Chapter Text
The world was a blur. The networks of cyberspace amalgamated into a single path, blinding, searing itself onto V’s eyes, its webs unbinding and untangling before her. The surrounding blackness encroached on the neon line she followed; slowly, she reached the end of the stream, and blinked.
She awakened to reality -
- to the soft beeps of hardware, and dull, purple light. The room was welcoming to her eyes. Familiar. She sat up, elbows weak against the operating chair. As the world became clearer, she heard muffled snoring. To her left, Viktor lounged uncomfortably, face obscured by a mask.
V hauled her legs to the side of the chair, leaning out - and was pulled back by something. She winced. Appendages poked from underneath her shirt; V pulled it up. Wires sank into her spine, pulled taut by her movement. Grabbing one, she pulled - first lightly, then with more of a tug. She gasped in pain, as it left a speck drooling blood.
“V?”
She turned her head to the entrance. Misty sat, eyes groggy and knees pulled to her chest. She stood quickly, reaching for a cloth.
“What the fuck are these?” V gasped out. Hunched over, she stretched her neck to observe in disgust the many wires hanging from her body.
“They were meant to stabilize your consciousness to this body,” Misty said, speaking lightly as she went to cover the wound V created. “I’ll have to ask Vik if we can remove them, now that you’re up.”
“To what body?” V squinted at her legs, torso, hands, arms - all which looked fairly normal. She winced, “to whose ?”
“It isn’t hard to find a body in an alley, you know,” Misty smiled weakly, “or anywhere in Night City.” She handed V the cloth. “We just had to patch up… what killed her.”
Misty nudged Viktor out of his sleep. His eyes opened wide, surveying V’s movement. Pulling his mask down, he swiveled his chair by her side.
“Feel off at all, kid?”
V blinked. “No - ‘feel like a million eddies.” She managed a smirk.
“Uhuh…” Vik scratched his stubble, leaning forward. He tilted his head to see the chords, and the one she ripped out.
“Maybe wait a sec’ next time you start thinking of botching a surgery…eh?” He pulled another out without warning, and then a few more. “Hand me that cloth, will you?”
He was silent, but V could tell he wanted to scold her. His brow twitched, and the corners of his mouth were held forcefully to form a thin, straight line. Instead, Misty interjected, as she stood awkwardly in the corner.
“Was that really you, V?”
V’s eyes glazed over, and she looked to the side. “Yeah.”
Vik sighed. Loudly. “Misty won’t say it - so I will,” he looked V in the eyes, “Why would you raid Arasaka tower alone?”
Once Vik had pulled all the chords, he leaned back into his chair, tossing V the cloth. “Well?”
“Johnny and I-”
“Don’t bring that into this. This was all you,” he took off his glasses and folded his arms, “How did you even manage to escape?”
“I-” she bit her lip. V didn’t escape - not the real V.
“V didn’t. V failed, Vik.” She covered her face. “This was the best I could do.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“V’s consciousness gave out after I entered Mikoshi. Alt, an AI we picked up from the VDB, copied my brain’s data into an engram. Johnny took over her body,” she held her nape, “Who knows where he is now.”
“So, that file you sent… that was your construct?”
“Yeah.”
Misty grabbed V’s hand. “Then you didn’t fail, V.” It was cold, yet comforting. “You figured it out in your own way.” A memory seemed to jolt into V - seeing Jackie again. And another thought… could she retrieve Jackie’s construct, and bring him back? Even if he was just an echo of his former self?
“What’re you gonna do now, then?” Vik put his glasses back on.
“I didn’t really think about that…” she huffed, stepping out of the chair. Her legs wobbled a bit, and Misty helped her keep balance.
“Going back to being a merc?” V questioned aloud. “Maybe IT? I’ll probably need to fake an ID…” Her mind swarmed with ideas for the future, so much so she almost forgot about the past. And who was in it.
Her face went pale. “Shit…” she released Misty’s hand. “Goro…how am I…? What do I do?” she mumbled to herself. He would’ve heard of the raid by now.
“How long has it been…since, y’know…”
“It took Misty and I about a week to calibrate your body with the file you sent. Now that I think about it, we thought you were just trying to make this body a proxy…” Vik’s words were muffled by her thoughts.
Goro had to be livid. What chance did he have to reclaim his career, now that he was a perceived associate of someone like her - a terrorist?
Instinctively, she tried to check her messages. Again, she would have to face the fact that she was starting from zero.
“...just come to us if-”
“Has Goro contacted you at all?” V interrupted, prompting a sigh from him.
“You weren’t listening at all, were you?”
“ Vik . Please.”
“Well, yes-”
“What’d he say?”
“He came in a few days ago. ‘Asked where you were,” he gestured to Misty, “she made the call not to mention what we were doing.”
“He was cold,” Misty added, “I guess, more than usual. We told him you’d been silent since your last visit about a month ago.”
“I fucked him over. Bad .”
“So what’re you going to do about it?”
V was silent.
***
The death certificate was another dead end.
Issued anonymously, with certified information: photo evidence; time of death; cause of death. The photo of her was blurred, but the blood leaking from her nose, eyes, and ears was clear; it had happened not long after her raid on Arasaka tower, only later that night; brain trauma, or as he assumed, the engram, had finally killed her. It brought him little satisfaction. Yet, her eyes looked alive in the photo; he’d seen the face of a corpse, and plainly, this was not the face of one.
He was scraping at scraps.
Invaluable scraps, no less. He investigated a receipt stapled to the certificate. It was for a columbarium slot. Even more scraps. Either her body was in some back alley by Arasaka tower, or she was in hiding. Arasaka seemed to think the latter. Their bounty on the woman was more than enough for Goro to start a new life in Japan.
As what? He didn’t know. His door to Arasaka was closed. He was a foreigner trying to poke at the impervious membrane of Night City’s machinery. He would never understand how it ticked.
Footsteps clacked against the floor. Goro closed the shelf, ducking out of the row as the footsteps entered it. Crouching over to an exit, Goro mixed into the crowd.
The stench of petrichor hit him. It overwhelmed everything - car exhaust, overflowing trash cans in the alleys, the unclean populace. Any rain was blocked by an overpass, only a sheet of fog perceivable beyond. He kept his head low, maneuvering around the various pillars and stagnating lines of people. There was little flow. Just chaos.
Funds for transportation had been depleted, and his van stolen by a thief. Perhaps he glanced at the street in envy, at the vehicles which avoided the chaos altogether. They viewed it from the outside, much as he used to. There, the rain was strong, as tires slogged the streets turned streams. There, a semblance of order was to be found.
Instead, he tread carefully, viewing only through the screen of gray. It would be many more corners to the columbarium, and many more streets. They mixed together, all walled by dead concrete. Gradually, less people populated the street, and Goro could slow his pace. There was no calm - just a racking tension. By the time he reached the screen of gray, it had evaporated.
Ahead, the road wound into suburbs. The many hills only slowed a painful process.
A walk down the final road. The last road he could follow before losing his way altogether.
The columbarium’s archaic structure imposed itself as a ruin among Night City; almost brutalist, as if manufacturing a sense of the future. There were even fewer people here. He wondered how many people had come to see V.
A stark realization halted his walk.
He knew only her first name. And if she truly was as secretive with him as everyone else around her, then no one knew her last. He felt a headache coming on. Even the death certificate had lacked a last name; the culture of death surrounding the city, gang life and all, contextualized it. But to butcher a document so vital?
It had to have been faked.
He rubbed his eyes. It was foolish to waste time here in the first place; what did he expect, to wander through every plate that started with “Valerie” and be satisfied? Would he need to pry each slot open, investigate the contents, and desecrate the small space these people were afforded?
He leaned against the wall. It seemed to be only a matter of time before he lost his principles completely, and much sooner, any reason. No last name, no confirmation, just a sea of ambiguity. No rules, no order. And V would thrive in this entropy, able to slip through his fingers.
Groggy, he stood defeated. Looking around a final time, endless names passed his vision, yet few people stood. And now there would be one less.
Ahead, a woman entered; likely the day’s last, he thought. Blinking to her side, a familiar jacket itched at his nape, urging him to turn. An oni, red and taunting, glared below a logo:
SAMURAI.