Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 2.13

2.13

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The path that I took through the city was a fairly straightforward one. I didn’t bother to do any forms of trickery this time. No vanishing into alleyways to superspeed around the place whenever there was a gap in attention.

I just walked.

The catgirl quickly reported it, and turned to monitoring me for as long as was possible while other assets shifted into position. My path made it a bit easier for them, admittedly.

Outside of the City Centre, Night City was usually a lot less vertical than normal. Santo Domingo was about as flat as it could get outside of the Badlands, and that meant that I basically had a direct route straight to my destination.

I only needed three different streets to get there. The highway got me most of the way there, nice and simple.

The catgirl herself wasn’t in a position to follow, but an AV quickly joined the rest of the traffic in the air, utterly unremarkable if not for the fact that I could feel the attention coming from it and trace the connection back to Danger Gal.

The path it took was enough to keep eyes on me for most of my walk, and just before it went out of sight, a flying drone took over for it.

I didn’t really care that much.

My steps eventually took me to my destination, and I found myself in a rather large, open area that was just about filled to the brim with stalls, and ringed by shops.

The shadow of Megabuilding H4 kept it out of direct sunlight at this hour, but there were still enough people around that it was notably warmer here.

I hummed.

People were shouting for attention, calling, talking, bartering, making deals, hawking wares, but it wasn’t actually the stalls themselves that had drawn me here. No, that honour, such as it was, instead went to one of the shopfronts on the edge of the area, a little run down but still fairly intact, and obviously cared for.

A bright set of neon letters above the notably larger-than-average door declared it to be METALHEADZ.

I moved in its direction. The crowd gave me space easily, most of them seeing me and then promptly choosing other ways to go entirely. More than a few eyes stayed on me the entire time as I walked over to the shop.

I ignored them, and pushed the door open.

The inside of the shop was... interesting.

It was clear to me that this hadn’t originally been a single shopfront. The entire series of shopfronts were, in fact, just cut up parts of the same building, with interior walls installed after the building had been renovated in order to separate them. It left the ceilings oddly tall, and the room itself basically a box, but it was tall enough for me to rise to my full height and it wasn’t like it looked awful, so it wasn’t really a bad thing.

The way that the shop had been laid out, though, was definitely quite odd. There was merchandise all across the walls, with shelves that extended from them. In the centre, and almost splitting the room in two if not for the slight gap between each other and the walls were two more shelves.

There was quite the variety of items here. Tools, things that tools would be used for, oils, synthetic substances, lubricants, canisters full of specific mixtures of gasses, cubes of materials, a score of different types of gadgets, paints, Cyberware plating and more.

The reason for such an eclectic array of merchandise was very obvious once one looked at who owned the store.

A bright blue and white Cybermatrix Copernicus Full Body Conversion model was seated behind the counter, in a posture that had been bored before I’d walked in.

Even by Night City’s standards, that was fairly odd. The Copernicus had been designed for operations in space, after all. It was undoubtedly weird to see one here, on the ground of a planet.

Still. “Good morning.” I called, closing the door behind me before moving further inside. “I am reliably informed that you are selling things that I am looking for.”

The Copernicus slowly straightened up, his head tracking me as I stopped a small distance away from him. Small relative to our sizes, that is. Magnetically attached to his chest, and looking rather out of place with the rest of his frame, was a simple name tag with the word “Max” written on it.

A Kiroshi Monovision Optic blinked back at me. “Hello..?” He said, uncertain. “I’ve got all sorts of metal here?”

“So I saw.” My head tilted to the side, briefly. “But in this particular case, metal would refer more to a genre than a substance.”

That optic ‘blinked’, briefly dimming before brightening again. “Wait, hold on.” The FBC perked up, confusion giving way to interest. “You’re looking for music?”

I nodded.

As an FBC, he was missing most of the normal tells, but even so, it wasn’t hard for me to read the excitement in his body language as he perked up.

“Well, you came to the right place!” He said, rising from his seat. “I’m an aficionado for music! You won’t find a better place in Night City!”

I literally would not. Unless I decided to rob some record labels, that is.

A tempting thought, honestly, but I was here now. “I should hope.” The skin around my eyes creased a little in a smile. “I used to have a rather sizable collection, but I have no access to it in this city.” I explained. “As such, I am looking to acquire replacements- Mere digital copies, for convenience, and for something to listen to as time passes.”

Max nodded. “Then I can definitely sort some things out for you!” His arms spread wide before falling back to his side. “What do you prefer?”

“What do you have?” I asked, in turn.

He chuckled. It was genuine. He appreciated the chance to talk about something that he was interested in, and it was exceedingly obvious. “What don’t I have?” He asked himself, looking upwards towards the ceiling, briefly. “If it came before 2025, I’ve probably got it. I used to download pretty much everything that I could get my hands on, and I only really stopped because of the DataKrash.”

Bartmoss, as always, Ruined Everything.

“From Mozart to Eurodyne, you name it, I got it.” He bragged, one thumb pressed against his own shoulder.

And yet... Was it bragging when you could back it up? “Shall we test that?” I asked. “How about Mike Oldfield?”

The Monovision optic blinked again, before focusing on me, this time. “Tubular Bells all the way to Return to Ommadawn.”

“War Of The Worlds.” My head tilted to the side.

“Every version.” He said, optic narrowing even more.

“ABBA.”

“Ah, another person who appreciates the classics.” He said, smiling on a mouthless face. “Ever head of Sky?”

This time, it was me who chuckled. “Toccata is the only song of theirs that I listened to on the regular.” I stated. “I have a particular fondness for it.”

“The guitar work?” He asked.

I nodded. “Both it and the piano are truly excellent. Money For Nothing is the only song that is more immediately memorable for me.”

“I very nearly lost Dire Strait’s album.” Max shared. “Anything more modern?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Something on the turn of the millennium, then? Linkin Park.”

He let out a noise that sounded, somewhat, like an exhalation missed with a ‘whoo’. It didn’t quite manage it, since he wasn’t actually exhaling, but it was close enough. “I didn’t know anybody else even knew that band! A real shame that the SCAW-” He pronounced the acronym like it was a single word. “- ruined their chances like that.”

My Sight shot into the past. Linkin Park had been a casualty of the Second Central American War, the economic hit of the conflict causing effects that ultimately made them unable to sustain themselves. They had broken up in 2007. “Minutes To Midnight was a fine album for things to end on, at least.”

This world continues to disappoint me.

“Only a few more, then.” I said. “Queen, Guns N’ Roses, and Black Sabbath.”

“That’d be a yes, a yes, and a yes.” He stated.

Good. I nodded. “You have a rather extensive library, it seems. I have to give you my compliments, it certainly could not have been easy to acquire... Or maintain.”

“Backups.” He nodded, before his knuckles curled, and he tapped himself on the chest twice, tink tink sounding out as the metal collided with itself. “Being made of metal helps, too.”

Record companies could be a little vicious when trying to make sure that people didn’t have ‘unauthorised copies’ of music that they had the rights to. Still, that particular genie was well and truly out of its bottle, by now.

“That leaves the next question very simple indeed.” I stated. “How much do you want for a copy?”

The price he named was large, but honestly too small for the sheer number of songs that he actually had stored. If I’d bought them all from the record labels, it would have been a dozen times larger, at least.

I paid the price easily. It was a good deal, after all, and I didn’t mind parting from my cash in the face of his genuine enthusiasm and enjoyment of the subject.

It took a decent amount of time for him to make a new copy, because every memory chip that he had was sealed behind security measures that would give even a lot of FBCs trouble if they tried to break them. The ‘easiest’ of them was a private safe that he kept in the back, a reinforced block of metal that kept the interior climate controlled and isolated from the outside world in every meaningful way. It had been anchored thoroughly to the walls and floor, to boot.

I suspected that he had another copy on the systems of his own body, but I didn’t bother to pry. It gave me the opportunity to talk with someone who was passionate about music, and that was a rather pleasant experience.

Full Body Conversions were stereotyped as future cyberpsychos, but honestly, Max may very well have been the most pleasant person I’d met so far in this city. I wouldn’t call him a friend yet, but if enough time passed... Well.

I walked out of that shop with one additional memory chip full of songs tucked into my robes, the data on it already scanned into each of my Autgents, and something resembling enthusiasm for the rest of the day.

The walk back through Night City’s general unpleasantness killed most of that, but it didn’t quite manage to get all of it.

Danger Gal’s little spying operation continued all the way, though. This time, at least, they had multiple different drones for the route that I’d taken, all of them shifting in and out of the area seemingly at random. It would have worked perfectly on anybody other than me.

I ignored them during the entirety of my walk back to my base.

When the building came into sight, I was once again struck by the same sense of dissatisfaction that had bit at me earlier this morning. Unlike last time, however, I didn’t allow myself the chance to linger on it. I just walked into the building, before heading straight downstairs and depositing the data chip in its own little safety vault. It didn’t take me long to scan through all the files I received, none of them anything other than what I’d expected them to be. I loaded the data onto my system, and then walked upstairs to my clinic.

I had just finished sitting down when an alert went off, and the consequences of my choice arrived.

I flicked a holoscreen open, and checked the cameras. There, on the street, pulling into the driveway, was a car.

It was a newer vehicle, nice and shiny and advanced. If not for the bright pink sparkly paint job, it might have even been somewhat pleasant to look at.

The driver’s door opened the instant it parked, sliding upwards rather than outwards.

The woman who stepped out was certainly extra. Her skin was a pale lilac, her hair dark purple with pink highlights, one of her eyes a shining yellow, and the other pink. A green jacket over a dark purple corset, and a brighter purple skirt that left most of her upper legs exposed.

Oh, and the cat ears on her head. Couldn’t forget those.

I recognised her. It was hard not to, really.

She was literally the poster girl of Danger Gal, after all.