Night City, Watson District - Kabuki Market
January 14th, 2077 - 22:47
The neon rain fell in chromatic sheets across Kabuki's narrow streets, each droplet refracting a thousand corporate logos into kaleidoscopic noise. V pulled her leather jacket tighter—not against the cold, which her dermal plating handled fine, but against the sensation of being watched. Night City had eyes everywhere. Cameras nested in every overhang, every street corner, every goddamn vending machine. Blume's ctOS architecture ran so deep into the city's bones that even the puddles seemed to be recording her reflection.
"Yo, V! You spacing out on me, choom?" Jackie Welles' voice cut through her paranoia like a mantis blade through cheap polymer.
She blinked, refocusing on her partner. Jackie stood a head taller than her, broad-shouldered and grinning despite the miserable weather, his Valentino ink just visible beneath the collar of his jacket. The man was built like a street samurai from old corpo propaganda—all muscle and chrome wrapped in genuine enthusiasm. Somehow, after six months of running gigs together, that smile still hadn't been beaten out of him by Night City's special brand of brutality.
"Just thinking," V replied, scanning the alley entrance ahead. Their target—a mid-level Tyger Claw data courier—should be exiting through there in approximately three minutes, according to the intel T-Bug had scraped from traffic cameras. "You remember the plan, yeah?"
"Claro. I play the drunk Valentino stumbling home, bump into our guy, you ghost him while he's distracted, swap the data shard, we vanish." Jackie rolled his shoulders, loosening up. "Easy eddies, hermana. Like taking candy from a screaming baby."
V snorted. "That's not how that saying—"
"Contact," came T-Bug's voice through the subdermal comm behind V's ear, the netrunner's tone flat and professional. "Courier's moving. Thirty seconds to intercept point. Got three Tyger Claws providing overwatch from the pachinko parlor across the street. They're sloppy—only watching the main throughway, not the alley mouth."
V's optics flickered, highlighting the three gangsters in yellow wireframe through the parlor's grimy windows. Biotechnica-issue Kiroshi implants, top-of-the-line. Cost her a month's worth of jobs to afford them, but worth every eddie. The thermal overlay showed all three focused on their phones rather than actual security work. Typical.
"Copy that, Bug." V shifted her weight, dropping into the loose ready stance Viktor Vector had drilled into her during their sparring sessions. The old ripperdoc kept insisting she needed formal training if she wanted to survive the major leagues. Something about "natural talent only carrying you so far before someone with actual skill zeroes you out."
The courier emerged from the alley right on schedule—a wiry kid, maybe nineteen, with the jerky movements of someone chromed way beyond their body's natural tolerance. His eyes held that telltale glow of overclocked optic mods struggling against their own feedback loops. Cyberpsychosis starter pack, V thought grimly. Another few months and MaxTac would be scraping his remains off a street corner.
Jackie stumbled into his performance beautifully, all swaying steps and exaggerated laughter. "Ay, perdóname, friend! These fucking legs, they got a mind of their—"
The collision was perfect. The courier cursed in Japanese, shoving Jackie back while his other hand instinctively went to his jacket pocket—where the data shard was—
—and V was already moving.
Muscle memory took over. Her Zetatech Sandevistan kicked in mid-stride, flooding her nervous system with artificial adrenaline as her perception of time collapsed. The world smeared into motion-blur watercolors, everyone moving through molasses except her. Three seconds of objective time stretched into fifteen subjective seconds of hyperfocus.
Step left, dodge Jackie's "stumble"—good, he's maintaining the act—
Courier's hand is coming out of his pocket with the shard—red case, exactly as described—
Swap the duplicate from my pocket—
Match the motion, make it look natural when time catches up—
The Sandevistan released its grip on her neurons. Reality snapped back to normal speed with a nauseating lurch. V's vision blurred momentarily—the usual price of accelerated perception—but she'd already completed the swap. The courier's hand emerged from his pocket holding what he thought was his original data shard, none the wiser.
"Watch where you're walking, pendejo!" the kid snarled at Jackie, who was still playing up the drunk routine.
"My deepest apologies, friend!" Jackie held up both hands, backing away. "Just trying to get home to the old lady, you know how it is—"
"Whatever. Fucking Valentinos..." The courier shoved past, disappearing back into the neon haze.V waited exactly forty-five seconds—long enough for the kid to clear the area but not so long that the Tyger Claws' attention might wander their way—then jerked her head toward their exit route. Jackie fell into step beside her, the drunk act melting away into smooth professional movement.
"Clean lift," T-Bug's voice crackled in V's ear. "Tyger Claws didn't even glance your way. Courier's heading back to their safehouse in Japantown. You're clear to extract."
"Music to my ears, Bug." V allowed herself a small grin as they ducked into the maintenance corridor she'd scouted three days ago—because proper planning prevents piss-poor performance, another Viktor-ism. "Jackie, you good?"
"Órale, that was smoother than synthetic tequila." Jackie's grin was infectious. "Think the fixer will throw in a bonus for the clean execution?"
"Wakako pays exactly what she promises and not one eddie more." V navigated the corridor by memory, her Kiroshi optics highlighting the safe path through the debris. "But she'll remember we delivered clean. That's worth more than bonuses."
They emerged into the relative quiet of a residential block, the corpo towers looming overhead like chrome gods judging the mortals below. V's optics automatically tagged the dozen surveillance cameras tracking their movement—ctOS integration, courtesy of Night Corp's infrastructure monopoly. Even here, in the supposedly "free" districts, the corps watched everything.
"Yo, V." Jackie's tone had shifted, losing some of that trademark enthusiasm. "You ever think about... I mean, we've been grinding these small-time gigs for six months now. When do we make our move? Hit the major leagues for real?"
V glanced at her partner. In the neon-drenched darkness, Jackie's expression was harder to read, but she caught the edge of hunger there. The same hunger that had driven her to Night City in the first place—the desperate need to be somebody in a world designed to reduce people to disposable assets.
"Soon," she said, and meant it. "Bug's been putting out feelers with the bigger fixers. Rogue, Wakako's connections downtown, even heard Dexter DeShawn might be looking for fresh talent."
"DeShawn?" Jackie whistled low. "That's big leagues, hermana. The kind of gig that either makes your reputation or..."
"Or you end up in a shallow grave in the Badlands." V nodded. "But that's the game. We're not gonna get anywhere playing it safe."
Her comm chimed—incoming message from T-Bug. V's optics projected the text across her vision:
> DATA VERIFIED. CLIENT SATISFIED. PAYMENT TRANSFERRED.
> 15,000 EDDIES SPLIT THREE WAYS.
> ALSO: WAKAKO HAS ANOTHER JOB. INTERESTED?
"Damn straight we're interested," V muttered, keying in her acceptance. "What's the gig?"
> MEET TOMORROW, 14:00. JAPANTOWN. DETAILS IN PERSON.
> SHE SAYS IT'S "DIFFERENT." MIGHT BE YOUR TICKET UP.
V and Jackie exchanged glances. In Night City, "different" could mean anything from a simple courier run to a full-scale corporate extraction. But if Wakako was personally flagging it as potentially career-defining...
"We in?" Jackie asked, though his grin already gave away his answer.
"We're in." V confirmed, feeling that familiar electric anticipation building in her gut. The same feeling she'd had the first time she'd jacked into a corporate subnet, the first time she'd zeroed a target, the first time she'd realized she might actually survive this city.
They walked in companionable silence back toward the Metro station, two more shadows among thousands in Night City's eternal neon night. Overhead, a Trauma Team AV screamed past, probably heading to extract some corpo who'd paid their premium subscription. The sound faded into the urban symphony—sirens, gunfire, the bass-heavy throb of music from a dozen clubs, the electronic whine of malfunctioning advertising holograms.
Home. Hell. The only place that mattered.
As they descended into the Metro's artificial light, V caught her reflection in the chrome-plated walls. Kiroshi optics glowing faint blue, synthetic skin looking almost natural under the harsh fluorescents, Militech subdermal armor creating subtle contours beneath her jacket. She looked like what she was—a product of Night City's special kind of evolution, where people replaced their bodies one piece at a time until the question of what was "human" became philosophical noise.
Her phone buzzed. Text from Viktor Vector:
> HEARD YOU PULLED OFF THE TYGER CLAW GRAB. NICE WORK, KID.
> STOP BY THE CLINIC TOMORROW BEFORE THE WAKAKO MEET.
> SANDEVISTAN NEEDS CALIBRATION. YOU'RE PUSHING IT TOO HARD.
V smiled despite herself. Vik always knew when she'd been burning her chrome harder than recommended. The old man had some kind of sixth sense for that kind of thing.
> WILL DO, VIK. THANKS FOR WATCHING OUT.
The Metro train arrived with a hydraulic hiss. V and Jackie boarded, finding seats among the other night-shift workers, gangsters, and insomniacs that populated Night City's veins at this hour. The train lurched into motion, carrying them deeper into the city's chrome heart.
"Hey, V?" Jackie said after a few minutes of comfortable silence.
"Yeah?"
"Whatever this job from Wakako is... we're gonna be careful, right? No cowboy shit?"
V looked at her partner, seeing past the bravado to the concern underneath. Jackie talked big, but he had people who cared about him—his mom, his girlfriend Misty. People who'd mourn if Night City chewed him up and spat him out like it did to everyone else eventually.
"Careful as we can be," she promised. "But Jackie... in this city, careful only gets you so far. Sooner or later, we gotta take the leap."
Jackie nodded slowly, his reflection ghostly in the train's windows. "Then when we leap, we leap together, yeah?"
"Together," V agreed.The train dove deeper into Night City's neon-soaked depths, carrying two more dreamers toward whatever tomorrow would bring. Above them, invisible to the naked eye but omnipresent to anyone with the right optical mods, the city's surveillance grid watched and recorded everything. Every face, every conversation, every movement tracked and filed away by systems that never slept.
Somewhere in the corporate towers overhead, algorithms processed their data, assigned them threat ratings, calculated their value as potential assets or obstacles. Night City's machine intelligence, vast and indifferent, noted two more small pieces moving across its board.
It did not yet know that these two pieces would soon become players.But it would learn.