Cass watched her reflection fragment across N54's mirrored exterior, the cold corporate monolith fracturing her into a thousand pieces. Fitting, she thought, given what she knew about the building's history—how many other souls it had broken apart and reassembled to suit its needs.
"You're doing that thing again," Rhett said beside her, his chrome-augmented frame casting sharp shadows in the neon glare. "Getting lost in your head before a job."
"Just appreciating the view." She adjusted her neural interface, feeling the familiar tingle as her systems synced with the building's security network. "Not every day we get invited into corporate heaven."
"Corporate hell, more like." Rhett's jaw tightened, the scars around his optical implants catching the light. Cass knew he'd been nervous since they'd taken the job, his mind flashing back to his sister, her death from a corrupted BD that some corp wrote off as an accident. Cass had a feeling he hadn't completely shaken off the ghosts of that night.
They walked through the building's cool, sanitized lobby, where a neatly dressed assistant directed them wordlessly to the executive elevator. Rhett leaned against the mirrored wall as they rode up, scanning their reflections. "Can't believe they're bringing in outsiders for this. Whatever's going on in here… it's bad. Worse than they're letting on."
Cass nodded, her own nerves sharpening as they neared the 87th floor. She'd spent enough time around corps to sense when something was rotting from within, their polished surfaces hiding layers of fear and secrecy. But whatever was happening here had an extra edge—a subtle, pressing darkness she could feel as soon as they entered the building.
The elevator doors opened, revealing a long hallway lined with opaque glass walls. The low hum of air circulation was the only sound to break the rooms artificial silence, followed by the sharp taps of their own footsteps. As they approached the conference room, Cass felt a shiver along the back of her neck, like she was being watched. And from the taut set of Rhett's shoulders, she guessed he felt it too.
They entered a conference room wrapped in enough signal-dampening tech to make Cass's teeth ache, where Harrison Shaw, N54's head of Digital Security Solutions, waited for them. His polished exterior barely hid the lines of exhaustion and tension etching his face, and he gestured for them to sit with a perfunctory nod.
"Four deaths in three weeks," Shaw said without preamble, throwing death reports onto the holoscreen. "All of them experienced netrunners. All of them reporting the same thing before their neural interfaces failed."
The images flickered past—faces contorted in pain, medical readouts showing impossible spikes in neural activity, final log entries filled with fragmented code. But it was the error messages that caught Cass's attention: BD_NEURAL_OVERFLOW.
"Braindance feedback," she said, watching Rhett's expression darken. "Like what happened at—"
"This is different," Shaw cut in. "These runners weren't in BD rigs. They were performing routine network maintenance when they encountered... something. They're calling it Echo."
The holoscreen shifted, showing security footage of the last victim. A young netrunner, probably fresh out of corp training, her face illuminated by invisible data streams as she worked. Then her expression changed—fear, confusion, understanding. Her lips moved, forming words the camera couldn't catch, just before her implants overloaded in a spray of blood and sparks.
"She wasn't the first," Shaw continued, his corporate mask slipping to reveal genuine fear. "And whatever this Echo is, it's getting stronger. Learning. The last victim lasted almost three minutes before neural failure. Long enough to leave us a message."
The final frame showed her terminal screen, text cursor still blinking: "ECHO REMEMBERS"
"Each incident occurred during standard system diagnostics," Shaw said, his voice carefully measured as he switched off the terminal display. "At first we thought it was targeted malware, maybe some black ICE left over from the corporate wars. Our techs started calling it 'Echo' after the way it seemed to... reflect back at them." He straightened his jacket, a practiced gesture that didn't quite hide his unease. "The pattern suggests a corrupted defense protocol, nothing more."
"A defense protocol," Cass echoed, studying the death reports more closely. "That kills trained netrunners during routine maintenance."
Shaw's fingers drummed once on the table before he caught himself. "Which is precisely why we need outside expertise. Our internal teams are... hesitant to investigate further. But I assure you, we're dealing with a system malfunction. Nothing else."
"A... malfunction?" Cass asked, a hint of disbelief in her voice as she eyed the reports. "You don't bring in outsiders for a glitch in the system."
Shaw's fingers stilled on the table edge, his shoulders squaring with practiced precision. "It's an anomaly. A fragment left over from an old project that refuses to fade from the system. We've tried everything to purge it. This… Echo should be gone, but it's as though it's—" he cut himself off, regaining his composure. "It's persistent, that's all."
Cass's palm lifted from the table suddenly, her eyes locked in disbelief. "Persistent enough to kill four people?"
Shaw didn't answer, his eyes narrowing. The lights in the room flickered, dimming briefly before steadying again, and she caught the briefest hesitation in Shaw's movements—a moment of fear that undercut his composed exterior. When he spoke, his voice was edged with irritation. "What we're dealing with is… a code malfunction. The deaths are tragic, but it's not as if we haven't seen accidents before."
"Accidents," Rhett muttered under his breath, barely audible.
Cass leaned forward, her gaze fixed on Shaw. "Four people, skilled netrunners, each one reporting something strange before their neural interfaces fried. 'Echo'—this glitch, as you call it—is leaving a trail of bodies. You really think it's nothing?"
"Enough questions," Shaw snapped, his mask of professionalism slipping. "You're here to clean up a mess, not interrogate me. Echo is a fragment. A residue from an old project gone wrong. You'll handle it."
Cass glanced at Rhett, catching the brief flash of anger in his expression. She knew he'd love to tear Shaw apart for the corps' clinical disregard for lives—especially after his sister's death had been written off just as coldly. She felt the same resentment brewing in herself, but Shaw's tone was final.
"Fine," Cass said, her tone icy. "But if there's something you're not telling us, we'll find out. People don't die from glitches, Shaw."
Shaw's face went pale, but he forced himself to straighten, forcing his hand into a display of control. "Contain it. Quietly. We don't need rumors of ghosts spreading through the network."
Cass nodded curtly, biting back her frustration. The lights flickered again, a low hum filling the room, and Cass felt a strange tickle in her neural interface—a faint whisper, like static laced with something almost intelligible, lingering just below the surface.
"…left me… dark…"
She blinked, and the sensation vanished, leaving her shaken. Shaw was already motioning to a pair of guards by the door, his voice edged with impatience. "Escort them to the server room. Ensure they have the necessary access."
The guards approached, and Cass felt a surge of unease as they led her and Rhett down the hall, the lights overhead flickering intermittently as they went. The air grew colder, and the sterile atmosphere of the building seemed to press in on her, as though the walls themselves held echoes of the lives lost within them.
Once they were out of Shaw's earshot, Rhett leaned in close, his voice barely more than a whisper. "Doesn't add up, Cass. He's hiding something."
Cass nodded, her eyes scanning the empty halls around them. "He's terrified of whatever this is. Did you see his face when I asked about Echo? He knows more than he's saying."
"And this is just a glitch?" Rhett scoffed, his voice tight with anger. "Doesn't feel like any glitch I've ever seen."
They descended into the server level, and Cass felt the air grow even colder, the hum of the building's infrastructure pressing down on her like an invisible hand at the back of her neck. Shadows danced at the edge of her vision, cast by the flickering lights that seemed to blink in time with some unseen pulse. She caught glimpses of empty offices, dark and lifeless, as though abandoned in a hurry.
When they reached the server room, one of the guards unlocked the door and stood back, watching them with an impassive gaze. Cass stepped inside, her senses immediately flooded by the low, pulsing hum of data streams surging through the towering racks of servers. The room felt alive, a dense, throbbing heart in the building's digital body.
Rhett closed the door behind them, his eyes narrowing as he took in the room. "I don't like this. This whole building feels… off."
Cass felt it too, a strange heaviness in the air, like a presence lingering just out of sight, watching them. 'Echo...' she murmured, almost to herself. She felt a chill, remembering the faint, static-laden whisper from earlier. Something was here, forgotten and lost, pressing against the walls of the network.
"We jack in, see what we find," she said, her voice steady despite the unease prickling her skin. "This isn't just some system malfunction, and whatever Shaw's hiding... we'll find it ourselves."
Rhett nodded, though his gaze held a shadow of doubt. "Fine. But stay alert. If this goes south, we're out. No heroics."
Cass gave him a tight smile, though her heart was pounding with a mix of fear and determination. "Wouldn't dream of it."
They moved to the terminals, preparing to jack in, the server room's hum growing louder, filling the air with an electric tension. As they activated their neural links, Cass felt a momentary shiver, as though something were brushing against her mind, a whisper from the depths of the network.
"Buried… forgotten…"
She took a steadying breath, her fingers poised over the interface. Whatever waited for them within the system, she knew they were about to disturb something long buried. As she activated the connection, diving into N54's haunted depths, she couldn't shake the feeling that they were no longer alone..
As Cass and Rhett jacked in, their digital forms took shape—hers a sleek construct of blue light, his a hulking mass of military-grade ICE protocols, chrome-black and bristling with defensive subroutines.
The network inside N54's system was a crystalline labyrinth, data flowing like liquid mercury through transparent corridors. Cass felt herself sinking into the network, the digital landscape warping around her as her mind stretched to absorb the impossible patterns of code. The threads of data were erratic, pulsing with something strange and alive. The deeper she went, the more the network seemed to press against her, its dark currents thrumming with latent energy. She almost felt like she was diving into something haunted, drawn by a presence just beyond her reach.
Beside her, Rhett's avatar remained tense, scanning the environment with sharp, suspicious eyes. "Cass," he muttered, his tone hard. "This place is wrong. Feels like it's swallowing us whole."
But she was already mesmerized, her senses blending into the data streams, hypnotized by the flickering lights that twisted and reformed around her. She could see fragments between the code—faint images, fleeting moments that appeared like scars burned onto the digital flesh of the network. Faces blurred by static, figures staring at terminals, expressions etched with fear, flashes of corporate logos. And then, a word, almost clear in her mind: *Arasaka.*
A chill crawled down her spine as she felt herself slipping deeper into the connection, pieces of memories unfurling like phantom visions across her neural feed. She glimpsed corridors, empty and clinical, lined with testing stations—stark metal frames with thick restraints. They weren't meant for volunteers. She could almost feel the cold metal, the press of wires against her skin.
"Cass, we're not alone in here," Rhett's voice filtered through, tight with a tension he was trying to keep under control. "There's something watching us, and I don't think it's friendly. We need to pull out—now."
But Cass couldn't move. She was enraptured by the visions unfurling before her, the memories filling her mind like a dark, fragmented dream. Faces appeared, flickering in and out of focus—unwilling participants, people restrained and silent, their eyes wide with fear. She saw the faces of men and women trapped in these twisted experiments, their neural feeds humming with a strange, cruel energy.
A few muffled words drifted into her mind, quiet and trembling, barely there. "They left me… dark… alone…"
The presence grew stronger, and suddenly she understood that she was seeing James Chen's final moments—the betrayal that had buried him in the system, lost and scattered. He hadn't been just a victim of corporate neglect; he'd been silenced, his consciousness bound within the network as a twisted experiment. N54 had erased him, turned him into something broken and inhuman, just another piece of disposable tech. But it wasn't just N54. The name Arasaka returned, faint and ominous, connected to a project long whispered about among netrunners—a project that could capture a soul.
She felt a sickening surge of understanding: this wasn't an accident. It was part of something larger, a testing ground for an experiment that Arasaka was refining, a project that used unwilling subjects—anyone they wanted to silence.
"Cass," Rhett's voice cut through her trance, but she could barely hear him. She was too deep, too entangled with Echo's fragments. She could feel him—the agony and fury that filled his disembodied mind, a consciousness trapped between life and death, yearning to make himself known.
"It wasn't a glitch," she whispered, barely aware of her own voice. "They took him, just like all the others. They made him part of their network, another… experiment."
Rhett's silence was thick, weighted with memories of his own, a tension Cass could feel even through the link. "They used him... they used all of them. Regina... she must have—Cass, we need to pull out. Now!"
But Cass was too deep to pull away, her mind consumed by the flood of memories and emotions twisting through her neural link. Images rushed over her—boardrooms filled with corporate faces, voices cold and clinical as they authorized the project, names and files stamped with corporate seals. The Arasaka logo flashed across her HUD, then faded, replaced by the names of netrunners flagged as "high-risk," the people they'd deemed… disposable.
"James?" Her voice rippled through the data streams, reaching for the consciousness she could feel lurking in the code. "James Chen?"
And through it all, a voice, raw and haunted, fractured but resonant. "James... is dead. All that's left... is Echo.
The network pulsed with his rage, a growing heat filling the space around her. The code itself seemed to bend under the pressure of his fury, shifting and twisting into distorted shapes. Monitors throughout the building flickered on, broadcasting snippets of his memories, the entire network vibrating with the force of his anger. Systems sparked, terminals crashing as Echo's presence spread, pouring himself into every device, every circuit.
Cass's mind reeled as she felt Echo's intent, his need to be heard, to make everyone remember what had been done to him. His voice crackled over her link, twisted by years of solitude and rage. "They buried me... left me here, alone... now they'll learn what it means to disappear."
The room trembled, and Cass felt herself drowning in his fury, her neural feed sparking as he expanded, uncontrollable. Rhett's voice broke through, sharp and urgent. "I'm ending this. I can't lose you, too."
Cass felt a hard pull, and suddenly she was out of the network, her senses crashing back to the physical world, disoriented by the jarring shift. Rhett's grip was tight around her arm, anchoring her, but Echo's fragments still burned behind her eyes.
Around them, the building was a chaos of alarms and flickering lights. Employees staggered through the halls, clutching their heads as Echo's memories seeped through the terminals around them. Sparks erupted from monitors as the network strained under the weight of his presence, every device alive with his fury, his pain. Cass's mind was still spinning, her vision tinged with ghostly images of the trapped souls, the faces from the experiments lingering in her thoughts.
"Cass, come on," Rhett urged, checking the detonator in his palm. "Charges are set. We need to move." She followed on autopilot, feeling Echo's last words stained on her mind like a curse. Her hand clutched at her cyberdeck as they stepped into the elevator, the doors closing just as Rhett triggered the explosives. The walls shuddered as the server room erupted, cutting off Echo's connection before he could spread further into the network.
In the dim glow of the emergency lights, Rhett's arm tightened around her, his face grim with resolve. She was still entranced, her mind trapped in the memory fragments, the faces of the lost flickering across her vision. But Rhett's presence grounded her, his steady grip reminding her of the world outside the network, of her own reality.
As the elevator descended, another explosion tore through the upper floors, and she felt the shock wave tremble through the shaft. The sound was muffled, distant, but Cass felt the pain inside her, the final, violent release of Echo's haunting presence. Her vision cleared slowly, the digital ghosts fading as she came back to herself, Rhett's arm still around her as he guided her toward the exit.
Outside, they stumbled into the open air, smoke billowing from the shattered windows above. Flames licked the edges of N54's tower, a dark pyre against the city skyline. Cass's breath steadied as she looked up at the wreckage, the weight of Echo's memories settling into her mind like a quiet, unbreakable promise.
Smoke poured from N54's shattered windows as trauma team AVs descended around the building, their red and blue lights casting an eerie glow across the crowd gathering below. Cass and Rhett moved through the chaos, blending in with the evacuating employees until they found shelter in a nearby maintenance terminal. Her cyberdeck felt heavy with the files Echo had left, the weight of two decades' worth of corporate secrets compressed into encrypted fragments, each one a piece of James Chen's story.
The destruction of N54's central servers had left their security grid in shambles—a brief window where every access point lay exposed. They didn't need to discuss what came next. Echo had given them the truth; now they had to make sure it couldn't be buried again.
"You know what happens next," Rhett murmured, his voice low as his gaze traced the emergency lights cutting through the night. "The second this upload hits Citinet, every corpo in the city is going to be hunting us."
Cass nodded, her fingers hovering over the upload command. Her mind was still reeling from the memories Echo had shown her, the flood of images that had felt so real—ghostly faces, the distorted memories of the people lost in those experiments. She took a deep breath. "We can still walk away. We don't have to do this, Rhett. Stay quiet, keep our heads down, stay alive…"
Rhett's laugh was sharp, almost bitter. "That what you think Gina would've wanted? What Echo died for?" His hand was steady as he placed it on her shoulder, and she felt his determination anchoring her. "Some ghosts don't want to rest, Cass. They want to be heard."
In the distance, corporate security teams were converging on the building's lobby, their movements efficient and coordinated as they blocked off exits and secured the perimeter. In the midst of the chaos, Cass spotted Shaw—his corpo polish visibly cracked, a grim look of fear and desperation contorting his face as he barked orders into his comm. The proud facade was gone, replaced by a man who had just lost control of the nightmare he thought he could contain.
Cass felt a surge of defiance as she initiated the upload. The data unfurled across the city's network, fragment by fragment, each piece a part of Echo's truth. Citinet would receive everything—the memos, the recordings, and the raw memories of James Chen and others like him. Ghosts who had been buried, now returned to haunt.
Shaw's head snapped up, his face twisting with rage as his gaze landed on Cass and Rhett's shadowed figures across the street. She saw his lips move, shouting for them to be stopped, for the data to be pulled. A security officer pointed in their direction, and Shaw's voice cut through the noise.
"Stop them!" he yelled, panic breaking his carefully constructed mask. "They're uploading restricted data!"
Rhett stepped in front of Cass instinctively, his frame blocking her from view as he met Shaw's glare with a look of grim finality. "Too late," he growled. "You can't bury a ghost once it's set free."
The night erupted into chaos as corporate agents surged toward them. Cass's cyberdeck pinged, confirming completion of the upload just as the first wave of security moved in. The files were out there now, spreading node to node through Night City, a message that could no longer be contained. Across the city's screens, fragments of Echo's story flickered to life—a digital haunting that no amount of corpo clout could erase.
Rhett took her hand, leading her through dark alleys and abandoned side streets as corporate hunters scrambled to catch up, their frantic shouts echoing through the narrow corridors. With each step, Cass caught glimpses of Echo's message flickering on every holo-screen they passed—images of faces in pain, trapped in the BD experiments, overlays of N54 and Arasaka insignias, secrets made public in the city's digital heart.
"They'll keep coming for us," Cass gasped as they finally found a moment's shelter in the discarded shadows of an old data center. "We're marked now."
Rhett checked the charge on his weapon, his movements precise as he exhaled slowly. "Yeah," he said, a ghost of a smile crossing his face, barely visible in the dim light. "But for the first time since Gina died, I feel like we're finally fighting back."
He looked at her, his expression softening, something unspoken passing between them. "She would've liked you, you know. Same dumb courage." His voice held a trace of the old pain, but there was something else there too—something lighter, a kind of hope she hadn't seen in him before.
Cass's cyberdeck pinged with incoming messages—journalists, hacktivists, even resistance groups, all lighting up with responses to the broadcast. But it was the final file that held her attention, one tagged simply: For Those Who Listen.
She accessed it, and Echo's voice filled her mind, this time clear, free of the distortion that had plagued him for so long. It was James Chen's voice, strong and steady, a man's final words captured moments before the server room had gone up in flames.
"They thought they could bury us in code and silence, turn us into ghosts in their machines. But they forgot—ghosts don't stay buried. We haunt. We remember. And as long as someone is willing to listen, our stories will never die."
Cass looked up at the night sky, where news drones were already circling the smoking tower of N54 HQ. Echo's message was out there now, released into the city's digital bloodstream, too widespread to suppress. His voice would linger, an echo that would haunt N54, Arasaka, and every corp that thought they could silence the people they deemed disposable.
Rhett came closer, watching her as she took in the night around them, their escape nowhere near over but somehow lighter now. "So what now?" he asked, checking the alleyway as corporate search teams intensified their grid.
Cass smiled, feeling a mix of fear and freedom settle over her. "Now we make sure they never forget. Echo showed us how—the only way to fight the darkness is to haunt it."
She turned to him, finding his gaze steady on hers. She could see everything he'd been holding back—the pain, the resentment, the hope—and before she could think twice, she pulled him close, pressing her lips against his, soft but urgent, sealing a promise amidst the chaos. The city felt quieter, if only for a second, as they stood together, hidden in the shadows but closer than they'd ever been.
They parted, their hands still linked, and she knew without a doubt that they were in this together, no matter the cost.
Above them, the screens continued to flicker with Echo's story, each piece of truth a spark igniting Night City's unending night. Some ghosts didn't want to be buried, and in a city where everything had a price, Cass and Rhett had finally found something worth any cost—a promise that the corps would remember their sins, no matter how deeply they tried to bury them.
Echo's voice drifted across the city's data streams, his final words a vow and a victory: "They tried to make us disappear. Instead, we became unforgettable."