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[Demons of NC] Chapter 47
🕑 Added 2024-12-02 00:08:49 +0000 UTCThat night, Ariq Iqbal and the other news anchors didn’t answer the burning question: did the high-ranking corpo exec survive? I found out the next morning at El Coyote Cojo. Jackie had been bugging me to come by, and I figured it was time to clear my head. I hadn’t slept much, thoughts of our future keeping me awake. Bad omens kept gnawing at me, clawing at my mind. A stiff drink seemed like the only solution.
Jackie Wells, usually the life of the party, looked like he’d swallowed a storm cloud that morning. We found a quiet corner on the second floor. He slapped a bottle of tequila on the table, poured us both a shot, and sat down heavily.
“Alright,” I nodded, pulling my glass closer. “What’s eating you?”
“Eating me? Yeah, something like that. Listen up, mano. I’m gonna tell you a sad, shitty little story. Vic passed it on to me, and he got it straight from Gloria, who’s been crying her eyes out. Her kid—yeah, you know the one—he climbed up high in Arasaka. Too high. Shouldn’t have, but that’s not the point. Anyway, he hooked up with someone there. Don’t know if it was amor a primera vista or just a close bond, but that’s not the point either.” Jackie paused to knock back his tequila in one go. He didn’t even bother clinking glasses. “They were both just interns, but they got assigned to protect some big-shot corpo bitch. David got the gig for his talent and implants. His girl, though…” Jackie hesitated, sighing deeply as he poured himself another. “…she had conditions. They made her go under the knife. Not for chrome—plastic surgery.”
“Ah, shit…” I breathed, feeling my stomach twist.
There it was. The answer to the question: “Did Abernathy survive?” She’d pulled a sleazy but undeniably effective trick.
I knew where this was going, but I let Jackie keep talking.
“They didn’t just give her surgery, mano. They slipped some kind of sneaky-ass chip in her skull, hidden so deep even the best scanners wouldn’t pick it up. Turned her into a decoy. Bastardos. Then the whole mess went down… you know the one.” Jackie waved his hand dismissively.
“Yeah, I know,” I replied, taking my own shot.
“Crimson Harvest, all those firefights, drones, explosions, everything. David tried to save her. He almost managed it too. He had her in his arms, unconscious but alive. Just as he was about to inject her with a stim… BAM!” Jackie slammed the table, making the bottle and glasses jump. “A shot to the neck. Damn near took her head clean off.”
“Fuck…”
“Yeah. He got her out, but there wasn’t anything left to save. And the real kicker? That corpo bitch survived. She came out on the roof disguised as an Arasaka runner. Helmet, body armor, the whole deal. Just a couple of scratches from shrapnel.”
Damn. I’d seen her. The “runner” David had dragged out of the burning AV first.
“Shitty night, mano. I was there too, down on the streets. Didn’t see it, but I heard it all. Gunfire, screams, glass shattering. Then your nomad friend shows up. Little banged up, but grinning like she’d just taken out the devil himself. She even had this giant Techtronica railgun with her. That thing could decapitate someone with a neck shot.”
“You tell anyone? Vic? Gloria?”
“Hell no,” Jackie muttered. “I ain’t a snitch, and I’m not stupid. Feel bad for the kid, though. And I don’t envy you either. Cosas que pasan. Shit happens.”
“It does,” I agreed.
“Look, mano, you should get out of the city. Take a year, maybe two.” Jackie’s tone shifted, his voice tinged with quiet concern.
“Why?”
“That corpo bitch won’t let this go. Streets are buzzing, V. Everyone feels it, like the calm before the storm. You went and poked a very dangerous snake, and now you’re on her shit list. She’s got money, V. And Arasaka’s already throwing eddies around to find you.”
“It’s not Arasaka. It’s her,” I said flatly. “I’ll null her, and it’ll blow over.”
“Desperado, huh? Stubbornness is one thing, but this? You rattled the hive, and now they’re sealing every crack. Door’s shut, mano. You had a shot, and you blew it.”
I stared at my empty glass for a moment before answering.
“Maybe… But let me make one thing clear—there are folks out there, believe it or not, who don’t give a damn about closed doors. They’ll slip through the cracks, even if those cracks don’t exist.” *
“Well, do what you gotta do…” Jackie sighed heavily.
I will.
From the outside, sure, it might look like a no-win scenario. But I saw a path to victory, even if it ran straight through hell itself.
_______________________________________________
That evening, Lucy brought it up.
“Let’s leave tomorrow night.”
I sat at my desk, half-focused on the feeds coming in from a netrunner I’d hired. He’d sold me access to hacked infrastructure: megabuilding servers, gas station bots, even a few ancient vending machines.
“Leave?” I asked distractedly, catching Lucy’s reflection in the kitchen glass as she stood by the wall.
“Yeah. I found a nomad smuggler. Three grand each, and he’ll get us to Texas. No IDs required.”
“Why Texas?” I asked absentmindedly, scanning more data.
“From there, anywhere. Latin America, maybe. We’ll figure it out. I’ve still got over three hundred thousand eddies saved up. You?”
“About six hundred,” I admitted. “Spent a bit, but I’ll make it back.”
“Oh, and speaking of eddies, remember Linda Sherman? They raised the bounty on you—two hundred K now.”
“Nice,” I replied, still watching the numbers roll in.
The virus I’d unleashed was spreading beautifully. If it had been a real malware attack, NetWatch would’ve been all over it by now. But my code was subtle, almost elegant in its chaotic complexity. Any netrunner who glanced at it would probably scratch their head, then marvel at the genius of its design.
Operators, variables, and functions tangled together in what looked like utter nonsense at first glance—but it worked, and it worked with astonishing efficiency.
I figured a program like this would fetch hundreds of thousands, if not millions of eddies. It had cost me only a single promise, one I wasn’t planning to make good on just yet.
“V…” Lucy’s quiet voice brought me back to reality as she stepped closer. “This city isn’t worth your life.”
“Give me a few days. I’ll try one last thing. If it doesn’t pan out… we’ll leave.”
Lucy shook her head, clearly unimpressed with my attachment to Night City. I turned to face her. She was looking at me the way you’d look at someone terminally ill and clinging to the edge of a cliff.
I had no doubt she suspected my “one last thing” had something to do with the ghosts of the Cynosure bunker, but she didn’t say it aloud. That was a relief—arguing was the last thing I wanted. I wasn’t even sure myself if I was making the right call.
While my mind churned over these thoughts, the program pinged back. Contact established.
“I’m heading out,” I said, standing up from the table. “Maybe for a little while. Maybe for longer.”
Lucy didn’t reply. She, too, was staring into the glass, as if her reflection held the answers to all our problems.
I left the megabuilding, slipping into the narrow alleys where I’d once watched an invisible predator at work. My blood boiled with anger—anger that had a name. Susan. Why couldn’t you just leave me alone? I knew the answer, of course. It was painfully simple and offered no solace. It wouldn’t comfort David’s girl, whose head had nearly been blown off, or the poor bastards caught in the crossfire of bullets and shrapnel.
A rented apartment, a bathtub filled with ice cubes, and some basic gear were waiting for me. Another dive into the Net. This time, I’d let the program guide me.
In the shimmering lights of cyberspace, I sent out a signal, and a response came instantly—a cluster of particularly bright points leading me away from the city’s data arrays. Red lights glowed through walls of ice and local net barriers. Shedding my humanoid form, I followed them.
The metallic, alien voice of the Cynosure AIs echoed in my mind:
“FIND HER. FIND HER FOR US.”
I’ll find her, alright. But not for you. For me.
Even with the fallout from the DataKrash, the Net still allowed for lightning-fast travel across massive distances in virtual space. I had no idea where the program was taking me geographically—somewhere buried in icy fortresses. Maybe the northern part of NUSA. Maybe another continent entirely. Didn’t matter.
The red dots on the horizon became a blazing beacon—a corrupt flame of human greed lit by Militech long ago and stubbornly kept alive.
I was approaching the Blackwall.
It was like flying over a turbulent sea. Although “over” wasn’t quite right—there was no up or down here. But that was the image that came to mind: the Blackwall rippling with blue lines, flaring red, pulsing, and throwing out bursts of energy. In these violent flares, I saw shadows of the battles raging in the depths of the Wild Net. AIs multiplying, devouring each other, trying to breach the Wall—and failing, consumed by it. I’d been there once, one of many ghosts haunting this artificial, yet far from human-made, hell.
Bartmoss had sparked the initial impulse, but even he hadn’t foreseen what it would become years later.
The bright light drew me in, pulling me toward a tear in the fabric of the Wall.
It looked like the maw of an erupting volcano and a bleeding wound at the same time. The edges throbbed, locked in a struggle of algorithms and subsystems within the Wall itself. The Wall wasn’t just ice; it was a complex system—a living entity, almost. An AI composed of countless dynamic elements. You couldn’t build something like this without internal contradictions. The Blackwall consumed other AIs, absorbing their fragments, constantly escalating an arms race against anyone trying to break through or tear it down.
How do I know this? I’d watched it. Picked up scraps from its dark feasts. Dodged its pulses. Spent years on the other side, calculating my odds of slipping through. And now, all that knowledge was flooding back.
Closer. Closer still…
And there, in the heart of the Wall’s wound, I saw her. The one the Cynosure AIs were so desperate to find. She glimmered white against the red haze—a spearhead piercing the Wall’s fresh wound.
Song So Mi, known by her ops codename “Songbird.” An FIA intelligence agent and, effectively, President Rosalind Myers’ right hand in all things Net-related. A living weapon of Militech, as much machine as human.
I “zoomed in,” starting a surface-level, completely non-aggressive scan.
If I and most other AIs were defined by flexibility, change, and lack of fixed form, Songbird was the polar opposite. She exuded an unyielding solidity. Loops of ice, closed on themselves. Sturdy, firm structures backed by Militech’s supercomputers and black-ops implants. An exterior tough enough to ward off even the spirits of cyber-hell. In the Net, she didn’t resemble a human—but she wasn’t an AI either.
Попробуй разбить меня - ты не поверишь глазам.
Попробуй сломать - ты скорее сломаешься сам.
(Try to break me—you won’t believe your eyes.
Try to crush me—you’ll break first.)
In a split second, the Wall’s wound sealed completely, leaving only a ripple as evidence of the disturbance.
I felt a combat program snap around me like a vice. I couldn’t even identify it—it worked too fast. This thing was leagues ahead of even NetWatch’s tricks. A delicate grid of white lines cut off all my escape routes.
And then she was there.
“An AI?” she asked, half to me, half to herself. “No. An engram-based AI? Closer.”
I shifted my form, taking on a human appearance.
“Hey,” I said, as casually as I could to diffuse the tension. “The resemblance to an AI? Side effect of past experiments. Courtesy of Arasaka. But, yeah, I’ve got a flesh-and-blood body out there.”
Tiny points of scanning programs swirled around me, tracking the signal I hadn’t bothered to hide.
“Alright,” the runner nodded. “You’ve got a body. I’ll allow for that possibility. So, what’s up? You’re not gonna tell me this was an accident, right?”
“Nope. I was looking for you. I need help with my ex-employers. Arasaka’s hunting me down.”
“Got it. Let’s chat somewhere more… suitable.”
And just like that, as if by the wave of a magic wand, the Cyberspace around us began to change. It was replaced by an illusory reality, the kind you’d find in a top-shelf braindance. Jory used to pull tricks like this, so some runners could, too? But So Mi wasn’t just a runner. Comparing her to an average netrunner was like putting a two-bit thug with junkyard implants next to Adam Smasher.
We ended up in the illusion of a small apartment, probably in New York. So Mi was from there originally. Not fancy, but cozy enough. Multicolored walls, paintings, old-timey artifacts like paper books on shelves, and a netrunner chair where Songbird sat sideways, her feet touching the floor.
Her virtual appearance didn’t match her real body anymore. Instead of a borg, I saw a pretty ordinary-looking girl with fewer implants than Lucy, probably.
“You found me, and that’s bad for both of us,” the netrunner said, her voice tinged with a hint of sadness. “I’ll have to shut down today’s operation and... well, the protocol for dealing with intruders is clear. Nothing personal. But you’re not just any intruder. If even half of what you said is true, we might be able to work something out.”
“Oh yeah? And how’s that?” I asked, smirking as I studied the abstract paintings on the walls and the vintage record player.
“I can’t just let you go, but I can keep you here. Your body can handle staying in the Net for a day, or at least twelve hours, right?”
“Hmm... I had some water this morning, hit the bathroom... Yeah, I think I can last a full forty-eight if needed.”
“Good,” the girl nodded. “Our agents will come for you. Judging by your signal, you’re somewhere in Night City?”
“Yeah. And what’re your agents gonna do with me? Something tells me I won’t just get a fine for peeping.”
“A sense of humor is good,” she replied with a faint smile. “No, we don’t deal in fines. You’ll be taken to the NUSA. You’ll get a job, new opportunities, protection from Arasaka. After all, where better to hide from one Leviathan than on the back of another?”
“Logical. Even poetic,” I admitted. “Benefits? Salary?”
“Of course. Although vacations might be an issue.”
“So, you’re recruiting me with a mix of threats and promises? First, you mention elimination. A minute later, it’s a job offer. Playing both good cop and bad cop at once?” I grinned. “Funny, considering you were recruited the same way by Solomon Reed once.”
Her face changed instantly. The confidence cracked. We were back to questions instead of ultimatums.
“How do you know that? Who are you, really?”
“I know a lot about you, So Mi. How? Long story. The important thing is, I know you’re dying. Not just dying—day by day, you’re losing your memories. The faces of those you loved most, their voices, the early years of your adult life. You’re losing yourself. You try to fill that void with new information, but they keep taking more and more. You can’t keep up. Every month, there’s less of you. That void inside is growing, and I dread to think what might already be living in it.”
Every word hit her where it hurt most. Some memories of the future still lingered. If Songbird was destined to risk everything on an escape less than a year from now, then the terror of it must already be clawing at her heart from the depths of the Net. She felt the shadow of death—or something worse.
I paused briefly, then continued.
“And that’s not all, So Mi. I know what can save you, where it is, and who holds the keys. It’s true. I’ve been to the underground complex at Cynosure, intercepted Arasaka’s classified data, wandered the depths of the Net. I pieced this puzzle together bit by bit. Now, I know exactly what and how to save you.”
“This... is some kind of recruitment, isn’t it?” she muttered, frowning in confusion.
“I’ve got nowhere to recruit you to. No corp or government backing me. Check if you want. My name’s Vincent Price, from Night City. Former Arasaka employee. They’re hunting me, and I’m in danger. I’m not recruiting you—I’m offering help in exchange for yours. Sure, you could hand me over to Militech. They’ll come, drag me to D.C. But you’d lose out.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’d lose an ally outside of Militech. Someone who can help you if you decide to break free and get the cure.”
“You’re smooth, Vincent,” she said cautiously. “You know exactly what I want to hear.”
“And I want you to believe me.”
“That’s hard to believe,” she replied, standing and pacing the room.
She was thinking, doubting, searching my words for traps.
“You’re worried this could be a corp’s setup? Fair enough. Verify everything. I’m ready to provide any data about me and my past. It’s hard to believe, but I’m alone. Just me, except for a couple of friends who know nothing about you. I’m telling the truth—an outsider caught in a big game. Hard to imagine, sure, but you went solo without corp or government help when you broke Biotechnica. And you pulled it off.”
“Yes. I did. And I got caught.”
“Exactly. And now I’ve been caught by you. What’ll you do? Follow in Reed’s footsteps and keep serving the Leviathan, or...”
“Don’t you dare—” she started, but her voice already wavered.
“Don’t dare say it? That Leviathan’s insatiable, So Mi. Meyers won’t stop, no matter how many memories you lose. She’ll keep sending you past the Blackwall, into the clutches of the AI. They’ll grab at you, trying to break through. They’ll crawl into your mind, into the deepest...”
“Enough!” So Mi snapped, pressing a hand to her head like she was fighting a brutal headache. “Let’s say, just for a second, that I believe you and agree to help. Just for a second. What do you want from me?”
“My old boss is hunting me. I need to reach her first to gain my freedom. But she’s protected by a dynamic ICE barrier—fractal structure, seventh-grade complexity. I can’t break through it. But...” I let a sly grin spread across my virtual lips, “even ice like that can be bypassed if you open a connection through the Blackwall.”
__________________________________
TN:
In the original this part of the dialogue was formatted like a poem. Lyrics to a Russian song. The problem is V wouldn’t speak to Jackie in Russian. So I simply translated it as a regular part of the conversation.
Here are the original lyrics:
Тогда проясню один момент…
Есть в мире, можешь поверить
Те, кто клал на все их двери,
Кто протиснется сквозь щели,
Даже если их и нет.
Translation:
But let me make one thing clear
There are folks out there, believe it or not,
Who don’t give a damn about closed doors.
They’ll slip through the cracks,
Even if those cracks don’t exist.
