Never Fade Away: I See Your Eyes, I Know You See Me (ch. 6) (Patreon)

Was this what we escaped for? It was a question that weighed heavily in my mind as I looked at the bright neon streets, casting away the deep shadows that fell upon Night City. The lights felt necessary considering that the outside world lived underneath a dark ceiling. My gaze lingered on a back alley that had a dumpster that was overflowing with garbage to the point that it was buried and surrounded by plastic bags.

I still preferred alleys, but standing on a road wasn’t that bad. I just thought of the buildings as hallways and tried not to look up. It was something I forced myself to get used to because… Night City was beautiful. It was something fundamentally alien to everything I ever knew, completely unfamiliar to anything that I experienced before escaping. From the cars on the street that zoomed by at high speeds, the people walking on the street that came in all shapes, sizes, and colors, to the buildings that were brightly lit with scrolling advertisements for so many interesting things.

But it was so… worn down. I’m not sure how else to describe Night City. The neon drew attention, but everywhere there was a shadow, there was filth piling up. The smell was awful. More than once, I nearly puked when the air conditioning shifted, carrying a stench of… something. Becca just laughed when I asked her what it was.

"Don't need no help with this one. Just some goon that pissed someone off enough to get some lead with his name written on it," Becca said, melting into her seat as she looked out of the window. We were parked at the corner of a road, both David and Becca watching the building.

"Learning opportunity," David responded. "Won't take any of your eddies."

Becca scoffed, "Sure ya don't need 'em? Between all the chrome and that swanky downtown apartment, I figured your pockets would be filled with lint." To that, David chuckled. A warm-sounding one.

"Lucy is the breadwinner," he responded, sounding like he agreed.

"She ever tell you what she's doing on the Net?" Becca questioned, sounding curious and bored. That got a sigh out of David and I listened to the conversation curiously. David and Lucy… the only frame of reference that I had was Dr. K. At some point, everyone developed feelings for her. If they didn't for one of the guys in the dorm, but that was almost always a bad idea. By the time it would happen, you were already on your way out. But no one ever actually managed to do anything with Dr. K -- at least as far as I was aware.

David and Lucy had a relationship that I was having difficulty quantifying or puzzling out what it was exactly. The same could be said for a lot of things, really. Night City was utterly overwhelming.

"Not exactly," David muttered. "She let it slip that she was looking around Arasaka files." Which was how she learned about the Home for Wayward Boys. "Most of the money, I'm guessin', comes from skimming off the book's transactions."

"She always did have a bone to pick with Arasaka," Becca agreed. Arasaka.

"Because she was like me," I voiced, making Becca jerk up in her seat while David shot me a look over his shoulder that told me to shut my mouth. It was odd being on the receiving end of the look. I was used to being one of the eldest that was alive and being the ones with the answers.

"What?" Becca questioned, looking at David, who sighed dramatically. "Lucy was-?"

"Not the same as what L went through. It's not my story to tell, Rebecca, but… yeah. Lucy has good reason to be pissed at Arasaka," David stated, his tone telling us that it was the end of the conversation. It was odd to think that I found -- or, rather, was found by -- someone else that managed to escape the clutches of Arasaka. Or any of the other megacorporations that paid to experiment on me and the others.

Lucy, however, didn't really seem to know how to handle me. She seemed sad when she looked at me. Like she wanted to help but didn't know how. It would be a lie to say that I didn't want more help, but I knew that I was lucky to be alive and to run into people that could help me at all.

"If you say so, David," Becca decided. "So, L, what you plannin’ to do with those implants?" Becca questioned, catching the attention of David, who looked very interested in the answer. The implants that were harvested from me were still at Doc's, who was poking around at the software to see if anything could be salvaged. There wouldn't be. I scorched the earth to prevent them from being used against me like the orphanage did.

That didn't mean that they were useless. Such as the two glowing implants that had killed R and so many others. "I can recreate the software," I answered, looking out the window. "It'll just take me a little while."

Becca made a noise of surprise, drawing my attention to her, "Seriously?" Based on her tone, it wasn't a rhetorical question.

"Sure. I recognized most of what Doc pulled out of me," I answered with a shrug. Adrenal Booster, Limbic System Enhancement, Visual Cortex Support, Brain Dance Doc, Kyroshi Optics, Biomoniter, Tyrosine Injector, Micro-rotors, and Lynx Paws. All of which I recognized. There were some implants that I didn't -- such as the glowing ones, or some of the ones that were pulled out of my head. "Shouldn't be any issue."

"If you can get some of it up and running, I'd buy it off of you for a preem price," David offered and Becca rolled her optics hard enough that I thought they would break. Money. The concept was explained to me, but I was struggling to grasp it. It was a currency that had agreed upon value in exchange for goods and services, but… I've never owned anything before. I've never paid for anything either. The entire concept was just kind of weird.

I had to get used to it, though. I needed money if we were going to make it -- me and everyone else trapped in the orphanage.

"Oh, fuckin' finally," Becca muttered, looking out of the window to see that someone was approaching the building we were watching. A man that looked around Dr. D's age, dark skin, bright green hair, and a prosthetic arm. He checked over his shoulder before he stepped through a door that slide open for him. "Okay -- learning time, L. What's the most important thing in a fight?"

I wasn't expecting a pop quiz. "Killing the enemy?" I guessed, earning a cackle from Becca while David answered.

"Adaptability," David started, getting out of the car. "You never know what you're getting into fully during a fight. You'll never have all of the information. Maybe doing a run and gun looks like the best option, right up until it turns out the target got a subdermal implant on the down low so your bullets bounce right off of 'em. Or you're running the Net to pop some heads, but one of the targets turns out to be pure organic and you can't fry his synapses with a bit of code. Or maybe a member of Maelstrom lucked out and installed some preem military-grade tech instead of the usual garbage they slot in?"

As he spoke, David walked forward with me and Becca in tow, who hummed a tune. I listened carefully -- it almost echoed some lessons that I learned from the training sims, but not quite. David continued, "Game plans can only get you so far. Eventually, no matter what, a plan will get scuffed and you'll have to improvise. The margin of error decides if you'll live or die, then. And the best way to stack the odds in your favor when the plan does get scuffed? Implants and experience."

As he spoke the words, David frapped the doorframe and door, forcing his fingers into the edge before ripping the door open. He was greeted by the sounds of gunfire.

"YEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH BAABBBYY!" Becca shouted, stepping out from behind David, announcing herself before her jacket fluttered open to reveal it was lined with weapons. Her prosthetic arms grabbed two assault rifles before she unloaded into, what I'm guessing, had been a lobby before it became a crime scene. "COME CATCH SOME LEAD! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

David glanced back at me before pressing a gun into my hands, his expression serious despite Becca sounding like she was having the time of her life inside. "Rebecca will handle Justin Sanatago's friends. You flatline Justin. I'll be there to cover you, but you'll take point on this."

I glanced down at the Nue pistol in my hands -- pulling back the slider to see that there was a bullet in the chamber, and the magazine proved that it was full. Glancing at David, I offered a curt nod before I stepped around the corner to see that Becca had dropped a number of people, all of whom had been carrying guns. "Where would he be?"

"Figure it out yourself," David responded. Point.

Walking forward, I looked at one of the people that still seemed alive. Pinging off of his system, I saw that Breach was enough to get a foot in the door but it wasn't enough to get me through it entirely. Busting through the ICE was too time-consuming, but what I could do was trick the subnet into giving me the dying man's access to it. Ripping through his safety measures was easy enough and with his access, I could use Ping to see what was connected to the subnet.

My optics marked what was and what wasn’t. I didn’t have admin access, so I couldn’t freely manipulate my surroundings, but I could with minimal effort. More importantly, it gave me access to information -- the layout of the building, and where Justin would be. Based on a quick scroll of information… the building had a basement.

My gaze slid to the elevator that I triggered before heading down the stairs. A door slid open for me and I was greeted by the stench of… decay, if I had to put a word to it. While Becca was running around the building, dropping everything and anyone with a pulse, I slowly made my way down the stairs. I noticed that David moved near soundlessly behind me while I did.

From the basement, I heard sounds of panic. “Who the fuck spilled?” I heard someone shout as Breach managed to dig a bit deeper into the building's ICE. A security system. A window appeared in the corner of my eye of a live feed from a camera -- first, it showed Becca firing a shotgun that didn't just tear through a man, but also the wall behind him, the room behind the wall, and then the wall behind that room. I could hear her laughing from where I stood. Cycling through the feed, I caught a view of the basement even before I reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Don’t know, don’t matter. Snag what you can and we’ll bolt. Set up shop somewhere else,” I heard someone else say, and through the camera feed, I used Ping. Justin Sanatago, and two others. They were frantically loading up bags with materials, only one of them keeping an eye on the stairs. That was until the elevator reached the basement with a loud ding.

“Light her up!” Justin shouted, grabbing a shotgun and unloading a shell into the elevator doors before they opened. Crouching down, as the basement became filled with the sound of gunfire, I lined up a shot with my pistol using the camera to see where the three men stood. When all three of them focused on the elevator that was getting ripped to shred, I poked my head out. My motions were practiced and sharp, lining up the shots and with no hesitation, I pulled the trigger.

The pistol jumped in my hands, snapping back from the recoil. The first dropped to a bullet to the side of the head, but they took that as Becca shooting back within the elevator. The second dropped without any fuss, but the chorus of gunfire ceased when what was left of the elevator doors slid open. Justin looked at the shot-up elevator with wide eyes, “What the-”

I pulled the trigger for the third time and dropped him where he stood.

“Clean,” David remarked. I stepped out from my cover and for the first time, I took the basement in. A wide room rather than tall, but the walls were covered in equipment. And bodies. Several laid on tables, naked with their heads shaved, cut open with bits of tech half extracted from them. Men and women. Some were in body bags, stacked up on the racks along the walls.

My stomach clenched as I realized the smell was coming from the corpses. “What was happening here?” I asked David while we heard a final shotgun blase coming from upstairs.

“Scavs,” David answered, crossing his arms. He mentioned them before. “They take people off of the street, hack them up for their implants, then resell them to whoever’s willing to buy. Usually to back alley rippers like Doc.”

My lips thinned as I looked around me, my gaze lingering on the face of a guy on a table, his eyes glazed over and unseeing. He almost looked like R. “Why?” I stressed, looking away from the corpse that was hollowed out with its skull ripped open.

“Money,” David answered, a sad note in his voice. “Some of ‘em just need the eddies and reselling one good implant could set them up for years. Can’t really judge anyone for that. Others just don’t give a shit about other people and couldn’t care who they snuff so long as there's a payday at the end of it.”

“Which were they?” I asked, feeling as if I already suspected the answer.

However, David shrugged. “Don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. We got a job and we did the job -- the why in this biz only matters if it impacts the gig. In this case? Justin seduced the daughter of a corpo, convinced her to get chromed up, then murdered her. Did it all for a bigger paycheck. And the only reason you need the deets is to know that the mother will follow through on payment. May pay extra if she knows the target and his chooms got flatlined in a brutal way.”

I was silent for a moment, the sound of Becca descending the stairs. I could feel David’s gaze on me, measuring and weighted. “Is that actually true?” I asked David, looking at him and I saw him offer a waned smile.

“It's not. Had Kiwi dig a step deeper. Justin did date the commissioner's daughter, but they broke up six months ago. The daughter got a taste for high-end chrome all the same, and that would make her a target for Maelstorm. The corpo can’t buy that her daughter was picked up by another group of scavs without it being because of Justin either doing it himself, or ordering it done. And, from all we know, that could be the case. Might not be, though. So, she ordered the hit on Justin thinking that he killed her daughter,” David explained, his voice decidedly even.

You never had all the details, huh? So, I killed an innocent man? Well, maybe not innocent. It was hard to think that standing in this room. He was like the doctors that carved us up, only instead of shoving shit in us, they were taking everything out. But I didn't kill him for something that he actually did. And that…

“Doesn’t matter,” I decided. I had my reason -- to get everyone out of the orphanage. That was reason enough to kill anyone as far as I was concerned. If there were additional reasons, then those were just extra.

“Heh,” Becca chuckled, looking thoroughly satisfied with herself. “There's the attitude! Come on, let's go get paid!”

Money. “These guns and implants… they’re worth something, right?” I asked, picking up a shotgun with a hand and giving it a look over. Through the surveillance camera, I saw Becca and David share a look.

“Gonna be a loot goblin, huh? Fair ‘nough. But, if you’re gonna start shovin’ bodies in my trunk, then think again. You’ll need your own set of wheels to start hauling bodies to chop shops,” Becca answered, offering a dismissive shrug before she started heading up the stairs. The idea of it made my stomach clench, picking up another pistol.

But I had left them all behind. And I would be damned before I did anything less than everything that I could to get them out.

…

Regina Jones was a stern-looking woman. Dark hair pulled back, and one of her eyes was covered in a black patch. Something that stood out given that she could get an optic easily enough. Even a lower-end model would be better than no eyesight at all. However, when I tried to Ping off of her systems when we entered a highly secure room somewhere in the city, I got nothing from her.

She didn’t have any implants at all.

“Not often we do this in person, David. Becca,” Regina remarked, her lone eye sliding to me. “Could’a just flicked you the scratch like normal. I’m guessing he’s the special occasion?”

“Something like that,” David responded, gesturing to me. “I know you like to do things face to face with the talent when you can afford it. Thought I should introduce you two -- this is L.” He introduced me, making Regina cock an eyebrow at me.

“L seems to be on the young side,” Regina remarked, speaking about me like I wasn’t here. My eyes narrowed at her before I spoke up, determined to not be ignored.

“I turn sixteen in four weeks,” I stated, crossing my arms. With how things were going in the orphanage, only me and M would have made it across the threshold to enter bracket sixteen. I wasn’t a lower bracket looking to hang off of the older kids. It was more than a little annoying when Regina looked at David as if I had somehow proven her point.

It got even more annoying when David looked far too amused for his own good, “He’s not that young.” David responded, and I saw that Regina heard the unspoken message in his words. “Feel free to give ‘em a few dry runs. You’ll see that he does good work.”

“I’ll take your word for it, David. Since it's you,” Regina decided, giving me a lingering glance before she walked behind her desk, opened a drawer before she took out a stack of paper. “Standard rate for a Gun for Hire. Plus a little extra from our client for a job well done.” Becca skipped forward and held out a hand expectantly, making Regina chuckle when she dropped the bundle of bills.

Becca split off a few bills before she passed them to me, about half of the stack in total. “Here ya’ go. Half for me and half for you,” she decided and I inspected the bills for a moment. Based on the number, I had about five hundred eddies. And that made it click in place, more than anything else. It was a simple job, really. I just pulled the trigger a couple of times.

It put in perspective how far away I was from a million eddies.

The job put in perspective that I didn’t need a million eddies exactly. I could steal the immune boosters, for example. Or ask Regina to find someone to steal them for me. There were options that David hadn’t laid out for me, likely expecting me to come up with them myself. I killed three men and I wasn’t even close to being where I needed to be.

“Do you have anything else that I can do?” I asked Regina, catching her by surprise. Her gaze flickered to David, who offered a shrug. He wasn’t my handler. He was helping me but he didn’t speak for me. “I don’t care what. So long that it pays.”

“Huh. Maybe you are older than you look because that sounded like a real grizzled merc line right there,” Regina noted. “It’s Night City. There’s always something that needs to be done. Got any preferences?”

“None.”

Regina chuckled, “Alrighty, L. Let's see what you’re made of. Got a thievery gig for you to dip your feet in…”

…

Time was something that was subjective. For most of my life, I was completely ignorant of its passage except for a single day that marked that I had entered a higher bracket. Then I gained my ability, and I realized that time could be measured by the charges. And it was when I left the orphanage, I learned that time could be measured in seconds. Milliseconds, even. It was because of that, I knew I spent the next five hours working gigs with Becca and David.

The first was to steal a car out of a garage guarded by people called the Tyger Claws. All the while, David talked about them -- both the car and the Tyger Claws. The car was a Quadra Type-66 "Jen Rowley" and how to be cautious of the Tyger Claws. They were something called a gang that specialized in two things -- smart weapons and blades.

I knew about smart weapons already. Each bullet contained a gyroscope that allowed midair maneuverability that would lock on a target connected to an implant in the user. There were only two ways to deal with them -- one way was to have an implant that prevented smart guns from locking onto you. The other was to have enough body armor or subdermal armor that it didn’t matter.

For that reason, we never bothered getting close. I slipped into a backdoor to the subnet, granting me access to the garage systems, and gave myself authorization to drive the car. I didn’t even need to get in it. I just turned it on, opened the garage, and engaged the auto-pilot to send it to the pick up destination. The Tyger Claws tried to give chase, but I encrypted the cyberkeys to their own vehicles. And that was that.

The job landed me another thousand eddies and as soon as they cleared into my account, I was looking for another gig. This one was to plant evidence of an affair between a couple that was getting a divorce. Becca just laughed at all my questions about the entire thing -- especially about the photos that we were meant to upload into the wife’s computer -- but the job got done and I gained another thousand eddies.

Our fourth gig involved combat. It wasn’t a Gun for Hire, but it was an extraction. Some people took someone. Kidnapped them. And we killed them to get the guy out. That job paid a little better -- a thousand and five hundred eddies, but I split the money with Becca like she did with me. Her trunk was loaded up with guns that I was going to try to find a way to sell.

Five hours later, I possessed three thousand and two hundred eddies gathered over four jobs. Some additional sources of income were coming -- selling the guns, and some eddies that were scattered about on site. However, Becca called something called ‘dibs’ on them, and it would go against some code if I took them anyway.

“Not bad! I think you impressed Regina with your work ethic,” Becca remarked, draped over the couch in David’s ‘living room.’ Not sure why it was called that, and no one could give me a straight answer. Lucy had pulled David away, leaving me and Becca alone. “Called you a go getter. Gonna go again tomorrow?”

I nodded, a laptop resting on my lap. Becca stole it for me. After purging it, I was able to bring it up to start coding. The gigs showed me that Breach was… good enough. Not great, but good enough. Ping was simple enough and it did its job. However, both could be improved and the jobs showed me that I needed more tools in my belt. Sorting through information that I gained couldn’t be done manually, not on a job.

The beginnings of a program to flag important texts, blueprints, and details that I stumbled across was being built. All the while ideas kicked around in the back of my head because of Coding. Regina proved that not everyone in this city was chromed up, so I couldn’t entirely rely on netrunning to win fights for me, but enough of them were that I felt like it was a good idea to invest into it.

“I am,” I decided, frowning at the computer screen while my fingers drew up code. My gaze flickered to the room that David and Lucy were in. The action didn’t go unnoticed by Becca.

“Hm. Lookin’ to be independent. Not bad for a baby lamb,” Becca remarked, sounding like she approved. “Course, you’d get picked up and your brain fried within the hour by fallin’ for some con.” Another thing that I learned about the city. Lying.

“Is money the only thing that matters?” I asked Becca, seemingly catching her off guard with the rather direct question. “I get why it does matter. But… back in the orphanage, we lied to each other, sure, but it was to protect the younger kids. Stuff like everything was going to be okay or they wouldn’t die. Or they’ll see their dead friend again. I didn’t know lying could be used to hurt people.” For money.

“Money isn't the only thing that matters, but it makes everything easier,” Becca answered after a moment. “It gives you options. Lets you do what you want to do or buy the tools to do it. In this city, you can’t ever have enough. You have to guard what you got and what you want.”

That was something that was abundantly clear. I brought up a map of Night City to find that it was mindbogglingly huge. My curser lingered on the spot where the crash was reported before it moved up to the building that I had come out of. My search for any official mentioning of the Home for Wayward Boys had come up with nothing. Officially, Night City didn’t have an orphanage by that name, but there were a couple of orphanages throughout the city. All high-end. According to Becca, orphans just ran around in feral gangs like she did.

I didn’t just need tools to complete jobs and provide a future for everyone back in the orphanage. I needed tools to get them out. A plan of approach and extraction. Where we would go and how we would get there.

4 Charges have been spent!

Cyberpunk 2077: Cyberware -- 2 (+1)

Cyberpunk 2077: Netrunning -- 4 (+2)

Prey: Recycling technology -- 1

Ideas bloomed in my head. Money would be the deciding factor in a lot of my ultimate goals, but I could limit how much of it I would need by becoming self sufficient. Instead of buying tools to build a foundation, I could build a tool that would build tools for me. There was so much trash gathered around the city in every dark corner that someone thought would be out of sight. Converting it into base materials, then repurposing those materials would shave off a huge demand. Not to mention that it would open up a number of possibilities.

I could feel the possibilities opening up before me, the way forward suddenly feeling less rigid and certain. However, my focus was stolen away when I realized that things were getting less dark. Looking up from the screen in confusion, I looked at the ceiling to see if someone had switched them on, only to see that they were still off. My brow furrowed and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Becca giving me an odd look. I barely noticed when the door swung open to reveal David and Lucy. My attention was stolen away when I realized where the light was coming from.

My computer near clattered to the floor when I jumped up off the couch, looking straight ahead, through the glass plane that served as the wall. Becca watched me as I stumbled forward, not quite believing what I was seeing. “L, you good?”

I pressed a hand against the cool glass, gazing up to see that the black ceiling had retreated. “Becca-! The ceiling! It’s blue!” I breathed, a wide smile finding its way on my face, barely able to tear my eyes away from it. I never believed it. I thought it was just another rumor. I thought the ceiling was black- wait, did this mean that the giant lightbulb was also real?

Becca recoiled ever so slightly, her jaw dropping and for the briefest of seconds, I saw pity in her eyes. Hers, Davids, and Lucy’s. But she wiped it away to offer a lopsided smirk, “Yeah. The ceiling is blue. Just you wait until you see clouds.”

“What's a cloud?”