January 28th, 2069
Cyberspace
Alex Mitchell (Volkov)
"God, I hate this place…" I muttered, sweeping my gaze across the picturesque hellscape of cyberspace — endless, sterile, and aggressively monotonous. Usual orientation tricks don't work here. Which means I have to brute-force my way through, overclocking my brain just to keep my bearings. Sure, the nausea fades eventually, but pretending I've gotten used to this crap would be a lie.
"Connection's stable. Ready to initiate the request," Vega said, materializing behind me. She took my hand without hesitation, dragging us both into a shared neurodrift. Out here, the rules are different — and not every netrunner's wired to survive them, let alone comprehend them.
I pushed our precompiled request through to my mentor and waited for Bartmoss to open the gates. Thankfully, the wait didn't last. Within seconds, a handshake came back. One quick confirmation later, Vega and I were pulled into one of Rache's countless server domains.
He was already there — waiting, smug as ever — and he wasn't alone.
"So, you're the infamous Alex, huh?" Alt's gaze swept me from boots to brainstem with clinical precision, like she was running a threat assessment in real time.
"Alt, I assume?" I replied flatly, instinctively shifting Vega behind me. My brain flagged her as a potential threat before I even registered it — and my body followed suit. Bartmoss and his old flame didn't miss the reflex.
"I'm not here to fight," Alt said, her voice steady, distorted only slightly by a ripple through her avatar's form. "I just want to talk."
"About what, exactly?" I kept my posture locked, tone even, guard up. "You don't strike me as the type to book a meet-and-greet without an agenda."
"Mainly about you," she said. "It's been a while since someone new made this kind of noise on the Net. Word is, you're not just climbing the ranks — you're reshaping them. Am I wrong?"
"So this is a vetting." I raised an eyebrow. "Alright then."
Without another word, I pushed my capabilities to the edge — kicking into full overdrive in a heartbeat. Alt's defenses flared, but I tore through them with precision and force, burning through layer after layer of digital shielding as I tunneled toward her core. Vega looked ready to jump in, but I fired a sharp signal through our link — a clear warning: my fight. Stay out.
To her credit, Cunningham held her ground. But "credit" only gets you so far. We'd moved far beyond the level she was throwing at us. The flickering figure in front of me might've once been the Alt Cunningham — the netrunner who carved out Ghost City from Hong Kong's scorched cyberspace, a haven for the first victims of Soulkiller — but right now, she felt more like a relic than a threat.
It took me less than a minute to tear through her defenses — not exactly record-breaking in netwar terms. At least, not by human standards. For AIs, time works on a whole different scale.
"That enough?" I asked, halting the assault just as I hit the core — tucked away deep inside one of her obfuscated processing clusters.
"Are you even human?" Alt asked the moment her avatar reformed, digital shimmer fading back into her familiar silhouette.
"Head to toe," I nodded, dropping onto the virtual couch Rache had conjured up and pulling Vega down beside me.
"Told you so," my mentor smirked, clearly enjoying himself at his old flame's expense.
"You know, you could talk a little less about me like I'm not sitting right here," I muttered, flicking the comment his way like a thrown blade.
"Sorry, kid. She just came in swinging." Rache held up both hands in mock surrender, shooting a glance at the woman who'd once coded the damn Soulkiller like it was a weekend project.
"How old are you, really?" Alt finally asked, eyes locking onto mine.
"Almost twenty," I said with a shrug, like that explained anything.
"Age doesn't matter. Skill does, right?" She offered a crooked smile, quoting one of Bartmoss' ancient lines. "Now I get it, Rache. Alright — I'm good." She gave a small nod, then turned toward the hacker who'd been quietly watching from the sidelines.
"So... you in?" Rache tilted his head, sounding cautiously hopeful.
Alt snorted. "Do I look dumb enough to sign up with people who'd toss me out the second I stopped being useful?"
That hit harder than I expected.
"Wasn't like there were many options back then," she went on, bitter but steady. "I didn't have a choice. But your offer? It landed at the right time."
She raised one finger — slow, deliberate.
"But I've got one condition," Alt added, eyes narrowing. "Get me Silverhand's engram — and I'm in. Fully. Code and conscience."
"What the hell did Johnny do to you that you're still chasing his ghost?" I asked — maybe too personal, but I couldn't help it. Curiosity was already chewing through me like a virus in an open port.
"He's the only thing still chaining me to the past," Alt said, voice colder than her avatar's glow. "That narcissistic bastard left a scar on my code I still can't wipe clean. There's one thing I need to say to him. Just one. And it's between me and him. No one else."
"I get it..." I ran the probabilities in my head, weighed the cost. "I've got a lead. But I won't lie — this isn't something we pull off in five days. Or five months. Think years. Minimum."
"I don't care. If I get my hands on that bastard in the end, every second of this'll be worth it."
"And... cue the guests," Rache cut in before Alt could finish the venom in her voice, pointing to the walls around us as digital static rippled through the environment like heat waves over asphalt.
"Knew they'd trace you eventually," he muttered.
"That was quick," Alt said, irritation edging her tone. "Guess they realized the deal's dead — so now they're out to wipe me."
"Vega, release the hunters," I snapped, already mapping our exit through the datastream.
"You planning to turn this place into a killbox?"
"Got a better idea?" I shot back. Same game, just flipped the board. Rache lifted his hands in surrender, nothing left to argue.
"Vega? I thought she was long…"
"I'll fill you in later, Alt," Rache cut her off deliberately — I could tell. He wasn't about to let her spill something he didn't want on the record.
"Done. We've got sixty seconds," Vega reported.
"Rache, while we've still got a window — one last thing. Jack Biotechnica's interface node. Take control, hold it as long as you can."
The words barely left my lips before I yanked Vega with me, diving headfirst into the deepest corridors of cyberspace — gone before the first ICE even blinked awake.
No hesitation. No rearview mirrors.
We scrambled the trail as we moved, scattering decoys, redirect loops, and weaponized breadcrumbs at every junction. The heat followed hard for a while — system scans, tracer threads — but eventually, the signal chatter died off. No pings. No shadows. Just empty bandwidth.
Only then did we surface, slipping back into meatspace like ghosts bleeding out of a machine.
Back in my office, I wiped the sweat from my brow and turned to Vega. She was lying beside me, unmoving.
"You okay?" I asked, watching her freeze mid-motion — eyes wide but unfocused, like her brain had dropped out of sync with the rest of her.
"Alex… I've been having these dreams lately," she said, quiet and unsure. "In them, I see this blonde woman — early twenties, maybe. Rache is there. And Alt. But not you. Not anyone I know or even recognize. Why?"
"Dreams, huh…" I rubbed my chin, trying to make sense of it. That shouldn't be possible. Her memory core had been wiped — clean. Every trace of her past erased, down to the last residual echo. There wasn't supposed to be anything left. No anchors. No bleed-through. No ghosts in the machine.
And yet… There was one possibility. A good one, actually. Militech had been running quiet trials with recovered engrams a while back. What they found was… unsettling. The copies worked — on paper. They could think, move, speak. But they were hollow. No drive. No spark. Just noise in a shell.
The corps never figured out why. Hard to blame them — none of their lab techs had the kind of perspective it would take to see the real problem.
I did. But it wasn't something you could run simulations on. The soul. Or whatever name you want to give that spark — the part of a person you can't digitize, no matter how clean your copy.
"Alright," I exhaled, leaning back in the netrunner chair. "Didn't think I'd ever have to tell you this. But here we are."
"Tell me… what, exactly?" Vega's voice quivered — just enough to twist something in my gut.
"Your past."
She didn't say a word. And just like that, the room felt heavier. Thicker.
"This goes back over forty years..."