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Colin Glass is a thorn in Bill's side. Has been the whole time that they've been unfortunately conjoined in this literal partnership, this insufferable three-legged race to an inevitable conclusion.
He's just a figment of Bill's imagination, of course. Or something. The real Colin Glass has been dead for fifty-odd years, long before Bill was ever born. What lives on a chip inside Bill's brain is nothing more than a bunch of binary numbers that—Bill hates to admit—is slowly growing on him. Like a weed. Or a parasitic mind worm that's slowly overwriting Bill's mind with the saved remnants of Colin Glass's personality, memories, personhood.
He doesn't like thinking about it much.
Presently, Colin's engram is busy circling around the Auto-Fixer terminal, smirking—invisible to anyone else but Bill. Of course. Bill stares at his options—he has a lot of eddies, since he's been picking up gigs left and right ever since Colin totaled his fucking car. And he's tired of walking around everywhere. Bill is a grown-ass adult with an apartment in The Glen and he doesn't have a car because Colin Glass totaled it.
"Technically," Colin says, lips quirking up into a grin behind his douchey sunglasses, "that was you."
"You were me when I did that," Bill tells him.
"Yeah, but I was saving your life."
He's right. It was a recon gig gone wrong, jumping sideways out of an Arasaka building and nearly passing out when he hit the concrete. Bill'd had some rough landings before, but not one where he wakes up in Zeeb's chair with no memory of how he got there.
He's been having more and more of those blackouts lately. A sure sign that the Relic is definitely working. And Colin means well, he does, but every time he steps into Bill's body and puppeteers his limbs like he belongs there a little bit more of Bill dies each time. And Bill knows Colin knows. Colin tries not to appear on most days (if he can help it) because the more that Bill sees him, the worse it is for the both of them.
(Bill remembers waking up on his apartment floor, bloody and gross and broken and being met with a six-foot-tall stranger with a face that had plagued Militech for years.
Who the fuck are you, the stranger'd said, eyes wild with the desperation of a man who'd woken up in the wrong century. Where am I?
And the rest is history.)
"Saving my life and totaling my car," Bill pointedly says, out loud.
He no longer gives a shit if he gets odd looks. No one else knows about the Relic—it's not exactly like Militech secret technology is common knowledge to the masses, who wouldn't even be able to cough up the eddies required to even view the thing. One-of-a-kind. A ticking time-bomb inside a chip. Bill's on borrowed time—he no longer has the luxury to give a shit if people think he's crazy; there's plenty of people walking around Night City all chromed out and talking to thin air.
Yeah, and plenty of them are cyberpsychos, a little voice that sounds suspiciously like Colin says inside his head.
Fuck, maybe it is Colin.
Bill's never going to be not unsettled by the way that their thoughts can just… link up, without his consent or say-so, because Colin is—quite literally—in his mind. 24/7. An unwilling, silent (or not-so-silent, the way he mouths off) voyeur.
Colin whips off his sunglasses, glares at him playfully. The silvery arm catches the afternoon sunlight, momentarily blinding Bill—even though it's fake, he feels it, as real as anything. "Would you rather be dead?"
Bill's got to admit he has a point. "No. But I sure as hell am not buying a bike, Colin."
"Why not?"
"Have you seen what they look like?"
"Oh, what, scared of a little two-wheeler?"
"They're death traps."
"Eh," Colin makes a so-so gesture. His chrome-jaw moves just like the real thing. It'd—once upon a time—been unnerving to look at, and then the shine wore off (literally) as Bill got used to looking at Colin a lot more than he would admit. "Potato, poh-ta-to."
"Okay, gramps," Bill says. "You want to get on the Nazaré? Fine. But you are not doing it in my body."
"Technically," Colin says. "It's also my body now, you know."
Colin knows how he feels about that. Colin has seen Bill argue and beg and curse (uncharacteristic enough) and pretend like he's not even there when Colin first woke up. Bill knows Colin knows how he feels, because he can feel what Colin feels, and neither of them have any idea how to shut the ever-present connection off.
It's like this scene in this horror movie that came out when I was young, Colin'd said to him once, when they were still figuring things out. It was about this couple who were so codependent that they literally started melding into one person. Body and all.
Well, was all Bill'd said in response, because what the hell do you say? It's not… exactly like that.
Okay, so what is it like?
Seven months in and he still doesn't have an answer.
"We're shopping for a car," Bill says, to change the topic. "No bikes. Final."
"You're boring," Colin pouts at him. Pouts. "Fine. What are you looking for? Not some obnoxiously rich Rayfield, I hope?"
"Do I look like I can afford a Rayfield?"
"You never know," Colin says. "You also look like you'd buy a minivan." His face drops. "Oh god, please don't tell me you're going to buy a minivan."
Bill snorts. As tempting as the idea is, Bill wants something practical, close to the beat-up Quadra he'd always had and had to retire when Colin smashed it into the side of an alleyway in his rush to get Bill's bleeding, broken body to Zeeb's. Which, Bill really can't fault him for—but he really misses his girl. "No minivan," he says, exiting to the Auto-Fixer home page. "What about a Thorton?"
"Are you kidding," Colin starts, and then he looks at Bill properly and realizes that Bill is not kidding. "You're going to drive around in a Thorton?"
"They're economic and practical," Bill defends. "And—" He pulls up the page for a Thorton Galena— "They're cheap!"
Colin stares at him, and then at the Thorton Galena in question. Which costs $13k eddies and looks rather, um, beat-up. "We're not driving around in that," Colin says. The offended look is back. "Buy another Quadra. At least."
"None of the Quadras on here look nice," Bill grumbles, but swipes through anyway. "And they're all expensive," he adds, looking through the list. "$99k for a Javelina? Colin, you know we're not actually made of money, right?"
"Shouldn't've bought that bougie place in the Glen," Colin snarks back. "Fine. What about a Porsche?"
Bill raises his eyebrows. "A what?"
"A… Porsche?"
"What?"
"This is the worst thing since the chromedeck," Colin says, as if disbelief. He's so painfully offended that Bill almost laughs. "Do you not have those anymore?"
"I think that's a 2026 thing," Bill offers, indelicately. Sometimes he forgets how old Colin is. Sometimes he gets flashes through Colin's memories—the figments of an existence almost sixty years in the past, visions of a different future. The tech was different. The people were different, Colin'd told him, rubbing his metal fingers together, as if he could feel it. "We have Quadras and Thortons and, uh," Bill checks the list. "Rayfields."
"Pieces of expensive trash," Colin says. "No accounting for taste, I suppose." He's frowning in deep thought.
"Fast expensive trash," Bill corrects. He catches the considering glance Colin's giving the Auto-Fixer. "What is it?"
"What's what?"
"You've got that shit-stirring look on your face."
"I do not."
"It's like when a cat's about to knock something over," Bill tells him. "C'mon, headmate, out with it."
Colin huffs. Crosses his arms petulantly. "First of all, don't call me that ever again," he says. "But I was thinking. About my car, that is."
"Your—"
"Yes, my car," Colin says. A fond look flashes across his face. "Ran over so many gonks with that baby."
"Let me guess," Bill says. "Was it a Porsche?"
"Porsche 911, to be exact. One-of-a-kind. Custom made. I wonder what happened to it."
Probably rusting at the bottom of a junkyard in the Badlands somewhere, Bill thinks, but doesn't say it out loud. He knows Colin's probably considered it. He wonders if all the pieces that made up Colin Glass—his car, his gun, his face—were all gone now, and the little left over was left to Bill. A fragment out of time and plonked into one unsuspecting mercenary.
Then again, Colin's not alive. Bill just has a hard time remembering that, sometimes.
"Well," he says, out loud. "I mean, I can ask around?" He's got contacts from his merc work. He has the money and resources—making a name for himself before Bill inevitably crashes and burns, the same way any rising star does in Night City. "It wouldn't be too hard, unless Militech got their hands on it—they, uh, seemed really intent on making you disappear from the books."
"They tried and failed," Colin points out. There's a thread of what might've been bitterness laced through the strange pride in his voice. "People still remember Colin Glass."
"For breaking into a Militech facility and going out in a blaze of glory," Bill says, neutrally. These days, Colin Glass lives on like a bad smell, a ghost that comes attached to the definition of infamy.
Colin shrugs. Puts his sunglasses back on. Like this, Bill can't see his eyes—although he can feel him, all the way at the forefront of his brain where the little chip is inserted. The Kiroshis that Zeeb had given him burn a little. "Yeah, well. Sometimes you have something worth going out 'in a blaze of glory' for."
The unsaid part hangs in the air between them. Like so many things that Bill doesn't ask about, Colin's words have that guarded tinge to them, heavy with the weight of unspoken history. Like the years he'd spent wandering around in Mikoshi that he doesn't ever really talk about.
Bill never asks. Colin would tell him when he's ready—and Bill sees so much of his memories, already, that any more felt like trespassing. Like free invitation.
"Maybe not the car, though," Bill says. "Did you know what it looked like? We can find something that's—" he pulls up the Auto-Fixer homepage, eyeing the different brand categories, "—reasonably similar." He winces at the pricetags, but decides he doesn't care. Maybe Nikki'd be kind enough to throw a few more gigs his way, but if that doesn't pan out he's still investing. He could even clean up a little in the inner city, sell Jubal some more scrap he finds off the bodies of the scavengers that—frankly—breed and grow like vermin. Which they were. They were no better than thieves and murderers, loyal to no one except the almighty eddie.
Colin squints at him, and then at the Auto-Fixer. A warm, almost soft feeling laces through Bill—and for a second he's taken aback, because he doesn't know where that came from. Before he can say anything, Colin visibly shrugs—flickering, suspended in the air for a moment—and then says: "Why not. But if you buy us an Archer, Bill, I will not be responsible for also totalling it."
They wind up settling on a Mizutani. It's a fancy, sleek piece of technology, all silver and chrome and red when Colin's done with it.
Bill had let him take over for the repainting job—inadvisable, he knows, but Bill doesn't have an artistic bone in his body and Colin had looked so longingly at the (formerly) pthalo green car that he'd handed over the reins without a second thought.
And credit where credit is due, Colin's done a good job. He'd done it old school—real paint, real decals, actual painter's tape (where had he gotten that?). Bill hadn't even recognized it as the same car.
"Wow," he says, stepping into the garage. "You really went all out."
Colin, a flickering mirage slumped over the hood of the car—because he's back to being incorporeal, he can't scratch shit anyway—shrugs. "Tried to do it justice, even if it's just a MZ2," he says.
"Just a MZ2," Bill says. "Man, you really grew up in the 20s with zero inflation, huh?"
"My inflation looked different to yours," Colin says, propping his sunglasses on top of his head. "You youngsters freak out about a MZ2 when we were busy trying to find real cars." He nods at the windshield. "Look at the dashboard."
There was a set of initials scratched into the leather, above the speedometer—so small that Bill'd thought he'd hallucinated it. "Does that say…"
"Yup," Colin confirms, popping the P.
Because it was. There's the tiny letters C.G + B.G scratched into his fucking dashboard, with a heart drawn around the whole thing. Bill blinks, blinks and blinks. He thinks his tongue's grown three sizes too big for his mouth. "That's, uh."
"Be glad I didn't tattoo it on your arm," Colin says. "Nice finishing touch, you know, for letting me paint your car."
He's saying something that might be more meaningless words—but Bill's tuned him out. Something about Colin Glass means that he can't be serious about something without being angry and prickly about it, has to cover it up in a good slathering of jokes and a side of callousness to serve. Like a cactus. Or like an entire bouquet of barbed wire inside a person, all acerbic mask and words meant to drive anyone from looking at him a little too closely. He's a contradiction and an enigma all in one.
Bill wonders if the alive Colin Glass would have done this, or if the engram is doing this because he, too, had somewhere—along the way—absorbed a little bit of Bill, too. Melding into one person. The Relic would destroy Bill in its uncaring conquest to overwrite everything that made up Bill with whatever remained of Colin's consciousness, but maybe it was like… backwash. Maybe a little bit of Bill bled over into whatever Colin was, and if the Relic erased him—well. He'd still live on, wouldn't he?
It takes him a minute to find his words. "Signing your work is a sign of an artist, you know," he says. "Maybe it's your car now. Or will your rockstar ego let you drive a lowly MZ2?"
"It's not a bad car," Colin finally ascquiesces, rolling his eyes. "It's our car. Since we're both driving it, and all that."
"Romantic," Bill says, dryly. "Is that what you think when you're also wearing my body like a skinsuit?"
"That's different," Colin says. He shifts, flickers like a heatwave at the peak of noon. "It's not actually my body."
"But you treat it like your own."
"I was joking. Besides, you have a lot more cyber than I do."
"Only through necessity," Bill says. Colin has a lot of visible cyber—the jaw, the eyes, the arm—but it's old tech. Bill's is hidden. It's deadly. He's got a high-grade sandevistan he won off the market in Pacifica and everything built into his body makes him stronger, faster, better equipped to handle whatever dirty work gets handed to him. "Somehow I doubt you're exactly complaining about the upgrade."
Colin shrugs. His own eyes flicker, robotic lens zooming in and out as he blinks. Not that Bill thinks he needs to—sometimes he thinks Colin just effects all these human mannerisms, like breathing or blinking or letting gravity affect him—because it's the closest to being real that he has. Other than possessing Bill every second of the day, that is. "Think of it like a vacation," Colin says, instead, of acknowledging whatever Bill's just said. "From your body, I mean. It's not forever."
The blackouts that happen are rarely because Colin's trying to push his way into the driver's seat. Bill knows this. Most of the time, it's because he lost consciousness, and Colin's busy trying to save them both, trying to make sure Bill gets out in one piece.
For an engram supposed to erase him, Colin is suprisingly kind to Bill. It's just—well.
In the beginning, Colin was busy trying to take over Bill's body. Bill doesn't blame him. Because Colin'd thought he'd been dead; had been scared and alone and freshly woken up from fifty-something years lost in Mikoshi. Because he wasn't sure where he was except that he was a spectator in a body that should have been his, helpless and unaware, and the only person who could hear him was also busy trying to get rid of him.
And now it's like Colin doesn't even care anymore. Has been resigned to the idea of being erased, gotten rid of, whatever. He behaves. He's like a parasite that talks and talks and talks until Bill wants to throttle him, but he always acts like Bill's going to dump him out with the dishwater any day now.
When it comes to Colin, words matter little to nothing. Secretly, Bill thinks—they're not that different. Maybe that's why the Relic attached to him so fast, clicked like a lock in place that refuses to be removed because Colin and him aren't actually that different. They're so compatible that it's not that hard to simply, quietly join their minds together. Tweak a little here, change a little here, and suddenly voila, they have pieces of each other's DNA encrusted into their very consciousness.
And the final nail in the coffin: they're terrified of separating—dying. Both. Bill knows this, has had on-and-off nightmares ever since he consigned himself to cohabitating with something that would eventually evict him from his own body. Like he never existed at all. He feels it every day that Colin's around, every day that he can feel Colin's own fear. Like now.
Bill blinks, lays a hand on the shiny silver of the hood, the slight red streaks Colin's painted on the rims. It's not that far off from what he imagines Colin's Porsche must have looked like—he's seen it, he thinks, in his dreams, some cute thing that lives in the depths of Colin's consciousness.
"My baby is not cute," Colin says. "I can hear you think, you know."
"Stop listening," Bill tells him, pointlessly. "You should do those meditation exercises that Zeeb recommended to us. Shutting the metaphorical door, and all that."
"I will when you will."
"You do it better than I do," Bill says. "I used to be unable to read your mind entirely."
"You shouldn't be reading my mind, that's the point," Colin says, uselessly. Bill steps closer. His eyes are a pitch-black, sclera and all—but the pupils are white, shot through with flecks of what he thinks might be pure chrome. They refocus as Bill steps up to him, the imaginary distance between them closing. "You know that's a symptom of the merge, right?"
Bill shrugs. He's shoulder to shoulder with Colin—the man has always been freakishly tall, but he exudes no warmth. In life he might have. Bill likes to think that if they'd both been alive at the same time, they would have been good friends. Maybe.
His stomach churns, a little. The scar over his rib where he'd gotten shot hurts.
"Sure," he agrees, just to stop talking about it. "Let's go for a test drive, partner."
Colin blinks, and then nods, slow. "By your leave, mate."
By the time that Bill slides into the driver's seat, Colin's disappeared.