The room behind the drugstore smelled like antiseptic and old metal. Not the clean, sterile kind. More a mechanic's workshop than a doctor's office, the kind of place where the smell of rust and machine oil had been fighting the disinfectant for years and winning. If I had come here for surgery I would have turned back around based on first impressions alone.
It wasn't really a chair. More like a surgical rig bolted into the floor, restraints hanging loose at the sides, cables coiled neatly within arm's reach. The walls were lined with open shelving units, mismatched and overloaded, holding components I half-recognized and things I didn't want to think too hard about. A pegboard above the main workbench held tools arranged with the kind of compulsive neatness that suggested the owner was very meticulous, despite what first impressions suggested. The overhead light was industrial, bright enough to work by and unflattering to everything underneath it.
The ripperdoc hadn't offered a name. Neither had I. Zeke had called her Laura on the way in, greeting her in a way that suggested he didn't much like her either.
She hadn't seemed keen on introductions and I wasn't either, too busy being skeptical of the exposed pipework running along the ceiling and the faint brown stain on the far wall that I had decided not to look at too closely. She'd said maybe four words since we came down the stairs.
Laura herself was somewhere in her mid-thirties, lean in an unhealthy way, the way someone gets when they forget to eat, or don't bother to. Her hair was pulled back with the kind of pin that suggested function over everything else. The cyberware on her forearms was subtle, precision work, the kind a surgeon would choose I suppose. She moved around the space the way people move in rooms they have spent a lot of time alone in, no wasted motion, no acknowledgment of the audience.
At a muttered word and gesture from her, I settled into the chair as best I was able. Zeke stood near the entrance with his arms folded, leaning against a shelving unit he was definitely too heavy for. Laura sat on a wheeled stool, tapping at a tablet, and after a while set it down and rolled over to the chair, pulling the overhead screen into my field of vision.
"Last chance to back out," she said, her first proper words to me, her voice flat and distracted, fingers already moving across the terminal.
In the corner of my vision a small prompt blinked awake.
[SCAN ATTEMPT DETECTED]
I sat up slightly. "No diagnostics. I just need you to plug into the port and upload the software."
A pause. She looked at me over the screen with the expression of someone recalculating. "Your funeral," she accepted, with a drawl that suggested she wasn't being sarcastic.
She moved around behind me and I heard the snap of examination gloves pulled on in quick succession. Then her hands landed on my shoulders, turning my head to the side, looking for a port. Her fingers moved across the side of my neck, searching, and then slid further, pressing into the jacket over my chassis.
Her hands stopped at my upper chest, her fingers digging into my jacket, in a way that made me more than a little uncomfortable.. "Are you going to do your job or just feel me up the whole time," I said, more than a bit irritated. "The port you're looking for is at the base of my neck. The smaller one."
"Hold on," she said quietly. Not to me, but more to herself.
Her hands resumed, slower this time, working down my shoulders and along my upper arms with a focus that had shifted from procedural to something closer to compelled, she pressed across my back, tracing the lines of the chassis through the fabric, and I could hear the quality of her breathing change in a way she probably wasn't aware of.
She reached the hem of my shirt and her fingers moved to lift it. I reached back and caught both her wrists.
"The install," I said. "That's all you need to worry about." She pulled her hands back without argument. I released them. A short silence followed, and then she exhaled through her nose, in what seemed like irritation.
"How much of you is chrome?" she asked eventually.
"That's not what I'm here for." The words came out more clipped than I intended. The truth was that I was still making my peace with the question itself. It was one thing to run the diagnostics, to read the error logs, to know the numbers. It was another to have someone pressing the reality of it by curiosly poking and prodding at me, treating me less like a patient and more like a machine someone had rolled in for inspection. I didn't like how that made me feel, how much it bothered me.
"That's not an answer," she said, and for the first time since I'd met her, something that wasn't professional flatness moved in her voice.
"It's the one you're getting." I said.
She turned back to the terminal. For a moment she was quiet, but it was the busy kind of quiet, fingers hovering, eyes moving. She was muttering under her breath, low enough that she probably thought I couldn't hear her.
She was wrong about that.
"Not Kang Tao. Not Militech. Not anything Arasaka ever put out, I'd know the architecture." She pulled up something on the screen, scrolled through it, discarded it with a flick. "Not even black site spec. Black site stuff is still derived from something, still has a lineage you can trace if you know where to look." She leaned back slightly, arms crossing over her chest, staring at the terminal like it had personally offended her. "This is a full custom job. Every single component. Maybe scanning will show me a better picture?"
She reached toward the camera scanner mounted at the edge of the terminal. I started to push out of the chair.
"That's enough," Zeke said from the corner. His voice carried the specific flatness of someone who had said the same thing to the same person before and fully expected to say it again before the night was over. Laura's hand stopped on the camera. She turned to look at him properly for the first time since we'd come downstairs, and the look on her face was the particular one of someone who had been interrupted mid-thought.
"It would make the install safer," she said. "A full diagnostic, five minutes, just to understand what I'm working with before I start putting foreign software into a system I can't even identify."
Zeke looked at her with the expression of a man who had heard better lies from people who'd had more time to prepare them. "Laura."
"I'm serious, if something goes wrong during the install because I didn't have the information I needed—"
"That bullshit isn't flying here," he said. "No questions. That was the deal."
"It's not like I'm asking him to—"
"No. Questions." He said it the same way he said everything, flat and settled, like a stone dropped into still water. There was no argument in his voice because as far as he was concerned there was nothing left to argue about. "That was the deal."
She held his gaze for a moment longer, working through something privately, and then her jaw shifted and she turned back to the terminal. Her fingers hovered over the keys for a few seconds without touching them, and then dropped into her lap.
"Fine," she said. The word sat in the room without going anywhere. She stared at the screen a moment longer. "Fine." Quieter the second time. Like a door closing on a room she'd wanted to stay in.
She rolled the stool back around behind me, reached for the cable on the coiled bracket at the back of the chair and held it out. I took it from her, found the port myself, and seated it with a click. Her hands came up briefly like she was going to guide it and then thought better of it, dropping back into her lap.
"Software's loading," she said, voice stripped back to flat. "If you fry your brain I'm keeping your corpse."
[NEURAL INTERFACE DETECTED]
[WARNING: FOREIGN ARCHITECTURE]
[COMPATIBILITY: NON-STANDARD]
[INITIATING SANDBOX ENVIRONMENT]
"I'm really starting to not like you. You ever hear of bedside manner?" I said.
"If I cared about that I wouldn't be running a backdoor rippers out here." She was tapping something on the tablet again, not looking at me. "I'm only doing this because I owe Dakota a favor."
I said nothing to that. Privately I found myself wondering what exactly Dakota had done for a woman running an unlicensed surgical bay behind a drugstore in the Badlands that warranted this level of repayment, she clearly had wanted a look under my hood, but one word on the favor owed and she just let it go, and she didn't seem the type to silently accept not getting her way.
My musing was interrupted by a sharp pressure at the base of my skull. Not pain exactly, and not touch either, given that a brain has no nerve endings to feel with, the sensation was less physical than it was conceptual, like something pressing against a boundary from the other side. Like something knocking on a door.
[VIRTUAL MACHINE: ONLINE]
[KERNEL INITIALIZATION IN PROGRESS]
[ISOLATION LAYERS: ACTIVE]
[FAILSAFE PROTOCOLS: ARMED]
There it was.
I felt it before I registered it properly, a partition forming somewhere inside the architecture of my own mind. Clean and deliberate, a separate space carved out from everything else I was, walled off on all sides with the kind of precision that only made sense because I had spent three days in a motel room building the foundations of it myself; artificial, contained and safe, or as safe as anything ever got when netrunners were a thing.
The local architecture booted inside, and it felt a bit disconnected at first, the way a foreign language sounds when someone speaks it for the first time with a native speaker. But I and my VI were already getting used to it, I could already tell it was crude, not in what it could do, but in the assumptions baked into how it did it, somehow needlessly abstract and rigid at once, and with the code, came data.
[COGNITIVE PACKAGE DETECTED]
[LANGUAGE COMPRESSION MODULE: INSTALLING]
[CULTURAL INDEXING DATABASE: INSTALLING]
[SOCIAL FRAMEWORK LIBRARY: INSTALLING]
It hit all at once, and it hit harder than I expected. Information, and a lot of it, the kind of sprawling, half-organized body of knowledge that accumulates in a person not through study but through living. The sort of thing the average Night City resident would have long ago learnt.
The collapse of the United States government. The rise of the Free States, the corporate city-states, the Nomad exodus, all of it landing with the casual familiarity of things everyone around here grew up knowing.
Night City's own history followed, Saburo Arasaka and Richard Night and the dream of a city that would belong to no nation, the reality of a city that belonged to whoever could afford to buy the next block. The bombing. The reconstruction. The second bombing, The corporate wars that had happened in between.
Brand recognition arrived in bulk, the corporate landscape assembling itself into something legible. Which Arasaka subsidiary handled what. Why you didn't buy Militech small arms in Maelstrom territory. The specific reputation of every major gang carved into the city like scar tissue, their territories, their codes, the things that got you killed by them and the narrower list of things that didn't.
It settled into me the way sediment settles, quietly, completely, until it was simply there. I inhaled sharply, and for a moment said nothing at all.
The world stopped feeling like something I was observing from a careful distance and started feeling like something I was standing inside of. I inhaled sharply, and for a moment didn't say anything at all.
"Brace yourself," Laura said. "That part messes with people."
"I'm fine." A lie. But a manageable one.
[WARNING: NEURAL LOAD SPIKE DETECTED]
[STABILIZING]
The system held. No bleed-through into my core processes, no corruption, no trojan software burrowing into anything it wasn't supposed to touch. The virtual machine sat exactly where it was supposed to sit, running parallel to everything I actually was, touching none of it.
"Most people install this as kids," Laura said, settling into something closer to conversational, the professional distance dropping by a fraction now that the critical window had passed without incident. "Brain grows around it. Learns with it the same way it learns language, or how to read, while it's still plastic enough to absorb things without pushing back." She paused, and I heard her pull up something on the tablet, less out of necessity now and more out of habit.
"Past a certain age the window closes. Neuroplasticity drops off, the brain stops reorganizing itself so readily, and any install that touches cognition starts carrying real risk. The body reads it as intrusion. Starts fighting it." She set the tablet back down. "Even something as relatively simple as a language package, basic cultural software, nothing invasive, nothing that rewrites anything structural. Past thirty, past forty, the rejection rates climb fast. Migraines that don't stop. Dissociation. In bad cases the immune response attacks the surrounding tissue and you lose more than you gained."
She was quiet for a moment after that. The professional kind of quiet Then, like she was pointedly avoiding asking a question: "You're not rejecting any of it."
At my silence she continued on. "Even people in full Gemini conversions," she said, slower now, more deliberate. "Custom built for them, fitted and calibrated and tested before a single component goes in. The kind of work that costs more than most people earn in a lifetime. They still get rejection symptoms. Neural fatigue. Load spikes bad enough to drop them mid-sentence, and those are people whose entire nervous system was rebuilt from the ground up to accept exactly this kind of integration." The stool shifted slightly as she leaned forward. "The standard advice for anyone in a full conversion rig is no further intensive neural cyberware installs for at least 5 years post-op. The risk of cascade damage is too high, the system is already under enough strain just learning to be itself again." A pause. "And yet here you are sitting there like someone just gave you a flu shot."
She had stopped talking to me somewhere in the middle of that. She was talking to the problem itself, working through it out loud the way she probably did everything, alone in this basement, with no one to hear.
"Alright," she said finally, and I heard something in her voice give way. Not frustration exactly. More like the sound of someone deciding to focus on the job in front of them. "Here comes the fun part."
[NEURAL LINK PROTOCOLS: ATTEMPTING HANDSHAKE]
[ACCESS: DENIED]
[RETRYING VIA VIRTUAL LAYER]
[HANDSHAKE ESTABLISHED]
[INSTALLATION: 87%]
"You're not seizing," Laura said.
"Disappointed?" The word came out before I'd fully decided to say it, but I didn't take it back. She hadn't gotten what she wanted out of this visit and some part of me, the part that was still irritated about being prodded like a piece of equipment, found that quietly satisfying.
She didn't rise to it. Just looked at the readouts with the focused expression of someone who was going to be professional about this if it killed her. "I'm serious. Most people would be by now. The load spike alone should have had you on the floor."
She rolled the stool slightly to the left to check something on the secondary screen, her eyes moving across the data with the quick efficiency of someone who had been reading these readouts for years. Whatever she was seeing, she wasn't sharing it. "The install is still integrating. It'll keep settling for the next few hours, you might notice some latency in peripheral cognition, things at the edge of your attention feeling slightly off. That's normal. It passes."
"Guess I'm built different," I said.
She huffed at that, a short sound with no humor in it, the kind that comes out when something is too close to unfunny to laugh at. "That's what every cyberpsycho out there thinks too, right before they stop being able to tell the difference between a person and an obstacle."
I didn't have an answer for that one. I let it sit between us and didn't examine it too closely.
Time blurred after that. Minutes, maybe longer. The basement settled into its own quiet, the low hum of the refrigeration unit built into the far wall, Laura moved occasionally, adjusting something on the terminal, cross-referencing readouts on the tablet, wheeling the stool a few inches in one direction and then back again. Mostly she was still. Watching the numbers, waiting for something to go wrong.
Nothing went wrong.
[INSTALLATION COMPLETE]
[INTEGRITY CHECK: PASSED]
[ISOLATION CONFIRMED]
To test it I let my attention settle on Laura's forearms, where the cyberware sat visible below her rolled sleeves.
[CYBERWARE IDENTIFIED]
[RAVEN MICROCYBERNETICS MICROWALDO, SURGICAL GRADE]
[ROCKLIN AUGMENTICS QUICK DIGITS, FULL SET]
The MicroWaldo first. Raven Microcybernetics made the premier surgical variant, a spider-like arrangement of micro-probes housed in the forearm and deployable through the palm, designed for work that human fingers were simply too blunt an instrument to perform reliably. The kind of cyberware that took months to learn properly and years to master, that separated the ripperdocs who were genuinely skilled from the ones who were merely adequate. The fact that she had them explained the Zetatech surgical arms I had already clocked, the two systems were commonly paired, one handling speed and stability, the other providing the precision that speed alone couldn't buy.
The Quick Digits were Rocklin Augmentics, specialized cyberfingers running enhanced dexterity architecture throughout all four fingers and the thumb on both hands. Not cheap. Not the kind of thing you bought unless your hands were your livelihood and you intended to keep it that way. Combined with the MicroWaldos they painted a picture of someone who had invested seriously in being good at this, whatever this was, whether that was legitimate surgical work or the considerably less legitimate variety she was currently practicing out of a basement behind a drugstore in the Badlands.
The identification had taken less than two seconds and arrived without any sense of effort. I glanced away before she noticed me looking.
"We done?" I asked.
She looked at me for a long moment, not at my eyes but at all of me, the way someone looks at a machine they want to take apart and understand from the inside out, searching for a thread, finding none, having to accept the shape of something she was never going to be allowed to fully see.
"Yeah," Laura said. "We're done."
From the corner came a short disbelieving laugh. Zeke pushed off the wall and reached behind his waistband, producing a revolver I recognized before my systems even finished the identification, heavy framed and unmistakable in silhouette.
[WEAPON IDENTIFIED]
[BURYA TECH REVOLVER, STANDARD ISSUE]
The Burya. Old Russian design philosophy filtered through forty years of Night City pragmatism, a double action revolver chambered for 10mm that had somehow outlasted half a dozen corporate arms races through sheer stubbornness. Too heavy for most people to carry comfortably, too loud to use discreetly, and accurate enough at close range that none of that mattered. The kind of gun that people bought when they were done being clever about it. Militech had tried to phase it out of circulation three separate times. It kept coming back.
"Half expected you to go psycho in the middle of all that," Zeke said, turning it over once in his hand with the casual ease of someone who had been carrying it long enough that it was less a weapon and more a familiar weight. "Brought this along just in case."
"I'm touched," I said.
"Yeah, yeah." He tucked it back behind his waistband and looked at me with something that wasn't quite respect but was in the neighbourhood of it. "You got what you needed. Let's get out of here, you're my ride."
The ride back to Dakota's was quicker than the way there, partly because I knew the route now and partly because the minimap my system had assembled from the cultural database was already doing the work for me, tracing the most efficient path through the Badlands roads in clean amber lines at the edge of my vision. It was already proving its worth. I had even taken the time on the drive over to have my system clone the Agent Dakota had given me into an internal one, running it through the virtual layer so it would interface with the outside world the way everyone expected while keeping the actual architecture safely out of reach.
Along the way, after I my VI had set up a dummy profile to experiment, I turned to Zeke and said.. "Ping me."
He had looked at me sideways, then shrugged and done it, his system sending the standard handshake query that people here used the way other generations had used a business card. I let it connect through the virtual layer and fed it back a spoofed response, enough information to satisfy the query without giving it anything real. Name. Rough location. Basic civilian flag.
Zeke had looked at his display, then at me. "Huh," was all he said.
I pulled into Dakota's lot and killed the engine. We walked through together, the gravel crunching underfoot in the early afternoon quiet. A few familiar faces acknowledged us as we crossed the yard, the nods of people who had decided provisionally that I wasn't a problem. Near the door Benjy leaned against the frame with his arms crossed and as I passed he raised one hand and give me the finger. I returned the gesture as we passed him, though only he got a warning look from Zeke.
Ha! Sucks to suck.
At the door to Dakota's office Zeke slowed and stopped. "This is where I leave you," he said, and then after a beat: "Remember what I said. About pulling your punches."
"Yeah," I said. "See you Zeke." He gave me a look that suggested he wasn't entirely convinced, and then headed back toward the yard.
I knocked.
"Come in." The door slid open. Dakota was already leaning against her desk, monitors running, a fresh burn of O2 curling from the respirator collar resting near her elbow. She looked down as I took a seat, taking me in with the same measuring quality she'd had the first time, checking for changes, finding some.
"Your ripper pulled through," I said. "Though no offence, I'd rather never meet her again."
Dakota's mouth shifted slightly at that, something that was almost amusement. "I can see that." She leaned back in her chair. "You actually showed up when I scanned you, I'll give you that." Her eyes moved to somewhere slightly past my face, reading something I couldn't see. "Though that fake layer you're putting up wouldn't fool a script kiddie. The spoofing is sloppy."
"That's what I'm here for," I said. She didn't answer with words. She stood, crossed to the main monitor bank, and began moving through screens with the quick efficiency of someone who had done this particular thing many times before. After a minute she found what she was looking for and pressed something.
[FOREIGN INTRUSION DETECTED]
[ACCEPT / DENY]
I glanced up at her.
"At least your ICE is better, let that through," she said, without turning around. "That's your identification number. Cost a lot to make it stick,"
I accepted the intrusion and let it pass through the virtual layer. A loading sequence ran for a few seconds, quiet and clinical, and then the information arrived in a clean cascade.
[SIN REGISTERED]
[IDENTITY CONFIRMED]
[NAME: GENOS HARKER]
[DATE OF BIRTH: MARCH 14, 2049]
[PLACE OF BIRTH: NIGHT CITY, FREE STATE OF NORTH CALIFORNIA]
[CITIZENSHIP STATUS: NIGHT CITY FREE STATE, UNAFFILIATED]
[OCCUPATION: FREELANCE TECHNICAL CONTRACTOR]
[CRIMINAL RECORD: FLAGGED]
[OFFENSE 01: VANDALISM, DEFACEMENT OF CORPORATE PROPERTY, PETROSYAN PLAZA DISTRICT, 2064, CHARGES DROPPED, INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE]
[OFFENSE 02: DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC PROPERTY, PACIFICA DISTRICT, 2066, FINED 800 EDDIES, PAID IN FULL]
[OFFENSE 03: FLEEING ARREST, NORTH OAK DISTRICT, 2067, CHARGES DROPPED, WITNESS UNAVAILABLE]
[OFFENSE 04: SUSPECTED ARSON, INDUSTRIAL SECTOR, WATSON DISTRICT, 2069, INVESTIGATED, CASE CLOSED, NO CHARGES FILED]
[OFFENSE 05: ILLEGAL STREET RACING, SANTO DOMINGO HIGHWAY INTERCHANGE, 2071, FINED 1,200 EDDIES, PAID IN FULL]
[NOTE: SUBJECT FLAGGED AS PERSON OF INTEREST BY NCPD METRO DIVISION, 6TH STREET GANG SUSPECTED AFFILIATION, UNCONFIRMED]
[CREDIT ACCOUNT: ACTIVE]
[BALANCE: €$ 25,000]
[MEDICAL REGISTRY: PARTIAL, FLAGGED FOR INCOMPLETE BIOMETRIC DATA]
[NEXT OF KIN: NONE LISTED]
I read through it twice. Dakota had built a whole person out of nothing, not a clean slate designed to disappear under scrutiny but someone with edges, someone who had grown up in Night City the way most people grew up in Night City, scraping against it until both parties had marks to show for it. The 6th Street flag was a nice touch. Anyone who grew up on the streets of the cirty was tied up with one gang or the other.
"Genos Harker," I said quietly.
"That's you," Dakota said, dropping back into her chair. She picked up the respirator collar and took a slow drag, exhaling through her nose. "Welcome to Night City. Try not to die in the first week." A pause. "And you know who to call next time you 'find' some more tech or memorabilia belonging to a Night City legend."
"Funny you should say that," I said. "What's your policy on corpses?"
Dakota looked at me over the edge of her desk, staring at me with a raised brow. "Depends on the meatsuit," she said finally.
Finally
The highway opened up, the road widening from a cracked two-lane stretch into something that actually deserved the name, and I let the engine have what it had been asking for since I pulled out of Dakota's lot.
The car surged forward with the kind of immediate, rumbling violence that made it very easy to understand why nomads spent so much time, energy and money on their vehicles. The reinforced body didn't shudder at speed, it settled, the extra weight of the armor plating pressing it into the road like a hand pushing down on a surface. The engine note climbed from a growl into something sustained and continuous, the whole cabin vibrating at a frequency that sat just below the threshold of discomfort.
Outside, the Badlands blurred. The scrubland and power lines and distant smoking structures dissolved into peripheral streaks, and ahead the horizon grew. The glow of it had been visible from Dakota's yard, that smear of neon and light pollution that the city wore like a halo it hadn't done anything to earn. At speed it resolved itself into something more specific, giant holographic advertisements picking themselves out of the haze, the highway interchange catching the late afternoon light, the faint figures of AVs threading between megabuildings too tall to fully comprehend from this distance.
I felt, for the first time since waking up in that trash heap with error messages running through my eyes, something close to excited.
The cultural database was still integrating in the background, cross-referencing everything I looked at with everything it knew, the minimap tracking my position with quiet confidence, the internal Agent running its spoofed handshake responses to the automated toll and traffic systems I passed through without slowing. The world had texture now. It was still dangerous and still foreign in ways that ran deeper than software could reach, but it was legible in a way it hadn't been a week ago.
I thought about the conversation with Dakota.
She had heard my offer out the way she heard most things, with her face giving nothing away and her eyes giving away considerably less. When I finished she had been quiet for long enough that I thought she was going to stand up and end the meeting.
"No," she had said.
"Hear me out."
"I heard you out. The answer is no." The argument that followed had been less a negotiation and more a prolonged back and forth that Dakota had clearly expected to win on the basis that she was Dakota and this was her office. The first obstacle had been the obvious one. She had wanted to know how I even knew she had access to it.
"You wouldn't have paid me twenty five thousand eddies for some old emails Dakota," I had said. "Some people would consider that shortchanging me if they knew exactly what was on that slate."
Her eyes had sharpened at that. "Is that a threat?"
"No. It's an observation. The R.A.B.I.D.S virus is something people would kill for. You know that better than I do."
The R.A.B.I.D.S. were Bartmoss's final statement to a world that had spent decades trying to either own him or kill him. Triggered upon his death, designed to breach every corporate Datafortress simultaneously and flood the public net with everything the corps had spent fortunes keeping buried. The idea had been grand in the way that only someone with nothing left to lose could conceive of, total informational annihilation of every wall the corporations had ever built.
It had worked, after a fashion. It had worked so completely and so far beyond anything Bartmoss had apparently intended that it had taken most of the net down with it, infecting seventy eight percent of the network, driving rogue AIs into mutation cascades, forcing the corporate world into the humiliating position of admitting the only solution was to wall off a vast portion of the net behind the Blackwall and hope whatever was trapped behind it stayed there.
The viruses had been based on a twisted derivation of Soulkiller, which meant somewhere in their architecture was the ghost of a human consciousness, Bartmoss himself, running on a framework designed to eat corporate infrastructure and reproduce without limit. The man had turned himself into a weapon and pointed it at everything he hated on his way out the door.
What Dakota had pulled off the slate, buried under layers of encryption that had nearly killed two experienced runners, was a copy of the pre-release framework. The version that existed before it became the thing that broke the net. Early enough in its development that it was still legible, still something a sufficiently capable system could study without triggering the cascade that the final version had been built to initiate.
Dakota had known what she had the moment her runners finished decrypting it. Which was why her first answer had been no, delivered with a rigid finality.
In the corner of my vision something blinked awake without me asking it to.
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCANS INITIATED:]
I kept my expression neutral and my eyes on Dakota's face while my attention split.
[SEARCH EYE: ACTIVE]
[INITIATING THERMAL MAP]
[AUDIO LOCALIZATION ENABLED]
Dakota's eyes had blanked a bit while I was talking, a small physical gesture, nearly imperceptible, the kind of thing that looked like she was wondering, but it was suspicious enough for my VI to go full on recon mode, tracking the motion, identifying the signal her agent was emitting, tracking the outgoing signal before it had fully left the room.
A message. Short. One recipient. I didn't have the content. But I didn't need it.
[THERMAL SIGNATURES DETECTED]
[COUNT: 4]
[POSITIONS: PERIMETER, OFFICE EXTERIOR]
[MOVEMENT STATUS: CONVERGING]
The heat signatures were already moving, two coming from the direction of the main workshop floor, one from somewhere above, one from outside the rear wall. Not rushing, which meant I had a window, small but present.
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: IMMINENT]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: DE-ESCALATE OR REPOSITION]
I looked at Dakota. I had to give it to her, nothing on her face gave her away, patient and settled, the respirator held loosely in one hand, waiting to see how this part of the conversation went before she decided what the next part looked like.
"I'm not trying to blackmail you or hardball you," I had said. "So you can tell them to put their guns down." A pause. The people gathering towards the room, where my VI had flagged movement behind the walls, the shapes settled back into stillness. Dakota hadn't confirmed or denied that they were there. She hadn't needed to.
"Why would I hand this over just so you can sell it to some corp," she had said. "Walk me through why that's a good business decision for me."
"You're a fixer in the Badlands sitting on pre-release R.A.B.I.D.S. source code," I had said. "Every corp with a net division would empty their accounts to get their hands on that. You haven't sold it. Which means you've already decided a quick payday isn't worth what comes after, because what comes after is a bullet and a cleanup crew and someone else taking credit for the find." I had paused. "You're sitting on it because like me, you think it's worth more as leverage than as a transaction. I'm not arguing with that. I'm just asking for access to the architecture, not a copy, not the payload. Just enough to study the underlying framework and build something derived from it. Something that cracks corporate ICE the way he designed it to, without the part where it eats everything else in the process."
"And why should I trust you won't just release it into the net the moment you're out that door," she had said.
"Because I'm not running this through a cyberdeck," I had said. "I'm running it through isolated virtual architecture with a hard wipe function built into the base layer. If something goes wrong I can kill the entire environment in under a second." I had let that land before continuing.
"And more to the point, if I wanted to sell this to a corp I could have done it before I walked through your door. I didn't. Because corps probably already have their own derivative versions, and if they don't, the moment they had what they wanted from me I'd be worth more to them as a loose end than as a contractor. I'd rather build something that lets me take from them directly than hand them a tool."
The office had been quiet for a moment after that.
"Nice speech," Dakota had said. "Still doesn't tell me why I'd hand this over for a corpse."
"Not just any corpse," I had said. "The perfectly preserved body, brain intact, of Rache Bartmoss." I had watched her expression. "I don't know a lot of people who wouldn't be interested in that. Arasaka, to name one. NetWatch to name another. Anyone who ever wanted to know exactly what was inside that man's head and never got the chance." I had leaned back slightly. "That body might be worth more than the slate was. You know it and I know it. The only reason I'm offering it as part of this deal instead of taking it somewhere else is because you're the only person I've met so far that I'm reasonably confident won't immediately try to kill me once they have what they want."
Dakota had looked at me for a long time after that. "That might be the strangest compliment anyone's ever paid me," she had said eventually.
"I'm serious Dakota, if not you than I'll try my luck with Rogue, this is the only chance you'll ever get. Take it or leave it," I had replied.
She had taken it.
The highway curved northward and Night City filled the windshield completely now, close enough that the individual towers had faces, the lights cycling through their advertisements in the gathering dusk, the elevated roads threading between buildings carrying their thin rivers of traffic.
I eased off the accelerator and let the car settle back into something legal, as I approached city limits.
Author's Note: That's it for Chapter 6, hope you enjoyed it. I'll be honest, this one took longer than it should have. Assignments have been multiplying the moment I think I've got a handle on them, and on top of that I've been working on a commission, in between all of that I've somehow managed to build up a catalogue for The Witcher fic, which is sitting two chapters ahead right now, one of which, goes public on Monday, so look forward to that.
I also wanted to briefly touch on the chapter naming since a few people have asked. Each chapter is named after a tarot card that reflects what's happening thematically. The Wheel of Fortune felt right here because the card is about cycles turning and circumstances shifting. He started this story buried in a trash heap with no name and no place in the world he'd landed in. By the end of this chapter he has an identity, a contact, and a city of opportunities. The wheel has turned. Whether it's turned in his favor is a question for later. That said, if you think the spoiler titles are already doing enough of a job explaining the themes, let me know in the comments.
Now, the commission. This was actually my first one and I was genuinely excited writing it, there are 6 chapters in total, so the next few weeks are going to be busy. That said I am not neglecting my other stories, so look forward to those too.
As always leave a like and a comment and If you enjoyed this and want to support my writing, you can leave a tip or commission your own story over on my Ko-fi!(https://ko-fi.com/maydae010401) And if you want to read my story chapters early, I am also on Patreon( https://patreon.com/Maydae010401). Fair warning, the only story ahead right now is the Witcher one, so I'd hold of on subscribing for now if you want more Genos, specifically.
See you in the next one.