My views about Nightcity have been very clear from my Arasaka days: this city is a cold and cruel monster that will chew and spit us out if we let it do so, and there's nothing that we can do. A lot of people like to think that they are the heroes or protagonists of their own stories, but the truth is that we all are nothing but side characters. People like us… our story is one of many thousands, and this city will not suffer, should it end too soon. The only one who actually matters here is this city of ours, The Nightcity, the main character.
But try as I might, I can't bring myself to hate it. There is this infectiousness that just binds you to this city, no matter what.
When I started at Arasaka, I tried to move somewhere else for a long time, and after a while I actually did manage to move to the UK branch of the company. But it was nothing but a fleeting moment of my life, just a few months, and the need to move back here grew in me like a cancer that I could neither cut out nor ignore; sooner or later, I had to succumb to its call.
Nightcity is a beautiful place; it can be considered a crown jewel that everyone wants for themselves. It doesn't matter who you are—a big corporation, a fucking country, or an entire union of nations. Everyone wants a foothold here.
These thoughts are even louder in my head now that I'm seeing nightcity in the rearview mirror of my car as I'm driving deeper into the Badlands. In the distance the city almost looks like a mythical place, with an almost otherworldly glow, beckoning the outsiders to come closer. Like a siren in a vast ocean.
'You really do have a way with words, don't you?' Johnny said slowly while lounging in the passenger seat beside me.
"Well, I do have a dead lyricist in my head." I said with a small smile.
'I'll be honest, I started the songs, sure, but Kenny and others always had to polish them.' That is something that I can believe; Johnny alone cannot make it alone, at least I don't think so; he needs someone to ground him. His views are too radical; they can be a little too much for the mainstream music culture.
After a few minutes of driving into the silent night, Johnny softly asked, 'You really think it is a good idea to tell Misty anything?'
This is a question that I've been asking myself too, and to be completely honest, I don't think that there's any harm in doing so. "I mean, what's the worst that'll happen? She already believes half of this stuff. This'll just be conforming her… beliefs."
'You do know that the majority of the time people like Misty don't really believe what they are yapping on about?' He asked with an incredulous look on his face.
"Of course, but you and I both know that's not Misty."
'I'm just saying that you'll never know what kind of person you're talking to.' he said with a shrug, before putting his feet on the dashboard.
Contrary to the popular belief, I actually quite like the Badlands; I don't know why people always assume otherwise. Driving like this on a quiet night into the heart of a desert area is an experience that very few people get or understand. I always enjoyed these long drives.
Emphasis on 'I'
It wasn't even five minutes of silence when Johnny groaned loudly, and with an exasperated sigh, asked, 'Anyways, how much longer until we reach there?'
"Just a little further; we just crossed Edward Farms." Just a few more seconds of driving, and I'll reach my destination. Despite how much I enjoy driving in badlands, tonight was all business. Parking the car near the edge of my destination, I turned off the engine and got out of the car. Taking a deep sigh of clean air here… relatively speaking, I stretched my legs and looked around for any kind of security measures I missed last time.
'Didn't you fight a cyberpsycho here?' Johnny asked, distracting me for a quick second. Furrowing my brows, I looked around for a sec and realised that he was right. "I did. They're not here yet, but maybe we'll lock horns again, who knows?"
'Alright, remind me again, what are we doing here again?'
What we are actually doing here is completing a contract. Two days ago I was given a contract by Hands for the identity of the elusive netrunner B@D. This would've been an almost impossible task if it had been taken by anyone else; B@D has always been one step ahead of everyone ever since she started working last year. No one could even get close to her or get a pin on her location or anything.
But having the unfair advantage of being from the future, I know of one place that she used as a safehouse for a while. The bunker near Edward Farms. In LF, by the time I got here, this place was already deserted, and bodies of wraiths were strewn around for everyone to find. Inside the bunker was just one message: the princess is in another castle.
But this time I'm three weeks early, and I know for a fact that she is in there right now.
"If I'm right, and by looking at the drones, I'm pretty sure she's here already. Now all I need to do is drop a small virus into her system, and it'll extract all the information from her network. Almost everything." I said, while quietly making my way towards the exterior of the bunker, where I could see a small sensor peeking out, and hacked it. I didn't disable it; that would raise a huge red flag. Instead, I entered myself into the system as an approved entity and entered into its field of view. Once there, I crouched next to the sensor, took out my personal port, jacked into it, and started the upload.
'You're very confident.' Johnny whispered from behind me; turning my head, I saw that he was crouching right behind me.
"Well, considering the fact that this virus hasn't been invented yet, yeah, I'm pretty fucking confident." I said, rolling my eyes. After a few seconds of silence, I turned towards him and saw a curious expression on his face. "This particular virus was… or will be made by Netwatch in three more years. They made it especially to combat a very, very skilled netrunner. She was a rogue EEC agent; she almost destroyed the entire KGB in just two days, but the devastation she left in its wake was truly a sight to behold; the European net was in tatters by the time the Soviets stopped her."
Slowly nodding his head, he asked, 'How does Netwatch come into the picture?'
"They were the ones who uncovered her identity and then turned it over to the EU, and then the Soviets dealt with her." Just as I finished the sentence, information from the bunker started flying towards me in full force; there was quite a lot of it.
"This was the virus that they used to uncover her; it basically brute forces its way through firewalls and then discreetly copies everything, but instead of demolishing everything in its way like a speeding bullet, this penetrates everything like a supersonic pin just piercing its way through everything." There was no specific document that would tell me the identity of B@D; for all intents and purposes, B@D is her real name now. But there were a lot of journal logs here, starting from somewhere around 2072, and the latest entry was at the beginning of this year. I thought for a second before I started copying the entire journal.
'But won't the system recognise that the firewalls are getting damaged?'
"The intrusion is so fast that before the defensive programs can even detect something, the program is moved far past it, leaving the wall completely intact. The only problem is that you have to install the virus physically, in person. And then you have to wait until the virus returns back to the port it was inserted from; otherwise, you won't get the data, and the virus will be lost."
Nodding and looking mildly impressed, he rhetorically asked, 'How did you get your hands on it?'
"I told you that I worked for Netwatch for a while, right?"
'Right,' he uttered, shaking his head in disappointment, 'I leave, and you go right back to being a corpo cunt.'
Okay, I get where he was coming from, but, "To be fair among all of the heavy hitters, Netwatch is the best choice. Sure, they are just as corrupt, if not more, but when it comes to the security of the world from rogue AIs and other problems that might compromise the safety of the world through the net, they don't fuck around. They do exactly what their directive says they are supposed to do. Sure, along the way they do a lot of bad things, but usually it is for the right reason."
Smirking, I quietly added, "A lot like you, Johnny."
Hearing the last part, he jumped up and exclaimed, 'The fuck did you say, V?!'
"You do remember nuking a fucking tower in a heavily populated area to achieve your goals, right?"
'That was different!' he said in a petulant way. Shaking my head in amusement, I just said, "It was… but a connection can be made…" before turning back towards the sensor. The transfer was complete. Now all I needed to do was purge myself from the system and plug in the small holes the virus made in her defenses. These holes were so small that if you're not sure what you're looking for, then you'll miss them, but if some expert runner tried their hands here, then there's a very good chance that they'd find and exploit them. So I repaired them and also left a small monitoring program of my own in there so that I can keep an eye out.
"There, done!" I exclaimed once it was done, and then I immediately pulled out my jack and got up.
'Then let's delta the fuck out of here.' Johnny said before disappearing from my view. To avoid getting spotted by any camera, sensor, or drone, I moved slowly while crouched down. As soon as I reached my car, I got into it and gunned it.
Reaching a safe distance, I checked my surroundings and my system to see if I had any problems, but it looks like I'm in the clear.
Sighing in relief, I put my car on auto drive, or more like cruise control, with a directive to follow the road at a slow speed, and began reading the journal and all the other information I got from the hack.
The images I got from the bunker showed a small, slender-built woman in her early 20s, with white hair with a purple tint and red accents in it; it was styled in a sort of wolf cut. Due to the darkness of the bunker, I couldn't properly see her face, but an older photo shows that she has purple eyes.
'So what's her name?' Johnny asked, once again appearing in the passenger seat.
"For all intents and purposes, it is B@D, but she used to be known as Luci… Lucyna Kushinada." Where have I heard that name before? I'm pretty sure I read about her somewhere.
I was just thinking about it when Johnny spoke up again. 'Lucy… wasn't that the netrunner chick that ran back in the day with that cyberpsycho? What was his name?'
Right! That crew from Santo Domingo! "David Martinez, died in front of Arasaka Tower while fighting Adam Smasher." I said, finally remembering reading about him and his crew after I received his jacket from Muammar.
'Fuck... really?' Johnny asked while taking his glasses off in surprise.
"Yup, a lot of his crew actually died in that fight actually. Remember that shotgun, 'Guts,' that we found in that park? It belonged to another member of that group, Rabecca." That fucking gun man!! Why haven't I gone after it yet?
'What happened to her?' He asked, looking at me curiously, to which I just shrugged my shoulders and said, "Smasher crushed her."
'We really have to do something about that walking industrial equipment.'
"Oh, we will. Smasher's days are numbered." I said grimly, no, not said, more like promised.
Focusing on the journal, I read more about her time with Martinez and his group. It started okay; I'd almost call it happy, but fuck me, the end is where everything began to fall apart faster than I can even blink. In just three entries, everything has gone to utter shite. In the end she got her wish and ended up on the moon. The only thing that I can't understand is why she came back…
In any case, I should call Hands and let him know that I got the information he needed.
I was just entering the city when Hands picked up. "Hands, you there?"
"I'm here, my dear," hands replied in his usual elegant accent. "Tell me how I can help you."
"I found the identity of your netrunner."
"Really?" Just for a quick second, I saw as his finger and shoulders tightened before he forcefully relaxed himself. "My, my V, you passed where many others failed. I'm impressed."
"Believe me, it was just a stroke of luck." The only reason I got this info was because I knew that she would be here, not because I found her or anything.
"Being modest, are we?" hands asked in a teasing manner, before waving his fingers in dismissal. "In any case, tell me, who is our friend?"
"Her real name is Lucyna Kushinada. Flicking you her detes now."
For a while, hands said nothing; he just sat there, completely still, reading everything I sent him. After a few minutes, he quietly murmured, "Lucyna Kushinada, you say?"
"You know her?"
With a sharp sniff, he straightened up and simply stated, "No." It was a little more forceful than I was used to. I was just thinking about my next words when hands deflated a bit and slowly began, "I'll be honest with you, V, I was hoping for a different answer."
"What do you mean?" I asked, a little confused. This entire situation has been somewhat weird since the very beginning. First, this contract itself was very out of the blue, and second, it sounds like hands is not after B@D, but instead he's trying to find someone else.
"I mean that I was looking for someone else, and I thought that B@D might be that person; her activities started right at the end of 76'..." right on the money.
"Yeah, that was when she came back to earth."
"Yeah." Hands agreed slowly before leaning a bit forward and asking, "Why did she come back? Reading her journals here, the only thing she cared about was getting away from Earth, or I should say Arasaka."
Hands was not wrong; the beginning of her journal was filled with this almost unhealthy obsession to get away from Arasaka, forcing her to become almost a nomad. Moving from one place to another as fast as she could. Slowly that need to get away grew so much that she finally found a destination. Luna. but something big must've happened up there, because a few months into her stay, the tone shifted away from feeling finally content from reaching her destination to an overwhelming urge to get back to the Nightcity "Something big must've happened while she was on the moon; you can tell by the shift in tone of her writing that her personality did a complete one eighty while she was there."
"Hmm, you're right, and details get too erratic and vague during this period." Taking a deep sigh, he cracked his fingers and shrugged his shoulders before saying, "In any case, you did an incredible job here, my dear; your payment is on its way." Just a second later, I saw my bank going up by 15000 eddies. Not bad for just information retrieval.
But as good as it feels to see my account get richer, I can't for the life of me bear the thought of that girl suffering anymore than she already did. She was thrown to the wolves by her parents and then suffered at the hands of one of the worst corporations out there. And when she finally found a family to call her own, one by one they all were taken away from her. "Hey, you're going to leave her alone, right?" I asked, hands just as he was about to end the call. Mercs actually never care about their targets like this; I never did either. But after coming back from the dead, my priorities have changed massively. Whereas before I would've happily sold her to the highest bidder, now I have this overwhelming urge to try and keep her safe.
"Of course, she is not on my radar. And I hope that continues." Hands said with a dignified shrug.
"Good, she's suffered enough."
"A merc with a heart." Okay, that is the worst thing you can hear from a fixer about you in this line of work. I was just about to disagree and try to say something, anything, to dissuade him from that notion when hands quickly said, "That's why I like you so much, my dear," and ended the call.
Fuck my life.
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Hey guys! thanks for reading! please do consider rating, commenting and saving, it'll help me immensely! also i have no idea what Powerstones do, but do consider throwing some my way please!