Chapter Text
The sun was like a living thing on my body, it reminded me of something...
Smooth, metal, closing around my arm. I cracked open my eyes.
"Yo." The massive figure said. He was clutching my arm, not even as thick as one of his fingers, gently. His hair was blond, his face cut with tanned cybernetics. The sun glinted off of his red shades.
"Maine?" I asked. My voice was dry and cracked, like the burning asphalt I was lying on.
"That Animal must have punched you pretty hard there," he said, leaning back now, sighing with relief. "You okay kid?"
I felt my mouth open and words like a flood spill out, my brain was so full of cold water...
"What's that?" he asked, surprised. "Everyone died? I went Cyberpsycho?"
More words, uncontrollable, my mind struggling to keep up with what my senses were telling me. My nerves, still burning and frayed from the raw output of the Cyberskeleton...
"Adam Smasher!?" He exclaimed, shaking his massive block of a head. "What's a Cyberskeleton? Musta hit ya harder than I thought..."
I ran out of air and just lay there panting. Was I really dead? I just remembered falling, Lucy, the moon and the neon stars of Corpo Plaza.
"Crazy dream..." He said, rubbing his chin. He was smiling, really smiling, when was the last time that I had seen that?
A shadow suddenly cut across my vision and another familiar face knelt by my head. The second I felt her cold hands on my face I knew who it was, even without seeing the shining pastels of her hair.
"David!" Lucy cried out. "You're finally awake!"
I didn't resist when she lifted my head off the hot asphalt and put it on her cool lap. She began stroking my hair in a casual way, in a way that I thought we would never be able to do again...
"He's been rambling on about this crazy cyberskelton thing, real gonked out on this one..." Maine added, standing up, looking off into the distance. I closed my eyes and cried.
Lucy wiped my tears away.
---
Maine supported me as we made our way back to the rest of the group, stepping over the piles of still bleeding corpses that we had just slaughtered together. We were in Pacifica, I remembered, cleaning out this mall for a certian datashard that the Animal's had stolen. We made our way inside of the shaded building, where the rest of the crew was still waiting around the car.
Rebecca flexing her steely new hands, gave me a quick look.
"You look like shit." She commented before opening the door to the back of the Mainemobile. "I told you guys to move him into the shade but nooo... he was going to have spinal injuries or brain damage, now hes cooked like a lobster."
"Fuck you." I said casually as Maine threw me into the soft seat across from Rebecca and Dorio, who was staring off into space with her pupils flashing in the way that indicated she was busy.
Kiwi was probably sitting in the shotgun seat, where she keeps her dive chair. Lucy took a seat next to me and did my seatbelt. I tired to sit up, but all of the muscles in my body were still fried from... what was it? A Cyberskeleton or something? I had a hard time remembering, just like how dreams sometimes just vaporize after waking up.
Another person I didn't recognize climbed into the car after us. He had this short street kid cut very similar to mine, and was holding a sheathed Arasaka katana. He gave a wave, but there was no recognition. Lucy pulled me up so that he could sit by me.
"Who are you?" I managed to ask.
"New kid." Dorio said, phasing out of whatever she was doing. Probably contacting the fixer. "Workin' with us this gig."
She saw that I didn't recognize him at all.
"Damn David, you get some goo knocked out or something?" she said exasperated. "Name's V, flown back in from Atlanta."
"Hi." V said.
"I heard they're are a buncha stray dogs in Atlana..." I mumbled.
"You're wrong." V said.
Maine started the car and pulled out of the mall, headed back to the shack.
"How 'bout we party at Turbo's bar tonight?" He shouted through the glass.
We all looked at one another.
"Sure." Lucy said.
---
"You any good with that funny knife of yours?" I asked V. I had regained some control of my body by now, and we were watching Rebecca do funny gun tricks together. I hoped that I didn't really offend him at all by forgetting who he was...
"Yeah, I think so." He said, taking an inch or so of it out of the scabbard. It looked rather plain for a sword like this actually, with barely any cybernetics at all except for a small light on the wooden scabbard. However, judging by the way he never let it leave his grip it was valuable to him.
"It looks real good." I noted.
"It's Saburo Arasaka's, if you can believe it..." he said quietly.
I didn't know what to say to that except that that sounded like a whole load of shit. The TV that was on in the corner suddenly caught my eye, especially the words that were flashing in big red letters on the bottom of the screen.
I turned to Lucy, who had just returned with two beers.
"Lucy, what has been going on recently?" I asked. I could not keep the panic out of my voice. "Why does the TV say that Saburo died?"
She gave me a funny look and tapped the Sandevistan on the back of my head, like she always does when I do something silly.
"Oh David..." She said.
"How much do you remember?"
---
"Krenzikov?" I asked. V flipped his collar down, exposing the black and orange implant on his spine. It looked remarkably similar to my own Sandevistan, just a lot smaller.
"Yeah, it helps me use my sword. Nervous Systems mod. Think it predates the Sandevistan by thirty years or so, real Cold War tech."
"So the question is," Maine asked, "Who's faster?"
We were all standing in front of the bar. Rebecca had busted one of her fingers, so we had become the next most entertaining thing. Everyone was clustered around us.
V shrugged.
"I don't know, we can test it out."
"How bout' this," Maine suggested, taking his bottle of beer and just throwing it straight into the air. "First one to catch it!"
Maine could throw really fucking high when he wanted to, and all of the people around us began cheering. I saw V throw his sword and jacket aside, exposing his own cyberware spreading down his black like a glossy black river. We both eyed the bottle on it's downward arc intensely.
Suddenly, I saw a line of sunset red carve it's way down his back, and him flying into the air, jumping for it early.
Activating the Sandevistan is really hard to describe, but it just fit in my brain like anything else. It's like flexing a muscle that doesn't exist, but if it did, it would exist somewhere along the back of my neck.
The world quickly began to drag itself out into lines and everything grew greyed out as I slipped into the zone. Suddenly, electric fire, blue and blindingly hot, flashed down my back like a river of ice. The world froze around me as I made my own leap into the air.
V's Krenzikov left red streaks in my eyes as I watched him accelerate at the bottle, which was barely falling anymore. His eyes suddenly locked onto mine. Sounds were drained into the roaring sea now raging behind my head as we both ran for the bottle.
He was moving very fast, but not as fast as I was. I could run as fast as I could in regular time, but V was still struggling through it like he was swimming through honey. I could tell that he was perceiving time at the same rate that I was, or maybe faster, but unlike mine, his own implant didn't make his physical body faster. I was fast and light, quick enough to pull off stunts that I would never be able to do otherwise.
I barely stole the bottle away from the tips of his fingers and we both crashed onto the ground. I could see the look in his eyes grow more and more distant as he slipped back into realtime.
I had enough time to land effortlessly (Sandevistan time always left my muscles with a weird, airy feeling) and put the bottle back into Maine's hand. He probably hadn't perceived any time passing at all, or at least didn't have time to react...
I felt the roaring sea grow more and more loud, until suddenly it spilled over and my invisible muscle relaxed-
I slammed back into realtime, and the cheers of my friends.
I could not get the feeling of how V was looking at me out of my mind... In slower time, it almost felt like he wasn't just one person. There was something seriously different about him, and I didn't know how I felt about it.
---
Lucy and I were just chillin with no clothes on in her apartment.
I remembered that we did this often. We had just completed a job and gotten paid, so we had both decided to just flop around and take a rest and relaxation weekend. We could see Turbo's bar across the street, but at this ungodly time of night, there was nobody there.
She was smoking while watching the TV while I was just lying next to the window and reading the skybanner ads that stretched across the sky. Lucy's apartment smelled like cigarettes and computer oil, kinda like her.
"So, Arasaka has actually died?" I asked.
"Yeah." Lucy said. "I'm surprised you forgot. Some merc popped him, stole a chip or something, and escaped. The news are on fire right now, and we're just taking advantage of the chaos to pull off some quick ones."
"Alright." I said. "The new kid, V, told me his sword was Saburos'. Do you think..."
"Nah." Lucy interjected. "He's good, but not THAT good... I did his background research, aside from some small jobs, he's done nothing really important."
I got up from the windowstill and sat on the couch next to her.
"Lucy," I asked. She look at me, her eyes shining like her hair. I felt suddenly immensely shy. "I don't remember if we- if we had... a-a-"
"We had a lot of sex?" She completed softly. She threw the cigarette aside and leaned forwards, pushing me back into the soft couch.
She gently bent over me and our mouths connected. She tasted just like I remembered in my dream, like want and electricity.
Her insides felt exactly like I remembered too.
---
"What do you think Maine did before joining the Army?" I asked. Lucy and I were just watching them launch rockets from the roof of her apartment to pass the time. We had ordered a pepperoni pizza and were eating as we watched the rockets fly one after another into the sky. Somebody downstairs was playing hardcore classical music at high volumes.
"I dunno." Lucy said. She reached for another smoke but found none and gave up. "I heard from Dorio once that he wanted to be an Olympic runner."
The rocket left a grey pillar under it as it flew upwards like some sort of long, white arrow.
"Trained all the time on an old airfield outside of the city." She said, taking a slice of gooey pizza instead and taking a big bite out of it. Lucy was incredibly cute sometimes. "Running back and forth and back and forth for hours and hours..."
"He must have failed though. Then he joined the army." I said, rolling the narrative around in my brain. It felt really good. "Weren't you... also part of the army or something?"
Lucy suddenly stopped chewing.
"Where did you get that bullshit from?" She asked, looking me in the eyes, a bit confused.
I rubbed my head. "No, it was something about a Corporation you told me once out in the badlands, remember?"
There was stony silence as Lucy just stared at me, an uncalculatable look in her now wide-open eyes.
"When did this happen? I don't remember telling you anything!" She said, shocked. I realized that it must have happened in my dream. These sorts of things just kept happening, popping forwards into my consciousness, my old life, the one I must have lead...
"Nevermind." I said, looking away. Lucy suddenly had this really dark look in her eyes that I didn't like. "It's from the dream, I must be going a bit off the rails..."
---
Lucy, V and I were jogging around the City Central Pier. It was a foggy, wet day and you could easily look up and not see the tops of the buildings, they were lost in the clouds. Lucy and I have a thing were we go run together on Mondays, and today V had asked to tag along.
"What does the V stand for, anyways?" Lucy asked. She usually just talks to me when we go running, so it was really cool that we had someone else to talk to.
"Vincent." V said simply. Even when we were just running around, he still kept that sword strapped to his back. He didn't elaborate further so we just kept running until we got to an abandoned pier.
There seemed to be some sort of gang violence going on below the pier, and I could hear a woman screaming. The familiar notification that a crime was occurring and that the NCPD would pay money to see it stopped appeared in the corner of my vision. This happened so often usually that I just ignored it.
V, however, suddenly stopped. He turned to look at us.
"Free money?" He asked. I took a look over the edge and saw a bunch of scavs preparing to attack what looked like a group of nuns who were by the ocean praying. I have no idea why they would even do that with scavs around, and honestly it seemed like a them problem. I looked at Lucy and Lucy looked at V.
I barely had any time to react as the guy sort of just vaulted over the fence and into the group below.
"God," I said. "Gonk's messed in the brain..."
"Based!" Lucy said. I saw her take one look over the railing and also jump down. I sighed and also joined them. Lucy can be very irrational at times.
I landed on the ground and imminently it was apparent that the situation had developed, and not in our favor. The Scavs were now pointing their guns at us, and the nuns were running away.
"Shut up Johnny." V said very loudly, a hand on his blade. "I know they're kinda hot."
He then suddenly realized that he was talking out loud and self-consiously cleared his throat. "Very sorry."
"EMT Jacket has a Sandy!" A Scav in the back of the group of five shouted. "Hot one!"
"You wanna see me use it?" I threatened, taking a step forwards.
"You boys should go back to your holes," Lucy said, "And I'll let you live."
"Fuck no!" A Scav said. "Screw the nuns, lets burn this kid's Sandy!"
I saw that they were about to shoot, and flexed the invisible muscle. The world suddenly began to go grey, and then suddenly the flash of blue fire through my nervous system and the whirr of the overclocker, and I was rushing forwards.
I could see their fingers on their triggers tighten, and I ran out of the way, grabbing Lucy and running as fast as I could behind the Scavs. I saw V activate his own Krenzikov a second later, the long streak of red bursting from him as he drew the sword from his scabbard and began to accelerate. Suddenly, a flash, a bullet pass by, barely in sight, hitting the ground where I was standing a second earlier.
V accelerated into my speed, a vicious look in his eyes as he slashed the first two Scavs into pieces. His sword passed through them like butter, I have never seen something so stupidly sharp before.
He began to decelerate as I put down Lucy and used my remaining momentum to kick in the knees of the other three people. They fell to the ground as I snapped out of my speed. I wondered how it must have looked to Lucy, suddenly being teleported behind the scavs, and two of them suddenly getting cut in half and the other three falling crippled...
"wow." she said. V was panting, wiping the blood off of his blade. I heard police cars approaching and methodically lined up all of the unconscious people and kicking the remains of the dead ones into a pile.
We each got paid around 500 eddies for the job. I had a bit of a nosebleed afterwards.
---
"Do you just randomly go and kill people?" I asked V. "Sounds like the onset of Cyberpsychosis."
"Only when I get paid." V said ominously. "There's a voice in my head that tells me to kill people."
That sounded very weird, but I had heard weirder stuff before so the three of us just kept jogging. We were almost approaching the bridge from the City Center into Watson, we had been jogging steadily northwards.
I took a deep breath and felt my syn-lungs absorb the extra oxygen for later. It tasted like salt, plastic, shit and flowers. Very Downtown City center.
If I looked to the right I could see the landing island where they launched the rockets from. It was quiet this morning because the fog messed with the launches or something.
There was nothing but the sound of our feet hitting the concrete and the washing of the waves on the pier for a little bit.
"Do you drive at all?" Lucy asked. "You didn't bring your car to our job party at Turbos'."
"I don't need to." V said. I suddenly felt the attitude around him change, like he was about to tell us about something really cool. "I discovered something really cool you can do with this Krensikov that I have, that helps me run really fast."
Lucy and I both asked him to show us, and he happily took off his jacket.
"Check this shit," he said, bending down into a runner pose. Suddenly, orange flame seemed to burst from his back, and he sent flying into the air in an impossibly high jump, impossibly fast. In less than two seconds, he had launched himself, barely contacting the ground, completely across the long section of side walk, only stopping once he lost his step on one of the landings and faceplanting into the concrete.
It was like watching a bullet suddenly blast it's way out of a gun, with a lot of fire and smoke everywhere.
I actually doubted that my Sandy could keep up with whatever impossibly crazy shit V was pulling off.
When Lucy and I had finally caught up with him, he had pulled himself up and was sitting with a dazed look on his face.
"Nova party trick." Lucy said.
"I call it K-hopping." He panted. "Old glitch built into the physics engine of the software or something, you can disable the speed limiter by activating it and deactivating it really fast..."
Lucy and I helped him up and we continued our jog, now up north alongside the really long bridge that connects Little China and Downtown.
---
I knocked on the door to Rebecca's house. It slid open, and predictably, she was standing almost naked pointing one of her shotguns at me.
"Hey choom!" she said, "Good to see ya!"
Having Rebecca point a gun at you is not a pleasant experience, and I carefully pushed it away.
"Um, City Center's on lockdown right now, some gonk decided to detonate his homemade nerve B-machine in the corpo plaza," I began, "So can we crash at your place?"
Rebecca scratched her head with the shotgun. I remembered how she used to only use handguns, but now with her big hands, she could do more things like this.
"Who's with you?" She asked, even though she could pretty much plainly see because they were standing behind me.
"V and Lucy." I said, stepping inside.
Lucy was having one of her spontaneous mental breakdowns outside, and V gently prodded her up and inside.
"Hi dad." Rebecca said, looking V up and down.
"I told you not to call me that." he said. He was almost old enough to be our dad, if I really thought about it...
Rebecca's place had been pretty trashed since Pilar died, with a lot more holes in the walls and less posters. She still kept all of the thick wool rugs and stuff though, and it still smelled like gunpowder and beer.
Body Heat FM was playing in the background.
I took a seat on the couch next to Lucy, while V went looking for the bathroom. Rebecca soon returned with some drinks.
"What brings you this far up?" She asked. I opened Lucy's drink for her and put it in front of her on the glass table. "I thought you were having a rest and relaxation weekend with Lucy?"
"We got carried off on our Monday jog," I explained. Lucy had reached the part in her mental breakdown where she was now crying really quietly. I pulled her into my arms, where she cried a little bit less. It was pretty much a reflex at this point.
Becca ignored Lucy and drank half of her bottle in one go.
"Well, you're welcome to stay the night, just don't fuck too loudly."
She got up and left for her own room.
V returned from the bathroom with a distressed look on his face. Becca's bathroom has a lot of cursed shit in it.
"Wh-" he began, but I silenced him.
The three of us just sat on the couch together. Lucy eventually fell asleep, and I just watched T.V. with V until eventually the electric cloud that we call 'sleep' finally took us.
---
"You're so short." I commented.
"ok, put some inches in me then." she replied.
---
V left in the morning for one of his own jobs.
I watched him blaze off like a metor from Rebecca's balcony, going from 0-60 faster than some fighter jets.
Chrome is one helluva drug.
"What do you dream about?" I asked Lucy at the breakfast table. Because Rebecca was out doing whatever she did by herself, Lucy and I were by ourselves again.
"Netrunning shit mostly," she said, stirring her carton of instant noodles with a plastic fork. "I do patterns in my sleep, literally, the people I used to work for installed a program into my brain for it. I don't really hate it so I kept it."
I ate my own hotpocket solemnly. That sounded really boring.
"You ever dream about the moon?" I asked.
"Only when I let myself." She said wistfully.
The rain was still pitifully going at the city in the way that rain does, trying to wash this cursed hell of a city off of the earth (it was not succeeding).
"How do you even do the netrunning?" I asked. "I remember learning about it in school, but maybe the real thing is different."
She had to think for a second.
"I dunno." she concluded. "You probably will never be able to netrun, a deck would probably interfere with your Sandevistan. It's really weird and hard to describe."
That made sense. She had asked me to describe how it felt to use my Sandevistan, and I wasn't really able to. Everything just got a lot sharper and colder and stupid slow and unbearably hot at the same time.
We held hands under the table while eating. It's the small joys in life that make it worth living...
Suddenly, I was interrupted from my preem handholding by a call from Maine.
"What's up choom?" I asked.
"You with Lucy?" He asked. I nodded an affirmative.
"You two get down to the plannin' house, fixer's come in with summin' real big and heavy..."
"How big?" Lucy asked.
"Prototype Corpo tech big." Maine said solidly.
"How heavy?" I asked. I watched the smile on his face suddenly grow like eighteen times bigger.
"Five hundred large ones each." He said. "You don't wanna miss this one."
Lucy suddenly locked eyes with me.
A ticket to the moon cost almost that exact amount.
I had that feeling again that this was going to be a big moment.
---
We sat together in Dorio's garage, where we keep the Mainemobile and all of our gear.
Shards, still in their black cases, waited for us. This was our ticket to the moon...
The whole gang was here, Dorio, Maine, Kiwi, Becca, Lucy and I. I also had a feeling from the unopened cases that we could bring in more people if we had to.
I slotted it in without any hesitation and suddenly the images began to fill my brain as Maine explained the gig to us.
"Arasaka's well known for building prototype chips, this one is no exception. Bioware, just like the Relic thing that just got klepped, but instead of ghosts, this one... well, we just don't know a lot bout' it."
I saw an image of a quite ordinary looking shard. It was plain and red, with a black Arasaka logo on one side an a really exotic looking interface on the other that reminded me of the 'rising sun' Japanese flag.
"Fixer says that it's real hot and real fast, they call it the Sun. Supposed to do somthin' about how quickly your brain functions or some wacky corpo shit."
"What's the plan, Maine?" Rebecca asked.
"Well, first off, we gotta know where the hell they even keep it." Maine said. "We gotta get on the 'saka network somehow, so that means breaking into one of their buildings."
I wondered if we were even cool enough to break into Arasaka Tower. The last time I remembered our gang tried to break into a corpo HQ, the netrunner died. That was the one before Kiwi and Lucy, I remember. What was her name? Sasha?
"Well, I don't know about you guys, but I would think our chances of getting into Arasaka Tower after the whole Yorinobu shitshow is about as slim as it gets. So instead, we're gonna break into the school."
I sighed. Ah yes, the school. That's why they needed me.
"How are we gonna do that?" I asked.
"Well first off, you still have Academy records, don't you?" Maine asked. "Your account still exists."
"Yeah, I picked the signal up off him when we first met." Lucy said.
"The school is supposed to be connected to the big hotel, Konpeki Plaza, right?" Maine asked.
I nodded. Kids who were staying overnight at the school had the option to use the hotel. I never was even close enough to being rich enough, so the thought had never really stuck in my brain.
"David, you take some good netrunners and some extra meat if you need it, stay a night in the hotel, then sometime after all the kids leave, rappel down the side into the Academy. Then you just gotta connect to their network, let the netrunners do some funny stuff, and we get the detes and leave. Real easy, no real risk, and we've already got reservations for two rooms on the north face."
Maine is really good at planning this sort of stuff.
"So David, this part of the plan relies on you, so I say you get to pick your little task force, i'll handle extraction." He concluded. The visualization of our room numbers zipped out as the shard finished downloading it's data.
"Whaddya say?" Maine said. "Impressed?"
"It's just the first step." Kiwi said mechanically, her voice messed up by her filter. "The hard shit comes later."
"Well, when it comes to breaking Arasaka ICE, there's nobody quite like Lucy..." I noted.
"I knew it." I heard Rebecca grumble.
"And if we have to pick some more meat up, can I take the guy from our last mission with the katana?" I asked.
"If you're really sure." Maine said.
"And the backup netrunner, I really have no idea." I said. "Kiwi, you wanna do this?"
"I'll be over comms like we are every mission." She said coldly. "I hate walking. And breathing. And I would like my whole cut, thank you, not part of yours."
I sat there.
"Is there anyone else we know who's available?"
"I don't think so." Lucy said.
The door to the garage suddenly opened. A girl, around V's age, with a black bob and purple eyes, surprisingly feline...
"I volunteer!" She said cheerfully. "Glad to be back with you guys."
I almost recognized her just from the stories that the other told about her. The crazy cat lady.
"Sasha? Are you sure?" Dorio asked. "I thought you quit for good after the last job."
She took a seat between we and Lucy, a funny look in her eyes.
"Hi Maine, did you really forget about me?"