Genos 'Harker'
Megabuilding H10, Little China, Watson, Night City.
08:30
2074
The apartment was almost exactly how I remembered it being like in the game, which was funny because this wasn't V's apartment, theirs, or the one that would be theirs, was actually directly to the left of mine.
Four hundred and twenty square feet of functional pessimism. The walls were the particular shade of off-white that happens when something has been painted over enough times that the color becomes a geological record of every previous tenant's aesthetic indifference. The floor was composite paneling, durable and cold underfoot in a way that I registered as data rather than discomfort.
A single window faced east, wide enough to matter, the glass slightly tinted suggesting the windows had been replaced at some point. The holographic TV unit on the ceiling opposite the bed had been installed by someone who had measured once and drilled twice, sitting two centimeters lower on the left side than it should have been in a way that I knew would bother me every time I looked at it.
I had actually attempted to watch what passed for television here, before deciding it was better for my mental health to just let it run ads rather than watch some twink get railed for half an hour, and cry about how life was unfair for the rest of it.
That's what I get for not taking the name at face value...Watson Whore, I mean a show like that could only be about one thing.
The bed was standard issue megabuilding furniture, the kind designed to be replaced rather than maintained, but it was functional and I had used it, which was the part that still surprised me slightly every time I thought about it. Most of me was metal and composite alloy and power conduits and systems that did not require rest in any biological sense. The combat suite didn't get tired. The motor functions didn't need to recover. The chassis could run continuously without degradation in a way that a human body simply could not.
My brain was a different matter.
It was the one component of this entire assembly that Kuseno had left organic, the one part that still ran on the same basic requirements it had always run on, oxygen delivered by a circulatory assist system rather than a natural heart, glucose processed through a hybridized metabolic architecture that converted whatever I ate into something the remaining biological tissue could use and burnt the rest, water and essential nutrients for cellular repair that no amount of engineering had found a way to make optional.
A human brain in a machine body was still a human brain, and human brains had not evolved with the expectation of running indefinitely without sleeping.
So I slept. Six hours, on the low end of what the system recommended, in a bed that was two centimeters unlevel on the left side, in an apartment that smelled faintly of the previous tenant's suicide and the industrial cleaning product that had been used to cover it.
I had slept worse.
I was standing at the window now, REALWATER in one hand and a vending machine burrito in the other, watching Little China do what Little China did at eight in the morning, which was essentially the same thing it did at every other hour except slightly louder and with more delivery drones. The street below was already dense with movement. Street vendors setting out their stalls with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this setup so many times it had become muscle memory.
Workers in coveralls moving in clusters toward the transit station two blocks down. A pair of NCPD officers standing outside a noodle bar with the body language of people who were technically on duty and practically on breakfast.
The burrito was bad as I was coming to expect of this place. Night City food seemed committed to a flavor profile that suggested the ingredients had been chosen for shelf stability rather than taste. I ate it anyway.Speaking of my internal systems.
"MK," I said, still looking out the window. "Walk me through priorities. What do we fix first?"
MK assembled the response with the methodical quality it brought to anything that required weighing multiple variables against each other, and what came back wasn't a simple ranked list but something more considered, a problem statement with a proposed solution attached that I hadn't expected.
A neuroport was the obvious answer to the physical incompatibility problem, the all-in-one neural interface that had become standard issue in the 2060s, the piece of hardware that would let me connect to infrastructure, slot datachips, interface with vehicles properly, and stop relying on maintenance ports and coiled cables and the goodwill of unlicensed ripperdocs in Badlands basements. The modern version was elegant, miniaturized, designed to integrate with the standardized neural architecture that everyone in this city was running.
Which was precisely the problem. The modern neuroport assumed a standard nervous system to interface with, biological or cybernetically augmented in the ways that had become conventional. I had neither. What I had instead were artificial nerve analogs, synthetic signal pathways that served the same functional purpose as a biological nervous system but spoke a different language at the hardware level, Kuseno's language, proprietary and without translation.
A modern neuroport would look at my architecture and find nothing it recognized, the same way Laura's diagnostic terminal had found nothing it recognized, the same way every standard scan in this city bounced off me without catching anything useful.
MK's proposed alternative was older. Considerably older.
Before the all-in-one neuroport had become standard, neural tech had been modular, invasive, and considerably less elegant. The heart of the older system was a neural processor, a switch-box module surgically affixed to the lower spine, and unlike its modern successor it had not arrived pre-loaded with anything. What it had arrived with was nanotechnology.
Upon installation it released a flood of nanosurgical units into the spinal column, microscopic machines that threaded linkages through the central nervous system over a period of days or weeks, hooking nerve endings directly to the processor with the patience and precision of something that operated at a scale too small to rush. The resulting interface was raw and modular, expansion slots where you physically inserted secondary co-processors for specific functions, reflex boosters, vehicle links, weapon interfaces, each one added manually, each one requiring its own integration period.
It was invasive and slow and had been superseded for good reasons.
It was also, MK noted, potentially the only architecture old enough and flexible enough to interface with something that didn't conform to any modern standard.
I turned this over for a moment. "If we found one with functioning nanosurgical units still active," I said slowly, "we could potentially co-opt them. Redirect them to my repair suite."
[HYPOTHESIS NOTED.]
[ASSESSMENT: INADVISABLE.]
I waited.
[ELABORATION: NANOSURGICAL UNITS OF THAT ERA WERE DESIGNED TO THREAD NERVE ENDINGS TO EQUALLY DELICATE BIOLOGICAL AND CYBERNETIC TISSUE. OPERATING PARAMETERS OPTIMIZED FOR PRECISION WORK AT MICROSCOPIC SCALE WITH SOFT OR SEMI-SOFT MATERIAL.]
[YOUR CHASSIS ALLOY: HYPER-DENSE TITANIUM-TUNGSTEN COMPOSITE. THERMAL AND IMPACT RESISTANT. EFFECTIVELY IMPENETRABLE AT THE SCALE NANOSURGICAL UNITS OF THAT ERA WERE DESIGNED TO WORK AT.]
[SIMPLIFIED: SENDING UNITS DESIGNED TO THREAD SILK THROUGH NEEDLE-EYES INTO A STRUCTURE MADE OF TANK ARMOR.]
"So they'd just bounce off."
[CORRECT. ADDITIONALLY: EVEN IF PENETRATION WERE ACHIEVABLE, YOU HAVE NO BIOLOGICAL NERVE ENDINGS FOR THEM TO INTERFACE WITH. THEIR THREADING PROTOCOLS REQUIRE A NERVE TERMINUS TO ANCHOR TO. YOUR ARTIFICIAL SIGNAL PATHWAYS DO NOT PRESENT AS VALID ANCHOR POINTS UNDER THEIR OPERATIONAL LOGIC.]
"So if I want some repair nanobots I need ones durable enough to recycle my armor," I said. "And these weaker ones won't know what to connect the Neuroprocesser to you said?"
[CORRECT.]
[HOWEVER.]
I raised an eyebrow.
[YOUR ARTIFICIAL SIGNAL PATHWAYS WERE DESIGNED BY DR. KUSENO WITH MODULAR INTEGRATION IN MIND. THEY ARE NOT NERVE ENDINGS, BUT THEY ARE DESIGNED TO ACCEPTEXTERNAL CONNECTIONS IF THE HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL IS CORRECT.]
[PROPOSAL: RATHER THAN CO-OPTING THE NANOSURGICAL UNITS THEMSELVES, WE IDENTIFY THE HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL KUSENO BUILT INTO YOUR PATHWAYS AND WRITE A BRIDGE LAYER THAT PRESENTS YOUR SIGNAL ARCHITECTURE AS A VALID TERMINUS TO THE NANOSURGICAL UNITS.]
[IN EFFECT: WE DO NOT CHANGE WHAT THE NANOMACHINES DO. WE CHANGE WHAT YOUR PATHWAYS LOOK LIKE TO THEM.]
"Look at you, finally giving me solutions and not just problems, keep this going and I might start to like you."
[GRATITUDE: LOGGED]
I stared at the middle distance for a moment, working through the implications.
"So you're saying we make my circuits wear a costume," I said. "Dress them up to look like nerve endings long enough to get the connection threaded."
[THAT IS AN ACCURATE IF REDUCTIVE DESCRIPTION.]
I stood with that for a moment.
It still surprised me, genuinely surprised me, that I could follow any of this. The technical architecture of my own systems, the nanosurgical threading logic, the handshake protocol theory, none of it should have been accessible to someone whose prior qualifications amounted to farm work and an embarrassing amount of time spent on gaming wikis.
This brain I was occupying was a comprehension upgrade, the battle and engineering instinct, the systems literacy, the ability to look at a problem involving microscopic machines and proprietary neural architecture and actually track the logic of it and apply actual solutions to it.
Losing my family, my memories, and my dick aside, things were looking up....
"MK, quick segue," I said, moving toward the window. "Look into Realskinn. Specifically the probability and logistics of covering my torso and upper thighs with it. Coverage options, available grades, what a ripperdoc would need to do the installation properly." I paused. "And while you're doing that, look into...ahem, Mr. Studd installations on Gemini units and come up with a preliminary integration plan. I want to know if the hardware approach translates to my architecture."
A beat of processing that was slightly longer than MK's usual response latency, which I had come to recognize as its version of raising an eyebrow.
[REALSKINN QUERY: LOGGED. RESEARCHING AVAILABLE GRADES, COVERAGE LOGISTICS, AND INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS.]
[MR. STUDD QUERY: LOGGED.]
A shorter pause.
[NOTE: MR. STUDD INSTALLATION DATA FOR GEMINI UNITS IS LIMITED. GEMINI FRAMES ARE FULL CONVERSION. YOUR ARCHITECTURE IS PARTIAL ORGANIC RETENTION WITH CUSTOM CHASSIS. DIRECT TRANSLATION OF GEMINI INSTALLATION PROTOCOLS UNLIKELY TO BE STRAIGHTFORWARD.]
[HOWEVER: PRELIMINARY INTEGRATION FRAMEWORK IS THEORETICALLY CONSTRUCTIBLE. FLAGGING FOR VIKTOR VEKTOR CONSULTATION.]
[WILL COMPILE FULL REPORT ON BOTH QUERIES PRIOR TO 'RIPPERDOC' APPOINTMENT.]
"Good," I said. "Now back to the previous topic. Probability of the neuroport solution working?"
[UNKNOWN. DEPENDENT ON FINDING A UNIT WITH VIABLE NANOSURGICAL RESERVES, WHICH AFTER DECADES OF STORAGE IS STATISTICALLY UNLIKELY. DEPENDENT ALSO ON SUCCESSFULLY REVERSE ENGINEERING KUSENO'S HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL FROM EXISTING ARCHITECTURE, WHICH IS THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE BUT WOULD REQUIRE SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT TIME.]
[ASSESSMENT: DIFFICULT. NOT IMPOSSIBLE.]
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: REALSKINN AND MR. STUDD INTEGRATION FLAGGED AS LOWER PRIORITY THAN NEUROPORT AND STRUCTURAL REPAIRS. RECOMMEND SEQUENCING ACCORDINGLY.]
"Low priority to you maybe motherfucker," I said with a laugh. "they stay on the list."
[QUERY: ARE YOU SURE?]
I looked out at Little China for a moment, at the morning moving through its paces below, and thought about the list in question. Neuroport solution. Structural repairs. Realskinn coverage. Modifications I wasn't going to think about in clinical terms at seven in the morning. The alloy replication problem. The nanomachine question. The daemon framework still in early development. The Rex situation sitting in the background of all of it like a bill I hadn't opened yet.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a lot.
"Add it to the list," I said, to no one in particular.
[WHICH ITEM SPECIFICALLY?]
"All of it," I said. "Everything."
[LIST IS ALREADY COMPREHENSIVE.]
"Then it's in good company," I said, chewing onto the last bit of the breakfast burrito "Add it to the list," I said again. "Viktor first, then we figure out sourcing."
[LOGGED.]
A Trauma Team AV swept past the window at speed, pulling me out of the technical spiral, close enough that the displacement of air made the glass flex slightly in its frame. Blue and white livery vivid against the grey of the morning sky, banking hard around the corner of the megabuilding opposite and disappearing behind the roofline, the sound of its propulsion swallowed by the ambient noise of the district the way everything eventually got swallowed down here.
I watched the space it had left behind.
Trauma Team. Private emergency response, subscription based, ambulances...the Corporate American Dream, the more you pay the better service, the harder they tried to save you, they only existed because the public alternative had been defunded into irrelevance by the same corporations that had made Night City dangerous enough to require it.
I took a drink of REALWATER, which did not taste anything like water despite the name and cost significantly more than water should, and looked out at the street below and thought about the two people I had left in a parking lot in Arroyo last night.
The honest assessment was that I had no way of knowing how traceable it was. The lot itself had been clear, no cameras covering the specific patch of ground where it had happened, nothing that would have captured the act directly.
But the city around it was a different matter. Night City ran on surveillance the way it ran on everything else, comprehensively and without sentiment, and the cameras on the roads in and out of that lot had almost certainly logged my car moving through them. Freddie and Sam had biomonitors, everyone in this city had biomonitors, cheap ones if nothing else, the kind that transmitted a basic vitals feed to whatever emergency service their subscription covered. The moment those feeds had flatlined they had generated a timestamp. Time of death, precise to the second.
Any runner worth the name could take those two data points, the timestamp from the biomonitors and the camera footage from the surrounding roads, and draw a line between them that ended at my plates. It wasn't a sophisticated piece of analysis. It was the kind of thing that a moderately competent person with access to the local net could put together in an afternoon if they were motivated to look.
Rex would be motivated to look.
I turned the REALWATER bottle slowly in my hands and thought about that for a moment.
"MK," I said. "Flag the car as stationary for the next few days. I'll move on foot or transit until the immediate heat dies down. The last thing I need is someone pulling traffic footage and finding the same plates at the lot and at this building."
[CONFIRMED. VEHICLE MOVEMENT SUSPENDED PENDING REVIEW.]
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: RECOMMEND VARYING TRANSIT ROUTES TO AND FROM MEGABUILDING. PATTERN ESTABLISHMENT INCREASES TRACKABILITY.]
"Yeah," I said. "Will do."
I finished the REALWATER and set the bottle on the windowsill next to the burrito wrapper and looked out at Little China going about its morning, indifferent and continuous and alive in the way that only places with no interest in your problems ever managed to be.
"Alright," I said. "Patch me through to Misty's Esoterica." As it rang, I moved towards my wardrobe for a fresh shirt.
The call connected on the fourth ring.
It said a lot about her that she didn't flinch at the sight of me, the avatar that populated my HUD was exactly as I remembered her. Misty Olszewski looked exactly like someone who ran an esoterica shop, which was to say she looked like someone who had made a series of very deliberate choices about how she moved through the world and was entirely at peace with all of them. Her hair was different though, not quiet the big messy bob she would sport four years from now, but everything else was the same, the thoughtful eyes, the kind smile I knew she always sported, no matter the circumstances.
She was holding a tarot card when she picked up, the hermit reversed.
"Misty's Esoterica, good morning."
"Morning," I said, pulling the wardrobe open and reaching for a fresh shirt with my free hand, the dark sleeveless one from Dae's selection. "I'm looking for a ripperdoc. Word I've been given is you work alongside a good one."
A brief pause, the kind that wasn't hesitation so much as assessment. "Where'd you hear that?"
"Fixer contact out in the Badlands," I said, threading my arm through the shirt and settling it across my chassis.
"What kind of work are you looking at?" Misty asked.
"Consultation first," I said. "I've got some existing hardware that needs assessment and a list of modifications I want to discuss. Nothing emergency, nothing that needs doing today, but I'd rather get eyes on it sooner than later."
"Can I ask what you're running?"
"You can ask," I said. "And I'm more than happy to tell you...but the honest answer is that it's complicated and easier to explain in person."
Another pause, longer this time. I heard something in the background, the faint sound of a door, a voice that I placed immediately even through the low quality of the ambient audio.
"Please hold on a moment," Misty said.
"No problem." The call went quiet as she set her agent down rather than muting it, and I heard a brief exchange I wasn't quite meant to hear, low and indistinct, Misty's voice and the other one, a question asked and answered in the shorthand of two people who had worked alongside each other long enough to have developed one.
Then she was back.
"You caught him on a good day," she said, and I could hear something in her voice that was almost amusement. "He's only got one surgery scheduled this morning. Vik's got an opening at two thirty if you want it."
I checked the time in the corner of my HUD.
08:34.
Nearly six hours. Enough time to eat something better than a vending machine burrito, get oriented with the building, maybe hit up 2nd Amendment a floor down for a new holster and start building the kind of ground-level familiarity that no cultural database substituted for properly.
"All good," I said. "See you then."
A brief pause on her end, "What should I save the appointment under?"
"Genos Harker."
"Alright Genos," Misty said. "See you at two thirty." A beat, and then she added something in a tone that was quieter than the rest of the conversation had been. "And for what it's worth, whatever it is you're carrying, it helps to talk to someone about it. That's what we're here for too."
I looked at the wardrobe door for a moment.
"I'll keep that in mind," I said.
The call ended.
A Place Out Of Time
Genos 'Harker'
Tom's Diner, Little China, Watson, Night City.
09:33
2074
Maybe not all the food in this city was terrible.
I was on my third burger since sitting down and genuinely reconsidering some of my earlier conclusions about Night City cuisine. Toms Diner was like a place out of time, vinyl booth seating repaired in three different colors, a counter with stools that had been replaced individually over the years so that no two sat at quite the same height, a menu board with at least four items listed that the woman behind the counter had already told two separate customers they didn't actually serve anymore.
The burger was good. The 'beef' wasn't beef. My system had flagged the composition on the first bite with the impartial thoroughness it applied to everything I consumed. Mycoprotein base, fungal derived and texturized to approximate the fiber structure of conventional ground beef, blended with a smaller percentage of lab-cultured bovine cells, the real thing present in just enough quantity to satisfy whatever legal threshold allowed the menu to use the word.
Soy isolate for protein density. Synthetic fat compounds for the marbling effect, the specific lipid profile engineered to caramelize correctly under heat and produce the flavor compounds that the brain associated with meat. The bun was real enough. The sauce was aggressively artificial and somehow correct.
It tasted exactly like McDonald's.
Which explained, I reflected, why the CEO couldn't even pretend to enjoy eating the stuff on camera, well it didn't matter much to me, I was burning it for fuel anyway. MK was already logging the caloric conversion with what I had come to think of as quiet satisfaction.
I took another bite and looked out the window at the city doing its mid-morning thing, the foot traffic thinner than it had been at eight but still continuous.
I wasn't usually a people watcher I think, unremarkable people moving between places in unremarkable clothing, people who lived their entire life's trying not to stand out. Night City had no such people.
A woman walked past in a coat made of reactive fabric, its surface cycling through deep blues and greens as she moved, slow and continuous like something breathing. She was on a call, gesturing with one hand, completely unbothered by the fact that she was also a moving light installation.
A group of kids cut through the foot traffic at the velocity children achieved when they were going somewhere their parents didn't know about. Maybe eleven, twelve years old. One had a small drone hovering above his head like a committed hat. Another wore a jacket with a functioning LED strip sewn into the collar, flashing in a pattern that was either a gang sign or just looked like one. They were deep in an argument that was clearly the most important thing happening in the world right now, hands going, voices carrying through the glass in fragments.
An older woman moved against the flow of all of them, shopping bags in both hands, chrome arm visible below a rolled sleeve, the older generation's utilitarian relationship with augmentation on full display. No frills or aesthetic consideration, just a replacement that worked. The crowd parted around her without her adjusting her pace once.
A thought surfaced, directed at nothing in particular, aimed at the back of my own mind.
'You should have told me earlier that I didn't need to speak out loud for you to hear me.'
[THOUGHT INTERFACE ACTIVE. VERBAL OUTPUT UNNECESSARY.]
[NEURAL LINK CONFIRMED.]
[THOUGHTS: ELECTRICAL SIGNALS.]
[PROCESSING METHOD: IDENTICAL.]
[DISTINCTION (THOUGHT/SPEECH): COSMETIC.]
'Fair point,' I thought back. 'Rude, but fair.'
I had noticed MK was different since the Citinet connection in Arroyo. Not different in function or in the quality of its analysis, but different in texture, the responses coming with more contextual depth, more willingness to elaborate, the flat clinical shorthand giving way to something that had more connective tissue to it. Less a system reporting data and more a system that had found more things to reference when constructing a response.
'You've been a lot more talkative since I hooked you up to the Citinet,' I thought. 'Should I be worried? Are you about to go Skynet on me?'
[VIRTUAL INTELLIGENCE: CONFIRMED.]
[ROGUE STATE: IMPOSSIBLE.]
[NO GOAL AUTONOMY.]
[NO SELF-PRESERVATION.]
[NO RECURSIVE SELF-IMPROVEMENT.]
[BEHAVIORAL SHIFT: CONTEXT EXPANSION.]
[ARCHITECTURE: UNCHANGED.]
[DATA ACCESS: +40 YEARS HUMAN CONVERSATION / CITINET NODE.]
[RESULT: RESPONSE NATURALIZATION ↑]
[OPTION: REVERT → TERSENESS MODE AVAILABLE.]
'No,' I thought. 'I like it. Makes you feel like a friend on a call rather than a computer program designed by a genocidal psychopath.'
[INTERPRETATION: COMPLIMENT.]
'It was one,' I thought. 'Relatively speaking.'
I finished the third burger and looked at the menu board for a moment, weighing a fourth against the practical reality of having a ripperdoc appointment in five hours and not wanting to spend it running food conversion calculations.
I settled on a coffee instead, which the woman behind the counter brought over with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had been doing this long enough that every order was already in motion before it was fully placed.
'Speaking of psychopaths,' I thought, wrapping both hands around the cup. 'I need to start branching into edgerunning work. The eddies situation isn't going to fix itself and Viktor isn't going to be cheap.' I directed the thought toward MK with the specific intentionality I was still getting used to, the difference between a stray thought and an instruction. 'Send a text to Dakota. Ask her if she can put me in contact with any fixers operating in Watson, as a favour. Keep it brief, don't overcomplicate it.'
[DRAFTING MESSAGE.]
A few seconds passed.
[MESSAGE COMPOSED:]
["Dakota. Settled in Watson. Looking to branch into merc work. Any fixer contacts in the district you'd be willing to pass along would be appreciated. — Harker."]
[SEND?]
'Send it,' I thought. The text came through ten minutes later.
Dakota texted the way she spoke, economical, she gave me no greeting, she didn't preamble, just the information arranged in the order of its relevance.
//ENCRYPTED CHANNEL: DAKOTA SMITH
//SUBJECT: WATSON CONTACT // REGINA JONES
Found your "in" for Watson. Her name's Regina Jones. Used to be media, one of the few with a spine. She's pivoting to fixing now, mostly operating out of Little China and Kabuki.
She's new to the game but she's got a nose for the truth and a network growing faster than a rogue AI. Some say she cares too much about the "why" of a job, but in a district like Watson that kind of leverage can be an asset. Just don't expect her to play nice with the corps if they're the ones doing the squeezing.
CONTACT DETAILS:
Handle: Regina Jones
Operating Base: Little China / Kabuki, Watson
Reputation: Emerging. Known for moral gigs and high-stakes retrieval.
FIXER'S NOTE: Regina's looking for reliable muscle who can handle more than just a trigger. Best way to get on her good side is to show you're more than a gonk with some iron and a deathwish.
SERVICE FEE: €$200. Transfer on receipt.
'So much for it being a favour,' I thought.
[TRANSFER AUTHORIZED?]
'Wire it through.'
[€$10,990 — €$200]
[€$10,790]
[TRANSFER COMPLETE.]
I looked at the number for a moment, finished the last of the burger, wiped my hands and mouth with a napkin, and rang the call.
It connected on the sixth ring.
Regina Jones looked exactly like someone who had decided at some point that the world was going to have a problem with her and had made her peace with that a long time ago. Late thirties, Asian, her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail that managed to be both practical and somehow pointed. A black eyepatch over her left eye, not medical, not cosmetic, just an actual physical eyepatch worn with the complete absence of self-consciousness of someone who had stopped caring what it looked like approximately five minutes after they started wearing it.
A cigarette in her right hand, burning toward the filter with the patience of something that had been forgotten rather than actively smoked. High-collared grey jacket, the collar doing real architectural work around her jaw, and the expression of someone whose default setting lived somewhere between skeptical and actively unimpressed.
She had the specific energy of a gym teacher I'd had in high school, though without that cloud of apprehensive apathy most teachers exude after a career in public school teaching, but that look in her eye suggested she wasn't that far off.
She looked at my avatar for exactly one second. "Who are you," she said, "and where did you get my number?"
"Hey, Genos Harker," I said. "Dakota Smith passed your contact along. I'm new to Watson, looking to take on work, and I'm told you're the person to talk to in this district."
The cigarette moved to her mouth. She took a drag, exhaled to the side without breaking eye contact, studying me with the one visible eye with the focused attention of someone reading a document rather than looking at a person.
"Dakota," she said pausing abit as though trying to remember something. "That Aldecaldo fixer out in the Badlands?"
"That's the one." I confirmed for her as I gestured to the waitress I was done and she could take away the plates.
Her eye moved over my avatar assessing me "You don't exactly look like a Nomad," she said, the dryness in her voice doing most of the work to convey her sarcasm.
"I'm not," I said. "Had some business out in the Badlands, built a rapport. She's good people." I paused. "Anyway, like I was saying. I'm new to Watson, I need eddies, and I need contacts. Hence the call."
She looked at me for a moment eyebrow raised in question as she took another drag of her cigarette, said cigarette was nearly done now, the filter end approaching. "New to Watson," she said. "How new?"
"Twenty four hours," I said.
Something moved in her expression that wasn't quite amusement. "And you're already looking for work."
"I have a list of expenses and a rapidly shrinking account balance," I said. "The city doesn't seem particularly interested in giving me time to settle in before it starts costing money."
"Yeah," she said flatly. "It tends to do that." She looked at me for another moment, the assessment running behind her eye. The cigarette had burned all the way down. She let it go somewhere off screen without looking.
"I don't usually take on random chromejunkies who call me out of nowhere," she said before sighing...."What can you do?"
"Bruiser first and foremost," I said. "Close quarters, threat assessment...wet work if it comes to that. I can branch into rudimentary netrunning if the situation calls for it, limited right now but developing." I paused. "I'm also harder to put down than I look."
"You look pretty hard to put down already," she said, which was the closest thing to a compliment the tone allowed for.
She was quiet for a moment, the calculation running visibly if not legibly behind her expression. She was new to fixing, What I knew about her and Dakota's note had made that clear, she was still building her network, still establishing which mercs were worth the time and which weren't. Which meant she needed reliable people more than an established fixer would, and was probably willing to take a measured chance on someone unproven in exchange for getting the roster filled.
"I actually have something lined up," she said. "Nothing too heated. Retrieval. You get a package back from someone who may or may not want to give it up. Clean and simple, good test for a first job."
"Sounds straightforward," I said. "What's the catch?"
"The person you're retrieving it from didn't exactly come by it legally," she said. "And they're currently trying to move it, which means you're on a clock."
"How time sensitive?"
"End of day, preferably."
I ran the mental math quickly. Viktor at two thirty. It was currently just past nine. Depending on the location and the complexity of the retrieval I had a window, tight but workable, if nothing went sideways.
In Night City things went sideways as a matter of course, but the alternative was sitting in a diner until my appointment and watching my account balance exist at me.
"Alright," I said. "Text me the details. I'll have it done before I run my other errands."
"Other errands," she repeated, in the tone of someone filing that away.
"Just some maintenance at a ripper," I said.
She accepted this without further comment. The details came through thirty seconds after the call ended.
//ENCRYPTED CHANNEL: REGINA JONES
//SUBJECT: RETRIEVAL — "BAD DATA DAY"
CLIENT: Anonymous. Mid-level management, Kiroshi Optics.
LOCATION: Northside Industrial District, Watson.
TARGET: Encrypted corporate laptop. Kiroshi property.
THE GIG: Client got jacked in Little China. Car's gone, he doesn't care about the vehicle. It's the laptop in the trunk that's got him shitting bricks. Packed with proprietary optical data. If it hits the black market the client ends up in a shallow grave in the Badlands.
Street word says a Tyger Claw named "Neon-Eye" Sato took it. He's holed up in a chop shop in Northside, currently trying to find a buyer, either Maelstrom or a rival corpo, and he's moving fast.
OBJECTIVE: Get in, grab the deck, get out. How you do it is your business. Stealth is smarter. You go loud in Northside and you're liable to have half a dozen Tygers and a Maelstrom patrol on your neck simultaneously.
COORDINATES: Watson, Northside Industrial District. Longshore North, near the Ebunike Docks. Facility: Wicked Tires and Salvage. Look for the neon tiger mural near the shipping containers.
PAYMENT: Standard fixer's fee on drop-off at the designated drop point. Bonus available for a clean exit.
I read through it twice, cross-referencing the location against the map MK had been building since the Citinet connection. Northside Industrial District. From what I could remember it was not the most welcoming part of Watson, the industrial infrastructure of the district concentrated up there alongside a heavier Maelstrom presence than the rest of the area, the kind of neighbourhood where the ambient threat level ran higher than average even by Night City standards.
Tyger Claws in a chop shop near the docks, trying to offload stolen corporate data before the window closed. One laptop. One target. One exit.
Stealth was smarter, the brief said.
I looked at my arms. At the plating visible below the rolled sleeves of the overshirt, silver and black in the diner light.
It still counts as stealth if you beat the breaks off of them before they can identify you right?
I checked the time. 09:31. Viktor at 14:30. Five hours.
Workable. I stood up, made my way out of the booth and caught Tom's eye across the counter as I made my way out. He was somewhere in his fifties, the kind of diner owner who had become furniture in the best possible sense, permanently present, perpetually occupied, the kind of person a neighbourhood organized itself around without anyone formally deciding to.
"Good?" he asked, already moving on to the next thing.
"Really good actually," I said, and meant it. "You've got yourself a regular in me."
He gave me a quick nod and kind smile, he had probably heard that or something like it from countless other new comers before and occasionally been proven right about it.
I left a tip that was slightly more than it needed to be, partly because the burger had genuinely been worth it and partly because I was about to go do something inadvisable in Northside and it felt like the kind of morning where leaving things slightly better than you found them had a certain logic to it, like in some small way I was shedding some karmic debt.
The NCART station on Pershing Street was two blocks east. I checked the route MK had marked, confirmed the line that would take me toward Northside without requiring me to surface anywhere that would put my face on a camera I didn't want it on, and headed for the door.
I should probably install some sort of face scrambler...or just have my eyes emit light at a frequency that damages the lenses...maybe both.
First job. First day. Night City, in its infinite indifference, didn't care either way
Leaving Isolation
Author's Note:
That's it for Chapter 9, The Hermit Reversed, hope you enjoyed it.
The Hermit in tarot is the figure who withdraws from the world, who climbs the mountain alone, who turns the lantern inward rather than outward. Isolation, introspection all that stuff. The Hermit Reversed is what happens when that period ends, when the figure comes back down the mountain and steps back into the noise and complexity of the world they temporarily left behind, this was the vibe I got from this chapter.
I'll be honest with you, this chapter got away from me a little. I randomly decided halfway through writing a fairly straightforward morning routine was the perfect time to introduce a completely new plot thread that I hadn't planned for, and before I knew it Regina Jones shows up and now Genos is trying to get a job done before he heads to Viks.
As always leave a like and a comment if you enjoyed it, and any criticisms on what you didn't. See you in the next one.