Never Fade Away: Fly Me To The Moon (ch. 40) (Patreon)

"Know what listeners? I'm getting mighty tired of folks talking shit about L.

Oh, you worked for Arasaka and now you're out of a job cuz of him? Cry me a goddamn river!

All the Megacorps are their own flavor of parasite, but Arasaka was the king of the leeches. Using and ruining and murdering people for over a century before they picked the wrong victim - L.

L took them down, and he did it for a reason. For him and his. But the world as a whole is a better place for it. You Arasaka grunts - sorry, former Arasaka grunts… at worst, you're monsters who don't deserve any more thought than what it takes to figure out how to cavitate your noggin'. At best, you just never gave a damn about all those folk that Arasaka used up and tossed aside as you got on with your life and, fair's fair, that's fine.

Cuz they sure as hell don't give a damn about you. And now it's your turn to get screwed over for the sake of people you don't give a shit about.

Not so easy to ignore from that end though, huh?

…Here's Yvette by Jason Isbell.

~

Music. It was surprisingly soothing, I was discovering, my fingers strumming at the cords. Each chord produced a different note determined by it's thickness and the force it was strung with -- the notes were further changed in pitch by the fretboard. It was different. Very different. Yet, at the same time, it felt familiar to me. In a way, a song was just like putting together a piece of tech -- only instead of nuts and bolts, it was chords and pitches-

"No. Fuck no. Music is something that you feel," Johnny said, sitting across from me, his expression on of supreme annoyance. "Leave that mechanical generated shit to the AIs and the corporate stooges. The worst thing that ever happened to music was when some blowhard realized that they could make a program to pick out every beat and pitch to tickle our lizard brains into liking whatever corpo shit they squeezed out." There was passion in his voice.

I listened to it, half annoyed and half amused. The only times when Johnny wasn't insufferable was when be was talking about music, but that was rapidly dwindling because he had nothing but criticism for me even as he taught. "Getting good at music is just learning how to get the words out. How to get the pitch and beat to match what you hear in your head. So, even if you use your super brain to master how to play, you'll still be spectacularly shit at music."

"Do you have anything useful to say?" I asked him, making Johnny snort.

"I am. You're just not listening. Music is personal, you gonk. If it resonates with other people, then great. You get to be a Rockerboy and get to stand on the big stage with adoring fans flashing their tits at you. But, at the end of the day, it's about you and what you want to say. It's not about the fans or the money, even if they're  nova to have. It's about the message." Johnny continued, and I suppose that wasn't terrible advice. "You're strumming along, but you aren't saying shit. That's why you suck, idiot."

That last part was unnecessary, and based on his shit eating grin, Johnny knew it. I looked down at the guitar in my hands, then around at my base. The decaying walls that were pockmarked with bullet holes, both new and old. My tech scattered about with thick wires running across the ground in an almost chaotic web. A song in my heart, as he liked to call it? I'm not sure that I had that. It didn't feel like I did.

Something to say? I'm not sure. What was there to say? I'm dying? I've always been dying and it was nothing new. I was going to protect the kids? I got them out, I was protecting them, and I would kill their enemies. I felt like I had already said what I wanted to say. I'm not even sure what Johnny was asking for and the confusion gave rise to doubts. Questions that I never gave any attention to in favor of focusing on the task at hand -- protecting the people I cared about.

"When I got the highlight reel of your life, I saw your exit from the Orphanage. Me? I hate Night City. Always have, always will, but as much as I hate it, I love it just as much. I felt what you did when you saw it for the first time. Try that," Johnny coached, the gruffness in his voice fading ever so slightly. I frowned, reaching back into my memories to when I rode out with the sky car, crashing down into the city. I felt…

Wonder, I suppose. Night City felt like the whole world to me then. Completely mystical and foreign, unlike anything I had ever seen. A sea of lights and color -- more color than I had ever seen before. It had almost been blinding. And, for the briefest of moments, it had managed to make me forget the weight on my shoulders. The lives that depended on me. The cost of my freedom.

How could I possibly put that feeling into a handful of notes?

Night City had been wonderful at first glance from high above, but when I crashed down… I recalled the piles of garbage gathering in every shadow and alley. The basement full of rotting people that were picked clean of their implants. The oppressive forces called Arasaka, Militech, and so many others that dominated this city and everyone within it. Underneath that illustrious shine was rot. Rot and disease and this was no place to raise kids.

I clenched my jaw, strumming a note. Then another. And a few more. Testing each chord to try to convey that feeling -- of glorious freedom and awe, only to crash down into a sea of filth. The notes went high, then they went low. And it… sounded bad. I could hear it. Some of my favorite days back in the Orphanage was when we just had to listen to samples of music, and the only joy it brought me was because I wouldn't be undergoing another invasive surgery that would either kill me or someone I cared about. I knew what good music sounded like. The squealing of the guitar in my hands was quite the opposite.

All the same, Johnny gave a roguish grin, "That's it. Now you're saying something," Johnny said, leaning back in his seat as he manifested a guitar. Then he played.

It was exactly the tune that I had been trying to play. Only much, much, much better. The notes started out high before dropping into a heavy low rift that sounded… well… good.

My lips thinned, looking down at the guitar. I could feel the charges on my brain. There were a lot. More than I ever had at one time. And I could feel them pressing against my brain like a damn that was about to burst. I couldn't control when I used a charge, but I did have some degree of ability to stop myself from using one. It was tempting, I would admit. And annoying. With a few charges, I could play like Johnny -- I could know the tabs, the beat, and whatever else went into playing music.

The only thing stopping me really was the fact that I would be taking a few steps closer to death for the sake of an unimportant skill. It wouldn't help me in any way. It wouldn't advance my technology, it wouldn't improve my position… honestly, even strumming along seemed like a pointless endeavor when there were more pressing issues at hand. Chasing down potential leads on where Arasaka was hiding. Gearing up to topple Militech, maybe. Or finally sweep up the gangs in Night City now that I didn't have to deal with Arasaka anymore.

I should think it nothing more than a simple restriction, but it was surprisingly enjoyable. I'm just not entirely sure I was enjoying it because I was the one that liked to play the guitar.

I began to try to copy what Johnny did, only to get an alert from Kaiden asking for some information. A woman in Biotech's corporate structure. I sent it over with a thought, but in that moment, the spell had been broken and I set the guitar to the side. And ignored Johnny's remark, "Quitting already?"

"I don't have days to waste away," I told him, turning towards my desk. A glance at the latest GN Drive filled me with frustration, so I pushed it out of my thoughts. I had all the tools that I needed to get the result that I wanted, I just had to put them together in the right way. In my frustration, I could end up spending charges unnecessarily. Especially when the damn metaphor was proving surprisingly accurate.

I could feel the charges pressing against my will to not spend them, the pressure building until I knew they would leap at the chance to be used on anything. It was a new sensation for me.

"As the king of bad ideas, you sure you want to do that?" Johnny asked me, seemingly sensing what I intended. Or he guessed when I started compiling a blank folder for a fresh project. Though, I suppose it would be more accurate to say it was a project that I had been putting off. "Every time you use that thing in your head, it kills you a little faster. And I don't want you dead until you manage to get me out of your head."

My lips thinned as I sorted through the charges in the back of my mind, counting them out. I had seventeen charges in total. A frankly absurd number, if I was being completely honest. A number so absurd that it told me that something had to have changed with my charges because I went from getting one a week, to suddenly having- nineteen. I just felt myself gaining two more as I focused on the charges.

"The relic did something," I realized, catching Johnny's attention. "I'm getting them faster now." The nanites were doing something to the hyper dense neural tissue in my brain -- Vik said that the nanites that flooded my brain from the burnt out relic were attacking the tumors, which was buying me time. Where they also stimulating the source of the charges? Or was it a response to being attacked? I didn't know-

3 charges have been spent!

Fallout: Autodoc -- 3

I hissed as I felt my control slip, blueprints filling my mind as the charges leapt to be used. Damn it. It wasn't awful, but I did regret the slip in control even if it did mean some of the pressure had been alleviated. Instead of lamenting the lost charges, I focused on what I gained.

An interesting piece of technology. A full scale medical instrument that could perform everything from minor checkups to full on invasive surgeries. All it required was information about the patient and how to perform the procedure. "Oh," I muttered, realizing that I might have just made ripperdocs redundant. I felt a little guilty about that, mostly because of Vic. He had been good to me and it didn't seem right that I might have accidentally ended his career. I think that the autodoc might be something best kept to myself.

All the same, I created a new folder that housed the project and started drawing the designs that I saw in my head onto the screen. A cylinder with a table to lay on that would shift back, holding the patient in place while the area around the patient was covered in surgical instruments. In theory, it was a one size fits all when it came to medical procedures. Including brain surgery. Did I just trick my power into giving me something that could save my life?

I tried to ignore it, but I felt a rush of optimism at the idea, eagerly manifesting the designs as I heard Johnny entertaining himself with a song for a time before asking, "Am I helping you or killing you?" He asked me, nearly breaking my concentration.

Looking back at him, I saw he wore a slight frown. I… think he had been chewing on the remark since I realized it. "Both," I told him with a shrug, turning my attention back to the screen. "The nanites are attacking the tumors that I already have, but I develop chargers faster now. A lot faster. So, I suppose it's a question of how many I use against how fast the nanites can attack."

"And you don't think spreading the love around won't have an impact on that whole me stealing your meat suit thing?" Johnny questioned, and that was admittedly a concern. The more tumors I possessed, the more spread out they were, I imagined there would be some level of effect with Johnny's mind overwriting mine.

I shrugged, "Probably?" So long as I took care of the problem before it became a serious problem, then it should be fine. In theory. I could feel Johnny's stare burning a hole in the back of my head, practically radiating annoyance. "The charges make all of this possible. I need them," I explained, my hands moving as the design took shape on the screen. The words were a vast understatement when it came right down to it.

Without the charges, I stood no chance. They were what let me beat Arasaka. They let me free everyone. They were what let me survive after I escaped. They were the reason I escaped the Orphanage in the first place. Everything that I had accomplished, I owed to the charges and my will to use them.

Instead of harping on me about it, Johnny just sighed dramatically. I was glad for it because it allowed me to focus on the design, filling in the details and exact measurements. If I did it freehand, I imagined that the process would take me hours, but by jacking into the computer, the software read my intent and filled data into the design. A simple bit of art designer software. Thanks to it, barely an hour later, I was printing off the design in my fabricator, only to find a red alert when I tried.

It wasn't exactly a surprise, "I have been burning through materials," I admitted. My cyberdeck had a skyscraper's worth of material and it had to come from somewhere. It was annoying, just not surprising, I decided, pushing my chair back and jacking out of the computer. I grabbed David's jacket and grabbed some of my 'harvester' grenades. Shoving them in my pocket, I locked up behind me and headed to the street where Johnny popped up.

"Stretch your legs a little. I want to see the sights," Johnny requested just as I was about to call a car. I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the request, but I obliged all the same and started walking. Johnny walked next to me, and I felt an echo of his disappointment. "What a shit show," he remarked as we passed a back alley that was crawling with homeless people and trash. An advert of me with a pair of devil horns and a tail flashed over them.

He sounded sorry for them, but I just shrugged my shoulders. That got me an even look, "You genuinely don't give a shit about them, huh?"

The answer was simple. "About as much as they give a shit about me," I replied. Which, was to say, not at all. "My family is my concern, just like their family is their concern. I'll take care of mine and they'll take care of theirs, but I don't expect them to take care of mine. And they shouldn't expect me to take care of theirs." I had a finite number of people that I cared about in this world and some stranger out on the streets wasn't one of them. It sucked that they were in the position that they were in.

It did. It really did.

It just wasn't my problem.

"You aren't wrong there," Johnny acquiesced. He knew it too. Even if word had gotten out about what the megacorporations were doing to us in the Orphanage, none of them would have raised a helping hand. Not a single one. I knew it, Johnny knew it, and if they were being honest with themselves, they knew it too. "Wait, hold up -- head down that alley. There's someplace I wanna check out," Johnny said, pointing in a direction. It was an unnecessary detour, but I was already walking instead of driving so I might as well.

The back alley opened up to a small court and a set of stairs that led to an elevated walkway. A handful of gang members were loitering, seemingly having a cookout based on the smell, and took little notice of me. Johnny blinked ahead to an old looking sign above some stairs that led to the basement, an expression of annoyance on his face. I stopped next to him, reading the sign, "Ace n' Spades?"

"Used to be called Hachi's Hibachi, an old restaurant run by a Japanese couple. Knew 'em from the war," Johnny said, blinking forward to lean against a door. "They were good people. Too good for Night City. Back when Samurai were a bunch of broke jokes, they made sure we were fed. Head on in. I wanna see who ran them out," Johnny said, a growl in his voice. Based on how old the sign looked, I'm not sure what he was looking for there.

I obliged, knowing that it meant something to him. I was greeted by the smell of mold and dim light with a cashier in the middle of a BD based on the wreath on his head. Looking around, I saw a lot of sunglasses, handguns, body armor, and a few odds and ends. I didn't think the store saw a lot of traffic since a number of items were covered in a fine layer of dust. Johnny cursed as soon as he saw it, immediately displeased.

I took a moment to pull up the building's specs and history, my attention drawn to the sunglasses. A pointless accessory when it came down to it, especially when I already had dazzle shields for my optics. All the same, I walked over to them -- they had a lot of aviators in a lot of different colors. The information was pulled up while Johnny looked for any trace of the restaurant, "The restaurant got condemned after the nuke went off. It was out of the blast radius, but there was a lot of racial tension in the aftermath. The couple that owned it forclosed, and I don't know what happened to them after that."

Johnny's shoulders hunched at the news, realizing that he had a hand to play in why they were gone. "Didn't mean for that to happen," Johnny reflected, a cigarette appearing in his hands. He glanced my way, "See something that you like?" He asked in a bid to change the subject. I let him.

My gaze lingered on a pair of aviators. I didn't need them. I wanted them, though. I caught a hint of my reflection in the cold blue lenses and before I could think better of it, I grabbed them and slid them on. A perfect fit. I flicked some eddies at the cashier, who didn't even seem to notice. Everything was colored blue before my optics adjusted, and when I caught my reflection in a mirror…

It was a pointless thing, but I liked how it looked.

Leaving the cashier none the wiser, I stepped out of the store to find the gangsters were suddenly paying a lot more attention to me. Their iron was on clear display, a warning. A lot like a dog bearing its teeth to prevent a fight… that metaphor probably came from Johnny seeing as I didn't know what a dog was. My gaze lingered on them, idly considering to start following through with my threats here and now, but it was Johnny that spoke up. "No point. Bottom feeders trying to have a good time and they're pissing themselves that you might start something."

Now that he mentioned, they did seem scared. That shouldn't mean anything to me. I've killed plenty of people that were scared to die, and it never stopped me from pulling the trigger. All the same, I turned away while the hoverboard hooked into my spine unfurled and hopped on it. I heard them cursing the moment I took to the air, realizing that I was the real me instead of some poser. I didn't see Johnny, but I heard his voice bouncing around my skull as I sailed to where I harvested materials. "You did good."

"I'm going to have to kill them eventually," I argued, heading straight for the dump outside of Night City. Even as I approached, I saw the mountains of trash were ever so slightly diminished already. It wouldn't be a problem for some time, but eventually, at the rate I was going, Night City would run out of trash.

"L, if you try to kill every piece of scum in the world, you're better off blowing up the planet," Johnny replied, and I heard disgust in his voice when the ripe scent of putrid garbage hit his senses after they assaulted my own. "Fuck me. This dump was here back in my day, and it's gotten way bigger." He observed as I sailed above the mountains of garbage and began dropping my recycler chargers -- only these were a far cry from the ones I had been using previously.

Making multiple trips was too dangerous, so it was safer to build bigger recycler charges to get a bigger haul in one trip. As I emptied out my pockets, I saw dozens, hundreds even, of plastic bags that were being sucked into the singularity. The shattered remains of cars, tech, weapons, and even disposed bodies were all pulled in and spat out in base components. Thanks to the added size, the cubes that were spat out were a lot bigger so when the singularity collapsed, they just fell in place.

Leaving me with tons of iron, copper, nickel, gold, silver, platinum, and so on and so on. Not to mention the plastics and biological material. Everything that I needed to work on my next batch of projects, which included a spaceship. As I had promised David.

And, almost as if summoned, I got a call from an unknown number that I didn't recognize. That traced to the moon. I didn't waste a second to answer it, "David?"

"Lucy," Lucy corrected, a smile in her voice. "Glad to hear you're up. And very annoyed that you forgot to send a text our way that you were," Lucy informed, making me wince ever so slightly. That was deserved. And it was good to hear her voice again -- I missed her and David, even if I was too busy to show it.

"Sorry," I returned lamely, not sure what else to say.

"It's fine. Just don't forget again," she scolded lightly, and I knew I would get yelled at if I did forget again. "Things seem to be going well on your end," Lucy remarked, making my brow furrow as I descended to the cubes before I started to shrink them down with PYM particles so I could fit them in my pockets. "You beat Arasaka."

"I have them on the ropes, and they fled the ring," I corrected, earning an acknowledging hum from Lucy. If anyone would understand that, then it was Lucy. We had both been owned by Arasaka.

"So I've heard. Arasaka's facilities on the moon went quiet, and I did some poking around -- they're empty," Lucy informed, making me frown. "But the rest of the moon is on high alert. Almost like they expect you to fly up here," she remarked.

"I've never left Night City," I felt compelled to point out. It seemed a little odd that they expected me to fly to the moon of all places.

"I've scanned their orders -- they don't know what they're preparing for, but they're gearing up for war it seems. I'll keep digging to see what I find," Lucy said, and my lips thinned. Why were they preparing for an attack on the moon? Did they think one of the mega corporations, or maybe a nation, would try to claim it? Most major megacorporations had a presence on the Moon, but fighting an actual battle on it?

It felt weird. Like we were missing a piece of a puzzle.

"Let me know what you find," I requested, feeling something in my gut.

To that, Lucy paused for a moment. "I did find something when I was digging around. A ticket."

I had no reason to jump to the conclusion that I did, but I jumped to it all the same. "Kiwi," I voiced, a hard edge entering my tone.

Lucy sighed in response, "I know where she is. She's hiding out in Atlanta until she comes up to settle on the moon."

Well… it seemed like a trip to the NUSA was in order.