Chapter 21 - Chapter Twenty One

The city was finished but that didn't mean the work was done, because if Kevin wanted it to be believable then it couldn't stand as an empty monument, it needed people, and not just Synth workers who followed programs and protocols, but citizens who looked, breathed, and acted like any other man or woman from the wastes, so he designed a new line of Gen-3s different from the labor force, almost completely biological, the pinnacle of human genetics with no mechanical control systems, able to age, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to live full lifespans like ordinary people, the only cybernetic feature in them the neural port everyone in Cyberpunk had installed at birth, which meant they could never be mistaken for artificial, and Kevin went a step further, ensuring they would never reveal him because they couldn't, stripping every memory of his hand in their creation and replacing it with believable fakes, a constructed past of nomad life, years of wandering as fractured groups until they banded together to settle, their story written as if they were an offshoot of the Aldecaldos or any other nomadic clan that had grown strong enough to build something bigger, and to outside eyes the city would be nothing more than a daring nomad project that had finally found fertile land, believable because the fresh air and clean water gave reason enough to settle. These new citizens were free, not bound by control codes or programming like his worker Synths, which meant they would choose, live, and die like anyone else, and with their presence Kevin could now stage the city as living, bustling, and legitimate, with culture and noise to cover what really made it possible. But there was another problem—roads, because while the G.E.C.K. had healed the soil and restored California's air and water, it hadn't rebuilt asphalt and highways, and a city without access would draw more suspicion than one too polished, so Kevin began drafting construction plans for believable roads, worn highways that led out of the wasteland toward Night City and beyond, some in good repair, some still half ruined, to make it look as though the nomads had worked hard to clear and restore paths over years, their origin story given physical evidence in cracked pavement patched with new layers, bridges rebuilt, and waypoints constructed where once there was only dust. While Kevin planned, life in Night City was already changing, because even without knowing about the hidden city, people could feel the environment shift around them, the smog that once burned lungs thinning, the sky no longer an unbroken haze, the air carrying hints of salt and clean water from the coast, fresh breezes sweeping through streets that had been choking for decades, Nomads outside the walls reporting wildlife moving again, foxes and stray dogs running in packs, deer glimpsed near rivers, even flocks of birds seen overhead for the first time in decades, their wings drawing stares from people who had grown up believing birds were long extinct, and on the streets it became the new topic of conversation, workers muttering on breaks, "You seen that flock?" and their partners answering, "Can't be real, Corpo tricks maybe," while others whispered, "Then why does the air feel better too?" Corpo towers weren't blind either, analysts filing reports about unexplained ecological recovery, executives holding meetings where phrases like "potential Biotechnica project" and "off-the-books Eden program" were thrown around, none wanting to admit ignorance but all too cautious to dismiss what their eyes confirmed, and among the people watching were Maine and his crew, David among them, noticing like everyone else how different Night City felt when he stepped outside, how the air no longer clawed at his lungs, how the sky above the megabuildings looked cleaner, how wildlife was slipping into the edges of the city itself, rats fat and healthy rather than diseased, stray cats in greater numbers, birds startling pedestrians with their sudden flight, and Rebecca had been the first to joke, "So what, Corpo's growing us a zoo now?" while Pilar muttered, "Feels like someone flipped a switch, chooms, this ain't natural," and Lucy stayed quiet, staring upward at the sky as if waiting for the illusion to crack, and David couldn't stop thinking of his mother still in her coma, wondering if maybe the cleaner air would be waiting for her if she ever woke, while at the same time across corpo meeting rooms executives demanded answers, "Who benefits from this? Who gains? Where is the source?" and their analysts gave nothing back, only shrugging at maps that showed green creeping into California's barren wastes, a shift no one had ordered, no one had expected, and no one had yet claimed responsibility for, but all of them knew such a change had to have a source, and finding it was only a matter of time.