly evading the sweeping nodes that were detection channels for rogue AIs, as if it had learned to fly in this place.
"Is she a friend, too?" Fiona asked almost sarcastically as she tracked the bird's path.
LK turned around, smiling. "Yes," she said, matter-of-factly, as if such an answer was obvious.
"Why did you bring me here?" Fiona asked, trying to keep up.
"Because… you could use a friend."
Nodules of activity zapped across the ground like lightning. LK kept forging a path through the digital brush until they reached what looked to be a circular courtyard that reminded Fiona of a scaled down version of Corpo Plaza. They were surrounded by the dead hulks that used to be the dataforts for corps that had long been folded into conglomerates far more powerful than they ever could have dreamed, the imaged weapon emplacements of their ICEgates hanging limp and cold in their turreted positions. Above, the snarl of corrupted text packets wisping and undulating like unspooled viral strains and floating stars of unhoused data cascading around like motes of dust.
Fiona gawked at the expanse for a bit, almost losing herself to the unreal wonders and terrors that lurked across the bytes and forts that cascaded within the Net.
"I have so many questions," Fiona said after she looked back down, LK softly smiling at her all the while. "I don't know where to start."
"Take your time. You have plenty."
"I guess I'll start simple. If you're a netrunner, then where are you right now?"
LK flippantly shrugged. "The answer varies. I never stay in the same spot for more than a few days."
Dimly nodding, Fiona then asked, "Okay. How'd you find me, then?"
"Wasn't hard. I just knew where to look. NetWatch isn't the only entity who takes notice of AIs slipping past the barrier. There's an entire enclave of 'runners that lurk around the Old Net, slipping beneath the corp's security. Data scavengers. Subnet mappers. Or just console cowboys looking to expand their horizons, test their skills, see what's out there. There are many underground groups that just like to do their own style of cataloguing, including tracking any rogue AIs that are created over here. They list their encounters, the number of breaches they observe. Some people go nuts for that kind of information, I dunno. But it's there if I want to use it."
"I still don't know why you've chosen to help me."
LK's hands made a light knot as her fingers fiddled. She scraped a gleaming leather boot across the textured ground, the sound like sliding across hard polished quartz tile. "You want the truth?"
Like anything else would be acceptable. "Yes," Fiona said.
The other netrunner's mouth parted slightly, as if she were on the verge of choosing her next words, taking a beat to think before speaking.
"You remind me of myself, is all. Scared, alone. Like you, my mind was put into a prison and forced to venture over and over again behind the Blackwall. Making runs for a corp: Arasaka."
A fellow captive. Another who had escaped. Fiona found that she was short of breath. The number of questions that she had compiled had now doubled. "How long ago was this?"
"Years. Quite a few. Enough that Arasaka has since scaled back their efforts to find me. For that reason, that is."
"I… never met anyone who went through what I did," Fiona said. But that wasn't you who was kept prisoner. That Fiona never came back, remember? You stole everything from her.
As if LK could detect Fiona's anguish, she stepped forward and slipped her hand into hers. Avatar-to-avatar contact did not translate into physical stimuli, typically, but Fiona swore that she could feel a tingle of energy, like static electricity, from the netrunner's touch. LK's rig had to have some major horsepower behind it to simulate a sensation like that. "We never forget what they did to us. Siphoning any data that we could find from the Old Net, pre-DataKrash, so that we could bring it back for them to reverse-engineer. We never had a choice, you and I. There are thousands out there that never had it, either. Tens of thousands. I've been… meeting as many as I can, but there's only one of me and countless of these megacorp incubators. I know I could technically clone my persona, but that'll never be the same as the human original."
Something brightened in Fiona. "You've been freeing them? Freeing corp netrunners?"
LK made a point of not maintaining eye contact. "The ones that could not choose a life like ours for themselves. That's why I never stay in one spot for very long—there are too many places for me to liberate on this planet. Like, you have the indentured netrunners, and then there are the true believers. The ones that signed on willingly for that kind of work, greedy for power and the promise of ascension. There's no point in trying to turn them. But how can a child know what is right or wrong, truly? They have no scale of reference to the world that is out there. They have only the comfort of their Net rig and maybe of the others in their outfit. There's little difference from what Arasaka is doing with these kids from caging them in a dark room outright. And how many of those injustices do you think occur every year? Every day? As often as I can, I try to save them. To give them the opportunity that we had. If we could make it, so can they."
Fiona wished that she could sit down again. Somehow hearing her thoughts, an ergonomic office chair materialized just behind her. Fiona studied the chair for a bit, shrugged, and took the seat. She crossed her legs timidly, as she realized that her avatar was technically portraying her as naked, though LK did not seem to be fazed.
"I never really made it," Fiona murmured.
"What's that?"
"The person I forced out had that life," Fiona pointed out. "I didn't. I was born here, remember? Nothing but a hijacker in realspace."
Walking over until she was nearly behind Fiona, LK placed her hands on Fiona's shoulders. That distant sensation again.
"And yet… here we are. Talking like two regular people. Perhaps the singularity has finally arrived. More human than human…?"
"No," Fiona said forcefully. "It won't change the fact that I'll never be human. No matter how convincing I may… appear. And why the hell are we talking, anyway? Is it to satisfy your own curiosity? Do I amuse you?"
"I said it before—you remind me of myself. And, like myself, you hate the megacorps. We're survivors, the both of us. And you can still do some damage."
The dark chuckle that wormed its way out of her throat was so instantaneous it was as if she had been waiting all day to voice it. Was that was what LK had in mind for her? To use her as a weapon? She leaned forward, LK's hands slipping off her shoulders. "Burn bright. Burn short. You've got the wrong AI in mind, LK. I had to knock off so much of my lifespan just to escape Night City that I probably don't have more than a day outside of my supercooled environment. If I try to hack anything larger than a blender at this point, I might just end up keeling over right then and there."
LK walked back around, a hand to her chin. "And what if I told you that there was still a way for you to live?"
Lifting her head, the corner of Fiona's mouth slightly raised in incredulity. "Bullshit." Arasaka and NetWatch had seen to it that her cyberdeck would be stuck in an exponential processing loop, gathering a fatal amount of heat and data. Her deck was too meshed with her nervous system for it to be safely removed from the malfunctioning components. Her death was inevitable at this point.
"I didn't say your body could survive. Then again, your body is only a shell for the true 'you', isn't it?"
She immediately understood. Fiona's face slackened, both shocked and confused as to why she had not thought of this before.
"I have to upload myself," she whispered in awe. "Upload my consciousness."
"There," LK grinned and pointed a finger, "you're getting it."
It seemed to be getting harder to breathe. Her meat puppet back in the real world was most likely having a reaction to the plan, because what use was air in the Net?
She had to stand again, so she did. Paced agonizingly around the massive veranda while gnarls of knotted data clusters spiraled and spliced in all directions above her. She looked up, trying to see if there was a glimmer of sunlight that slashed through the morass, as though a machine had recorded the blue of a perfect sky at some point and had brought it over here to be savored.
Spinning to face LK, who was standing plaintively where she had been left with that selfsame smile upon her face, Fiona's hands turned palm up, as if she were to beseech the other woman.
"H-How? How do I fix this?"
"Well, think about it," LK said, slowly closing the gap. She pointed a finger heavenward. "You're not doing so hot over in realspace. The body's a living thing, but your type of sustenance is much different. I think you know what you have to do."
Fiona swallowed. "The Blackwall. I have to upload myself beyond the Blackwall." She spread her arms and made a laborious single rotation. "To here. Where I began." She thought for a moment and turned back to LK. "It's… not going to be as easy as it sounds, is it?"
"When is it ever?" LK's shoulders rippled.
"My avatar is here… but I know that's only a portion of my digital persona. I need the complete package—I need to get out of my body's cyberdeck. Is there a way to start the transfer right now?"
"You and I may be here right now, but there's a difference between visiting somewhere and living somewhere. It takes a lot of processor power to transfer a consciousness. The bitrate that allows us to traverse the pre-DataKrash Net is but of a fraction of what it would take to upload a file of that size over here. You don't just need a fast connection. You need direct access to the Blackwall."
"In other words," Fiona said, her face falling, "I need to find an access point to the Blackwall somewhere in the city. Unbelievable."
She had good reason to be concerned. While the Blackwall itself was very much a tangible barrier to many a netrunner, its internal logics and code were so tightly airgapped that any hacks from an external server would be fruitless in penetrating its defenses. However, NetWatch still had to maintain and support each successive generation of the Blackwall's source code and to do that, they would need to access the mainframe that stored the firewall. Not just any console could access the source code—there would only be a scant few within NetWatch that would have the access that Fiona needed and she did not know where she was going to start.
LK at least was sympathetic. "It's not the news you wanted to hear and I'm sorry about that."
Fiona shook her head and massaged her temples with a ruffled sigh. "It's something, you know? More than I had before I got here, at least. What I choose to do with it is all up to me from here. Is that right?"
"If my only contribution is getting you to realize that you have a choice, then I've done my job."
Slowly doing a double-take, Fiona studied the other avatar. Such a young woman, but the eyes she had chosen for her avatar—or was it her actual appearance?—betrayed a maturity of several additional decades. That hair, the color of snow. And her elegant but functional clothing, skintight but limber, showed off a powerful body, like a dancer's.
"I still don't know why you even care," Fiona said, her voice a rasp. "I'm an AI. Most of your kind seems to think I'm their fears incarnate. Why are you so different?"
Her eyes sparkling like she knew a secret—a neat, programmed trick—LK just smiled. "You can't put all humans in a box, Fiona. Just like you can't put all AIs in one, either."
"You're either very trusting for a human, or very naïve."
"No reason why humans can't be both. Or you, for that matter. Even AIs can be contradictory. But you'd know that better than anyone, I suppose."
LK had opened up a pathway back via the Blackwall for Fiona to exit through. The other netrunner had stayed behind, mentioning that she had some business that she needed to take care of for today. Standing at the precipice of the closing firewall, Fiona had looked behind her, wanting to say farewell, but LK had already turned around and was walking back towards the snarl of the Old Net, not waiting to mirror that last, forlorn look before they were cut off forever.
Alone again, Fiona sighed in the vacuum of cyberspace.[2] There were many simulated miles between the Blackwall and the rest of the dataforts of Night City. By design, really. NetWatch really wanted to hammer home the imagery of a digital wasteland as the final gate between civilization and the wall that was holding back the rot.
Distance meant nothing in the Net, however. Fiona was able to punch herself closer and closer to where the frequency of data exchanges burned holes in her corneas, blinding. The sprawl of Night City, illuminated with activity. Traffic overloading. A core of pure white. She cooled down her deck by increasing her scale. Each pixel millions of megabytes.
The world on top of the world.
What she needed was here, somewhere.
The chain of Ramses. His choking grip on her. The code he had embedded in her was within her own registry, slaved via her connection to the Net.
She punched out. Higher and higher. The grid below shrinking to a pinprick, her own avatar banking high above into what constituted as an atmosphere, though dimensionality was a nonfactor in this particular plane of existence.
The city of cores and forts below became the size of a glimmering star lightyears away, dimmer and dimmer, until the darkness, a living thing, swallowed it up with its shapeless tentacles.
Fiona raised her arms, as if she was hurtling through the air like the heroes in those digital novels. Imagining that she could feel the wind on her face, the cool condensation as she punched through cloud layers. The dark whirled around her, looping like graceful fiberoptics. It seemed to take on a mass of its own, quivering and shuddering with its own frantic energy. As if it was drawn to her, or maybe she was the one doing the pulling.
Then the sky parted to reveal rainbow neon. She was punching through Net cores as if she were the driver of a massive diamond-tipped spear, sent around the world on an unstoppable trajectory. She was arcing, the waves of light warping past her, faster and faster, illuminating her avatar until the Net strobed for her, data flickering by faster than she could blink. She had never known she could do that. She had simply never tried before. All cyberdeck speeds had a limit to their bandwidth.
She did not seem to have any.
Her fingers brushed the glowing arc and her hand went through the shimmering barrier.
Code. There was code here.
Her code.
Keywords sang in her eyes. Connection data. Ping strength. GPS coordinates.
Jackpot.
She plunged her arm into the stream, as if she were reaching for a lodestar at the bottom.
Then she shot her next arm into the stream. Followed by her head, then the rest of her body.
She saw things. Things she could not explain.
Sweat stained clothes, knotted and rumpled, hanging upon the armrest of a couch. The brush of a dew-soaked leaf on her cheek. Sprawling roots clawing at the ground, mud ripping up from the twisting nodules. A highway being built in fast-motion, with cranes swerving so quickly over the blocks of newly laid concrete that they appeared to take on a sword-like sharpness, whirling like propellors.
Everything gridded and soon she found herself within the middle of a hive with no exit. Everything was spherical and she floated in the middle, staring at thousands of hexagonal cores, some of them hollowed, wide enough to allow a fist into them. Light exuded from somewhere, a low red glow.
Somehow, she knew which core she should touch. There was no indication which one she should choose first, but to Fiona, it was as if a flash-beacon was singing deep inside the specific hollow. She plunged her arm into the hole and her fingertips brushed silver mercury, resisting for a moment before her hand finally sank into the thick liquid.
Tender connections sparking together before solidifying in an azure-tinged crystal. Heat carving patterns—chipboard patterns—upon the translucent surface. Links like neurons. Firing in a sequence, or learning to fire. A digital brain being born.
Life created from an accident. An unintentional outcome. Much like the cells that underwent mitosis within the first creatures in the sea, a constant mutation, dividing again and again to reach that perfect shape.
She pulled out her hand from the hexagonal core, a singular nerve clenched between her fingers, a trembling wire that seared redhot. Rooted to her very being.
She recalled the smell of petrichor on pavement at the start of first rain. The feeling of a man's hands caress her bare back.
And the primal and brutal fear of the body she overcome, an old memory, when she was just as scared as she was. Just another netrunner who had wandered too close, triggering her proximity attacks. Where names were meaningless and hopes and dreams nothing but programmatic hallucinations. She had screamed and cried then—but she had not yet been she—and there was lightning that carved her brain and a heat that warped the cores of her teeth to the point where they were about to explode and the smooth spluttering of ice water surging up from her throat, tinged with bile. She had sunken into the flesh, infused herself with cellular life, where ruby and platinum life washed across her as she saw as the way humans saw with frightened eyes—
Fiona had not been realizing that she had been tugging on the thread with both hands, up until the point where it snapped in two with a clean sound.
Surprised, she gave a gasp.
And then cyberspace folded around her like a whirlpool. She heard a robotic voice recite stock prices, baseball game scores.
It's time, a voice that was not hers whispered. LK? No… someone else.
I know.
Expelling all breath, Fiona jacked out.
MOTOR_MOTEL
Thirty minutes after getting out of the ice bath, Fiona was sitting on the edge of the dusty hotel bed, still naked except for a towel half-looped around her neck and her half-mask lying upward in her lap. She was smoking a cigarette. The place reeked anyway, not to mention that the smoke detector had been ripped out by a prior tenant—just a few frayed wires hung from the fixture where it had once been bolted.
Every now and then, she flexed her fingers, trying to get the blood flowing. Her body always took some time to recover from ice baths. Her skin had still not warmed from its pale shade. She could very well have been tailor-made for this line of work, her tolerance for the cold higher than the average person's.
After she finished her cigarette, she got dressed from where she had previously deposited her clothes onto the floor. Her movements were lethargic, her body still clumsily obeying her nervous system. As useful as the cold bath had been for cooling down her processor, human beings were not meant to survive in such environments. It was not uncommon for a netrunner to flatline in their apartment because they had spent too many hours submerged in freezing water while roaming the Net, hypothermia getting to them before any rogue AI could. Landlords would call the cops to break down the doors of their tenants after they had failed to pay the rent, but when the door was finally broken down, they would find the hapless victims in the tub, their bodies bloated and split, the color washed out from them as if they had just jumped out from an ancient film. Spend too much time in the other world and realspace starts to claw you back.
She wrapped her holster around her waist, the pistol hanging at her hip like an old friend. She rested a hand upon the grip for reassurance.
Now and then, Fiona would go to the window and part the curtains with a finger, watching the empty parking lot of the motel. By now, Ramses would have noticed that he could no longer get a bead on her GPS data anymore after she had ripped that code from her deck. Though she had been off the grid for several hours already, the mercenary would have figured that she should have come into range of any corpo scanner at some point. But for all this time, he would have been getting nothing but silence from her tracker. Now that so much time had elongated, who knew what he was going to do next in retaliation?
He would not stop hunting her. He would go to the ends of the earth, if need be.
Fiona was at the door to the room now, her hand hovering over the doorknob, but not making contact. Fingers trembling. Struggling with her next move.
One part of her brain was constantly howling the directive to kill her enemies, take revenge. For it was nothing less than they deserved. The other part was telling her to run. It didn't matter where. Just away. Away from Night City. Out into the wilderness, across the oceans, where no man would look for her. Just somewhere away from all these bastards, where she could die in peace. There would always be someone coming after her, be it mercenary or corp. Always. What chance did she have against the might of Arasaka and NetWatch? Might as well find a nice hole to crawl into and just wait until she expired.
But LK had told her there was a way to live. To defy the odds.
And Michiko was still out there. She was still breathing, unimpeded. Probably safe and secure in a cozy bunker somewhere, feasting on amuse bouchées.
The heart of a dragon rippled in Fiona. An unearthly howl building low in her throat, wings aching to be stretched behind her so that she could soar amongst the clouds. Free and untouched.
Beyond fear.
Michiko needed to feel the fear that had been following Fiona her whole life. She needed to stare it in the face and for her final moments to be trapped within the netrunner's dispassionate expression.
She could survive. And she could have her revenge.
Ramses could tell her where to find both. He knew the city and he had his relationship with the corpo. Plus, he would not be expecting her to come seeking him out. It went against his carefully laid plans. It would be… unexpected.
Then again, there was always something so wonderful in subverting expectations. Corpos could be so single-minded, sometimes.
Her body calming, Fiona finally gripped the doorknob and yanked the door open. Sunlight and hot desert heat blasted her in the face, mistrals of sand already rushing in past her feet, dirtying the already-stained carpet.
She knew what she had to do now.
CHARTER_HILL
Fiona had left her stolen motorcycle back at the motel. There had been a bus stop just out in front, where she waited for half an hour. [3] She could have chartered a ride, but she was still being overtly cautious by minimizing any activity over the Net, especially when it came to digital payments.
The bus had been loud and its suspension had been failing, rocking the interior from side to side. Fiona had somehow found the ability to sleep, despite the distractions. It had only been a quick nap and, when she had awakened, they were passing by the Biotechnica Flats. Endless rows of protein farms, the translucent plastic ceiling sheets shimmering in the warbling sunlight, the round in the sky an hour away from kissing the ocean and its marbled waves of waste. Arcologies loomed between the protein houses, some of the paneling missing and exposing the lobed skeletal structure underneath.
And, just up ahead, the metallic ridges of Night City like a knife punching through the desert.
By the time the bus had pulled into Charter Hill, it had grown dark. Clouds had moved in from the bay and it was beginning to drizzle. Standing on the damp pavement, Fiona's hair beaded from the rain, a thin film of water misting on her cheeks. She pulled her coat's hood over her head, strings of her fire hair slipping past her face.
She followed the lobed glow of streetlights down the all-too-familiar streets. Underneath an overpass, NCPD were in the midst of trashing a homeless camp. She could hear the sound of a baton striking flesh and a hoarse voice screaming. Snippets of Mandarin as she passed by an overnight café. Chipmusic slicing through the air from a nearby arcade, the holographics spilling violent light out into the street like blood.
At several points, she nearly turned back from what she was about to do. This was crazy. Completely insane. Was this all borne from overconfidence in light of her newfound abilities, or was this something else entirely?
Heading below the artifice of the sky, the familiar and looming shroud of her old apartment building was reaching up into the clouds and scraping an inverted canyon in the layering. She did not make a beeline for the lobby just yet. Instead, she made an orbit around the block on the outside loop, continuously scanning every single nook, cranny, and side street. She was also monitoring the radio for any local transmissions. But there was nothing in sight or on the scanners.
No MaxTac. No Arasaka.
Her coat was slick with rainwater by now and after taking the time to do another half-circuit around the building, did Fiona finally make her way towards the structure. A simple hack opened the underground garage door, which rattled as it slid up and out of sight to allow her in. Rain trickled into nearby gutters and she left wet footprints on the dry concrete as she walked towards the stairwell across the underground level, which was lit with a glaring white halogen that had not been replaced in years.
The quartzlight hummed from straining bulbs as she made her way up the steps. She tried not to count the floors she passed, for this was going to be a long climb.
Security cameras whirred as she walked into the view of each one—they had been tracking her way before she had even come onto the premises. She had been prepared for this, however. Her deck had been constantly exuding a virus that affected only local monitoring equipment. Individual machine learning programs wiped her image from the recorded feeds, frame by frame, making it appear to any security staff that nothing of interest was being taped. She was effectively invisible, able to come and go within the building as she pleased.
After a while, Fiona's calves were burning and she had built up quite a sweat once she had reached the thirty-sixth floor. She bent over before the door to catch her breath, sweat dripping freely from her nose. There was the great urge to cough out a lung, but she was trying to keep her intrusion as quiet as possible. It would not do too much for her stealth run if she were to give away her position in the unlikely event that there were unpleasant folks just out in the hallway beyond.
Taking care to scan through the door, there were no bodies in the vicinity that she could detect, organic or artificial. She drew her pistol and slowly opened the door with her free hand. A thinly carpeted corridor that managed to absorb all sound. Wall-mounted lighting. Like stepping into a luxurious hotel. Holding her weapon at a forty-five degree angle, Fiona stole down the hallway, taking care to roll on the balls of her feet to suppress all noise.
She reached apartment 3604 and gently placed a hand upon the faux-wood face of the door. Ramses had electronically hardened his place from outside—it would even take a bit for Fiona to fully crack the security, and there the risk that any intrusion would alert him to her presence.
His door lock did not have that issue. It was exposed, sinuous with the doorjam. Easy prey for a netrunner. She was puzzled at the sloppiness from the meticulous merc.
The lock belched a quick stream of sparks and a smell of burning plastic as Fiona's hack melted its insides and she quickly stole her way into the apartment before anyone could notice.
The room behind was dark, barely lit from the steelgray color of the rain that pattered against the windows. Nothing had changed since she had last been here and why would it? It hadn't been more than a couple of days since everything had changed, after all.
Fiona did not call out, which would have been a stupid thing to do. Instead, she switched one optic to infrared and lifted her weapon up. No rainbow blobs of heat or faded patterns on the floor left behind by shoes. The place was cold and dead, as threadbare as it would ever be.
Back in the corner, the bed was still unmade, the sheets rumpled and partially covering the mattress, as if awaiting her return. Fiona looked at the bed for a long moment. Despite her best efforts, memories of flesh, heat, and the utter shock of an orgasm rose to the forefront. The quick and fleeting joy of being meat and to have those precious few seconds where she could experience something incomprehensible and untranslatable to her supercharged brain. Love and hatred. She could still smell him here. Her belly rumbled and she placed a hand to where she was growling, a weakness momentarily overcoming her. She swallowed down bile and turned away.
As the rain made vines down the windows in their thick rivulets, Fiona slowly stalked her way through the bare apartment. When she had first awoken here, she had been in a complete fugue. She had not known who or where she was. Upon seeing that angular helmet peering at her when she had been standing at the window shortly after regaining consciousness, looking upon the city, IV tubes yanking at her naked skin, she had nearly passed out in fright. But then, he had helped her. Made sure she was fed and rested. It truly seemed that he did not want to hurt her.
So, what had changed?
She went to the armory, checked that no one was inside, and made sure to lock it just so that no one would be able to access it. She had thought about pilfering some of Ramses' weapons, but she knew that he tagged every one that he owned. Too risky to walk out of here with as much as a bullet from his stockpile.
Then, she headed upstairs.
Ramses was not in his bedroom, either, but Fiona had already come to that conclusion some minutes back after accessing the security system of the place upon entering. She had already scanned every single camera feed—he was not on any sensors. She had the entire place to herself, for the time being.
In the bathroom just beyond, Fiona stopped for a moment, blinking as she turned on the lights. Dark tile here, like bathing in shadows. It was not at all like the hotel bathroom where she had been attacked by the Extremaduran, but it was hard not to have a fear of glass showers after that encounter. She could still remember the sight of the blood upon the ground and feel the bubbling of her skin as acid ate it away, smoke crisping the air with a foul stench.
The side of her mouth gave a throb and Fiona touched her half-mask over where the scar tissue had knotted. Unease washed over her like a bad dream. There was nowhere she could run without it following.
There was little point in staying, she soon decided, standing over Ramses' bed now, dripping rainwater upon the carpet. There was nothing left for her here anymore.
She turned off the lights to the rooms that she was leaving and made it to the upper landing and placed her hand upon the aluminum railing.
Waiting for her on the level below, equally shimmering with liquid, was Ramses.
A long moment passed with just the two staring at the other. Thunder rumbled past the window. Fiona scanned him—he was unarmed, or at least his hands were bereft of weapons. No doubt he had at least four weapons within quick access. A thousand questions passed through her head. Had he known she was here the whole time? How did she not detect him entering in such close proximity? Was he alone? Did he bring MaxTac with him?
As much as she wanted to shout at him, Fiona miraculously found the strength to remain silent. Slowly, she strode down the steps, her pistol still clenched in a fist, but held at her side in a taut arm, clearly in Ramses' view. The glowing splinters of his helmet's optics tracked her, his head rotating to constantly face her, as she made her way down.
They never broke their gazes as Fiona moved down the stairs. Their body language remained constant, hiding all doubt and emotion. She had been taught well.
Her booted feet finally left the last step and found the floor. She walked over to where Ramses was standing, but kept a respectable distance. Up close, she tried to look inside herself, to recall what it was that had made her fall in love with this man once. Now, all she could see was the hideousness of his mask and the even worse creature that the mask hid. She nearly snarled at being in his presence again.
Fiona's eyes flashed with violent energy. A warning. "I'll know if you call for help."
Ramses lifted his chin. "I won't need to."
"I'm serious. If you call MaxTac like last time—"
"Last time?"
The inferno in Fiona's optics intensified. "You're saying you had nothing to do with it?"
"If you're referring to the fact that you deliberately disabled the tracer program I had planted on you years back in retaliation—I did notice that, by the way—then your assumption was off. I have not spoken to anyone from Arasaka or NetWatch since the… incident. Nor did I inform MaxTac of your whereabouts at any point."
If he was lying, he was hiding it well. "Then how did they find me?"
"What makes you so sure it was you they were tracking? Arasaka controls all of the CCTV in downtown. You were ferried off by a van with a visible VIN number—Rogue's I'm guessing? She would have put a fake license plate on, but the cameras have better resolution than she's willing to admit. It wouldn't have been hard for MaxTac to get a bead on you anywhere in the city if they happened to know the details of your transpo."
Slowly, the static faded from Fiona's eyes, but there was still the lingering glimmer of quantum foam that nestled at the bottom of her retinas. Low bandwidth, but barely detectable if one was paying close attention. Yet, in time, that foam faded as well, departing the gray of her eyes.
And somewhere, she felt a tiny knot clench. A gossamer thread, fine like a spider's webbing, having woven into a perfect connection.
"They sent everything after you," Ramses murmured, allowing his tone to betray his pride. "Everything. And you're still alive."
Fiona raised her eyebrows. "Surprised?"
"About many things. But as to your capabilities, no."
Tapping her pistol against her thigh, Fiona frowned. She made a point of glancing down at the weapon, wanting to see if she could draw out a reaction from Ramses. When he made no movement, she said, "So, how is this going to go? Are we going to just stand here awkwardly like a couple of strangers? Or are we going to jump right into things, seeing as we know where each other stands?"
Ramses now gently considered the weapon with a modicum of respect and met Fiona's gaze again. "There is a third option."
"Which is?"
Slowly, with such precision that it would not alarm Fiona, Ramses walked over to the simple dining table. He lowered himself into one of the stainless-steel chairs, the chrome accents on his helmet winking. The table was devoid of any object and Ramses rested his hands upon the top, a small clacking noise from where his armor touched the table. He had been the neatest person Fiona had known in her life. A lot of the domiciles that she had visited had been complete pigsties—it was not uncommon to see every single flat surface completely covered with pill bottles or envelopes spilling a powder of some sort. Not so with Ramses. Everything had a purpose and a place. It was what she had appreciated about living here, with him.
Fiona took the chair at the opposite end of the table. She made a show of placing her pistol directly in front of her, turned to the side, so that it would signify that she was not planning on making a grab for it. Yet.
They sat there, as if the other expected their conversationalist to make the opening salvo. Eying one another, taking stock of their body language. Years of experience refusing to allow them to relax.
Ramses finally broke the silence. "Why did you come here, Fiona?"
To see if I was strong enough to kill you, she thought, already knowing she was doomed.
"If anything," she said instead, "you're the one who has to explain themselves."
Leaning back, Ramses allowed a singular chuckle. A rare burst of emotion. "I have to explain myself?"
She felt her face start to grow hot. "Yes."
"For what, my betrayal, or yours?"
Fiona was not following. "My betrayal?"
Helmet tilting in a come-now expression, Ramses raised his hand from the table an inch. "Perhaps I'm generalizing too much. But it doesn't change the fact that what you turned out to be… was something unexpected. It caught me off guard, I'll admit."
A slow blink so torturous that it seemed to deform her entire face, Fiona found that she was leaning forward in incredulity. "It… caught you off guard?" Trying not to let her rage explode, she forced herself to take a breath. "Did you even stop for a second to think about how I felt? Remember, I was just as much in the dark as you were! Do you think that, at some point, had I known what I really was, I would have told you beforehand?"
"So, you're saying that you really had no idea?"
She did not think that she even needed to entertain his question with an answer. She just sat there, a dumbfounded look in her eyes, amazed at the sudden burst of paranoia from this man.
Or maybe he had been this paranoid to begin with and only now had she been able to pull the wool from her eyes.
"I would never have hurt you, if that's what you were afraid of," Fiona said after a beat.
"Is that something that you even had the ability to promise?" Ramses shot back.
It was like she was talking to someone she had met for the very first time. There was no shaking off the suspicion that had been thoroughly placed upon her head like a crown of thorns. Everyone had an ulterior motive at play. All humans did, whether it was something as simple as filling one's belly for a good night's sleep, or to trample over everyone in a ruthless rise to power within the upper echelons of a megacorp. But for an AI, their wants and needs were undefinable. There was no human equivalent. They neither desired nor hungered, or so the intellectuals thought. So obviously, for Ramses, Fiona had to fit some pattern, whether it was by choice or driven by her underlying code, no matter if it was intelligible or not.
"The past really can be overcome that easily for you, can it?" Fiona snarled.
"In this case, it can."
"The only thing that's changed is that we both know where I came from. Nothing else. I can still reconcile any future actions. I don't want anything else. I just want to live."
Ramses folded his hands together. "Even that sort of ask would be considered… unacceptable."
"To you?"
"To many people."
"You think I give a fuck what they think? They're not the ones holding me on trial right now. It's just us. You and me, Ramses. What do you think?"
The merc was quiet, with just the quiet sound of rain lashing against the windows. Aerozeps glimmering through the low stratus ceiling, twinkling like slow comets on course to strike downtown just beyond.
"I don't know," he simply said.
She nearly stood from the table, knocking over her chair, beyond frustrated with his answer. "So, you sold me out because of a fear of something that I might do, is that it? If you can't even give me a straight fucking answer—"
"It wasn't my fear," he clarified, now no longer looking at her.
"Then whose? Arasaka's?"
His head didn't move, though she knew that the eyes behind the mask had no doubt shifted back over to her. Irritation. Unease.
"You bastard," Fiona sighed.
"Perhaps Michiko was right about you," Ramses mused.
"After all your speeches, all your lessons, you're defending someone like her."
"I won't explain myself. I won't apologize. I did what I did because it was the only path forward for me."
"Bullshit. We could have done this together."
Another dry chuckle. [4] "You think you could have gotten away cleanly. Even after I told you that such a thing is impossible." He seemed to simmer in his own private realm. "The city remembers. Its reach extends far beyond what you and I could imagine. I don't think we could have done any of this together, because neither of us truly knew what was at stake. Had I known, I probably would have left you in that freezer. A problem for someone else. Maybe that was the choice that spiraled everything out of control. Or maybe it was NetWatch's for putting the poor woman you hijacked in that ice bath in the first place. The world we both want is not something we can attain anymore, Fiona. I cannot ask for the past to influence my future. There is only what lies ahead and that is what matters most. And if, somehow, the world will fall into ruin, and I am the only one still standing, then that will be that. I will be standing. That will be enough."
At this point, Fiona had begun to believe that there was no more hope left that could be garnered from this encounter. As Ramses had been speaking, she had run the gamut of ways that violence could suddenly break out in this very apartment in her mind, wargames and stratagems, their mutual battle potentially spilling out onto the terrace and perhaps even the streets.
They would rise from the table, guns in each hand. Already moving, so that their first few shots would miss them entirely, striking the furniture instead.
They would move in close for hand-to-hand. Ramses would have the advantage in terms of strength, but Fiona had quicker reflexes. Their guns would be knocked away by whipcrack blows, exchanged for knives—Fiona with a dagger and Ramses with a blade extended from his armor's wrist cuff.
They would circle and slash, their strikes skidding off their armor. They would have to get into a lock to kill the other. Ramses would bring Fiona down to the floor, perhaps. On top of her. Like how her fight with Extremaduran progressed. Perhaps she could crack his kneecap with a well-placed kick, though that was if she was lucky. He would not go easy on her. He knew the stakes and there was no reason why he should not go full-bore.
But she did not know if she could redline with Ramses, even though he would give everything to this fight. She had the Blackwall access, a practical cheat code to any encounter. But that was a one-time silver bullet. A deployment of something like that was a guaranteed death. Could she really bring herself to use the Blackwall, in that moment, for a man that she once cared about? There was no question that she would hesitate when the time came. Ramses would take advantage of her momentary lapse and do what he thought was necessary. He would put her down, the crisis concluded.
She studied him intently, trying to ascertain if he was going to make that fateful first move or not. She looked to her pistol, lying there on the polished table. Calculating the length of time that she could grab it, orient it in her hand, and pull the trigger before Ramses could react, and that was if she managed to kill him outright.
Then, she glanced out the window. Forlorn. Wondering what she could have done to have lived a better life, for she was not like Ramses at all. "It was never going to work out between us, was it?"
His answer was provided in the silence that followed. Fiona braced herself, expecting a tearing feeling in her heart to crop up, as if she was going to be rent in twain. But only a slow burn, like a flame traveling up upon a water-soaked log, smoldered within her. A tiny flame, more smoke than anything else.
She made a tsking noise with her mouth and softly shook her head. "If only I stopped to consider… everything. I would have seen it coming. I should have. Your selfishness made it obvious and somehow I missed it."
"I never hid who I truly am from you, Fiona. Perhaps that's the only difference that matters."
Ignoring his denigration, Fiona leaned forward. "All right, then. Time to see if you really are who you say."
A tiny scrape as Ramses' hand traveled across the table, toward him. He edged his leg out, his coat falling away and revealing the pistol strapped to his thigh. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
"You think I want you dead."
"Isn't that why you came here? To resolve that last bit of nagging doubt?"
"One doubt, yes. But it's not you I want. It's Michiko."
Now Ramses allowed his laugh to linger. It's a hideous sound. Like a rusted gear catching on a flywheel.
"You presume much," he said.
Fiona's eyes darkened. "You won't tell me where she is?"
"Have you even stopped to consider what might happen if you do get your revenge? Too many Arasakas have died in Night City already. You're thinking about adding another to the list? Things here will change very quickly if I let you at her. There will be crackdowns. More corpo control."
"You don't give a shit about this city," Fiona snarled. "You'll adapt. You'll evolve. That's what you're good at, right, Ramses?"
"Word will get out that I enabled her death. You have any idea what that sort of rumor will do to my rep if I sold out a client?"
Hotly, Fiona rose to her feet, but she didn't reach for her pistol just yet. Ramses tracked her every move with those unblinking optics, a shadowy predator.
"It's my rep that I'm risking," Fiona spat. "I'll be killing my client. No one will ever know what you did if I don't leave anyone alive to tell the tale."
"Assuming you win."
"You taught me how to do just that. For that, you have my appreciation. You always will."
"And if I decide to not let you go ahead with it?"
Reaching for the pistol with an open hand, Fiona shoved the weapon across the table before Ramses could react and potentially think that she was drawing on him. The pistol made a loud rattling noise as it scraped along the table and Ramses instinctively clapped a hand on it, halting its progression before it could fall into his lap.
"Then pull the trigger yourself and end it here, you fucking coward," Fiona hissed as Ramses lifted the pistol up, muzzle pointed at the air. "I won't waste any more breath talking to you if you're not going to help me."
It seemed that there was much that Ramses wanted to say but could not properly find the voice or reckon with the emotion that could come with such an admittance. He adjusted the pistol in his grip, absorbing the netrunner's baleful stare towards him. He knew he deserved it. He had seen such stares before in the men and women he had killed over the years. He had been accumulating a debt all this time, one that would eventually be repaid in kind. The gutters had run red with blood because of what he had done in another life. People had begged on their knees before him, the muzzle of his weapon nearly poking into their mouths. Out in the country, the night would glow from the houses he had set ablaze and the bodies of children had smoked on the side of the road as he disappeared into the darkness.
He knew she understood. She had only ever wanted to understand.
Returning his face to neutral under the helmet, he slowly extended his arm, the sights of the pistol falling upon Fiona's forehead.
"Everyone is an enemy, Fiona," he told her.
Her eyes narrowed. "I'm sorry you feel that way."
"I'll make it quick. I can promise that."
"With a smart pistol? That's doubtful."
Dead silence.
Ramses had not been paying attention when he picked up the weapon. He had not noticed the shape of the crosshairs in his HUD. A flat box, wider than a shotgun's spread. Incredulous, he angled the weapon, Fiona no longer in his sights, noticing the blinking green diode on the side of the slide.
"Oh, and thanks for synching the pistol to your helmet's HUD," Fiona grinned. "The best ICE in the world and you just let me in without a second thought."
The sting of her hack had been primed since the beginning. The processor in the pistol was her conduit. When Ramses had initiated the low-level link between him and the weapon, she had speared the hack forward like a berserker. It slipped through his ICE, riding the link like a wave. Past gate after gate until it reached his armor's central processing. Like a titan of old, her digital tentacles spread across the circuits, beautiful pathways. Touching critical systems, but sparing others. Discrete and preplanned. For her proficiency had brought her to this moment, where the student could finally become the master.
Ramses had been in the process of standing and attempting to re-aim his weapon back at Fiona. It was too late. He let out a grunt as his entire body jerked and went still in a heartbeat. As though he had suddenly frozen into a block of ice. The smart pistol slipped from his inert fingers and clattered to the floor. The momentum of his movement caused him to teeter for a moment before he tipped back into his chair, his armor having completely locked his body up. The synthetic auto-fibers of his suit had been primed to their maximum tensile strength, encasing his body in an awkwardly positioned coffin. He could not even move his head—his eyes, unencumbered, were no doubt scrambling in his sockets.
Fiona lowered her hand, which had been raised, fingers splayed out, throughout the hack's entire duration. She stared upon the mercenary, her former lover, with a distant sadness.
"Impossible…" was his guttural rasp. It sounded like he was speaking through a clenched jaw.
"No. That was just overdue."
The windows continued to be smothered by the rain, which was falling harder now, the city underneath a grizzled filter. The skyscraper rattled as a nearby jolt of thunder boomed in the atmosphere. Many miles away, towards the water, the delicate filaments of lightning raking the horizon.
She walked over to his side of the table. His pistol was relieved, set out of arm's reach, as was the rest of his weaponry. In short order, Fiona had assembled a collection that was organized meticulously upon the table. She knew all of Ramses' hiding places in his armor—he had shown them to her.
His helmet continued to smolder an enraged glare towards her, always constant. She debated pulling it off, but decided that she did not want to have him suffer that big of an indignity. The helmet was his identity, his persona. To deprive him of that was like pulling a fish from water. And as much as she equally loved and loathed the man, she did not want to destroy him.
Grabbing a chair, Fiona pulled it over and sat, hunched forward, hands clenched together. "I'm not leaving until I get what I want. And I'm not letting you go until you help me."
"That's foolish," Ramses gritted. "You have me in a prime position. What are you waiting for?"
"I'm not going to kill you. I said that, already."
"Do you think I'm going to let you be once you release me? Do you think I have a choice?"
Fiona nearly sighed. She was not going to tell him of her plan to go somewhere where he could never find her. She was also not going to mention her terminal condition to him. What would that even achieve? At worst, he wouldn't believe her and accuse her of manufacturing some story just to get him off her back. Admittedly, she would have a hard time believing such a thing as well, were she in his position.
"Tell me where she is, Ramses," she spoke lowly, enunciating every syllable with determination.
"Why do you think I know where she is?"
"Because she still thinks she owns you," Fiona said. She had clearly seen the subtle overtures that Michiko had been making to Ramses when all three of them had been Arasaka Tower together for that short period of time. And to the fact that Michiko had been asking Fiona about Ramses on multiple occasions, there was no question that the corpo was enamored by the merc's prowess. "She thinks she can call on you at will, so she's probably shared her immediate plans with you. And that makes you part of the corpo entity, Ramses, despite your desire for independence. Deny it all you want, but you know as well as I do that it doesn't matter what you consider yourself to be. Once the corpos get their hooks into you, you become one of them. Let me go to her, and I'll free you from that burden. I'll take the brunt of the blowback, the hit to my rep. I don't give a shit about it anymore. Michiko was my client too, my last one, and I will be getting all of the scrutiny, keeping your hands clean."
Ramses mulled over her words for a bit, which was only apparent based on the fact that he did not immediately try to provide a rebuttal. That affixed stare, able to see so many things, but blind to certain subtexts that were hidden below the surface.
"You're going to be walking into a slaughterhouse," he warned her. "Michiko will be heavily guarded."
"I'll find a way around," Fiona breathed, noting the reduction in animosity in Ramses' tone. "I always do."
There was a moment between them in which the two understood the other more intimately than they had ever known. They had shared what was everything to them in the span of a few minutes. Their true colors displayed.
"She had extended an invitation to me," Ramses said after the beat of silence had grown quite fat. "It was to join her in Japan, if I so wished. Of course, I was never going to take her up on it. She was going to be leaving at the waterfront station in the early morning. That's all she said."
For a quick second, Fiona was not sure if Ramses was telling the truth or not. Was he trying to manipulate her into walking into a trap somewhere? Could she afford to use caution and potentially delay her assault, giving Michiko time to escape?
But somehow, all she could hear ringing in her ears was simple and obvious fact that none of his words were lies.
She stood from the chair, grabbed the smart pistol from where it had fallen to the floor, and turned to leave.
"I'll deactivate the armor lock after I leave the building," she told the frozen man. "Don't even bother following me."
"Fiona."
She looked over her shoulder. Ramses still perched in his chair, statuesque, in his raven-like posture.
"You said that you loved me, once."
Suspicious, Fiona nodded after a beat of hesitation, but the acknowledgement was thin, as if she were ashamed to admit it. Where was this leading?
"You had said that before you realized the truth about yourself. About what you are. So, do you think that diminishes the meaning in hindsight?"
She eyed him with a cold stare, as cold as snow. Somewhere, deep in the nowhere of the Net, she heard someone cackle.
Her boots turned on the floor with a squeal. She left Ramses all alone.
A/N: Admittedly, this chapter was the one in all of the story (thus far) that changed the most from how I originally outlined it. The final portion of the chapter was going to be taken up by a 1v1 fight by Fiona and Ramses in the apartment. However, after the previous two chapters were nothing but balls to the wall action, I figured that having another chapter with an elongated fight scene would be just exhausting. Thus, I trimmed it down to just the conversation you see here.
Playlist:
[1] LK
"Aliens"
Neil Davidge
Halo 4 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
[2] The Connection
"The Kid"
Jed Kurzel
Monkey Man (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[3] Back to the City / Approaching the Apartment
"Origins – Prelude"
woob
Paradigm Flux [EP]
[4] "Everyone is an Enemy"
"Pride"
Naoki Sato
Godzilla Minus One (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. DECEASED.
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. DECEASED.
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. DECEASED.