The next few days blurred together. Work in the garage by daylight, if you could call it work. More like slave labor as Sprocket began to "let me" do more and more work. Nights, though, were different. Nights belonged to me and my new toy, running around town.
I started running the nodes as routine. At first, I felt clumsy, like every step, every door, every jack-in would set off alarms. But the Raven made it simple. Too simple, almost.
The preinstalled quickhacks were the kind of thing you only believed in once you tried them. Names read generic, but they worked smooth. Nick did have quite a collection.
Ping. First thing, always. Like throwing a rock in a pond and watching the ripples. The Raven translated it into pulses across my skull. Each response came back as a pinprick of light in the dark—a wall terminal here, a camera there, sometimes a heat signature if the node tied into security. Within seconds, I knew the outline of each floor of the building above me. And it showed more than that. Most computers, showers, mirrors, electrical devices of all sorts were connected. I need to tweak what I want to see myself.
Camera Control. That one felt like bending fingers that weren't mine. Tap into a feed, and the world bent with me.
Short Circuit. I tried it once on a vending machine that barked static at me when I passed. The Raven hummed, heat climbed in my neck, and then—click. The whole machine shut down with a dying whine. So it works on everything?
Cyberware Malfunction. That one was darker. My heart beat with a cold pulse when I thought about it. Sprocket had taken a hit from that combo once—paralyze stacked with Short Circuit.
Bait. Distraction, noise. It flicked false pings into the neural network of a target. Simple but effective.
Extract Data. Bread and butter. Run it, and the node spilled its guts. Logs, cached creds, archived junk. Most of it worthless, but it would take me ages to do that with a Spiker.
Remote Deactivation. My favorite. The exit button. I passed by a store with a playing TV inside and shut it off in seconds. No alarms, no forensic trail, just another unfortunate accident nobody had time to fix.
I realized quickly how much easier it all was with the Raven. I didn't need to fight with raw code anymore. No more spiking syntax into a Spiker until my eyes crossed. The Raven did the heavy lifting. All I did was point it at the problem and hold on.
The best part? None of it required brain-burn. Quick uploads, smooth execution. All I had to watch was the cooldown. The Raven got hot fast, but it dissipated just as quickly. If I tried to chain too many hacks, the buffer indicator glowed red and the deck throttled itself. Sometimes the heat crawled into my spine, like warm hands pressing against my neck. Vik's words circled back every time: Don't push it. Let it breathe.
Still, temptation scratched. There was a note buried in the firmware logs—an option grayed out, locked. Overclock. In the game, it was a perk. Pay HP and run quickhacks until it's over. I didn't touch it. Not yet. I didn't know if "sacrifice life" meant frying a nerve cluster, bleeding in my sleep, or melting from the inside out. But the option was there.
It wasn't just the quickhacks. Those were convenient, efficient, but the Raven held more.
One night, I peeled apart the structure of a hack file. Expected it to be some slick piece of compact code. Instead, it was massive. Thousands of subroutines, nested exploits, fallback branches. The quickhacks didn't run just one trick—they carried libraries of methods for every possible version of the target.
Camera Control wasn't one hack. It was fifty ways of bending any surveillance feed—old Militech firmware, cheap Chinese knockoffs, Arasaka's cutting-edge optics. The Raven auto-sifted, chose the best path, executed. I didn't even need to know how in order to use it.
Still, I could peek at the raw streams if I wanted. That's when it hit different. The data didn't look like lines of code anymore. It was sensory, symbolic. Streams became flashes of sound, bursts of color, textures across my skin. Camera logs felt like glass shattering and my view shifting. Security alerts rang like church bells. I didn't read the code—I experienced it, like hearing music.
Details blurred, hard to pick apart, but the vibe carried through. A rhythm, a mood. Like hearing all the instruments in a song even if you didn't know how to play them.
It was intoxicating. Addictive, even. I was like a kid who got a new toy. But I'm sure it's just a temporary feeling and I'll get used to it. I will not be a cyberpsycho off on one implant.
When I finally logged onto the BBS with the Raven, the difference was night and day.
The glitches I'd grown used to—the broken avatars, stuttering frames, warped geometry—they smoothed out. The noise remained, part of the aesthetic, but now it looked intentional.
Small crowds moved with fluid rhythm. Conversations blurred into streams of light I could almost reach out and touch. Shapes had edges, depth. The Raven rendered everything clearer, sharper, but still artificial, still dreamlike. It covered my entire field of view, even on the eye that wasn't cybernetic.
I wandered. Browsed stalls, markets for the things I thought would be useful. Turns out, phones were obsolete. Couldn't run anything, couldn't access half the infrastructure. Might as well be paperweights unless you wanted nostalgia. People sold them as accessories.
The good stuff cost real money. Quickhacks, custom scripts, one-off exploits. The combat hacks caught my eye—expensive, boutique-grade. Stuff like tracking, suppression, auto-targeting. Small category, high price tags. Most of what I saw was niche, tools for specialists. But maybe this isn't the place to look.
Didn't matter. I didn't have the money anyway.
What I did notice: everyone ignored me. My avatar was still default. A noob mannequin drifting through a space where reputation and cred was currency. Nobody looked twice.
I decided to fix that.
The menu for avatars popped up like a cheap dressing-room interface. A rotating blue mannequin, blank face, default pose. Underneath:
[Generate via AI assistant — 200€$][Manual edit — free, limited features]
I snorted. Two hundred just to not look like a scrub. No chance.
The AI option teased: "Our assistant will create a personalized avatar based on your psyche profile and browsing history!"
Yeah, great. Pay to let some code psychoanalyze me and spit out a cartoon.
I hovered over manual. Sliders and palettes opened. Hair, clothes, skin tone, posture. Everything looked blocky, low-effort. Obviously rigged to push you into coughing up eurodollars.
I sighed, dragged the color wheel until the mannequin's body dulled to gray, then added a faint static ripple effect across its skin. Looked less like a blank doll, more like a shadow figure.
When I hit confirm, the system polished the edges automatically. My mannequin stood straighter, motions fluid, head turning slightly with awareness. Making me actually feel in control of that digital body.
I logged back into the main lobby. Nobody paid attention at first, but I caught one or two avatars flicking glances now. Progress.
I pinged Sasha.
"Got time? You said you'd show me more."
She replied instantly. "Already on. Come find me at the bar."
Her signal lit up inside the bar. I threaded through avatars—beasts, neon masks, flat 2D anime faces—to a booth in the corner.
Sasha sat across from Yoko. Her avatar looked the same as before—sleek, sharp-eyed, black-and-blue outlines that shimmered when she moved. Yoko's was harder to look at: a living oil painting that shifted every second, lines melting, reforming.
When I got close, a burst of encrypted chatter flared between them. Looked like neon windows flashing too fast to read. The Raven caught scraps, just enough to make my ears ring—half-sentences, corrupted syllables. Then the windows folded, silence again.
Both of them turned.
Sasha smirked first. "Well, look at that. He's finally got himself a real deck."
Yoko tilted her head, eyes glitching into rows of binary before snapping back. "Congratulations. You don't look like a complete idiot anymore."
"Thanks," I muttered, sliding into the booth. "Always nice to be recognized."
"Love attention, do you?" Sasha teased, leaning her chin on her hand.
Yoko's voice was flat. "Was obvious from the start, wasn't it?"
I spread my hands. "It was out of the best intentions."
"Yeah, yeah. Taco man."
Their conversation resumed, but slower, pulling me in.
"Been steady lately," Sasha was saying. "Mostly. We've been getting more serious gigs lately."
"That's good money," Yoko said. "Maine got you a better cut?"
Sasha shrugged. "Pays enough to make me not worry about shit anymore. Thinking about celebrating. Maybe a club night."
Yoko arched a brow. "Isn't this the usual for you?"
"Yeah." Sasha smirked. "But this time, it's Afterlife. Got the cred now."
That caught me off guard. "The Afterlife? Are you serious?"
"I told you we got serious gigs with our fixer." She smiled at me. "Queen of Fixers herself allowed us."
Yoko gave me a long, warning look. "I knew you would get there."
"And I think I can bring in a few people as well," Sasha said nonchalantly.
"You are fucking serious? You're inviting?" Yoko muttered.
Sasha leaned forward, eyes bright. "Friday night. Four days from now. You're in, if you want."
Silence filled our space. Getting into Afterlife even once is hard as shit, but even if I'm not a merc, getting to know people there would be invaluable.
I hesitated, then nodded. "Alright. Count me in."
"Good." She leaned back, satisfied. "My girl? What about you? Ready to party?"
"I'll think about it. I'm not sure. I mean, I'm fine with you guys, but I don't think the whole vibe is for me. I'd prefer something here, in Kabuki," Yoko answered cautiously.
"No worries. There'll be plenty more parties. It's our tradition," said Sasha.
Yoko suddenly glitched and said, "Shit, will be back in a minute. Backup server blacked out again." Then she disappeared.
After a while, Sasha flicked her hand, and a door materialized beside her. Private link, keyed to her signal. She stood, motioning me to follow.
The room on the other side felt like stepping into a split personality.
Walls were plastered with pastel posters, cute cats, stylized clouds, a floating jellyfish in piercing neon colors. The floor was pink carpet, soft, fluffy, glowing faintly at the edges.
But the desk in the center ruined the illusion. Stacked high with datacards, folders, partitions. Corporate intel, highlighted memos, financials. Labels floated in midair: BIOTECH, INCIDENT REPORTS, SHAREHOLDER MOVEMENTS. And before I could read more, she gestured her hand and it all vanished.
She plopped onto a beanbag chair, gesturing for me to sit opposite.
"Welcome to my room," she said, mock-formal. "I do interior decorating on the side."
I sat, trying not to step on a floating file. "Neon and more neon. Nice combo."
She smirked. "I contain multitudes."
Sasha flicked a data window aside and focused on me. "So. You wanted something. What do you want to know?"
I scratched at my temple. "Not small talk. A deal."
She tilted her head, ears twitching faintly—the cat avatar detail showing through. "Oh? You want to hire me? Big spender now?"
"Not exactly."
"Then what's the play?"
I leaned forward. "You know I'm learning. I don't have formal training, and I'm not gonna brute-force my way into the Net. I need a guide. Someone who knows what the hell they're doing."
Her expression sharpened, interest sparking. "You want me to tutor you."
"Something like that."
She gave a low laugh. "Cute. Problem is, you can't afford me. Even if I was charging bare minimum, you'd be broke before the second lesson."
"I'm not asking for formal lessons. I'm saying—trade. You give me advice, tips, help me not fry myself. In return, I help you. Small tasks, prep work, whatever cuts down your time."
She tapped her chin, eyes narrowing. "So I get a free errand boy, and you get… what? Hand-holding?"
"Not hand-holding. Just… direction. A push when I'm stuck."
Sasha leaned back into the beanbag, smirking. "You're not wrong—having someone do groundwork saves me hours. But I'm not running a charity. If you screw up even a little, you could get me and my friends killed."
"I won't."
"You will. Everyone does. There are almost no old people in this field. The question is: will you learn fast enough to make it worth my trouble?"
Her gaze bored into me, testing.
I held it. "That's the point, isn't it? If I don't take risks, I won't learn. But if I do nothing, I'll stay useless."
For a long moment, silence stretched. The only sound was the faint hum of the data stacks around us, scrolling numbers like rain.
Then Sasha smiled. "Alright. You convinced me. We'll call it an exchange. You do prep jobs for me, I'll answer your questions when I feel like it. But don't expect me to hand over premium code or trade secrets. You'll get explanations, not gifts."
"Fair enough."
"And when I say prep jobs, I mean grunt work. Looping cameras, jamming locks, sniffing comms. You'll be my shadow, not my partner. Don't get cocky."
"Got it."
"Good boy," she purred, tail flicking behind her chair.
I recoiled in disgust. "Ew. Don't call me that."
"Then don't act like one."
I exhaled slowly. "Well, deal's a deal then."
Sasha nodded. "Deal."
A thought crossed my mind, and before I could stop it, I said, "Guess this makes us even, huh? You know, after I saved your life."
Her smirk vanished. For a heartbeat, she froze. Then her avatar flickered. "I would be fine regardless, but you helped out Yoko more than anyone. She could have been shot, not you."
I raised my hands. "Joking. Just joking."
What the fuck was that?
"I know," she muttered. "Still. Don't."
The room felt heavier. To cut it, I forced a grin. "Alright then—what do I wear to Afterlife? I'm not exactly up to code on what's acceptable…"
That did it. Sasha burst out laughing, full-bodied, shaking her head. "Oh my god! You're a fucking gonk."
"Not joking this time."
She wiped a tear from her eye, still laughing. "Then we're going shopping. I need something fresh for Afterlife anyway. I'll fix you up. Don't worry."
I asked, "So, a date?"
That shut her up. She tilted her head, eyes narrowing. "Careful what words you throw around."
Heat crept up my neck. "Forget it. Wrong choice of words."
"No, no." She smirked again, playful but edged. "I heard you. We'll call it… a field trip. Safer that way."
The room quieted. Sasha kept scrolling through her datacards, her tail twitching like a metronome. I sat there, staring at nothing, and the silence left me too much space to think.
The "date" word sat heavy. I hadn't even meant to say it, just slipped out. But the second it left my mouth, something twisted in my gut.
My brain tried to reach back. To her. The woman I'd loved before all of this. Before Night City. Before the insane bullshit.
And nothing came.
Just static.
I could see flickers, like an afterimage when you stare at the sun too long. A face? Maybe. Brown hair? Or was it blonde? A laugh, warm, sharp, but the sound slipped through my fingers the harder I tried to hold it.
Kacey? Laura? The names slid past like they belonged to strangers.
I clenched my fist against my knee in real life. How the fuck do you forget something like that?
The whole thing made me sick. It wasn't just memory loss, it was like… erasure.
But I remembered the feeling. That much stuck. The weight in my chest when I thought of her. That quiet ache, like missing a limb you can't replace. Even if I couldn't picture her face anymore, the hole she left was still there.
I didn't know if I ever even knew...
Sasha looked up, catching me staring off. Her eyes narrowed. "What's that look for? Don't tell me you're already regretting our deal."
I shook my head, forcing the tension out of my shoulders. "Just thinking about something else. Where are we meeting?"