November 2073, Night City. Little China, Watson. Behind Misty's Esoterica, a steel door breathed recycled air and disinfectant.
Pain woke him first.
It was a full-bodied, industrial ache that started in Rocky's ribs and flowered through his left side like a bad software update. White light punched through his eyelids. When he blinked, the glare resolved into a bank of ceiling panels and a haze of holo readouts hovering in green and amber. A cooling unit hummed; a bone saw clicked in its cradle. Somewhere close, an ECG kept time like a bored drummer.
"You finally woke up," a warm, gravelly voice said. "Took a lot of work to pull you back from the brink."
Rocky turned his head. The motion fired a tripwire of nausea, but he held it. A big man in an old NCPD hoodie sat beside the gurney, shoulders like a freight loader, chrome glinting at the temples—round glasses. Calm eyes.
"Who are you…?"
"Viktor. Everyone calls me Vik. I'm a ripperdoc." He spoke like he'd explained this a thousand times. "Found you bleeding out in an alley. Brought you in."
Vik lifted a slate and scrolled. "Left arm was crushed. Left leg hairline fractured. Three ribs cracked. Head trauma mild." He shrugged. "I replaced the arm. The rest will heal with time if you don't go picking fights with dumpsters again."
Rocky flexed instinctively. A new weight answered: balanced, mechanical, obedient. Fingers uncurled in a slow, mechanical blossom. The cyberware moved like a thought—no lag, no jitters. For one dizzy moment, he was a child with a brand-new toy.
"Thank you," he rasped. His mouth was cotton-dry. "If you hadn't—"
"Don't make me blush, kid." Vik's mouth did a tiny smile. "You want more chrome, we take it slow. Too much at once and your body revolts. People think that's a myth until their immune system writes a resignation letter."
Rocky swallowed. Memory rolled back in jagged, unsorted tiles—rain hammering corrugated metal, neon in a puddle like oil paint, boots thudding past his ear, the metallic stink of his blood. Then something stranger: a blue, transparent rectangle in his mind's eye.
[Module Detected]
Target: Upper limb (left)
Status: Installed.
Do you wish to configure?Y/N
He squeezed his eyes shut, and the phantom UI blinked out. Concussion, he told himself. Stress. Night City is playing tricks.
Vik watched him steady himself. "You got people I should ping?"
Rocky shook his head. "No. And I… can't pay. Not yet." He forced the words past the weight in his chest. "If you'll give me time, I'll pay everything back. Work it off. Anything."
Vik leaned back, the cheap stool squealing. He rubbed his jaw with a chromed knuckle and looked Rocky over how a mechanic looks at a chassis—checking the frame, ignoring the paint. "Name?"
"Call me L," Rocky said after a beat. The letter felt safer than whatever name he'd used before the alley, before the pain.
"L, huh? Sure." Vik shrugged. "Most folks in Night City come with a story they don't want to tell. That's not a crime here." He tipped his chin toward the clinic. "As for work… I don't run a charity, but I'm not a Scav. If you can learn, you can stay. Sweep floors, sterilize tools, hold a hand when the anesthetics don't bite, learn the trade if you've got the head for it. Food and a cot in the back until your debt zeroes out."
Relief almost made Rocky dizzy. "I won't waste it."
"Good. Please don't call me doctor. It makes me feel old."
The clinic was a long rectangle carved from the building's bone, fitted in layers over years: steel tables, scarred stools, half a dozen wall cabinets with transparent fronts full of needles, gauze, replacement joints, packages stamped Kiroshi Optics, Zetatech, and cheaper Budget Arms knockoffs. The old elevator shaft next door served as a recovery room—two beds, one curtain, a view of a brick wall. Through a vent came the faint thrum of NCART rumbling under the block, shaking dust from the ducts.
Rocky tested his new fingers again. Cold, warm, pressure—everything mapped. The arm obeyed even before he consciously shaped the motion. In the back of his mind, the phantom rectangle flickered again, then vanished when he glared at it.
"Don't get attached," Vik muttered as if reading his thoughts. "It's a tool. You're still the one swinging it."
"I know." He didn't. Not yet.
Vik stood. "Sit tight. I'll run you through aftercare. Then you decide whether you want to earn your keep."
Rocky lay back and listened to the clinic breathe: compressors, circulators, the gentle ping of a sterilizer finishing a cycle. Outside, Little China kept being Little China—hawkers barking, steam from street noodles fogging neon, two gangers trading boasts that would turn into bullets by morning. The city pulsed like a living animal. He'd seen it on screens before; the real thing had more teeth.
He stared at the ceiling until the pain receded from a wave into a dull tide. When it did, he whispered to no one, I made it to Night City. The thought was wild and undeniable. In another life, maybe he'd wake and laugh at the dream. Here, the new arm flexed and answered. Reality had been patched.
"Alright," Vik said later, handing him a chipped plastic cup. "You drink. You rest. You don't hear anything. Tomorrow we sweep, we sanitize, we talk about syringes and sutures. You want to be useful? Be clean. Be calm. The rest comes later."
Rocky nodded. "I'll be here."
"Yeah," Vik said, almost to himself. "I figure you will."
Two Years Later — November 2075
Rocky—L to clients, kid to Vik—slotted a polished ocular into the waiting socket of a construction foreman and watched the status light wink from red to green. "Blink twice."
The man blinked obediently; the lens focused with a pleasant tschk.
"Clarity?" Rocky asked.
"Sharper than my ex-wife's lawyer," the man said, and grinned.
Rocky taped a data sheet to the man's chest and stepped back. The clinic had grown tighter, brighter, and cleaner under his hands. Tools lay where they were supposed to; meds were labeled in plain language; the old bone saw had been retired out of mercy. Clients came because Vik had a good name and left because Rocky had a steady one. He still slept in the back room, and the cot was upgraded to a narrow bed. He still owed Vik, but the number wasn't scary anymore.
He also wasn't just sweeping floors. He could suture, graft, wire a Smart Link, calibrate Kiroshi optics, and guide a panicked kid through a Monowire refit without letting the fear leak into his voice. At night, Vik taught him combinations and guard work on a tired punching bag hung from a beam; in the quiet hours, Rocky hacked practice sandboxes on a no-name deck, fingers moving in the glow like he was born to it.
Now and then, the blue rectangle returned.
[Module Available]
Environment: Clinic Hygiene Protocol
Apply Patch?Y/N
The first time he hit Y, the clinic's air filters spiked to "hospital-grade" on their own, and the autoclave landed on a routine he hadn't programmed. Vik noticed the difference and grunted approval.
Other "patches" were smaller: reducing glare on the surgical lamp, muting the ever-present NCART rumble during operating hours, teaching a cheap suturing gun not to jam. Sometimes the rectangle offered nonsense—"Urban Pigeon Density Control"—and he laughed it away. Other times it offered fear—"Street Crime Probability, Radius 300 m: -12%"—and he didn't dare touch it. He kept the UI secret. He told himself it was a hallucination that happened to pay rent.
"It's almost 2076," Rocky said one evening, cleaning a tray. "Feels like something big's coming." His mind flicks to rumors: a kid named David Martinez, a crew making noise, a city that could spit out legends when the weather turned the right kind of mean.
"Something big always is," Vik said. He stood at the sink, scrubbing to the elbow like a priest before a ritual. "That's Night City's trick. It keeps promising you the one next thing."
"You ever think about hiring a second assistant?" Rocky asked. He tried for a light tone. "One to sweep while I do all the genius-level stuff."
Vik snorted. "You get good and immediately start delegating. Classic management disease." Then his expression softened. "You're doing alright, L. You're doing more than alright for a kid who crawled in here with half a torso."
"Thanks, Vik."
"Don't thank me yet. You've still got to pay off that left arm." He tapped the chrome. "I don't do installment plans for sentiment."
Rocky grinned. "I'll install a module that prints money."
"Find me that one and we'll retire."
They worked until the city's neon bled into dawn. Outside, Little China steamed and rattled. Inside, the clinic stayed slightly cleaner than such places have any right to be. Before leaving, Rocky clicked off the lamp and glanced at the console. The blue rectangle waited, patient as the weather.
[Module Detected]
Target: Self
Name:Baseline Optimization (Sleep, Pain, Focus)
Apply Patch?Y/N
He didn't press it. Not yet.
He closed the door, and Night City blinked at him with ten thousand electronic eyes.