It's About Saving Yourself Ch 1 (Patreon)

Here is this one to start us off. Do let me know in the comments what you liked and what you didn't.

On with the show.

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I adjusted my gas mask so it sat more securely against my skin, dampening the ever-present effluvia of putrefied synthetic meat products, pickling vaguely vegetable-like organic slurry, and the occasional corpse. A few breaths did not serve to fully vanish the ever-shifting bouquet, and considering I’d replaced the filters last night, this meant the seals were shot. I'd have to see if I could patch them, if I couldn’t I’d be forced to buy new ones. I pulled in a shallow, putrid breath; preferably soon.

I kicked an empty box aside and scanned the seemingly infinite hills of stacked up trash that made up my domain, spotting the next thing that looked promising. I squelched my way to a fridge laying doors down. Crouching next to it I slipped my gloved hands under its edge and with a heave and a grunt, tipped it on its side. The fridge’s door popped open, and a slurry of gelatinous organic matter and water spilled out around my legs with something bigger that flopped to the ground.

Turning to inspect it, I saw it had once been a person, or at least most of one. The body parts didn’t quite add up.

Sifting through the mess I saw what looked to be the thoroughly ruined remnants of a business suit, two cyber arms, and a lot of cabling. The Netrunner that had ended up in the fridge in front of me had some extensive modifications. Looked like both arms and the majority of his upper torso.

Pulling out my trusty screw drivers and getting to work, I saw that a not insignificant chunk of the modifications were heatsink and cooling systems. I could see a smaller heart and synthetic lungs in there, obviously high quality, but the bioware bits they’d integrated had long rotted away, so they were utterly ruined.

Looking through the corpse’s clothing, I did not see a wallet or any kind of identification.

Shrugging, I picked up the head and gave it the good once over. My intention had been to plug in my interface port using a mostly isolated partition of my basic cyberdeck and run a diagnostic on whatever the fuck this guy had, but the brain matter slurry made me decide against that.

Looking around the dead man’s headware, I found the slot for his cyberdeck, it was covered up and sealed tight, but that was nothing that injudicious application of a knife and screwdriver couldn’t fix.

Man, it was a good thing I had managed to put together the Eddies for my cheapo hazmat suit, otherwise my dumpster diving would be a lot more unpleasant.

+The trash in the Municipal Landfill is the property of Night City.+ The intercom distantly pointed out. +To steal from the Landfill is to steal from Night City.+

“Yeah yeah, fuck off.” I muttered as I managed to tear the covering off the back of the guy’s head and cracked the semi-spongy skull open. Shaking my gloves clean and pulling out some tweezers, I removed brain matter until I could extricate the cyberdeck and held it up in front of my goggles.

It had the NetWatch logo on it.

I looked back down to the dead man, at his arms and torso.

This was, perhaps, the singularly best find I’d ever had, if I could fix it up I’d definitely use it, if not, someone would want what was left of it and would pay top Eddies for it. It went straight to a ziplock baggie and vanished into the special zipper in my salvage bag, after some consideration, I nabbed the right arm, drained it, shook it mostly clean, wiped it down with a good old tactical paper towel and stuck it in my bag too.

The bag slowly filled up over the next few hours. Broken Agents, the odd engine part, cracked, smudged, or broken scopes, laser sights and reflex sights. I even ran into another corpo body, most of his head was missing but his bank-shard was not, and it had two thousand Eddies, so that guy singularly paid for the upgraded BD wreaths my little brother and I needed for school.

He'd also had a briefcase; I most certainly didn't know the combination but wedging it in place and applying a knife and a crowbar worked as an adequate substitute.

I had been hoping for juicy corporate secrets that I could sell to a Fixer for money. Unfortunately, all it had was a very small and thin but luminescent nightgown, a set of very nice-looking lingerie that would utterly fail to guard a woman’s modesty, and a no-nonsense matte black M76-e Omaha with two magazines.

“I sincerely hope these weren't for you,” I told the corpse as I put the clothes in a pouch of my loot bag that would keep them safe, “I'm not about to kink-shame. But I will kink-judge.”

The corpse failed to defend its kinks as I checked the Omaha’s safety, then loaded it and slipped it into my jacket pocket past my home-made hazmat suit and pocketed the remaining magazine, making sure to put them in a different pocket from where I kept the magazines to my usual gun.

Yes, a Tamayura likely wouldn’t kill an Animal or a Malestrumer in a single shot, or in five. But a .45 ACP slug will still hit them like a punch in the gut, not to mention that most gangsters and punks couldn’t afford the implants that would protect them from gunfire.

I picked up a few more choice broken electronics, as well as what looked to be a smudged though otherwise fairly intact Kiroshi, the telescoping line if I was any judge. Hopefully all it needed was a thorough cleaning and some new wiring.

Feeling satisfied with my scavenging and my pack having reached the point that it was somewhat difficult to carry, I stumbled my way back to Rancho Coronado. The moment I was past the toxic areas, I peeled my hazmat suit off and stuffed it into its sealable compartment of my bag.

I was deep in 6th Street territory, luckily I was known around these parts. They had attempted to convince me to sign up a few times but so far a firm if polite decline (and accidentally providing my services as a mechanic to someone important and relatively benevolent) had managed to keep me from having to join the gang.

I stopped by the first gun store on the way home to purchase a shoulder holster and two more magazines for my new Omaha, along with a box of flechettes. I absently filled the magazines with flechettes, settled my Omaha snugly into its new holster, practiced the draw past my jacket a few times and continued my trek home.

There weren't many good things I could say about Night City, at all, fuck this place with a rusty carving knife. But at least its public transportation system was actually fairly robust and ran mostly on time.

I stared out the bus’ window as it rumbled along, the dusty and decayed knockoff American Dream streets of Rancho slowly morphing to Arroyo’s tightly packed industrial spaces.

One would have thought that one lifetime spent in a Corporate Owned Dystopian Hellhole on the indefatigable march to self-destruction would have been enough. That the reward for the remembrance a life of ceaseless, meaningless and unrewarding toil would have been to have a different existence free of the shadow of those Colossi, a chance to strike one’s own path in a new world and have fun killing slimes before graduating to bringing a God to its knees…or something.

Whichever hypothetical ‘one’ this person happened to be, I wanna meet them face to face so I can punch them in the fuckin’ mouth.

I had been three years old when I ‘woke up’ in Night City. I'm honestly uncertain if I enjoyed being a three-year-old the first time around, but the second time I most certainly didn’t. Having a fully realized mind in a child’s brain made for headaches and a bipolar experience, the certain knowledge that I should have greater control over my emotional state coupled with a child’s brain lacking maturity resulted in…difficulties.

That said, once I regained my calm (and resigned myself to my situation), I became the calmest, best behaved little shit in existence. Unlike my entirely normal seeming little brother, who was preoccupied with walking around, screaming, and learning not to shit himself in his clothes, I was able to see that we were being taken care of by a struggling, overworked and underpaid single mother doing the best she could with what she had.

Being an old soul in a young body, I decided to do the boring thing and make full use of my body’s early neuroplasticity.

Let me tell you, re-learning to read was an experience.

My early and rapid advancement had not gone unnoticed. Mom had been beside herself with joy when she saw she’d had a ‘prodigy.’ I didn't have the heart to tell her she was wrong. At least she didn’t shove it in my and my brother’s face all the time.

If the world were less of a shithole, I might have been able to leverage that into some kind of advantage. Unfortunately, we were poor, so fuck us.

Out of all the places to be reborn in, the world of Cyberpunk was not among the top of my list. I held vague recollections of playing the tabletop game and spending a not insignificant amount of time playing a video game in the same setting.

Unfortunately, I couldn't just slap a bunch of mods on clothing and essentially become a God.

I’d checked.

That said, it was rather surprising how much my new reality resembled my faint recollections of the game, though with a filter of not having perfect recollection or even a particularly deep knowledge of the setting.

I hopped off the bus, oriented myself to Megabuilding H4 and started walking. On the way I plugged into a burrito SCSM and hacked lunch out of it.

I pocketed the XXL Turquesas and dodged around Whilley as he enjoyed his newest porn BD, though it looked like he’d forgotten to clean his Auto-Vag 9001™ again.

I suppressed a shudder and stepped a little farther to the side as I made my way past him as he half-moaned half-giggled and jogged up the stairs to the H4 atrium.

The H4 Megablock low-income housing was relatively cheap to rent an apartment in. And the apartments had a neat Future of the 80s disco aesthetic that, with the proper sunset lighting, really accentuated the curves of the architecture. The ones with a window anyways.

That was the end of everything positive I had to say about it.

I got off the ugly cargo elevator, navigated the bags of trash clogging the stairs leading to the block my family lived at, and tossed one of the burritos at Kamil. He nodded his thanks at me, undid the wrapping, and ate as he kept watch, his baseball bat with nails tapping an absent beat against his shoulder.

Good man that Kamil. He'd helped Mom carry me to her car once when I got sick with a stomach virus.

I shifted my salvage bag so it would stop digging quite so hard into my shoulder and climbed the rest of the stairs to the apartment. I strolled into the bachelor pad inhabited by my family and sighed in disappointment.

David was scrolling BDs again, knowing him it was one of those XBDs from that hack Ripperdoc he hung out with every now and then.

I went over to my ‘workstation,’ a small table with tinkering tools, gunsmithing tools, a small refurbished external cyberdeck, and a soldering iron. Once there, I deposited most of the junk I’d scavenged, leaving the cyberware in my bag as that would require more specialized tool sets.

I tossed my hazmat suit into the wash, deposited extra money into it as it was running short and would likely cut off the sanitation cycle. Put my guns away on my drawer and made my way to my little brother.

To call David my ‘little brother’ was a bit of a misnomer. We were fraternal twins; I'd only come out of mom a few minutes before David.

But while I was an old man in a teenage body, David was a teenager in truth, with all the ups and downs that condition came with. We also looked nothing alike. He was short and scrawny, with sinewy muscle coiled up his arms and legs. I was tall, broad shouldered, barreled chested and a strict workout regimen (and plenty of hacked SCSMs for protein) had given me impressive musculature, further enhancing my physical presence. He had wavy brown hair he styled into a punk pompadour, I had straight black hair that ran past my shoulders, tamed into a ponytail.

David’s skin was brown as caramel, mine was fair, the only hint to my Hispanic origins being the fact that the sun made me bronze rather than giving me sunburn. He’d gotten cybereyes first chance he got, while I used a Militech visor I’d scavenged and refurbished.

Lastly and more annoying, I spent my off-time training with a gun, to throw a punch, to master the world’s technology, or trying to leverage all of the above to make money.

David scrolled sketchy BDs.

With another sigh I left David where he was sprawled out on the couch and went to take a shower. I was too tired to try and make him see sense.

Our allotment of hot water helped wash the feeling of ‘Night City Municipal Landfill’ off me. After drying my hair and getting ready to leave, I had run out of easy ways to postpone talking to David, I went over to his place on the couch and gave him a solid poke in the liver.

He sat up with a surprisingly girlish scream, flinging the BD headset in my general direction. I jumped and caught it, if it broke I’d never hear the end of it.

“What the fuck, Alex!?” he glared at me.

“I tried calling your name a bunch.” I lied. “Anyways, here's lunch, I gotta head out so I need a favor.”

Without giving him a chance to speak I tossed him his burrito and transferred him eighteen hundred Eurodollars. He fumbled but caught the food, then his eyes flew wide open and the burrito slipped through his fingers. “Woah, where’d you get this much scratch!?”

“Been saving up. I need you to go buy the new BD wreaths we need for class, we still have two weeks but better to do it early, that way Mom will stop worrying about it. Try and get the best you can within that budget. Future proof as much as we can.”

David’s face twisted. “It's fine, I've taken care of it.”

I raised one eyebrow. “Yeah? How’d you do that exactly?”

“How I had to. It'll be fine though; we can keep this scratch and pay rent or something.”

“David,” he flinched as if his name had been a whip crack, “please tell me, exactly, how you took care of the BD wreath issue.”

He grimaced and looked to the side, his right foot starting to bounce. “Went to Doc, got our current headsets modded. It’ll work fine now.”

I took a deep, lung-stretching breath, the tempo of David’s foot turned nearly violent. He went to that hack of a ripper for a bootleg update? Was he trying to get us expelled? Did he seriously think it would help?

I let the breath out and my emotions with it. I put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a slight squeeze. “Thank you for that, little bro.”

“We’re the same age.” He grumbled.

“But it's a risk, one we don't have to run now. Please, if only for my peace of mind, okay?”

“Yeah alright.” He grumbled some more as his foot stopped tapping.

“Nova, anyways, I gotta head out to make my shift with Vik.” I made my way to the door, smirked, and threw a last shot over my shoulder. “Do please get the BD wreaths before you continue your porn BD marathon.”

“They’re not—!”

The swish of the door closing cut him off. I hefted my much lighter bag and made my way back out of the Megablock and right back to the bus stop to get to the metro station, I was forced to take a roundabout route when the sounds of a firefight echoed from a few streets down.

I wondered for a moment if it was between 6th Street and the Valentinos, or 6th and the Tyger Claws. It was unlikely to be the cops, they didn't usually patrol this far from City Center.

I kept a hand on my Tamayura and thankfully reached the metro station without incident. Yeah, that shiny new Omaha was probably the better weapon, but I hadn't gotten to know that gun yet, I hadn't gotten a chance to learn its quirks, so I thought it better to stick to a lesser weapon that I knew well.

The ride to Japantown was fairly uneventful, as I exited the Metro station I considered getting on the bus for the next leg of my journey. But all things considered, the Claws kept relatively good order in the sub-district so long as you didn't cross them, and I was neither an attractive young woman nor an effeminate pretty boy, so barring a few very particular fetishes, it was fairly unlikely that they'd try to kidnap me.

So I put a hand in my pocket near my handgun and walked to the intersection of Broadbury & Buran and into Urmland street.

Urmland street was a microcosm of Japantown; Bright, noisy, packed full of people and stinking to high heaven. In this wretched hive of scum and villainy you could get fairly convincing replicas of brand clothing, knockoffs of the best weapons money could buy, surprisingly high quality cyberware, and last and absolutely certainly least, it had no less than two obnoxiously pink brothels featuring the latest in venereal diseases.

Really, it was Night City concentrated into a single street.

I walked into Misty’s Esoterica, unsuccessfully waved away the smell of incense, and gave the young woman a wave and a smile.

She smiled and waved back, not commenting as I made my way to the back door and into the alley behind the building.

I descended the stairs into the realm of Viktor Vector’s clinic. Top Ripperdoc in Little China, former championship tier boxer, and cool enough to wear sunglasses indoors and not look like a total asshat doing it.

“Afternoon, Vik.” I called out as I stepped into his clinic. The place was a little run down, but it was clean. It was half clinic, half boxing gym, and half tinkerer workshop. All three of those halves somehow managing to add up to exactly one whole.

“Afternoon, kid.” Viktor smiled as he spoke, turning away from the monitor that showed two boxers beating the living hell out of each other. Viktor had the type of voice I wanted narrating a detective story, all scratch, growl, whiskey and warmth. “How’d the morning scavenging go?”

I grinned back. “You won’t believe what I got today.”

“Alright, hit me.”

I put my duffel bag on the table at the back of the clinic and prepared the degreaser. “I found a NetWatch cyberdeck.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe you. Next thing you'll tell me, you found a limited edition Kiroshi.”

My grin grew to shit-eating proportions. “Perhaps not limited edition, but…”

He stood up from the table and made his way over, his eyes widening behind his glasses as he looked at the cyberware I pulled out of my bag. “Woah, you weren't lying.”

Viktor was an imposing man, not quite as tall as me, but his chest and arms were thick with chorded muscle, as befitted someone who took second place in the Watson Boxing Grand Prix back in his heyday. He reached out and picked up the Cyberdeck. “Kid, this is a NetWatch Netdriver Mk. 5. Where did you even find this?”

“A dead guy in a fridge. That's also where I picked up this cyberarm.” I hefted the arm in question and shook it. “It looks both weird and neat, so I was thinking of taking the thing apart to see what makes it tick.”

Viktor continued to stare at the Cyberdeck for a while longer, then set it down and turned back to me. “Look kid, I can’t flip the Cyberdeck for you.”

I raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

Viktor shook his head. “It's too hot, if I implant that and some gonk goes and spills where he got it, I’ll have NetWatch on my ass faster than rumor. No, you'll need a Fixer, a good one, you'll get pennies on the eddie, but for something like this that would still be a good chunk of scratch. I can get you in contact with one, but that's the best I can do.”

I hummed and scratched my cheek. “Eh, I still need to clean it and see if it needs fixing. We’ll see how that turns out. For now, I just wanna fiddle with the Thing.”

Viktor looked at me for a long moment before turning away and picking up the Kiroshi. He blinked, his eyes glowing for a few moments as he scanned the piece of Cyberware. “Huh, a Kiroshi Kromatic, not a bad find.”

“I've never heard of those.”

“You wouldn't have,” he said with a nod as he set the cybereye down, “they stopped production on them after some gonk or another sabotaged the production line and destroyed the blueprints. They were all the rage some ten years ago, but it's pretty rare to see them now.”

I leaned in to get a closer look at the piece, and Viktor continued as he examined different parts of it. “Their specs match the top of last-gen Kiroshis. And you can customize their color and glow on the fly with a cyberdeck. If you can clean it up and get it working, it'll fetch a pretty eddie from the right collector.”

“Neat.” I said and reached for the tools, only for Viktor to stop me.

“Sorry kid, but I need you to run an inventory. It's getting time I restock and I need to know what I'm missing.”

“Drat.” I grumbled as I pulled out my Agent and slipped my visor from where it hung around my neck onto my eyes.

Viktor chuckled. “If I don’t get a patient, you’re free to play around with that project of yours after you finish with the inventory.”

“Thanks, boss.” I said as I finished pulling on my haptic feedback glove and walked to the back of the clinic, pulling open my pirated spreadsheet app I began the long, boring, but nonetheless vital process of making a list of all of Viktor’s crap.