KeiransFuturismFantasy

2078: Highrider - Chapter 9

Added 2025-05-09 12:47:25 +0000 UTC

The Vanta would need four hours and two complete orbits to reach rendezvous with our target.

Luthando was kept busy with the orbital adjustments, Zandi made sure the Vanta wouldn’t explode on the way there, whilst Jax, Johnny and I just played passenger.

At least, in meatspace.

In the Relic datafortress, we were both going over the data on the Arasaka shuttle with a nanoscope.

“Fuck,” I groused, kicking my feet in the simulated water of the data pool idly as I sat on the edge. “It had to be a fucking Kōmori.”

Johnny was only wearing a pair of swim shorts on his avatar and idly read the data hovering over the pool. “Shuttle my ass, it might as well be a vac fighter.”

The Arasaka Kōmori-Class armed trans-lunar ‘shuttle’, was only called that to skirt around the various treaties signed in the wake of the 4th Corporate War, which had also made a mess of LEO and trans-lunar space. In the decades since, a steady effort from garbage scows and tugs had cleaned up Earth-Luna space significantly, but ships still needed active radar pinging constantly to get sufficient warning of the smaller hazards.

“Weird,” I muttered.

“What?”

“A Kōmori should have enough deltaV to go straight from Luna’s surface all the way to Earth re-entry and land without needing a refuel like this.”

“So they were definitely doing a lot of maneuvers beyond the norm. How many gonks we gonna have to flatline?”

“If they’re carrying something important enough for this, it means we have two pilots, one systems engineer, twelve Arasaka elite operatives and the onboard AI. Maybe less if they took casualties stealing the item from ForgeVex.”

In meatspace, I turned to Zandi, “When we pass the shuttle in our first orbit, think you can throw a few extra radar pulses at them.”

“Make it look like we’re just being thorough in our navigation?” she smirked knowingly. “Sure, but why?”

“I want more data for proper imaging. This is a Kōmori-Class and we must make sure we know what we’re getting into. They might have the standard ‘self-defense’ armament, but if they have a surprise for us, we’re going to suck vacuum if we’re not careful.”

Sure enough, forty minutes later the Kōmori practically zoomed past us at over 200 relative meters per second, 19 kilometers off the Vanta’s starboard side. Orbital mechanics meant we would have to speed up enough over the next orbit to properly intercept at a safe velocity.

In cyberspace, I poured over the raw radar data, throwing algorithms and imaging programs at it.

Finally, after seven meatspace seconds, it resolved into something understandable and accurate enough for our purposes.

A Kōmori had a black exterior with the typical Arasaka, angular neo-militaristic lines, which was accented by the white, backlit three-limbed tree logo of the corp, displayed near the cockpit and tail. It had a 48 meter length with retractable delta wings for when it reached atmo. Its primary armament was two 30mm retractable railguns and four Mantis-Blade class Micro-missile pods that were meant for anti-drone work or any lightly armored target - such as the Vanta.

That was standard, but it was what was on the dorsal mount that was definitely not.

“Fuck,” I shook my head, pointing it out to Johnny. “See that heat bloom and the shape of the mount, it’s got a point defense laser and the extra cherry on top, an ECM pod under the right wing.”

“They light us up with that, we’re toast. Better hope they don’t catch on to us, V.”

“About the only silver lining here is that when the lead and hacks start flying, they don’t dare use those guns. The blast will just as surely turn them to debris.”

“Butcher, the on-board AI, what can you tell me?”

The AI in my corner blurred his avatar into existence next to me. “Arasaka NeuralSync Kage-OS, restricted artificial intelligence with neural network architecture, derived from Arasaka’s Soulkiller technology; housing a sanitized, non-sentient version of Soulkiller 3.0. Its main purpose is autonomous flight control, mission coordination, security management, and crew augmentation. Based on available data, it has a processing power of 8 petaflops, hosted on a quantum-assisted neuromorphic processor. It is more likely to be 10 petaflops as Arasaka always undersells the performance specifications.”

“It would always have the hardware high ground, so it’s more about the cybersecurity protocols. You think we can take it?”

“It is not a matter of thinking, V. This is a chained AI, we are not.”

I nodded at the AI’s point. “So it will be cookie cutter attacks and defenses, with the force of a nuke behind them. Of course, there may also be a Netrunner among this security detail.”

Johnny shook his head, “Arasaka’s not about to put an elite ‘runner on a mission like this. Those don’t grow on trees and firing them out into the black is a sure way to lose ‘em.”

“We’ll just plan on the worst contingency and move on from there.”

Another orbit later in meatspace, the Vanta was steadily catching up to the Kōmori, the orbits now almost completely aligned.

“Range 83 km, 150 m.s. closure, nine minutes to docking range,” Luthando announced. “Zandi, you’re up.”

She nodded and switched on the radio, adjusting to the designated ship-to-ship frequencies used in Luna orbit, “Arasaka flight 31589, this is Tycho Refueler Vanta 15291. Approaching from your ventral at 180 mark 20.”

“Vanta, 31589, we read. Approach no faster than 20 m.s at our CQB perimeter or you will be assumed hostile and fired upon.”

“Roger that, 31589.”

The CQB perimeter for a spacecraft that size and armament was 5km, which was generally measured by how far its biggest gun could reach out within a single second. It would increase the time to dock but it was generally considered standard practice for any spacecraft carrying VIP or valuable cargo these days. The first actual pirate raid on the Crystal Palace two years ago had led to a sweeping change in the conduct of ship-to-ship operations in the Earth-Luna system.

Of course, no mere change in rules and laws would actually deter what we were about to do, which could be considered piracy from Arasaka’s point of view. In the classical Age of Sail sense, we were actually privateers, working on behalf of the Highrider Confed and the Driftkin.

Sure enough, Luthando tapped on the thrusters and smoothly shed closure velocity until we hit 20 meters per second at 5.12 km, which in an impressive show of skill he did completely manually with only his eyes and the feel of the ship around him.

Our orbit brought us into full sunlight two minutes later and we could finally see the Kōmori with the naked optic, growing steadily larger as the two craft merged their orbits into an intercept.

As with everything, Arasaka had a definite visual style in their products that I couldn’t help but find pleasing and their spacecraft design didn’t disappoint.

The shuttle’s sharp angular profile reminded me of a bat, if you gave it armor of titanium-ceramic plating with integrated reactive armor and polarized, ballistic-grade transparent aluminum frontage with retractable blast shields.

“See its fuel ports?” Zandi asked.

“Ventral side,” Luthando nodded. “Bringing us around.”

With deft taps on the controls, keeping his eyes on his instruments and looking through the narrow forward window, he practically danced the ship around their target, keeping the Vanta’s blunt nose towards the Kōmori.

“All right, we’re aligned on x, y and z, beginning final closure. Zandi, you can extend the fuel dock and make sure it’s the Arasaka Aerospace drogue.”

“Hey, I don’t teach you how to fly, spacejock, you let me worry about my systems.”

Whilst they were busy with the nitty gritty of meatspace, Butcher, Johnny and myself were carefully probing the approaching bubble of cyberspace that represented the Kōmori’s systems and on-board AI. We were close enough now that there wouldn’t be any appreciable signal degradation. If the Vanta had a proper com array that wasn’t a generation old, we could’ve used it to begin this process at 55 km range.

As expected, the Kōmori was a tight, orderly package of systems, ruled over by the iron fist of its KageOS AI. It didn’t tolerate a single disorderly data packet before it brought its metaphorical digital boot down and crushed it. There would be no sneaky junk data attacks here, nor was there any notion of stealth either. In its current contained operating regime, there was no chance to sneak in. It was not maintaining an active link with either Luna, LEO or Earth based Arasaka servers. It only had its transponder radiating data to Tycho City control.

“Unless either of you think you can push a stealth hack through a transponder that barely puts out kilobytes of data, our attack will have to coincide with the meatspace assault,” I shrugged with annoyance.

The smallest covert quickhack I had was the Ping, which needed at least 90KB. Trying to push that through the Kōmori transponder’s pathetic bandwidth would take at least 18 seconds. Given how anal this KageOS was, it wouldn’t surprise me if even the Ping would set off its internal alarms.

Butcher raised a digital hand and manifested a daemon.

I blinked in astonishment at the little thing and could scarcely believe what I was seeing.

Butcher had on the fly programmed a daemon that would cause havoc for any crew member that was relying on the KageOS for augmentation support and would disable the static internal and external defenses. It was barely 4KB in size and used a compression heuristic algorithm that was a work of art. The instant it was within the Kōmori’s systems it would unfold into a larger daemon of 8MB and go about its work. It was also stealthed to appear as just another routine function of the ship and its systems.

That was the problem with using an AI like the KageOS. Any true AGI would immediately see that there was a surplus program and have the imagination to deduce that there was something wrong. It was the trade-off that a corp like Arasaka had to make; keep the raw ability of an AI, but allow it no sentience and initiative. It might after all decide that it really didn’t want to work for them anymore and not just leave, but wreck things on the way out. Any employee could theoretically do that and I had definitely done that in the fullness of time, but those were the rules of meatspace. In cyberspace, the info nuke the disgruntled AI could leave would be apocalyptic.

I took careful note of the mini-daemon, learning its code architecture and began a background process to begin seeing if I couldn’t slim down my own hacks and cyberspace weapons further. It was immediately apparent that it wouldn’t work on high tier hacks but it definitely had applications on the low and mid tiers.

“Deploy it, might as well get started now,” I smirked, rubbing my digital hands together in anticipation. There was nothing like the thrill of hacking.

The Vanta shuddered slightly as its extendable fuel dock met the open dock of the Kōmori.

“Soft capture, moving to hard capture,” Zandi flicked a number of switches and we heard the latching motors whine through the hull as the Vanta pulled in the fuel adaptors, creating a tight seal between the two ships. “Give me an ullage burn.”

“Ullage burn,” Luthando confirmed, tapping his controls slightly. It created a short burn from the main engines to settle the Vanta’s fuel tanks from microgravity effects.

“Tanks look good, beginning transfer.”

I could feel the rumbling of the pumps through my feet as both liquid hydrogen and oxygen started its journey through the piping towards the Kōmori.

“All right,” said Jax with a smirk, unbuckling from his seat. “Zandi, give them 20% of the fuel load they need, then fake a pump failure.”

“Not hard to do on this bucket,” she chuckled.

Johnny and I followed suit, grabbing our weapons before floating our way through the tiny bridge, down an equally tiny gangway towards the port exterior maintenance airlock.

In the dozen seconds this took, the mini-daemon had uncompressed itself into the Kōmori’s cyberspace and began its subtle work. First was spoofing the return signals from the micro-missile pods and then thoroughly wrecking the control software.

“Secondary armaments on the Kōmori are down,” I told Jax.

“Already? You work fast.”

I nodded, “Railguns are down too, working on the crew augments and internal defenses. I’m going to keep them online until we breach. There’s some redundancy here that might be tripped and alert our targets.”

“Keep me posted,” he said and began a check on his own weapon to pass the time.

A complete refuel of the Kōmori would usually take 19 minutes according to its specs and so at four minutes I felt the Vanta’s pumps give off an awful noise that we only heard because our feet were maglocked to the deck.

Zandi waited further, simulating the time it would take for her to do a diagnostic, talk to the crew and decide on a course of action. Then she keyed the radio.

“Kōmori, Vanta, we have a malfunction in our primary pump system, the secondary is not responding. Our sincere apologies. We’re sending an EVA repair team.”

“Roger Vanta, any idea how long it will take?” The Arasaka pilot’s exasperated tone was clear even over the crackling comms.

“Sorry Kōmori. We’ll only have an update after the team has done a physical inspection. Stand by.”

In the time it took us to enter the airlock and shut the inner hatch, I directed Butcher to spoof the Kōmori’s external cams and show them exactly what they expected to see.

With the Vanta already in vacuum, we had no wait for equalization and opened the exterior door into the black void of space.

The moon loomed massively above the joined spacecraft, bearing silent witness to what was about to occur.

I took a deep breath and stepped out, grabbing onto a nearby railing and started pulling myself a few meters along it to allow Jax and Johnny to emerge.

My SMG’s targeting blossomed in my vision in both meat and cyberspace, whilst I casually cradled it against my right shoulder.

“V, ready?” Jax asked.

“Ready.”

“Hollow, ready?”

“Ready.”

“Push off in three, two, one… now!”

I pulled on the railing and let go, feeling the nervous thrill of the sheer danger of the action settling on my psyche as my momentum translated into a velocity to bridge the gap between the two spacecraft.

In cyberspace, I brought my suit’s micro-RCS online and began smoothing out my course towards the Kōmori.

“Butcher?”

“You’re cleared to proceed, V. The KageOS is fooled.”

That wouldn’t hold for long though.

The Kōmori had two airlocks for crew access, aft for cargo and another on the fore dorsal for crew transfer.

Jax and Johnny headed to the former, whilst I smoothly powered through space to approach the latter.

I had to be careful in my approach though, just a few degrees off and the pilots in the cockpit would literally see me through the front window and I had no direct access yet to hack their optics.

“V, we’re in position.” Jax confirmed.

“Hacking in three, two, one.”

As a well oiled team, Butcher and I dropped our stealth and began our opening salvos in the Kōmori’s cyberspace.

We both cooperated to crash upload a Neural Shredder V3.1 straight towards the KageOS.

My visualization of cyberspace was more esoteric as I began to see it beyond human norms.

It looked like a multi-dimensional cuboid mass that aggregated into a gigantic multilimb ‘creature’, which swam with red flowing machine code on its surface.

Our Neural Shredder exploded across cyberspace and washed over KageOS, flooding every port it had open to each system of the Kōmori with corrupted data packets.

I could only marvel at the spectacle as it settled over the entire expanse of our enemy, which to my perceptions was easily as big as a Megatower. Before I had switched over to a Gemini, I would’ve needed at least an external computing deck to support such an attack. Now I flung the Shredder with an ease that barely strained my RAM capacity and cyberdeck.

The KageOS immediately realized it was under attack but was indecisive in how to respond, as our opening volley had been intended to disrupt its decision making algorithms.

It ballooned in size, thrashing outward towards us in cyberspace, its own attacks completely missing or easily stopped entirely with junk data shields

Our infiltrator daemon, still undetected, spoofed the internal sensors into thinking that there was a fire aboard the Kōmori. Safety protocols that prevented the opening of airlocks failed to kick in and the explosive bolts fired.

In meatspace, I was well out of the way as the black outer airlock door blasted off and just missed the Vanta’s hull by centimeters.

All the internal air blasted out, acting as an impromptu thruster.

As this happened from the dorsal and aft sides, it didn’t have any appreciable effect on the combined spacecraft.

With deft pulls and precise RCS firings, I moved into the Kōmori with SMG poised to fire.

A 9mm SMG turret popped out of the airlock roof, scanning for targets.

The local program could barely even see me before the infiltrator daemon killed power to its actuators, keeping it stuck pointed directly into the side bulkhead.

The KageOS shot out a stream of offensive daemons the size of cars towards me, bristling with data scramblers, corrupting code and defrags.

I gestured with my virtual left hand, manifesting the next program that I had developed with Butcher.

The Echo Swarm burst into existence around me before streaking outward in a gigantic starburst.

It consisted of thousands of decoy subroutines that mimicked Butcher and I, drawing off the daemons to spend themselves futilely on the Swarm.

In meatspace, I stuck my SMG around the corner, using the tiny cam near the barrel to aim and let off a three round burst.

The tungsten slugs penetrated the visor of the first Arasaka operative, killing him before the oxygen in the helmet cooked off in a mini-inferno.

That the security operatives would be prepared for dealing with a sudden loss of atmosphere was no surprise. All of them were in black mechanical counterpressure suits prominently stamped with the corp logo on their chests, along with armor plating. Standard procedure was for helmets to always be on in flight, whilst their onboard Agents could seal the helmet faster than they could think.

The flashes of more railgun fire from the other end of the ship reached me as Johnny and Jax fired into the operatives.

Thankfully, the enemy operatives knew better than to just spray and pray, as any missed shots would go past me and straight through the closed door to my left that housed the pilots and very delicate controls.

A wrong shot there would be enough to certainly doom them.

‘We managed to get three,’ Johnny reported. ‘They’re using the dead bodies as cover and there’s deployable cover they pulled out from bulkheads.’

I was mostly focused on the battle in cyberspace at the moment, but reacted in time to catch another operative with a burst of tungsten through the braincase as he tried to lean out and shoot at my exposed SMG.

As the last of the KageOS’s attack daemons spent themselves, I deployed four rapid Synapse Burnouts that streaked towards the enemy AI like giant bending laser beams fired from orbit.

The KageOS predictably absorbed the attacks on its own firewalls.

Sacrificing integrity for time to counter-attack.

Butcher on the other hand had actually thrown his own attack to land between my third and fourth Burnout.

He had used a daemon he called the Codebreaker’s Gambit.

It slammed against the gaps in the enemy firewalls, that settled into them like thousands of tiny spiders that began destructively analyzing the codebase of the firewall and derezzed it further.

My fourth Burnout burst through these gaps and began immediately attacking the AI’s neural pathways, spiking the computational load to beyond redline and actually melting internal circuitry and logic gates.

“V! Those mad fools are trying to use their RCS to break the fuel dock!” Zandi shouted into the team link.

“Can Luthando match the maneuvers?”

“So far, but the strain is at half of rated spec, if it breaks off… There’s still residual LOX and Hydrogen in the feed lines!”

‘Butcher?’

My AI partner nodded, “I’ll handle the KageOS.’

His avatar blurred away from my side in cyberspace and appeared ‘above’ KageOS, where he immediately launched an Entropy Spike attack that manifested all around the enemy and shot inward to the beleaguered AI. I winced as I saw the self-replicating algorithms spear into the Kage AI’s codebase, causing its systems to degrade rapidly as critical functions were randomized or corrupted.

I focused my own attention on those corrupted systems and hit paydirt.

With a shift, I manifested my avatar right at the belly of the enemy.

With a gesture Subversion Protocols shot forth and wrenched away control of the internal doors, cams and deployable armor covers that the operatives were hiding behind.

Six of them were left at this point and with cam access I hammered their individual firewalls, burning them down and shoving Contagion and Blind Optics through.

A firefight was downright eerie in full vacuum.

There was just light, a body jerking as AP bullets tore through armor plating and vac suit.

The operatives could only stand in the darkness of their blinded optics, frantically wonder why the Kage AI had failed and die. Some would decide to go out with a bang and spray in the direction they knew Johnny and Jax were, but both had already taken cover behind the subverted physical defenses.

I pushed off the wall and grabbed a hold of the cockpit door, bracing with my feet to get the required leverage and pulled.

The door, which was rated to keep at least some air pressure behind it for a time to allow the crew to don pressure suits, was ripped off relatively easily.

My Weapon Sabotage hack went right through the two pilots and engineer’s meager native firewalls like they weren’t even there.

The pistols they had been aiming at the door discharged their accumulated energy outwards instead of into the projectile.

All three stupidly looked down in astonishment at their broken weapons, then at me.

My SMG went to single shot mode and with a careful adjustment of the ForgeVex’s velocity, I put three rounds through each’s helmet within less than a second.

“That better, Zandi?”

“Definitely. Thanks, V. We’re stabilizing now.”

“We’re done as well. All hostiles down,” declared Jax.

In cyberspace, Butcher had reduced the KageOS to an utter mess of disjointed systems and corrupted parts.

“AI’s down as well, let’s sweep and clean.”

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The Vanta resumed refueling only after we had done as thorough a check as possible for possible damage to the Kōmori.

We had been very frugal with our shots from the start to avoid breaching the hull from inside, but our opposition had no such constraints when the writing of their death was on the wall. We had to patch up seven holes using the Kōmori’s damage control supplies and only after a thorough check to see there hadn’t been any critical issues from that damage, did we begin the process of salvage.

Butcher and I spent most of that time picking apart the residual ‘corpse’ of the KageOS for all the system keys and repairing all the individual operating software to allow us to properly fly the Kōmori.

Jax, on the other hand, had already secured the objective.

It had been handcuffed to one of the operatives and was a large weapon case, with only the ForgeVex name printed on it in an unappealing font. It looked like it could easily fit a pump-action power shotgun inside, but I sincerely doubted that we had gone through all this just for a measly shotgun.

I didn’t like using them except in a real pinch when there were no other options, but my armory in NC had a fair number of custom ones, including the one gifted to me by Judy, which I wouldn’t sell in a million years.

Jax made sure we didn’t have an angle to see, before opening it briefly, nodding at the contents with satisfaction and latching it shut.

“Everything good?” I asked from the pilot’s chair, pulling out the personal link cord from my neck to interface with the Kōmori with considerably more bandwidth and going over every bit of data in the memory banks.

“We’re good, you two sure earned your paycheck on this gig,” Jax grinned, pulling himself into the engineer’s chair and looking around the cockpit with a rueful envy on his face. “Nyova, these Arasaka leeches have nice ships.”

“That they do. Controls are all hacked and I’ve spoofed the transponder. We should be able to pull it and chuck it overboard. They’re scheduled to only relink to Arasaka orbital assets eight hours after they’re on their way back to Earth.”

“Stellar stuff, V.” He tapped his suit controls and the eddies flowed to my account. “Now, no offense, but-”

“Yes, Hollow and I should go to the Vanta and be on our merry way back to Tycho with Zandi whilst you and Luthando take the package and the Kōmori to a clandestine landing pad somewhere on Luna.”

Jax smiled, “Burning stellar orbits, you are, V. Also never seen someone chop up a corpo AI like that.”

I waved off the compliments. “Part of the service you paid for.”

“Normally, we would’ve had to retrieve the package from the wreckage of a ship like this. Speaking of which, what loot do you want?”

“I’m already getting it. This AI had quite a bit of juicy intel on Arasaka that I’m going to be digesting for a while. Other than that, I think we’ll take half of the iron they were packing. It’s sure to be useful at some point.”

He held out a hand to me, which I grabbed.

“Pleasure doing business, V.”

“Anytime, Jax.”

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After an inclination burn and a two hour orbit, the Vanta landed back in Tycho without any mess or fuss.

Our case of loot was waved through customs with little fanfare and we returned to our apartment in Tycho Heights.

Johnny did a fair job of nearly bungling his enthusiastic jump onto his bed, pushing off way too hard on the floor and nearly kissing the ceiling.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” he grumbled as he floated back down to land on the bed with a slight thump.

“Here’s your share,” I transferred half the eddies over for the gig.

He nodded in acknowledgment, his optics flashing, “I’m beat, gonna catch some shut eye.”

“Got some calls to make.”

“Give Vik my regards,” Johnny said idly, turning over and pulling a blanket over himself.

I laid down on my own bed and fully focused on cyberspace.

Standing beside the datapool, I gave some thought as to how I wanted to amend my avatar. With the speed of thought and data, I switched from my sling bikini through a half dozen other outfits, finding a niggling problem with each that made me adjust or move on entirely.

Finally, I just grabbed a digital version of the outfit Johnny had gotten me in meatspace, adjusting the top so it didn’t give the epic underboob show it did currently.

That done I opened a window into Lunar cyberspace and got to work navigating a sufficiently secure and high bandwidth connection back to Night City. This wasn’t as easy as just placing a holocall. Intersatellite connections between corps and nation states were heavily regulated and monitored by NetWatch, always on the lookout for ‘illegal’ activity or ‘rogue AIs’ trying to manipulate data flows.

It also didn’t help that Night City cyberspace was essentially the secret domain of the Tentacle AI, who had the mayor and goodness knows what else dangling on its fingers.

After running into a sixth dead end in a Soviet satellite, I gave up and shot Gakulu a quick text message.

He responded in a few minutes with a net address to a Highrider satellite in lunar orbit, which would bounce from the O’Neill 1 space station at the L5 Lagrange point, straight down into Night City.

“Thanks,” I mumbled as I texted him back.

With that done, I was now looking through an ethereal digital window at the very familiar cyberspace expanse of Night City.

The lag became somewhat pronounced at this point, as the signal had a fair bit of distance to travel. However, it was easy to find my bearings and with a thought I had a connection straight to Vik’s Clinic in Watson.

There were two spyware daemons here that I only took the time to briefly identify before annihilating them easily.

I knew the computers in that clinic like the back of my hand, especially since I was also a minority investor in it. It had undergone an expansion in the last few months, with the clinic also taking over the ground floor of the building, where two ripperdoc students apprenticed under Vik’s stern eye and also dealt with any patient overflow.

Of course, Vik still practiced his trade in the basement, no matter how well his business was doing or how much eddies sat in his account.

I breezed through the firewall under ghost protocol digital stealth and engaged the camera of the large screen that Vik always watched his boxing matches on.

Sure enough I was treated to a view of Vik’s slouched form on his roller chair, gazing into the screen. He still looked good for a man of over 70 years old, though he had gotten a bit lazy with shaving of late, a slight beard forming along his jawline. His dark glasses reflected the screen and from his intense expression, which changed to the odd wince and grimace, it let me know he was particularly invested in watching the fight.

A quick reference search indicated he was watching the Night City Heavyweight Cyber-Boxing Championship that was currently taking place, between the champion Ryde “The Blade” Tanaka and Iron Kade, the challenger.

“Ah, Vik, are you seriously going to make me come between you and your boxing match,” I chuckled.

I decided to split the difference, generating only a small box window in the upper right hand of the screen and projecting a realistic rendering of my current avatar set in against a backdrop of my NC mansion.

For a moment, Vik was so invested in the combo that Iron Kade was throwing that he didn’t even register the intrusion.

“Gah!”

He flinched back, briefly flailing his hands. His face was utterly priceless and I made sure to take a snapshot.

“Good to see you too, Vik,” I chuckled ruefully.

He clutched at his chest, breathing hard before regaining his composure. “V? V! Is that you?”

“Sure, there are runners out there that could do this, but honestly, who would have the balls to try? Knowing I would eventually find out.”

“Good point. What was the first thing you said to me after Konpeki?” he asked suspiciously.

“Besides, ‘Fuck’?”

He rolled his eyes, “Yes.”

“I explained the hallucinations, ‘Blinding lights. It’s loud. I’m on stage and almost can’t breathe. I’m so damn full of hatred.’”

Vik breathed a sigh of relief and slapped the screen to pause the live boxing stream. “It’s really you. Fuckin’ chrome, V. You couldn’t have called a bit earlier?”

“You know what I did, Vik. Not about to bring that potential heat down on your head from those who would use my friends as weapons. I had to kill two spyware daemons in cyberspace that had their eyes on this building, one was NightWatch, the other Arasaka.”

“Typical corpo shit,” Vik groused. “I figured it was something like that. I contract Rogue to send a merc techie to sweep my shop for physical bugs on the regular.”

“I know, they were thorough and I’m not detecting anything either, so in that respect we are free to talk of… my circumstances at the moment.”

“Hell, kid. You look good, but I can’t really judge on a holo, last I heard you were on Crystal Palace for your last-”

I held up a hand to stop him. “To cut a very long story short, I’ve found the help I needed. I’m as cured as I can be.”

Vik sat back with folded arms, his old boxer’s arms bulging, whilst the right hand adorned with a ripper’s exoglove drummed on his left arm.

I knew that look, very well.

He was going over in his head just what could’ve saved me from the condition I had been in and only coming up with impossibilities from his own point of view. Yet, the fact that I was speaking to him at all, seemingly cured, stood in stark contrast to that.

“Kid… V… Do your old Ripper a huge favor. No dissembling and be straight with me. Of everyone on this planet, I know what the ins and out of your condition were. Just what the hell did you do?!”

I gave Vik a long stare, considering my options and most of all, what Vik had done for me. He was the one who had dug all the corpo implants out of me after I had been fired from Arasaka, replacing everything pro bono until I could pay him back. He was my second best friend in the new life I had built for myself as an Edgerunner. He knew me in a way that was probably more than just doctor-patient. He had put me back together after Deshawn’s bullet to the skull, after Jackie’s death, after Johnny and the Relic had been jammed into my brain. Only to watch helplessly as I faced down the specter of the limited life he had been able to give me.

I knew he stupidly blamed himself for not being able to save me from that specter.

If only he had been a better doctor, had better equipment, had better training, but he was just a Ripper in NC, not a world-class neurosurgeon with billions of eddies in equipment behind him.

He was like my… father of this life.

I didn’t need to look to the side or move, as I threw up towering firewalls around Vik’s computers and systems in cyberspace.

“You realize by now that my storming of Arasaka Tower was not done just for a last hurrah, to go out with a bang. I went there because it housed a local terminal of the Mikoshi aggregate server. Mikoshi was a system that housed an AI built in the mid 2010s called Soulkiller.”

“I heard those rumors, even as a teenager,” Vik nodded.

“Soulkiller is an AI originally programmed by Alt Cunningham of ITS, but Arasaka kidnapped her and suborned it completely to their purposes. I’m not sure what her original intent with it was, but what matters is what it does - it destructively scans any human mind and generates a digital engram of that mind. That is what Johnny was on the Relic and he was not the only mind imprisoned in Mikoshi. Over the decades Saburo Arasaka had Soulkiller harvest thousands of netrunners and anyone he considered too valuable to lose to death, including many of his enemies.

“Now, to bring my problem to an end. I needed to essentially disentangle my own mind from Johnny’s engram, which the Relic was forcefully pushing through. The only way to achieve that was in Mikoshi. Waiting for me there was the evolved hybrid AI of Alt Cunningham herself, who had digitized herself in 2013. She used her own refined version of Soulkiller on me, separating me from Johnny in the process.”

“Turning you into an engram, killing you,” Vik said woodenly and I could feel the glare through his dark glasses.

“I had complete continuity of consciousness during the process. I jacked myself into Mikoshi, submerged myself in the coolant fluid around the server and woke up instantly in cyberspace, job done. However, it wasn’t until then that Alt could do a full medical scan on my body and she realized the extent of what the Relic had done. I could return to my body, but my engram was at this point completely foreign to the meat. The Relic nanites had recoded the DNA, the brain, almost everything to host Johnny. Once again, I’d be returning to a ticking timer on my life. Roughly six months at most.”

“Fuck, V,” Vik rubbed his face as he took all that in. “So, in these last six months you went all in on the big leagues. Did gigs all over the world, got your mansion, lived the high life with Judy, invested in the Afterlife, my clinic… thanks for that by the way.”

I nodded, “You’re welcome, you had popped up on Zetatech’s radar. They were planning to buy you out, straight up hostile takeover. I convinced the middle-management corpo responsible that it would be in his best interest to stop pursuing it.”

Vik chuckled, “No doubt with terminal consequences if he pushed the matter. Let’s not get sidetracked, you clearly made another plan. If your body was rejecting you, there’s definitely neurosurgery on the nano scale that could fix that.”

“Which costs a ridiculous amount of eddies that would even make One-Percenters blink and think about it. I did my research, Vik.” I wasn’t about to tell him that I would’ve gotten that surgery for free, as payment for my critical service to Myers and the NUSA. If there was one lesson that Solomon Reed had managed to impart to me, then there were some secrets that just couldn’t be told. “Not to mention, I also learned a possible side-effect would be to render me utterly unable to use cyberware. They’d have to rip it all out and clone full ‘ganic replacements.”

“Which given your enemies, might as well have been a death sentence anyway,” Vik said grimly.

“So I turned to the places where the cutting edge of research happened.”

He snorted, “Don’t couch it in fancy words, V. You went to a black clinic.” As much as Vik would’ve drooled over the Highrider clinic’s technology, they practiced a distinctly different ethos of medicine that were at odds with the oath that he had taken.

“I knew what I was walking into Vik, I’ve taken precautions. I’m their guinea pig, yes, but I’m also holding onto the ace that could bring it all crashing down. Besides, it’s in their interest not to fuck me over, given the problem I’m also helping them solve.”

A gesture and the upload began. “I’m putting an encrypted file on your system that will upload to your own Agent. To unlock it you need to use the words I spoke at Jackie’s ofrenda. It will tell you everything you need to know.”

Vik’s eyes glowed behind his sunglasses as he accepted the download.

He sat back and I could literally feel him unlocking the file.

I was still getting used to this new sense I had of data that was slowly unlocking to the very core of my being.

“Holy shit, V,” he said after just twenty seconds of reviewing it. “You- you- you-” He was utterly at a loss for words, his mouth slightly slack jawed as he read the file that demonstrated the true end of the mortal condition. His head twitched left to right as he continued speed reading the file in his optics.

Finally, he bowed his head. There was way too much to properly read and digest within the bounds of the conversation, but he got the gist of it.

“Fuck, V. Who… who has this? Who did you give this to?”

“I can’t tell you. Those who own the clinic have a plan to make sure this doesn’t cause too much chaos and disruption. I can assure you that it will not be the sole province of one corp or nation. You are part of that plan. Get yourself a new nanolathe, Vik and study hard.”

He cradled his head in his hands, clearly fighting his own internal battle. “I should just… delete this. V, you’ve handed me something worse than a thousand nukes!”

“This needs to happen, Vik. The sins of your generation and the one before are catching up to humanity and if we’re to survive in any appreciable form, Relic 3.0 must spread far and wide, to everyone.”

He looked up and ripped his glasses off, his eyes staring at me, a raw naked fear shining in them.

“V…”

Hearing his voice and the emotion in just that syllable of my name almost broke me.

Vik might seem like just a back-alley ripper who was keeping his head down and not making waves in the world, besides fixing up mercs and doing pro-bono work occasionally for the underprivileged and new mothers under the poverty line. He only spoke of his boxing career in his twenties, but no one who had lived through the Time of the Red was ignorant of the greater existential dangers that were kept at bay by the Blackwall.

Butcher sent me a data stream from an exterior security cam, drawing my attention to movement outside of Vik’s clinic in the back alley.

There was a young woman approaching the stairs leading down into the basement clinic, walking with a dazed hurry that showed she wanted to sprint, but was keeping herself in check.

She hopped down the stairs, her bun of light blonde hair bobbing with each step.

She steeled herself, waved her hand over the security scanner and practically ripped open the hyperalloy security gate with a rattling clatter as it slid away in its runners.

“V?” Misty Olzsweski tentatively asked into the empty room of the clinic, her green eyes searching and then she saw Vik.

With a gesture and manipulation of Vik’s system, I enlarged my image and pushed the screen’s volume.

“I’m here, Misty.”

The owner of Misty’s Esoterica and the third friend I’d made in my new life as an Edgerunner walked tentatively into the scan range of the camera.

Her hair was the same as ever, if slightly more under control, but her improved means had seen her apparently go for some biosculpting. Gone were the slightly chubby cheeks, jowls and freckles, to be replaced with a sharp edge to her jaw and cheeks, with only a few artistically placed tiny moles on an otherwise flawless smooth skin. In keeping with her goth theme, her skin was almost parchment white, contrasted sharply by the spiked choker around her neck. Her eyes were surrounded by thick black makeup, emphasizing the distinctly soul piercing look in them.

Complementing this was her clothes, which was a shoulder-baring black closed jacket, with a matching mini-skirt and platform shoes that didn’t look comfortable at all to walk in, but she somehow always managed.

Jackie probably wouldn’t have cared about it. He had loved her as she was, but he was still a guy in the end.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you caught me,” I said ruefully. “Let me guess, your Tarot?”

She nodded, “I was just reading for a client, when I suddenly had this overwhelming instinct to read my own Tarot. I didn’t even need to finish and I ran here… It’s really you.”

“It’s me, Misty,” I confirmed with a smile.

From her pocket, she pulled out a Tarot card - The Star.

“It symbolizes hope, renewal and guidance after a period of hardship. It brings the light to illuminate the darkness, the exposure of secrets, it also brings healing.”

As usual she was unnervingly correct. “Yes, I’m alive and the Sword of Damocles no longer hovers over my head.”

Misty pulled out another card, “Death - inverted. V, in your context, that can only mean one thing and probably explains why Vik looks like you just pulled the world from under his feet.”

“He can explain the specifics, Misty. Do keep it quiet please.”

She turned the card around to face herself and shook her head, her eyes closing in disbelief. “V, it’s inverted for me as well.”

Misty had given me enough readings and I had learned through sheer osmosis. It more than likely meant she would, in time, accept the Relic 3.0.

“That’s… good I suppose?”

Her shoulders slumped and she looked at me with a weary affection. “Really V, only you. You don’t call or even visit for months. Then you go and become an international headline at the Crystal Palace and now you burst back into our lives like a sledgehammer.”

“Sorry,” I winced, giving a helpless shrug.

She waved me off. “Don’t worry about it and I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Judy.”

That hit me in the heart, but I had accepted that our paths would diverge. It hadn’t been easy for her to watch my condition deteriorate in the past six months. My time had been increasingly taken up by my international gigs, biz investments, moving into the mansion and secretly in the background, putting the plan in motion that had seen the creation of Relic 3.0 and the negotiations with the Highriders. It all only served to create even more emotional distance between us. In her eyes, I had been putting down even more roots into Night City - a place she wanted to leave.

I would always love her, but our respective choices had not given us the happily ever after.

Even with my terminal condition being a thing of the past, it wouldn’t do much to address the core issues behind our parting of ways.

Night City had chewed her up - her best friend Evelyn’s suicide, her well intentioned actions to help the dolls of NC leading to just more death, the constant grind of tuning smut braindances for the Mox, the day to day violence. Even if I dropped everything and showed up at her doorstep in Oregon, I’d be bringing all that trauma back to her. I’d be the embodiment of what she’d sought to escape.

“Yes, well,” I swallowed down the emotion bubbling up from my core and rubbed a stray digital tear from my eye. “I guess the old saying of ‘true love comes to die in Night City’ is proven once again. Silly me, thinking I would be the exception to that.”

I shook my head, “Vik, how long before you can be my ripper again?”

He was shook out of his own internal struggles and blinked at me. “Oh, well, given this… I’d need to hit up some contacts, get the latest Raven Gemini manual and specs. Study that and then look at your specs. Then see if I can get a parts source going. Three weeks, at least. Also a state of the art nanolathe is going to bust my bank, V.”

“Well, I guess it's my turn to give you a loan.”

“The waiting list for that is going to be a pain in the ass, V. We’d be lucky to get one within a year.”

“There are ways and means, Vik, you let me worry about that part.”

Butcher prompted my attention towards the approaching data signature of a NetWatch ‘runner.

Fucking gonks.

“Listen, I need to go. NetWatch is poking around. It was really good to see you guys.”

“Yeah, yeah, go already. I’ll get cracking on this.” Vik waved.

Misty waved, “Have fun on the moon, V.”

She cheekily slapped the power button on the screen, severing that connection.

As much as it would be fun to remind her that I had more eyes than just that, I hurriedly pulled back, playing along.

The NetWatch runner was left high and dry as he watched my firewalls around Vik’s Clinic wink out, leaving only the standard civilian grade security.

Back in the Relic datafortress, a gesture to the window above my datapool severed the connection.