The cult doth welcome QueenKthuluu to its venerable ranks.
May their toils honor the machine spirit.
-----
The Runner
For the nth time this morning, she found herself questioning her decision to stay put with her new mentor, nervously fiddling with her sleeves as she watched Kiwi flick something to the Tyger Claw guard, whose eyes glowed briefly before her entire demeanor shifted and she simply twitched her head for them to pass.
"Pays to have an in with the knee breakers." Her mentor commented, sounding almost impressed as they entered the... oddly subdued megabuilding floor.
Kiwi's eyes narrowed for a brief instant before the older woman silently kept walking.
Which only served to make Lucy curious as she activated her cyberdeck and made a brief surface level scan of the area, revealing an almost unnaturally clean local net.
It revealed absolutely nothing wrong, but she couldn't shake off the slightly ominous feeling the odd calm gave her. It was almost like she was back there, staring at the B-
'Best not think about that now.' She shook her head back into focus.
Kiwi shot her a warning look and she quickly caught up to her, still on guard.
The older netrunner was still an enigma for Lucy.
Ever since she escaped Arasaka she had made sure not to stay at one place for too long, and to not get attached to anyone who might drag her back to that prison, but the moment she made too much noise while hacking an apartment and drew Kiwi's attention, she found she couldn't reject the curious woman's offer of mentorship.
She had been alone for so long, she clutched the offer like a lifeline, even if her repeated reminders of 'Never trusting anyone in Night City' were getting a bit old.
Everything seemed to be going fine for those few weeks, but then one day while they were practicing monitoring some kind of disturbance at Militech, they had to emergency disconnect and her cyberdeck glitched out, and Kiwi immediately began insisting she have it looked at.
Of course she understood that ignoring the state of neural cyberware was a gonk fucking move, but who in Night City of all places was she supposed to trust with her obviously 'stolen' corpo tech?
A ripper would sell her out just as quickly as they'd help her, and probably take the paycheck for both.
Kiwi didn't let up though, which is how they ended up approaching a thoroughly clean storefront on the edge of the 16th floor of Megabuilding H11, an unobtrusive red sign of 'Ars Magos Mechanica' hanging right above the doorway.
The Latin words immediately screamed corpo at her, but she somehow managed to keep her unease from showing.
They were left to wait at the entrance briefly as the well hidden camera in the doorframe scanned them, before they were let into a well appointed waiting area.
Once more, as Kiwi began approaching the door, Lucy instinctively activated her cyberdeck only to completely fail to contain the dumbfounded face she made at what she found.
The whole subnet made her feel like she was suffocating, her presence in the net confined to a tiny passage surrounded on all sides by daemons she couldn't even begin to identify, just waiting for an excuse to fry her alive.
"Come in." She very nearly missed the synthetic voice coming from the other room.
And when she followed Kiwi in, still dazed and still very much staring at the subnet, she made the mistake of looking at the netrunner/ripper they were here to meet.
The familiar red robed ICON stared directly back at her, the eerie blackness of pure nothing surrounding it briefly feeling as if it were going to incinerate her on the spot... And then the ICON winked and she felt herself be ejected from cyberspace.
It all happened so quickly all she could do was stand there and stare like an idiot.
Kiwi's rebreather did nothing to hide her irritated scowl "Apologies for that."
"No matter, I do tend to draw that kind of reaction." The utterly dry voice of the...
Ah. He was actually a full cyborg.
Fuck.
"Besides." Magos went on "Both her hardware and software are quite impressive. A bit of refinement and she might just end up being competent." He tilted his head "Maybe."
Kiwi nodded along as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Which just served to piss her off further really "Excuse me?" Why the fuck were they talking about her like she wasn't even there?
"You are excused." The cyborg's voice turned dry again as he pointed an open hand at a factory new ripperdoc chair "Take a seat, please."
Lucy felt most of her fear disappear behind sheer annoyance as she crossed her arms and glared at him.
To her utter embarrassment, Kiwi let out the quietest sigh at her behavior, and when the borg turned to look at her questioningly she for the first time in forever sounded pleading "Just get in the chair, Lucy."
Thrown off guard by the sudden shift, all she could do was crumble and do as she was asked, hesitantly strolling over to the increasingly looming and inhuman cyborg, clenching her teeth and forcing her reasonable fear down as she made herself as comfortable as she could on the operating chair.
"Good." The borg nodded, not even bothering to acknowledge her as anything other than subject matter, and promptly pulled a personal link from his arm, slotting it into the back of her neck without so much as a 'By your leave.'
"Had a brush with a BlackICE AI?" He asked after three seconds that felt like an eternity.
"Yes." Kiwi answered for her "Something riled Militech up recently so they were on guard when we paid them a visit."
"Mhm." Magos hummed neutrally before addressing her "Your cyberdeck is surprisingly intact, you brushed an AI and only burned your connections by a subpercentile, which while not worrying should still be given timely replacements before the damage spreads to your actual synapses."
"Isn't that normal?" Lucy asked, ignoring the odd numbing sensation in the back of her neck.
"Let me give you some advice for free as your current physician." Magos said seriously "Neural injuries do not heal, they scab."
Even Kiwi twitched at the choice of words.
"But." The cyborg went on as if he hadn't just reminded them of the small bit of brain-death they suffered with each fuckup "This amount of damage is nowhere near enough for you to start getting visual glitches, and the rest of your cyberware has nothing to do with it either."
Knowing where this was going, Lucy felt her blood go cold "So-" She licked her suddenly dry lips "What is it?"
"This is Arasaka tech." He said bluntly, making her tense "Proprietary, experimental, Arasaka tech."
Unsure of what else to say, Lucy could only nod jerkily.
"Well, whatever you brushed at the Militech spot you were staking out activated some of your backup programs." His voice turned almost... excited? "And Arasaka tends to place a lot of recording software in their experiments, some more than others."
Lucy really did not like where this was going.
"And this experiment just so happens to be designed for Blackwall deep dives." The fucking giddy cyborg said "The freaks probably recorded each and every catastrophic failure in full-"
"Enough." Kiwi interrupted, to Lucy's immense relief and gratitude "Can you help her or not?"
"Oh?" The cyborg blinked, as if shaken awake "Of course, I already wiped the program in its entirety and replaced the scuffed nerve connections, I just felt she should know this."
He, or something Lucy just couldn't catch in her state reached over for a nearby computer and ejected a chip.
Magos put it in one of Lucy's pockets and stepped away, just a second before she felt a sudden sharp sting in the back of her neck that dulled almost instantly.
Did he just...
"Operate on you while chatting away?" The cyborg finished just a bit smugly "I wonder."
Despite everything, Lucy couldn't help but make another irritated scowl.
"All the recordings are on that chip, as well as the program itself." Naturally, he completely ignored her "There were no remote activation or deactivation programs installed, probably to stop the Blackwall from shutting you down on approach." He huffed and continued "So aside from the obvious Arasaka code you got for your operating system you are pretty much clean."
"Just like that?" She found herself muttering. Did he have any idea what he just did-
"Just like what?" Magos tilted his head, cutting off her train of thought "I'll have you know that I take my work very seriously." And seeing her dumbfounded expression he added "And your payment is more than enough for services rendered."
Of course, in the end all the borg really wanted was to look at the damn cyberdeck.
She knew that the massive discount they got for letting him give it a thorough look was the only reason they could even afford him but she still felt like some kind of animal at a super rich corpo exibit.
It was stupid, and emotional, and stupid, but she just couldn't help it.
And it must have shown on her face because the look the borg directed her with was one usually reserved for particularly underdeveloped children "You really going to get protective over Arasaka's tech now?"
Well, when he put it that way...
The cyborg shook his head and turned to Kiwi "I have some time remaining, and you look like you haven't had a proper checkup in a while."
"We don't have unlimited eddies." She responded simply, eyes still trailing over Lucy with a complicated look.
"The deck was more interesting than I expected." Magos shrugged.
The back and forth went on for a while longer as Lucy realized she was supposed to get up now, and did so while feeling an odd sense of clarity in her movements, and before long she was seated nearby while Magos was detaching Kiwi's visor, revealing the complex pit of machinery below.
"Oh and Ms. Kiwi." Magos said as he began wire-brushing one of the more clogged air filters "Just make sure your employer doesn't get too curious with his snooping, yeah?" The cyborg said almost disinterestedly "That outcome would be downright unfortunate."
The sight of Kiwi's half-face going deathly pale was something Lucy would not be able to forget anytime soon.
-----
Michael 'Magos' Sobronov
The instant the duo left my clinic I couldn't help but do a fist pump "Fuck yes!" I grinned and hopped like a little kid on Christmas.
That damn cyberdeck was a treasure trove of information, and while a massive chunk of it was filled with tacked on redundancies and inefficiencies almost natural to those bound to meat, it was evident it incorporated the best Arasaka could come up with around... five years ago? Give or take.
It was obviously updated over time.
The fact she evaded being 'retrieved' for so long made Lucy seem just slightly more impressive than her initial impression did, or it would have if not for the whole recording software going unnoticed for so long thing.
It didn't necessarily have to mean anything, but one could not help but suspect foul play whenever things like escaped corpo child experiments with unknown tech in their heads got involved.
But.
Child experiment or not, for all my skill and knowledge, I simply did not have the time and resources to throw into the proverbial grinder that Arasaka's teams did.
So, for all that I knew for a fact I was better than all of them, quantity was a quality of its own, and they had already given me a veritable feast of inspiration for my next Cyberdeck's iteration with their competent if still subpar work.
Did the fact that a bunch of children who were suspiciously similar to myself before my transformation died to improve on the design sour things for me?
Admittedly, yes.
Was it going to stop me from using the knowledge gleaned from their unwilling sacrifice?
Fuck no.
They were not me, nor were they close to me, which meant they did not truly matter.
...Even if a small part of me hoped pre-krash AI couldn't actually steal souls and they were in a better place now.
Why, the simple efficiency upgrades I could come up with off the top of my head made it tempting to just lock myself in my workshop for three days straight and just tinker away like a maniac.
In fact-
Of course, this was exactly when my Tyger Claw liaison decided it'd be fucking hilarious to shoot me a call, and for all my irritation I was mostly obligated to answer.
[Magos: Yes?] I asked, failing to filter out all of my irritation from my tone.
The woman on the other end of the call wilted slightly.
[Gangoon-chan: There has been a change concerning Maelstrom. Jugo-sama plans on holding a meeting later today and invites you to join him now for matters of security.]
"Matters of security?" I muttered in brief confusion 'He knew I only needed minutes to set myself up perfectly...'
'Ah.' I snapped my fingers 'Crazy fucker probably wants to ask me for favors and can't appear to be trusting me more than his own lieutenants. Fucking politics...'
[Fine.] I answered after the brief silence [How soon does he need me?]
[The Captain said it wasn't an emergency but he'd prefer if you came up quickly.]
[I'll make haste then.] I said.
Not waiting for her response, I ended the call and began rapidly ordering my clinic up while signaling the sign to mark me as closed on the outside.
Moments later, I was in the waiting room/hallway, and knowing I'd be out for a while I paused before deciding to take my time and walked up to the upper level of my new home.
"Hey." I waved at mom who was doing some knitting of all things in the living room "I'm going out for a bit. Want me to grab you something on the way back?"
She looked up at me as whatever she was attempting to knit together fell apart "More synth-wool, please." She said with false cheer, pointedly ignoring the pile of scuffed 'fabrics' tossed around the couch she was sat on.
Misty had recommended she try something like this, and it was definitely... going.
"I'll uh..." I hid a wince "Get right on that, sorry for interrupting."
Her smile turned genuine at that and she nodded "Just be careful at work, Mikey."
"Sure thing mom, I'll make sure to not trust the literal gangsters I work with." I deadpanned.
The annoyed look she gave me made me hop out of the room just a touch faster.
The doors to my room opened up to reveal a dark, near-lightless cave, and a small pile of blankets with an improvised viewing port at the top.
"Still binging that trash?" I asked, amused.
"You take that back, mister!" The blankets were launched back to reveal Rebecca who was pointing an accusatory finger at me "The Bushido anime is ten times better than the movies!"
"And yet, ten times the shit will still remain shit." I spoke the absolute truth.
"Hmmm." She faux glared "You haven't even watched it yet. You are just a hater."
"Yes." I agreed without an ounce of hesitation as I sat down next to her, wisely not pointing out I did in fact watch the whole thing, days worth of filler included "Most of the fucking Tygers can't go ten minutes without making a reference, it is driving me insane."
"Heh. Serves you right for working with those gonks." She grinned teasingly.
I knew my partnership with the gang annoyed her more than she showed but she didn't let it get between us. She understood why I did it, and even agreed, but that didn't stop her from poking at it whenever she could.
"Wait." She said suddenly, drawing me from my thoughts "If you never watched the anime, how do you get all their references enough to annoy you?"
'Ah.' I paused before quickly looking away "I had a... phase."
"Pfft" She snorted before breaking out into fullblown laughter "Oh you are so binging this shit with me now."
"But I already watched it." I most assuredly did not whine.
"Too late~!" She singsonged "It is already decided."
My eyes narrowed.
Whereupon she mimed some pretty convincing arguments to the contrary.
"Fine." I accepted my fate with all the due reluctance "But-"
"Nuh uh!" She interrupted "No getting out of it now."
"I have a meeting." I said firmly "An important one. We can watch it later."
Her cheer dimmed considerably and her shoulders slumped a bit "Tygers again?" She asked.
"Yeah." I nodded "Something big is coming up, and I need to be there."
She bit her lip slightly and looked away "Just..." She shook her head and looked back at me with "Just don't let the fuckers drag you down to their level, yeah?
"Yeah." I nodded, exhaling as I looked away "I won't." Ignoring the flash of memories of all I had done for the gang by simple association that stubbornly refused to remain buried.
-------
Give me your rocks or suffer the consequences.
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