"Good Morning, Night City! Yesterday's deadman lotto across all districts only racked up four bodies. I don't think anyone expected that number, and who knows how many people lost their shirts. You should all thank the NCPD officers, because if those donut-eating, pistol-waving heroes hadn't stopped you from getting rich, there would have been no fewer than twenty dead yesterday.
Watson and Maelstrom stirred things up again in Kabuki. These chrome-addicted lunatics never know how to sit still for even a second. The Valentinos over in Heywood seem to have hit some trouble too, so much so that they did not even celebrate their traditional Day of the Dead. They are wandering the streets holding up their pants, day after day without end. As for Pacifica, it is still Pacifica, and I think City Hall should give them a medal to celebrate yet another peaceful day. Anyway, this is your best buddy Stan, and with me, let's start another dream-chasing day in Night City."
The noisy broadcast dragged Carl awake. His head throbbed, and the first thing out of his mouth was a low curse.
"Damn it. My head hurts like hell."
Leaning against a wall, Carl opened his eyes, only to find everything blurred. A mess of bright colors slammed into his vision, and the glare hurt even more than keeping his eyes shut.
"The billboards are blinding."
After a moment of dull processing, as his vision slowly cleared, Carl realized he was lying in a foul-smelling pile of trash on an upper floor of an apartment building. Through a railing barely over a meter high, he could see down into the building's central shaft.
Billboards packed every bit of space, squeezing into corners as if they could never be bright enough. Their flashing lights painted his view in hazy, almost unreal colors.
His whole body felt wrong, sore and weak all over. Carl forced himself up out of the stinking trash pile and looked around.
The apartment corridor looked about a hundred meters long. Groups of oddly dressed people with a futuristic look stood around chatting, scattered along the hallway. No one spared a glance at Carl climbing out of the garbage.
"What kind of mess is this."
As the fog in his head faded a little, Carl tried to recall his last clear memory before blacking out. His name was Carl, surname Carl, a man with a rare last name and an otherwise ordinary life.
Aside from decent looks and a love of games, there was nothing special about him. In his memory, he had been watching a gameplay demo video.
And then?
That was where it cut off. The last thing he remembered was staring at that video.
"What is this supposed to be."
Thinking about the demo he had replayed again and again, the one called 'Cyberpunk 2077,' Carl suddenly froze. The last scene burned into his memory matched what he was seeing right now.
This mega tower was the same apartment from the demo, the place where the protagonist V lived.
Only then did Carl really look at the strangely dressed people around him. At first glance they just seemed weird, but now he saw the chaotic hardware on their bodies. Those were cybernetic implants.
Cybernetic implants were artificial body parts, a future tech from science fiction where broken or weak flesh was replaced with machines or synthetic tissue. Were these things real?
Carl glanced at a passing resident, his eyes dropping to the space between the man's legs. More precisely, the crotch area.
At that moment, he believed it. He had crossed over.
Because it was glowing.
Damn it, that guy's junk was glowing, and it even changed colors. What kind of rainbow nonsense was this?
As far as Carl knew, he had never seen anything this extreme back in his own country. Being dropped into a place identical to the video was bad enough, but this sight was on another level.
And it was not just glowing. The guy was twitching all over, shoulders jerking like he was having a seizure, his body swaying as the light pulsed.
Standing in the trash pile, Carl was not blocking the glowing man's path. The man shuffled past, still shaking, and after he moved on, Carl stepped away from the garbage as well.
He clung to a last bit of hope that this was not real. When he reached the railing and looked up through the open shaft, a flying car streaked across the sky above.
"Alright. Reality accepted."
He slapped his cheeks with his filthy hands, not bothering to care. Carl fully understood that he had crossed into another world.
His old world had concept cars called flying vehicles, but they were nothing compared to what he had just seen. The tech gap was so wide that years of development would never close it, and there was nothing he could do about that.
At least he had landed in a world he already knew, the Cyberpunk setting, instead of some grimdark universe where survival meant screaming nonstop. That alone was worth being thankful for.
Carl waited by the railing for a while. There was no system prompt, no friendly voice explaining things, so it seemed his journey came without a talking companion.
Could this be a soul transfer? Would the original owner's memories show up?
Just as that thought crossed his mind, a shameless resident nearby unzipped and started relieving himself not far from Carl. In the oddly colored liquid, Carl caught a reflection of himself.
Crap. This was a full body transfer.
But maybe not entirely.
The reflection looked about eighteen or nineteen years old. Carl clearly remembered that he was twenty-four.
A youth package, then. Five stars.
Ignoring the man who nearly collapsed face-first into his own puddle after finishing, Carl wandered through the apartment building, trying to figure out the current year. He already had a rough idea of the date from hearing Night City broadcaster Stan earlier.
That voice had mentioned Day of the Dead, which Carl knew was a Mexican festival similar to the Ghost Festival, celebrated on November 1st or 2nd. By that logic, today had to be November 2nd or 3rd.
He knew this because he had once watched an animated film called Coco, which took inspiration from Day of the Dead. A few steps later, he found what he was looking for.
On a shifting billboard in the corridor, an ad displayed the date. It was a promotion for the deadman lotto, and printed clearly on it was the day.
November 3rd, 2075.
2075?
He had no idea what had happened to bring him here. As he stood there in shock, another thought hit him.
He might not be completely without an advantage.
The language and writing on the ads and broadcasts were not ones he had ever learned. Yet somehow, he understood everything perfectly.
After discovering that in 2075, a Golden Finger could be obtained just by installing a translator, Carl felt a bit excited. He had already prepared himself to face this chaotic world completely naked and innocent, yet before stepping out, he realized he was at least wearing a pair of underwear, which counted as comfort. That alone made him feel much better about the situation.
He was not some lunatic who drank too much Water of Life, so wearing underwear was only normal. With his emotions adjusted, he started thinking about what he should do next. Standing there, he forced himself to calm down and plan his next steps carefully.
After a brief moment of thought, Carl came to a decision. First, he needed a place to live and enough food to avoid starving for a few meals. He also needed some kind of mobile communication device, though he was not sure whether normal phones were still sold in this world apart from implanted or external cyberware.
Carl had no intention of using his flesh to fight against machines. If he could install cyberware, he definitely would, but it was obvious that such advanced technology would be extremely expensive. Older models might be cheaper, though there was also a chance they had become expensive precisely because they were outdated.