Something i Wrote a while ago.

[repo2020]

Something i Wrote a while ago.

Diamond in the Data

Chapter One


Barrel looked at the apartment block from the window of his 1999 Mustang GT, a true classic car of the pre collapse. He knew that Slaps would be coming home to his hovel soon, but the thought of going and depriving that goon of a data pad stolen from his client was not a prospect he relished. Slaps was a stupid lug, but he was a big stupid lug with a temper and fire power attached to his blue touch paper. This was not going to be a piece of park, or a walk in the cake, but he was pulling in two large for it and you did not turn your nose up at the sort of Euro. It was time to man up and bring the office back a quick pay day for a dangerous hours work.

Cycling through his optics he decided on low light for this murky time of the evening as it gave him a slight advantage over image enhancement in this unmaintained area of Night City. At best there was three street lights working in a six block radius and a lot of shadowy corners for things to jump out at you. Barrel had never been the sort to get cyberware just for the fashion or practicality of it, but a flashbang in the face had blinded him about three years back and he had need replacements eyes. He had looked, well been told by his doctor, about standard replacement eyes that would have been just as good as the old one, but he had gone with a monovisor as it gave him that slight advantage of extra peripheral vision. When you are in the shooting game advantages are useful. The only other cyberware he had installed was his neuralware that aloud him to jack his guns, and the chip socket so he could store the feed from his visor if the stickies started asking about the legitimacy of a kill. Police tend to believe it is self defence if you can show a vid of what happened.

Slaps walked into view as Barrel finished playing with his his optics. Damn he was ugly. Six foot four with the husky build of a professional wrestler and a face even a lace ho couldn't love with two happy dream bags glued to it. He wore the outer wear of choice of all gun thugs nowadays, a dirty trench coat, this model a crappy brown colour bulked out on the right side. Hell that meant heavy ordnance. This was going to be a harder job than he thought. Well no use complaining, he had a job to do and two gees with his name on them waiting at the end of it. Time to suck it up and get the lead out. Barrel opened the door of his automovehicle and stepped out into the night of the City of Night, with a mind to do some violence.

Watching the lump of man enter his apartment, Barrel dodged a few cars and crossed the road. He had already clocked the Juvy gangers stepping out on the corner and made a bee line for them. Twenty bucks made for a better security system than any that could be fitted to a car, that and the right attitude. He handed the twenty to the alpha, nodded at the car and gave him the look. Street kids new their own, new that if one had made it to twenty five and was breathing he was not to be messed with, new if there was trouble that they couldn't handle you come find that senior and he would help. That was the code they lived by, the one given to them by Poppa, God rest his soul, seniors don't interfere unless asked and keep a bit of wealth coming down stream. The Alpha a kid known as Snicket nodded back and the Juvies moved over to Barrels car. He watch as they did and then winced and one sat on his bonnet. Ah well won't be the first dent, won't be the last.

Time had passed and Slaps was well into the apartment block by now so it was time to go talk to him. Barrel check his loadout as he walked. Tazer check, four flashbangs on his belt at the back check, and the tools of the street solo's trade, a pair of pistols in speed holsters, one under each arm. His weapon o' choice was, like his car, a Mustang. The Mustang Arms Mark II, a weapon of mixed reviews with a love hate relationship with it's owners. Like most US corporations that made it through the collapse Ford had diversified to survive. Their arms division needed a name that people knew, a name that was American, a name that meant raw unadulterated power. For Ford that only meant one thing, the Mustang. So they came up with a highly engineered eleven millimetre pistol with a rate of fire that could put up a fight with some machine pistols, there was only one problem with it. It was highly engineered. If the gun was not cleaned after firing or dropped, the thing would jam like High Street in rush hour and be about as easy to clear, so your average street Joe hated this weapon. The thing was Barrel was not your average street Joe, and he liked that speed and compact build, this was a gun made for an anal ex street kid like him that like thing clean and in their place, and he new how to look after his babies.

The apartment was just steps away now so it was time to clear his mind and get his game face on. Slaps was not going to give up this slate without bad words and the guy knew how to handle himself at least some. No more being in his head, Barrel had to move now to the moment. He pushed the front door of this shabby domicile and stepped into conflict.

 

[repo2020]

Piss, mould and damp. Those were Barrels first thoughts on entering the block. The hall way was run down with paint cracking on the wall and twenty years of despair oozing from it's foundations. There were four doors of it and a set of stairs going up. A standard type seven apartment block in the Night Corporation's building plan for the city, there were hundreds of them in the combat zone or South NC. Barrel new the layout, new it like the back of his hand. The conformity made jobs like this easy and predicable, hell he had spent the first five years of his life in a T seven with his mom before she died, not this one but the blue prints for each of them where the same so he new were all the exits were. He did not see any spotter in the lobby so that was a start, not a gang house so no blow back for going after Slaps, one up for easy. This place was well lit unlike the street so he cycled through to Image Enhancement and his picture got a lot clearer, old blood smears on the wall told him that evil intents had been carried out in this place. No trash suggested that it was kept clean by the inhabitant of apartment 1a as they had also polished the numbers on the door and had some potted plants out side their door. So that told him that the inhabitant of apartment 1a was not the sort of person that you messed with or those potted plants would have long ago been pissed in and killed of.

Barrel moved towards the stairs and put his hand under his suit jacket to pull one of his 'Stangs. The stair case was concrete so it did not creak and with the soft sole white tops he wore he would not make a noise as he went up. He pulled his fedora down a little more as the armoured hat could be used as a shield if bullets started flying at his face. It was not a pretty face but it was all right. Some lady had described him as rugged once but he did not know about that, but he did think his neatly quaffed hair gave him a touch of class, if only it was not mousy brown. He once had a set of sweet baby blue eyes but they had gone when the visor was installed.

Slaps lived up on the third floor but he did not want to take any chances of meeting him in the stair well. The second floor was much like the first only with trash. Four doors of and no one in sight. Nothing stood out here except for the dried blood spatter and the smears on the wall. The guy that had made the mess on mister clears hallway down stairs l had been shot up here. Nothing more on this floor so onto the stairway to the third floor and...

It was then he saw it. Hidden in an old Hog Shack bucket, a micro camera looking right at him as he came a few steps from the blood spatter. Barrel through himself to the side as a shotgun blast came screaming through the door.

 

[repo2020]

As he flew through the air Barrel pulled the compact tazer from his right hip and aimed for where his assailant would be when he came out. Hitting the wall jarred him some but not enough to offset his shot or mess up his reactions, but it was still a trade off. He was slumped against the wall sitting on the ground and the shock of the hit was going to make it hard to get up, but he was out of the initial line of fire with a cover angle of the shooter. Barrel was a very single minded kind of guy, so when he had chosen to learn a marshal art he chose one that would be the most practical for the type of work he wanted to do. Joe Gym offered a range of training that went from practical to fancy, but that was not where Barrel went to train. He went to a back ally in Little China and pay fifty Euro to Master Xang to learn the modern art of Gun Fu. As a street kid of fourteen it was hard to put together the money and would take him weeks at a time to do so, but on days like this it paid off. Other gym offered the Gun Kata, but that was nothing but a mix of stylised fancy moves that let you look cool shooting pistols, the first thing Master Xang did when you took his course was give you a flesh wound to the leg and then he taught his first lesson. He said that it showed you both the consequences of failure and the requirement of the the art. Manly solos that had wanted to learn from Xang had taken offence at being shot, trying to do something about it. They had not lived long after failing to hit him. Death had been quick and clean.

Barrel had not been so stupid. He had listened, learned and became stronger. Master Xang considered him his best student and he now did not have to pay fifty bucks to gain his Master's wisdom, he gave 'his' wisdom to other in payment to his sensei, and this was the ultimate pay off.

A fully 'borged up monster bust through the blown out door. He was not the tallest of guys at about five nine, but he had two cyberarms and a cyberleg, with hard build optics and face plating. It only took Barrel a few microseconds to assess all of this and he was moving. He used his shoulder to lever himself off the wall and kicked a skidded across the floor. The first premise of Gun Fu is do not try and dodge the bullet as that way leads to death, simply do not be where the bullet wishes to go. In short that meant that aiming at a moving target was a hard prospect and aiming at a target that move unpredictably in a perpendicular trajectory is nea' on impossible. The other load from the up and under sawn off shotgun hit the space where Barrel wasn't and in another microsecond he assess his options for rebuke. Centre mass was out as that would be covered by a chest plate or flak vest, well there was something bulky there anyway that an eleven mill and a tazer would have a hard time penetrating. The cyberlimbs would take minimal damage from the 'stang and they would be grounded so the tazer would have no affect. So that left the right meat leg, the weave of the jeans this guy wore meant that the pistol would penetrate, but he was not loaded for armour piercing so not a lot of damage, but the barbed ends of the tazer would get between the weave so this was his best option. A push of the tazer's trigger and the barbs whooshed out under air pressure, pushing through the guy's jeans and sticking into flesh. Three hundred kilovolts of electricity then travelled down the copper wire connecting the barb to the weapon and neuromuscular incapacitation ensued. This took the form of a 'borged up nut job going stiff, falling over and then doing the wibble dance and groaning.

 

[repo2020]

Groaning was about all you could do when you got hit by a tazer. In the movies you see people going sleepybye from a jolt from your 'little electric friend', but that was bull. What really happens is every muscle in you body gets told by your nerve ending to contract, so you go as stiff as a board and fall over as long as the power keeps pumping. Then nothing but a bit of cramp, even phantom cramp in cyberlimbs, so as Barrel moved towards the 'borg the shock from the tazer ended.
“Now calm down big guy. I'm not here for you,” Barrel cooed as he came up to the mound lying on the floor.
“No! I won't let you take me agaGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRR!” the other good thing about the tazer is once you have hit a person with the barbs you do not need to aim again, just pull the trigger and it sends more neo incap down the wire and more wibble and groan ensues.
“Not here for you big guy, remember? Here for a guy up stairs. Took something that I'm here to take back, not even going to take him with me,” as the latest shock whore off Barrel crouched down beside this person and started stroking the small bit of cheek that was still visible from under the face plating,
“You're really not going to take me back? Honest?” as this reworked mess of a kid look up at him, Barrel quickly knew what had happened to him. He was a test bed, a kid snatched off the streets to be used in human testing. He had seen it before, hell it had almost happened to him before. You know the difference between a pedo and an experimental lab kidnapping. The van alone tells you the difference. If it is a pedo then you get taken somewhere and bad things happen to you and you escape or die, if it is a black van with guys that seem to have military training then you will go to a lab somewhere and they will put thing in you and cut things off you, and you don't escape, well that is unless your this guy, poor ketsunoana, and when you do you tend to be carrying that much psychological trauma that you think everyone outside your door is here to take you back to the lab.

There had been a lot of stuff in the news about Cyberpsychosis, about how they just go crazy and start shooting in the middle of the street and have to be taken down by the stickies with heavy weapons, but one of the only cops that Barrel trusted, a guy call Mahoney, told him that there was about six different ways cyberpsychos show. From street corner madness, to cutting them selves on the fleshy parts to prove they still bleed. And in the middle of all that is the paranoia, what this kid had. It was not like paranoid schizophrenia, it's more like the brain has an overwired brain response. So if you think someone could be a threat then they are a threat. This kid was going to need some help, someone to talk to about what he was going through and what he had been through.
“Hey, kid,” Barrel said and he detached the barb module from the front of the tazer in full view of this broken child. “I'm going to call up a friend that has been through some of the same crap you have. Ok?”

 

[username_3643957]

Damn, this is well written. Completely captures the nature of Cyberpunk too.

Outstanding Work.

 

[MasticatorDeelux]

Would you mind if we turned this into a Writing thread? Don't want to clog up the forum with similar threads, but don't want to take yours off-topic, as well.

 

[repo2020]

Would you mind if we turned this into a Writing thread? Don't want to clog up the forum with similar threads, but don't want to take yours off-topic, as well.

Sounds like a Plan. Writing thread this is then

 

[repo2020]

Diamond in the Data

Chapter 2


Night City in August is hot, no getting away from that fact. The thing is I don't like aircon, not one bit. So my small apartment come operating room was hotter than a Yakuza assault rifle and about three times as unwanted. It was a slow Wednesday evening post op on a double leg amputation on a runner for Goodspeed Deliveries, a two bit runner collective out of Old Downtown. This sweet little thing had gone for a pair of high impact jumping leg that gave her better speed across the roof tops of night cities close nit building plan, and me a nice chuck of change for the install, and my sneaky sideline. The great thing about the installing of cyberware too the public, they don't know the worth of the bits they're chopping off or pulling out, I was up for one k for this girls pins, more if I could sell the perfect working order and fitness of the the meat, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm Rework in case your wondering and this part of the story is written in the first person, as that is the way I roll, unlike my good friend Barrel who pens his opus in the third person. I suspect that as signs of a personality disorder.

My apartment is a four room in Old Downtown, two of the rooms are set up for the medical parts of my trade, operating room and recovery room. Then there is the two rooms I inhabit, my living room come office and my bed room come love shack, oh yes, I went there. The girl I had in recovery I was hoping to lure into my amour shed as soon as she had healed up from getting the double leg job, but she would be healing up for about four days so that would be an ongoing project. Yeah I know what you are thinking, chatting up a patient while she is under your care, isn't that totally unethical? Well in answer to that question I posit this at you, for it to be unethical I would have had to have been a registered doctor with things like a medical degree, you can not be stuck off if you have never been stuck on, so... up yours, she's hot.

My secretary come Physicians assistant, a pink haired bomb shell by the name of Apples had just gone home for the night and a was stretched out on my couch watching some infomercial for a self install video wall when the phone rang. Not my office phone, but my personal cel, there was only a hand full of people that had that number and it was not to be used for calls about going to a club. This was the Bat phone. This phone rang when something had gone all upside down and we needed someone that could stitch it the right way up. And it always seemed to ring when I was waiting from someone from the Body Bank to call by to buy spare parts.

 

[repo2020]

I sat bolt up right and popped the phone out of my pocket, with a welling feeling filling my chest.
“Go for Rework,”
“It's Barrel, I need your help man,” didn't sound too bad on his end of the cellular but with Barrel you never really know. He once phone me saying he had been shot a bit only for me to get to his apartment and have to pull seven slugs out of him, and stop a bad bleed in his liver.
“Ok choombata give the sitrep on where you're hit and what sort of state you're in. Can you walk?” I grabbed a pencil and pad ready to do a quick treatment plan.
“I'm not hurt. There is someone I need you to come see,” to say I was pissed would have been an under statement. Barrel knew what this phone was for and he was calling me so I would come have a chat with some dude? I was quiet for a long time.
“Um... Rework... You still there,” he asked with what I hoped was a true sense of my pissedness. I answered with the slow pace of a mother that could not believe what her child had done, well that is how I had seen it done on the google box as I had never really had a mother.
“Yes B, I'm here. You know what this number is for don't you?” I ask the venom thick in my voice.
“Yeah, you said it is for when there is a medical emergency.”
“Is this a medical emergency?” I ask venom replaced with slow steady rage.
“Not one of the body bud, one of the mind. I just found a kid that got away from being a test bed. I thought you should know and come see him,” the anger in me just evaporated as a terror that had fill my dreams came back to my waking world. I did not like to think about it, my time in the research facility, but it raked my dreams with pain and screaming. I don't talk about it much. I did not have my legs and arms chopped off or eyes pulled out. No, the thing they did to me were not so apparent on my flesh. The thing they did to me were all under the surface, insidious. They changed the very make up of who and what I was. Changed the way my mind worked and how fast I move. Meant that I could see in the dark with out cyberware and kill without metal. If I went though a cyberscanner I would show up as clean, but there is a reason that when you go to get high end bioware they sedate you for for the entire time your there. Because when nanites rework your nerve endings and remake your flesh it feels like you're burning from the inside out. These were my nightmares. And for six years this was my daily life.

“Alright B, where are you I'll come down now.

 

[MasticatorDeelux]

July 20th, 2023

The following was taken from an abandoned apartment inside Night City’s Combat Zone resulting from a legal search warrant. NCPD’s all-points bulletin is still in effect, and the subject is considered armed and dangerous.
Another wonderful day at the office.
The Mark-19 machinegun is a wonderful weapon. You could break all machineguns into four categories—first are light machineguns. Your SAWs, et cetera. 5.56 millimeter, things like that. Not too scary, but enough to dent someone real bad. After that are medium machineguns. They typically use 7.62 caliber…your 240 golf, bravos. Shit like that. Slightly scary, and can turn any man into swiss cheese with a modicum of effort. I like them, personally. After that are heavy machineguns—50 cals. They pack one hell of a punch, and blow through soft tissue with ease. I’ve seen men ripped apart after taking a red hot 50 round or two to the chest. With a properly applied 50 cal, a man could do anything. But it’s still not my favorite.

The Mark-19 firmly falls into the last category, ‘other’. These are weapons that are unconventional by nature, and I love them for it. The round of a Mk-19 flies slower than a golf ball mid-flight, and can be easily tracked with the naked eye. But, its ammo are 40 mm grenades. Kill range of 5 meters, casualty range of 20. Averages 350 rounds per minute, just under 6 per second. Hold down the trigger for 10 seconds and you can make half a city block disappear. It’s powerful stuff.

And the smell. My god, the smell. The bitter tang of gunpowder on your lips mixed with the heavy metal tinge of their casings. It’s a full sensory experience, when the shells ricochet off the ground and the deep, rocking bass of explosions in the distance hits you in the chest. Right around the same time you start feeling grit in your teeth with the clack-clack-clack of the action hitting home jostling you around. It’s goddamn biblical.

I step out from a hastily built emplacement on the side of the street (an unlocked sedan I’d been more than happy to occupy), seeing the chaos I’ve sown—sheer fucking bedlam in the streets as the street urchins disperse from the scene. Some fuckin’ gangbangers had a bad day…wrong place in the wrong time, stepping up against some other gun toting shitbags. Someone looks to have gotten froggy with the neighbors and brought their friends to the fight—bodies were already littered on the ground by the time me and a few ‘coworkers’ arrived, and we helped mop up both sides of the conflict. The fact I’d murdered them doesn’t matter on a personal level to me. I wasn’t paid to preserve their welfare, only to retrieve some unlucky fuck that knows too much who found himself in their ‘good graces’.

You could say I’m a man of details. Like how the slide on my pistol has to sound just right before I say it’s good, or even the wardrobe I rock on the street. I remember this one movie as a kid growin’ up—some big muscly motherfucker, dressed black as night. Never flinched, never showed an ounce of remorse in the entire flick, like a damn robot. When I got into the ‘business’ it was a matter of professionalism to me, so I kinda…borrowed some of the source material. But back to the mission at hand.

The sound of reinforced rubber heels on asphalt greets my ears alongside the distant wail of sirens from a trauma team AV-4, poised high in the sky. Some other unlucky soul probably got popped from some other pissed off fuck, but he had the creds for a lifeline. These fucks weren’t as prepared. I flick the butt of my smoke off to the side, feeling the last striking hit of whatever synthcoke I’d laced in off some two-bit shitstain dealer. I don’t dope too often, but during most ops I like the edge it brings—Hardy, one of my aforementioned ‘coworkers’ is into the heavier shit. I’ve seen him take mini-missile hits right next to stubber shots and keep on truckin’. A fucking machine if I ever saw one. He’s a cybered up fuck, lost his limbs out of will rather than circumstance. More machine than man, you could see his chromed and buffed arms reflecting the neon lights of passing cars clear as day in the midnight light. Armed like a helo, and hits like a tank. A bit unstable, but that’s the norm in this profession.

Hardy’s a few steps behind me and to the right as we walk up to the shop in question. Passive biometric scans pop up on the vidscreen in my implanted eye as we walk up, twin kings of the street. The wet squelch of a knife in meat hits my ears and there’s one less blip on the biometric scanner. He really gets into his work when he’s amped up. I consider it a distraction, but we all have our intricacies.

It’s a few seconds before we make it to the building in question. At first glance it looks like it might have been an old auto shop, perhaps someone’s pride and joy. Now its faded yellow paint peels off the siding, flaking at will onto the ground. Once upon a time I might have given a damn, thinking about lead content and its dangers to kids. But that ship left port one hell of a long time ago, on both sides of the coin. Funny how the little details can get to you, I think to myself.

I need a name for my gun. Mark is a male name, and Markie just sounds faggy. A light blue screen comes into focus on my HUD, giving me ammo count for various weapons loaded into hardpoints of my legs and arms. A few years back on someone else’s payroll I took the business end of an IED. Lost my arm, part of my leg…my soul, my wife and kid. Getting hit takes a lot out of you, even if it ain’t physiological. I was crippled and alone, eternally drowning in a bottle. In rehab, I met this jittery ripperdoc named Trillian. Couldn’t fire a gun to save her damn life, but she was a demon with a scalpel. Slapped a metal arm on me, and gave me back a little what I lost. Taught me to walk again, and to be proud of what I was. Part of me misses her. The ammo count comes back clean, with no loading errors in any of my missile chutes, and the hand flamer is at 100% capacity. With a simple nod, I motion to Hardy to position on the other side of the door and prepare to breach. He understands me, nodding back with a sadistic little grin. Fucker loves the bloodshed, I’ve learned, and he’s a better fighter for it. Me, not so much. It’s a job.

Michelle? Like the skater? Meh, needs work. Not a good name for a damn grenade launcher. Maybe…Suzanne? I knew a broad named Suzanne once, was a freaky chick. I note there’s 4 rounds loaded in my missile chute, poised to fire out of my ‘forearm’ if the need arises. It’s been quiet, and that’s what scares me. In Syria, bustling markets were a good sign. Meant little trouble, and that the patrol would be easy. If the kids weren’t playing, that was bad news bears. Meant that a trap was set, or a 200 pound IED was nearby. Fuckers. As I look up into the sky, its bleak façade glares right back, like the color of an untuned television set. A gentle fragrance of burning tires meets my nose, contrasting the hissing air from my coolant valves as it dissipates heat. I arm my weapons, in time for Hardy to kick open a dried out wooden door on the side of this shitty chop shop. Someone tried to fix it up once upon a time, but it wasn’t enough to withstand his pneumatically armed cyberlegs. He’d lifted a civic on his back, once, just for shits and giggles. I’d seen it firsthand. I can see a hazy green line shift through my vision as I pop through the vertical coffin, ready to strike. Twin IRs on the edge of my wrist feed targeting info to my cybernetic cortex, painting my vision as algorithms detect targets and threats, finding none. Those distant sirens scream louder, coming a little closer. The screaming never stops, I find. It’s like the pulse of Night City.

 

[MasticatorDeelux]

Active scans find what looks like a human being, his zoot suit marred with matted blood stains. At first glance he looks like some smarmy accountant, with more brains than sense. The profile gave me the name of Michael, with no last name. Picture, too, but as I tug off the hood from his face it’s only a good guess as to who he really is. He’d been worked over real good, too. He looks up at me with what was left of his good eye as I unclasp the ball gag from his blood-caked lips. Fucker can barely talk at this point, but I still have a job to do. Hardy cuts through his wrist bindings via a monosaw in a fingertip. Handy little tools, they are. The Mark mumbles out a moan as he’s freed, a compound fracture pressing out against ruined fabric along his arm. Sucks to be him. Somewhere in the annals of my cybernetic brain a radio scanner screams at me, picking up a trace signal from this mook’s head. So he’s cybered up somehow. Great. It’s a frequency I can’t place, but remember from my time in the sand. The Mark stands up—tries to, anyway, falling down in a congealed pool of his own blood—and stumbles around a little, scampering off behind an eroded ceramite pillar.

He doesn’t ask to get away, doesn’t even try to talk. Most try to, even with a fractured jaw like his. Something’s up, and I don’t like that. Didn’t even beg for his life like most corporate yuppies. Hardy paces around the garage impatiently as I get my bearing. He can sense it, just like me even as he rages around, frothing like a rabid dog. The Mark speaks up, spitting out a shattered tooth. I don’t understand him, and walk forward with fists clenched. Sputters out a few words, some of the same syllables. I step closer, mini-missiles at the ready. “Tragginbacon.”, he blurts out.

The fuck? Bacon? “TragginBACON.” The fuck’s with bacon? I remember the craze of it about a decade ago, but--“TRAGGINbacon.” I don’t sense any weapons on him, don’t see him hiding a blade. Seems legit. The radar in my head screams, a few large hits on the holoscreen. His radio transmission intensifies as I step around him. “Beekawn.” He gurgles out, one hand keeping his shattered jaw roughly in place. Hardy brings his assault rifle into the crotch of his shoulder as I yank The Mark up from battered knees, scanning the area outside our little garage. A nice little program some hacker named Markis cooked up appears onscreen, letting me tap into Hardy’s transmissions. There’s something big outside forming up, and I don’t like it.

“Time to move.” I croak out, breaking a silence of over 30 minutes with a few stoic steps to the back. This is fishy, and I thank the god I don’t believe in for a rear exit. Mental math is raging in my head, drowning out the strangled moans of The Mark. I pull on his arm, and he falls to the ground with head in his hands…still scampering for that goddamn pillar. The fuck? Traggin bacon. Bekawn. Beacon. Tracking bea—fuck.

“HE’S WIRED!” I shout out, grimacing at this little shitbag with tears in his eyes. My hearing goes deaf for a second, tuning itself in time for the staccato clank of a shell casing bouncing off the floor. One less lifesign on my radar. And then it hits me.

Square in the back, actually. Twin machineguns bore through the shitty corrugated steel walls behind me, cutting through my Kevlar shirt and integrated subdermal armor. The pain flared through my system as I instinctively hit the floor, my elbows and knees pushing me along the ground like some retarded snake. I could hear Hardy screaming at the top of his lungs—whether it was out of pain or anger, I didn’t know. The whine of his arm servos popping into position preceded a metal crash as he charged through the wall, dead-set to fight his way out. I remember the hurricane of bulletfire that followed, taking the time to spring to my feet.

The job was botched—it was fucked the moment I signed onto it, now that I think about it. I lowered my shoulder into the new door I’d made, the pale green light of nightvision yielding to the rainbows of thermals with one subvocalized command. Two signatures were betrayed by my optics, the deep blues of cold steel showing off a nice submachinegun or two. I didn’t have time to fuck around with them, their surprise marking them as newbies. My arm snapped forward, two pairs of mini-missiles arcing out to meet them. One got hit like a truck and collapsed immediately, gurgling on a mixture of bodily fluids. The other took a glancing shot, rolling with a shattered collarbone. I could see him squinting in the light, his unaltered gelatinous eyes trying to find a target for his rage. Gunfire still echoed nearby—Hardy was still putting up a fight, it seemed.

Maybe the cop didn’t know what to do and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps he just followed suit from his brothers on the other side of the shack that were making a martyr of my friend. In any case, he went full auto on me. Of 25 rounds, a fifth of that hit me. Two hit in my false arm, its armor soaking the damage with ease. The next pair rolled into my chest, leaving one hell of a painful welt, like twin stab wounds in my tit. The last raked across my face, tearing the flesh from a dense metal frame. I could feel a jagged mandible servo cutting into the soft tissue of my head as I grunted in pain. Bitter metallic blood flowed through my teeth as the immense, throbbing pain wracked my body, all tuned out with a simple command to a pain editor. I remember hating the price of that particular wetware, but now I really don’t regret it. Goddamn do I love technology. I’d be bleeding like a stuck pig, but damned if I’d feel it. They had blood transfusions for a reason, anyway.

Current machinery is glorious. You can lose a limb to explosions or gunfire, only to have it replaced at a body bank. The future was replaceable, I’d found out. And although it was downright miraculous, it had its limitations. Tonight I’d found out that, despite all odds, a 9mm to the face could still damage good optics. My eyesight was cracked and dysfunctional, a hazy mess of movement and colors. My arm was out of ammo for now, and I could hear the crazed clack of metal on metal close by. He was reloading as I closed on him, one arm blindly grabbing for flesh and hair. The little bitch yelped as I clamped down on his bad shoulder, my fingers feeling a warm slickness of his oozing blood. Its twin rolled forward into his upper chest, a clenched metal fist cracking his lower ribs. Another punch applied to his chin knocked the poor boy out. I didn’t need to kill the bastard, just get away from him.

The kid stumbled and skittered on the sidewalk as I sprinted off, my natural eye blind in the darkness. A few blocks to the left, for safety, a few to the right to get back on track. The gunshots had quieted down. That was…very good, or quite bad. Probably the latter, knowing Hardy’s luck. I hadn’t heard the squealing of tires from the getaway van, so my driver was either dead, waiting for me, or detained. Taxis were a rarity in the Combat Zone—no one wanted to drive there at night, nevermind live there. As it was my best shot at a warm bed, I kept on stumbling forward. The wounds in my back were starting to become a liability, slowing me down. In the distance was the fading cigarette cherry of my spent smoke, sitting idly on the street. Success. The world sat on an uneven axis as I slapped at the van, feeling faint from blood loss. Seconds later I was inside, an in-house medtechie I’d paid to tend to The Mark’s inevitable wounds on hand. The fucking irony wasn’t lost to me as my ride took off, leaving a mutual scene of destruction behind. The doc—I’d taken to calling him Megelev, and he never really got the joke—did his best to stitch me up as we sped along, towards a relatively safe holdout. If you’re reading this, then you obviously know I lived through the ordeal.

After the fact I’d come to find that Hardy took out over half the cops paid to take us in before presumably being downed by gunfire. Fuckin’ cybernetics, man. Freaks me out. I never saw his body, and all the cops on my payroll never had a record of him on any slab in any of Night City’s various morgues. If I was a betting man, I’d guess he’s buried out in a shallow grave in the desert. Maybe I’ll come across bits and pieces of him on other sammies. Or shit, maybe he’s little humpty dumpty, being put back together in some doc’s personal jack shack. I don’t know and I don’t care to find out.
Someone wanted one of us dead last night, and I wanna meet the prick face to face. It was a set up most foul, and I fell for it. All the price of doing work in NC, I guess. If fairer weather ever finds me, maybe I’ll write another one of these things. Trillian always said writing this shit down was therapeutic, after all.

 

[PHYKUR]

Nicely done texts guys

 

[repo2020]

I arrived at the aforementioned shitty apartment block about 9 30ish in the evening in my beet up old ambulance I liked to call the Angle of Hoop, I have paid some artist down in Japtown to do a nice spray job on the side, but that has been sprayed over about 2 day after with “How's your Ass for Aids.” I thought it was intelligent graphite at least. Some brats where looking after Barrels pride and joy so I flicked them a six pack and told them to “watch the lady” and went in. The place was clean and well tended. An old man stood in the hallway with some real nice high end work on an arm and a half face plate. He had that hard man look. I'm not talking about the sort of person that goes out of their way to make themselves look hard, no I mean the “I've seen some shit and survived it” look you see on the face of Vet, and I was betting he had done a stint in the SouAm wars. He just had that look of one of those Nutters that enjoyed drinks in the Forlorn Hope. He gave me the look of don't start trouble as I walked past and I heard the message loud and clear. And then a lovely blood smear on the wall highlighted his point. Looked like an arm had been shredded by the way it scrapped down in a broad brush like stroke, someone had propped themselves against the wall as they tried not to succumb to blood loss and pain. So this was a happy place then.

I gave the old guy a nod as I went on up to what I expected from this place, rubbish and chaos. Two little minicams sat among the junk well hidden, There was also something unnatural about the how the rubbish was cleared in one are, a fight. The sharp smell of cordite, a slight smell of singed flesh met me on this floor. My senses are ramped up so I can track like a blood hound. That is why I could smell the tazer hit, and a small amount of Barrel's blood. I'm good at finding those sorts of things me. There was not a great smell of blood. More like a scrape or small cut, it made me feel better that old Nut Job McShooty Pants hadn't gotten him self all ventilated and had underplayed it. It has happened, I assure you. I moved towards a slightly open door where I could smell Barrel's claret and readied my self for what I was going to find.