Life's Not a Fairy Tale (No Matter How Much I Want It To Be) Ch.5 (Patreon)

The next week or so was spent in relative mundanity as I settled into my new life in Night City. I quickly settled into the rhythm required of a paramedic in large parts thanks to my Talents, Defenses, and previous experience in soul-crushing, service industry jobs. Surprisingly, my previous job experience was what played the biggest role in my adjustment. After working a 14-hour shift at a fast food place, anything seemed possible. Hell, since I didn’t have to deal with Karen customers and was even making a difference as an EMT, it was almost easy to make myself go to work.

Of course, Gloria also had something to do with that. She was a pleasure to work with and we’d gotten much closer over the time we’d worked together. My respect for her had grown so much that it was second only to my respect for my late mother. It was hard not to look up to someone who worked so hard for the sake of others. Gloria reminded me of mom in so many ways and still differed in so many others.

No matter how tired she was from work, Gloria visibly brightened when she was able to come home to David. Her will was constantly beaten down by this wretched city and the reality of being a single mother in this cyberpunk future, but she never broke. She would never break. I knew that because my mom never broke either. Even when she was just skin and bones on a hospital bed with the prospect of leaving me under a mountain of medical debt, that blinding, warming smile mom saved for me never wavered.

It was an honest shame that the anime didn’t get to show much of Gloria’s character. She was a beautiful person. A subtle force of nature for those she loved. A study of compassion in a world that had forgotten the definition of that word. A flicker of warmth in the darkness and most of all, a mother who was willing to do whatever it took for her son.

It was decided that I’d continue to stay with Gloria and David until my first paycheck came in. I didn’t want to be a freeloader though so I tried my best to contribute something to the household. Junk and mess would be cleaned up when Gloria or David weren’t looking. A couple more Eddies would find their way into their bank account out of nowhere. I did every little thing I could to help them, though I’m sure only Gloria noticed.

I also made sure to put effort into getting along with David. He was still just an angsty, bullied teenager at the moment — only a shadow of the Night City Legend he would become in a parallel timeline — But he was still a good kid. Honestly, I think I liked him more like this than as the cocky, self-destructive edgerunner he would become.

During this past week, I also devoted a good portion of my time to figuring out my current situation. I was a Wage Slave of The Company — the Fae to be exact — and figuring out how I felt about that was a key step to accepting it. And after some soul-searching, I found that it didn’t matter to me as much as I thought it would.

Any moral concerns I had about The Company went mostly out the window. I didn’t have a choice anymore. I was tied to The Company and its business practices whether I agreed with them or not. I did and I didn’t, by the way. It was… complicated. On one hand, slavery wasn’t typically conducive to happy endings. On the other, the slaves and employees of The Company got more chances at happy endings than not. A guarantee of companionship and loyalty, even one enforced by mind control, went a long way to making people happy. It was something of an ‘ends justify the means’ dilemma. I didn’t think The Company was good but I also didn’t think it was necessarily evil. It struck me as more of a lawful neutral entity with all the potential to do good and evil that came with that alignment.

That left my practical and selfish concerns about The Company. I was still beholden to it and the Fae after all. But from what First said, I had hopes that I’d gain more freedom after I paid off my debt. From there, was my situation any different from any other job? I could certainly do worse than stable employment and the multiverse at my fingertips. And from a purely selfish point of view, the opportunities offered by The Company were undeniably attractive.

I even found myself sort of thankful for the Fae. They had appeared before me when I was at my lowest, about to end it all, and offered me a way out. Sure, they’d stolen my name and forced me into service, but even that had silver linings. Serving them, for now, gave me a sense of purpose that I’d been sorely lacking before. And taking my name gave me a chance to start over. A chance to be a different person. A chance to reincorporate the childhood ideals and sincerely innocent virtues I’d long since lost.

I’d just about made peace with my situation. That would undoubtedly change when I had to make my first capture, but I was fine for now. I wasn’t planning on capturing Gloria or David — or even Lucy for that matter. There wasn’t any point. Since I had a loaned stamp, they wouldn’t even be bound to me, but to some anonymous Fae in The Company instead. I didn’t trust that they wouldn’t just be sold the moment the binding solidified. And that would kind of ruin the ‘happy ending’ part of my mission from First. Plus captures didn’t earn me any points due to my Wage Slave status.

With captures basically not mattering for this world, I wasn’t really planning on capturing anyone. My Patrons probably wouldn’t appreciate that little flex of rebellion from me, but I wasn’t completely bucking their mission. I still planned on collecting a metric fuckton of tech and augments and other goodies. I was doing my best to work out how to capture a concept for them as well, but that was slow going. Cyberpunk wasn’t a magic world where embodied concepts were a common sight. The most progress I’d made on that plan was setting my goal to somehow capture the concept of ‘the Edge’ that was so popular in this world.

But, once again, Cyberpunk wasn’t a magical setting. And I hadn’t chosen the Aethermorph Transhuman option. So the bottleneck for that plan was figuring out how to capture a concept. There was no doubt in my mind that the loaned stamp would work, but it still needed to be physically applied to something like an avatar of the concept to start the capture process. So I figured I’d go with the next best thing to magic in this setting: the net.

The net in Cyberpunk is almost unique in its cliches. It was the virtual space that connected everything and anything that wasn’t organic. Everything from simple wifi routers to corporate bank accounts could be found somewhere on the net. Even the individual gears of a door’s mechanism had their place. The net was a 90’s nerd’s wet dream of what the internet would one day become.

To netrunners, the net was akin to a great sea of data. You needed the proper equipment and preparation if you wanted to survive. If keyboards and normal computer terminals were like boats that allowed someone to sail across the service of this data ocean, then cyberdecks were like submarines that allowed netrunners to dive deep. The best netrunners swam through the net like they were born to it.

The ocean metaphor kind of fell apart when you got to the net’s interface. The way a netrunner saw the net used to be fully customizable and unique to each person. People eventually decided that having so much variety for someone’s perception of the net was too confusing. So the net was standardized by the introduction of IG Transformation Algorithms.

IG Transformation Algorithms were responsible for Cyberpunk’s net looking so damn cliche. They were honestly a much-needed improvement though. Before IG Transformation Algorithms, one netrunner could see a connection as a series of wires and another would see a busy highway. It made communication and understanding of each other unnecessarily complex. IG Transformation Algorithms changed that by governing how the net looked in real-time. They made the net an analog of real space, including the distance between things so netrunners could extrapolate real-world distance, and made it look like the cliche sci-fi-hacker virtual world that it was today.

And since magic didn’t exist, the net was my only chance at capturing a concept. It was a world of pure data after all. If anywhere in this world could host a concept, it would be the net. I just had to get good enough, dive deep enough, to find one. Getting my hands on some rogue AIs wouldn’t hurt either.

And as it turns out, riding around the city in an ambulance is a great way to train a budding netrunner. Especially one with my advantages. I could easily jack into any port or device remotely on the move. Every minute of my shift, I was getting opportunity after opportunity to train my skills with my neural augments. Even the limited time I had to connect to devices before I left their vicinity helped train my speed.

I threw myself into netrunning with an enthusiasm I hadn’t had for anything else in years. It was exciting. The first real creative expression of my new power and a reminder that a whole new world was at my fingertips. Sure, killing the junkie had been an expression of my newly modified form, but after the adrenaline faded, it was just violence. Netrunning was something else. It was exploration and enchantment. It was developing new skills and changing the way I looked at the world. It was information and intrigue in a way that made me feel like a hacker in a movie.

And so I just kept diving deeper. Almost every waking moment was spent at least partially jacked into the net. I found backdoors and long-forgotten data caches. I watched careless corpos and edgerunners as they interacted with the city’s Edge. I even fulfilled a few harmless requests for information anonymously, just to test my growing abilities. Nothing was off limits for my insatiable curiosity.

Dirty and dangerous secrets eventually took a back seat to data about the culture of Night City and the wider Cyberpunk world. It was mostly just background information that anyone native to this reality would have known. I dug through records of the Corporate Wars and the Time of the Red. I experienced the varied slang firsthand. I listened to the music of the Rockerboy movement and the rumors of things lurking beyond the Blackwall. I even jacked into the cop channels, mostly just to keep an ear out for a certain event that should be happening any day now.

I heard every report of Cyberpsychosis, waiting for the Cyberpsycho who would kick off the anime’s timeline. As the week went on, I started growing more and more dead to the frequency of the phenomenon. Seriously, there were multiple reports of Cyberpsychosis per day in this city. Most of them were low-level members of Booster gangs who were put down with relative ease, but it was still scarily common. I couldn’t fathom how anyone felt safe here, but I knew the real answer was they didn’t.

‘Just another symptom of the Cyberpunk future,’ I thought with a sigh.

I turned my attention away from the net to the road, making sure to still maintain a connection in the background. Gloria was driving at the moment and we were currently in that odd limbo between calls. It wasn’t worth going back to the depot when we knew we’d be called somewhere else any minute now. So we were just kind of patroling until another call came over the radio.

“Thanks for upgrading David’s school wreath, chico,” Gloria said abruptly, breaking the silence.

I tried to casually wave off her thanks, “Don’t worry about it. It’s the least I could do.”

“No, really, chico… I don’t know if we would’ve been able to afford to update it the legal way… And I know you don’t like that school. So again, thank you…”

“You’re giving me a place to stay,” I rubbed the back of my neck sheepishly. “You’re the reason I’m not homeless right now. I’ve got to pay you back somehow.”

“You already have paid us back. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the money in my account going up. I don’t know where you’re getting those Eddies, chico, but be careful.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Must be a glitch in the system…”

Gloria sighed, “It’s times like these that I remember how young you are.”

I went to protest but was interrupted by the radio before I could speak, “Rig 14. Come in, over.”

I sighed and picked up the handheld, “Rig 14 copies, over.”

“Medical assistance required at Corpo Plaza. Do not respond yet. Wait for MaxTac to take out the psycho. Will contact you when the scene is clear. Bring bodybags, over.”

“Copy. We’ll be on call and ready to roll on your signal, Dispatch. Rig 14, out.”

I put down the handheld and immediately dove back into the net. This was it. The beginning of the anime and David’s story. If everything went according to canon, Gloria and I would be called in for cleanup. Gloria would then end up swiping the Sandevistan from the Cyberpsycho’s corpse. I’d already decided to confront Gloria and help her move the Sandevistan, but after that, I still needed to figure out a way to introduce David to Lucy. I’d been walking the delicate line of changing enough to avert Gloria’s death while not changing the potential paths David could take to meet Lucy except the canon one. It was almost time to throw that balance away.

We waited patiently for the follow-up call. I kept myself up-to-date on the situation during that wait. According to the police channels, the Cyberpsycho — identified as Lieutenant Colonel James Norris — already had a body count of 27. MaxTac’s AV had just arrived at the scene though so James Norris should be flatlining soon.

The go-ahead came over the radio and we started making our way to Corpo Plaza. There was honestly no rush. James Norris didn’t leave anyone injured. The cops he initially tangled with were all confirmed dead already. We were just the cleanup crew.

We arrived at the scene of a bloodbath. Blood and gore coated the rain-slicked concrete of Corpo Plaza. Neon-lit corporate headquarters surrounded the plaza like they were trying to keep the violence contained in one place. Almost all the bodies laying around had pieces and parts vaporized before they died. Cops were ripped in half and exploded in equal measure until their insides painted the area like a modern art piece. It was almost as if James Norris had a vendetta against open-casket funerals.

I quickly swallowed my disgust at the sight of the plaza and got to work. It was easily the worst example of violence I’d seen since I started as an EMT but over the week, I had slowly grown numb to the blood, gore, and corpses that this job had to offer. Not even getting a chance to save anyone did bother me though. All we were doing was trying to piece together body parts so we could load them into body bags.

The work was so depressing that I almost didn’t notice Gloria ducking into the back of the rig with the body of James Norris. Luckily though, I caught sight of her backside disappearing into the ambulance and followed her. By the time I quietly slipped in behind her, Gloria had already removed the Sandevistan from James Norris’ body and was in the process of stashing it in her EMT jacket. I knew she did this at least semi-frequently but her speed and efficiency still surprised me.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Gloria jumped, whirling around and hiding the chrome behind her back, “Oh! You scared me, chico… Uhm… I’m not doing anything.”

“Cut the shit, Gloria,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ve already shared some of my dirty secrets with you. Can’t you do me the courtesy of not lying to my face?”

“You’re right, Romeo,” Gloria sighed. “You probably know what you saw anyway… I was just doing a little… scavenging. Someone I know will pay good money for salvaged cyberware like this. I understand if you have to report me now…”

I snorted, “Are you crazy? Like hell, I’m reporting you. You’re just doing what you need to survive. If you don’t take the chrome, it’ll just end up back in the hands of some shady-ass Megacorp. You’ve done more than enough to earn my trust, Gloria. I’ll even help you move this before anyone can find out we took it.”

“Wha-What? Why would you do that?”

“That’s a stupid question. You gave me a place to stay and you’ve been nothing but kind to me. If I’m willing to steal money and slide it into your account, then I’m more than willing to help you swipe chrome from a dead Cyberpsycho.”

Gloria made to protest, but I held a hand up to stop her, “There’s no use debating this. You won’t change my mind.”

After a few moments of internal turmoil, Gloria caved, “Okay, chico… Thank you.”

“Here,” I said, holding out a hand for the Sandevistan. “I can hide it better than you just stuffing it into your jacket. I’ll bring it back out when we get back home and we can figure out what we’re going to do with it.”

It was surprising how quickly I’d come to think about Gloria’s apartment as home as well. Since my mom died, I’d never really felt the safety of a home anywhere I went. Nowhere was permanent and I kind of just drifted from location to location. All that mattered was a warm place to sleep. Gloria and David gave me back the feeling of a warm home that I was missing.

She handed over the cyberware. It meant a lot to me that Gloria almost instantly decided to trust me. The Sandevistan was absorbed into my Cybermorph heritage by my smartmatter in the same way I’d absorbed the machete and revolver from that junkie a week ago. There wasn’t a flash or any other kind of fanfare. The smartmatter of my arm just rippled and sucked in the cyberware. A blueprint settled into the back of my mind, ready to be integrated into my body. The original copy was stored inside the pocket space linked to my smartmatter.

Her hand fell onto mine when the implant disappeared. I gave it a light squeeze that Gloria returned. A sad but grateful smile danced across her lips.

“We should get back to work, chico. These bodies won’t put themselves back together after all.”

I hummed in the affirmative. We spent the next couple of hours putting people back together like some sort of macabre jigsaw puzzle. In the end, we had 27 mostly full bodybags and another extra for James Norris. Reinforcements were called at some point but this wasn’t difficult or urgent work. When all the bodies were loaded up and on their way to a morgue — or in James Norris’ case, Militech — we were clear to go home.

We must have taken longer than in the anime because, by the time we got back to the apartment, David had already left for school. He shouldn’t have any problems with the wreath upgrade though thanks to me. That should then make the following meeting with the principal unnecessary and hopefully eliminate any chances of Gloria dying just yet.

I took the Sandevistan back out and Gloria went to call Maine. I sat back on the couch and let myself unwind. Piecing together bodies was unsurprisingly stressful. I knew we’d have some time to kill before Maine could come to pick up the chrome. I was just about to drift off when I heard the door to the apartment open.

David’s unexpected entrance immediately grabbed my attention. His physical state made me sit up. He looked like shit. Like a bus and then a train had run him over and left him in a dumpster. His face was bruised purple and black. His clothes were torn and stained. His lips were split and swollen. What the fuck happened?!

“Goddamn, man, what happened to you?” I asked as I got up and helped him walk over to the couch.

I wasn’t surprised when he ignored me in favor of sulking. The kid looked like he got his shit kicked in and I already knew he wasn’t one to open up about his problems like that. A quick dive into the net led to me hacking into some of the security cameras around his school. I winced at what I saw there. It seemed that his bullying situation had reached a tipping point earlier than it had in canon. That corpo kid from the anime had apparently decided to escalate his bullying, beating David up and snatching the cyber-wreath I’d upgraded.

“Mijo, what happened?!” Gloria gasped, rushing over to David and cupping his cheeks in her hands.

David flinched at the touch, but still leaned into his mother slightly, “… I quit.”

“Quit? What do you mean, mijo?”

“I quit! I’m never going back to that corpse school again! They don’t want me there. They’ll never want me there…”

“D-Don’t say that, mijo. I worked so hard to get you into that school. I just want what’s best for you.”

“You don’t get it, mom! I’m not some corpo kid. I’m just a gutter rat, another stone for them to step on while they make their way to the top. That place isn’t what’s best for me and it never will be!”

“You think I don’t know that?! We’ll always be looked down on by people like them. So what? You’re smart, baby. You’re so talented. I just know you can make it out.”

“So what?! So I quit while I still can! Before I’m locked into the system more than I already am! Before they flunk me intentionally and make all your hard work pointless! I can’t do this shit anymore! I… I just can’t…”

In an age-old tradition of teenagers everywhere, David then got up and stormed out of the apartment. Gloria moved to follow him but I placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her.

“Let me talk to him. Nothing productive will be said if you’re both still wound up…”