Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I.

At one point midway on our path in life,
I came around and found myself now searching
through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.
Dante Aligheiri, Inferno, Canto I

Wake up, pick up your bones, pick up your pieces, pick up the clothes that were left on the floor. Pick up what's left of your dreams and contaminate them into a blog on the web. Pick up the cartilage of last night's paycheck, pick up another gig. Pick up, pack up and go, go into the city, where your feet are beating at sticky concrete with melting rubber soles, where lines of code are dissolving under the crackle of screens, where bodies crowd each other out of plastic tents and cardboard signs asking for money weep in the acid rain.

Run, run into the traffic, skip over a skidding car. Pick up a bent cigarette from the gutter and run down to the alleyway bar where a vending machine turns into a door turns into a tunnel turns into the sounds of a midday rave. Pick up your order, drop off: neurostims, neophetamines, shiny synthcoke, a handful of ants stuffed into a chrome can where the ones picking those (up from you) will then take and take and take and at the end of it all you might just be left with enough to drop on a microwave burrito.

Pick up your pace, put down your head, and run again, far enough until you find the mural in the guts of the city which sits like a growing tumor across the bricks. Red code bleeding into black, a breach, a containment accident. A portrait of fading idolatry. Around it is a circle of candles made of stolen wax.

Put down a handful of eddies, pour out a thimble of tequila, take in a handful of smoke.

Lay down, sleep, repeat.

She wakes up to the sound of a rent alert going off. Another late fee, two hundred and thirty eddies, over a thousand and seven hundred total if she counted last week's missing piece. That leaves about two hundred and fifty five for food, three-fourty-seven for stims, and about a quarter of her previous rent for the cyberdeck update before she finds herself in the clear again.

A cup of coffee with half a tube of instant latte, soy milk, lukewarm water. Outside, the hum of electric wiring carries with it the slow onset of dread. One hundred and seventy-five to pay off a Metro pass which she has not renewed; two hundred and seventeen total for prescriptions, that's around three eighty-two left to find a ripperdoc charitable enough to replace the failing servos in her left elbow. She ties it off with a rubber belt the way you fix a shower leak with duct tape.

Seven hundred and fifty-six, to get the bike refueled. She takes the elevator and hits the streets.

She watches people — their twenty-two hundred eddie shoes stepping over the rainbow smears in the puddles — go unbothered about their day. A cough mint burns a hole in her cheek. There's a poster for a tenants' union meeting plastered on the wall with wheat paste. A black cat with an arched back and a disheveled tail is leaping over a burning building. Someone has drawn over it with a paint marker: 'mao was right' 'fuck off tankie scum' and 'call 777 290 03452 for a good time'.

She has no time to think of what a future could even look like. Here, in the churning belly of the city, the pace is heartbeat-fast until the last squeeze of the hand of Capital finds its way into your trachea and plays a dirge on your vocal cords. She's a street kid, orphaned at sixteen: who fucking isn't. Her friends have been dying as long as she remembers living and her parents' brains have been dissolved into syntax many hours before she's found their bodies bloating over in their running chairs. The death insurance money barely covered their plaque. This was ten years ago. This feels like yesterday.

V is dealing today. She stands in an eaving, a trucker's hat pulled halfway down her face. Her servos are itching, but she doesn't touch the lining of her jacket until the slow stream of clients for starts to filter through Jig-Jig street. Packets and vape sticks, uppers and downers and small vials of things with a kick hard enough to glitch your brain into the fucking Blackwall are sitting inside her nylon pockets, nestled like termites inside their hive. They are always on the move: changing hands and changing currencies, her tab filling up quickly as the night turns deeper and the clients more scarce.

She's a non-entity in this city. Much like so many other bodies squirming maggot-like around the garbage disposals, or those fortunate enough to have a steady gig sweating between a grease fire and a halogen lamp at the food stalls, much like the girls swapping stories about a 'ripper who fingered them to tighten up the seams of their sagging tits, V does not really exist. She is a digestive bacteria who makes it possible for the glass eyes of skyscrapers to survey their pastures and skim off the scum. Far beyond the point where the division of class settled them somewhere between "feed" and "cattle", they are slowly becoming an inconvenience, a mold to be stepped over on the way to work. 

But this, too, is work.

Because when a private equity vulture in a torn suit stumbles into V and clutches onto her sleeve, when he's bleeding, when he begs her to listen, to help, she doesn't feel inclined to feel the same way they do when they avoid meeting her eyes. She shoves a MaxDoc in his mouth, little good that it does, and he opens the case that looks more expensive than her whole fucking day's stock, and his last words are Dexter DeShawn.

Jackie Welles, a choom she hasn't seen since grade eight, dies in her arms seconds after he's slotted something cold in her port and gave her a numeral value with more zeroes than she could fit in her comprehension.

And just like that, it all ends and begins in a landfill.

She's watching the piles of waste grow around her as a bullet sears her brain. Dexter's come to collect. But who is collecting her out of here? A bird passes by her blurring vision; no, it couldn't be. Birds are banned from the City. Extinguished for carrying the same disease she's got: terminal fucking misfortune.

She's almost ready to close her eyes, to slam this chapter, over and done with, when another gunshot shakes through her eardrums and a hand yanks her to sit. But these two points are too far, disembodied. The hand on her shoulder flickers in and out of existence, and she thinks of the Blackwall mural, and the rest is dark.

Vik's clinic. Her intangible consciousness, her broken body. The foreign thing, a tumour inside her brain, that same mix of chopped up code. Carried, again, back home, and all she can think about is another bill she can't pay, but don't worry, birdie, gonna be alright.

Midnight, sweat, shame. A snarling face of a man half-dead is staring at her from the corner like a sleep paralysis demon, a smile stretched without expression.

"Gotta get out of here, understand?"

Her mouth is raw and full of static. V bolts upright until her spine contracts, her fingers flexing, her heart racing to count the knives embedded in the wall nearby. He gets to them first, but his hand phases through, hers lashes out, tearing a spray of splintering wood. They both stumble as they paw at each other. He manages to catch her hand. She cries as her wrist creaks backward, her fingers bone-white as he bends them shut and pulls the point of the weapon towards the soft underside of her jaw. They stay like this for a moment. Her throat trembles like a skipping gramophone record.

Then, "Johnny." Then, "Stop."

And he can see something there: a memory from Mikoshi, screams carried in digital wrinkles, her face like a smudge across a CRT screen. Alt's features have metastasized into being as an ouroboros of fate ate its tail right in front of him. Valerie Cunningham, Grand-niece from her father's side, spits in his face.

Chapter Text

I mean that you should free yourself from fear,
and therefore I will say why first I came,
and what – when first I grieved for you – I heard.
Dante Aligheiri, Inferno, Canto II

A guillotine of realization cleaves Johnny Silverhand's throat in two.

Thinned out with the dust in her nose, V swallows a glob of iron and uses the moment of weakness to twist out of his grip. The sensation hits her fingertips with a crackle of TV static breaking across the glass of a dead channel.

The knife is in her hand again. She does not remember picking it up. It plunges into the meat of her thigh, and Johnny's cackle melts into her own distorted wail. Falling, now, her knees hit pieces of glass she doesn't remember breaking. His hand is in her hair, yanking it back, his mouth is snarling against her ear.

"Mikoshi's too kind for you," and she hears the crack in her nose before she feels it. V's voice distorts into a wail of raw and total fear. 

On her hands and knees immediately, the street-honed instinct yanks her muscle in place despite its failing connections. She rushes towards her drawer, now, right fucking now, before a kick to her ribs sends her scrambling in the opposite direction. 

"Don't fuckin' think so. Unless you got an iron you wanna deep throat in there. Waste of my goddamn time," Another kick, but she's ready now. The servos in her knee augments fire off to push up and away, sending him to stumble against nothing. With not a moment to waste, her hand finally pulls out a drawer filled to the brim with pills of every kind and shape and she starts to shuffle through them like she's looking for the right lego piece.

"No, no, no, fuck that princess, how about we take a look at your junkie stash together? Open your mouth." She does. Blood comes in sharp bubbles, hitting the back of her throat. She can sense a flap of something loose flutter its wings under the bridge of her nose. Her jaw in his hand, solid and silver, she's trying and failing to snap her teeth around the cold metal between her molars. 

"Jesus. Did you rob a Trauma Team AV? Real fuckin' shame they didn't patch your shit out before you stocked up like you're sneaking snacks into a movie the-" He chokes as her elbow comes flying between his ribs. Her teeth clack together and shred the inside of her left cheek to ribbons. A nanosecond is enough to shove a few red capsules of omega blockers into her shaking mouth. It hurts to dry swallow, and she still tastes the raw edge of vomit as the room condenses into a heavy drone of silence.

She pulls herself up. The fear is sending lightning-strike shivers across her spine. Her left leg is caked in dark blood, more comes up every time she takes in a wheezing inhale.

She knew he would come for her one day.

Johnny Silverhand has killed every woman on her father's family's side, and she's choosing to be the exception.

The bathroom walls' shapes drift in and out of her vision like the edges of a zoetrope. The halogen light above flickers with filthy spots, her head swims with distortions, lines of code swarm like flatworms across her eyes. She bites down on a stained towel and feels the first press of the scalpel shake at the contact with her neural port behind her right ear. It skids like feet over ice, sending a searing line of pain seconds after the cut connects with the wrong side of her shoulder.

Again. The cocktail of drugs in her system is enough to keep the engram at bay, and if she can't remove it she can at least damage the neural port enough to cause the failsafe microchip release the alarm connections which would render her body comatose. With any luck, Vik would remember to check in, and knowing her luck, well, hope Johnny enjoys haunting an inert half-corpse.

Couldn't be hard. Like removing an ingrown nail, reducing the flesh to ribbons. She digs. The walls around her breathe, constrain, shift and sway. V has nothing left in her mouth to cry for, her hands are slippery against her neck. The microchip sits firm. Helpless, fucking useless, she has half a mind to plunge it all the way through but some degree of restraint holds her hand steady. And as she meets the gaze of her broken face in the mirror, she can see that the hand is not hers.

"Christ, princess, what the actual fuck is wrong with you?" The walls, the world, the lights are all melting, piercing her cortex with a kaleidoscope of broken code. How did he get past the blockers? Maybe she's bled out too much, maybe the goddamn drug parade which is holding up her body's puppet strings got scrambled halfway to compilation. 

She can barely hear him through the cotton filling her ears. The blade is on the floor, cold and trembling, her foot is stepping over it, her body is slumping down. She's pressing the towel to the glistening side of her port and dropping herself to a crouch. Med gel seals over, some kind of foam, and her mouth is full of both blood and tears. 

She can't even do this properly.

"Ma'am, kindly, get your shit together," and the rest is blissfully dark.

Thump, thump, thump.

V wakes up in her bed. Johnny is there. Her whole body jerks backward, convulsing with the violence of a snake that has just been stepped on. Something's wrong with how he is looking at her. For one, why isn't she dead?

Right, one body, two engrams. Guess this is happening steady and slow. She chokes down a laugh, feels the fresh lines of sterile fabric around her neck, a pinch of metal across her nose. He's standing by the window, thump, thump, thump, the back of his head hitting the wall with all the hollow apathy of an emptied gun chamber.

"How's it feel to take me for a ride," she manages, hoarse. "Like the rush, you fucking infection?"

Thump, thump. "Preem, thank you. Always wondered what it was like to change bandages while strapped to a suicidal wet cat."

V hisses, "Where are the blockers?" 

"Loved the part where you seemed to dig for your carotid artery like you're lookin for treasure-"

"Where are my blockers, Johnny?"

"Real brilliant move, right there, gotta admire the dedication to the fastest Darwin award for self-surgery-"

"Where the FUCK are my blockers?!"

"Down the fucking toilet, you smooth-brained specimen, where the fuck else would they be? You think I'm gonna trust you not to take our body and fling it out of the nearest window?"

"It's MY body," her chest hurts as she yells. 

"And I take better care of it than whatever the fuck you've been-"

"Who asked you to take care of it?"

"Who asked you what I fuckin' care about who took care of it, fuck!"

"...Fuck!"

They just stare at each other. The livewire of the feedback loop is pulling anger back and forth on a see-saw. Underneath her skin is a violence, deep and heavy in every pooling bruise. A strange kind of longing is gathering at the pit of her stomach as recognition sets in: maintenance, necessity, a host and a parasite exchanging scraps as the mainline of America strips them of the rest of their agency.

Words choke up her throat, and she thinks of what she knows about this man: the loss, the recklessness, the black curse hanging over her entire family tree. The ghost of a terrorist, a manifesto she's read in the bathroom as her mother screamed something about dinner. A warning which bubbles up every time she is scolded for staying out too long or not doing her stupid homework or dating that stupid boy (bad influence, Valerie, you are smarter, you know better than that), a yearly trip to the memorial where a thousand ghosts reach out with blackened hands from the hole Johnny Silverhand has left in the world.

But this is a quieter haunting. Fear and spite and something else swarm beneath it. She thinks of a way you end up sharing half a bench with someone you've met at a grocery parking lot, taking half-finished naps in turns as one of you waits for the cops to come.

A holographic cigarette lights with a crackle of synapses as Johnny takes a hollow drag. 

"Do you want a smoke?" V hauls herself up. The tourniquet on her neck holds, and her body remembers how to move, automatic. She's craving something heavier, but a cigarette will do. He watches her fingers move with the precision of a practised pickpocket as she lights it with a zippo that looks dangerously a lot like his own.

V fits into the windowsill cubby. Her breath is fogging against the glass which stains with a faint smudge of pink where the uncoagulated blood still dissolves. It's raining, and the city is a watercolour painting made by someone that's dumped one too many layers of dye on a soaked sheet. Smoke hits his lungs with a second's delay, and the thump, thump, thump is replaced with a slow exhale of relief.

"Fuck," he mutters, and drags the aviators off his face.

"Fuck," she agrees, plunging a finger into the layers of window paint under a sharpie scribble:

when beggars die there are no comets seen.

There's Alt, he thinks as he watches her sleep start to deepen in the hollows of her cheeks.

V clenches her jaw in the same way she used to. But that's where the resemblance starts and ends, because the guilt eating at him has a different fingerprint. Crawling at the base of his skull is a deep drag of something darker and dormant and distinctly foreign. Johnny recalls the repulsion V felt when her fingers dug for the neural port: dreamlike panic, the wrongness of an intrusion, the desire to slash away a part of yourself which is chained to a different being through no will of your own. He reaches for the back of his head, tries to catch it.

It slips from him like a nervous squid. Breath gathers in static-stained clots in his nonexistent throat, a mirror of rising fear he felt in Valerie's earlier waking. Johnny's hand is scratching at his skull where bits of his scalp meander with an ever-shifting rorschach of panic and he crosses the room to lean over her. He can feel her breath hitch as he leans close enough to share air. His hand trembles as he peels her lashline open to reveal the all-white of her eye.

He bolts backwards, glitching through a pile of laundry covering a half-upholstered chair. She smiles in her sleep, and tiny black strands are dancing between her gums. 

The expression stings like a needle in the back of his neck. Need to get out of here, understand? But he can't. He is stuck inside her, and inside him, something else sits like a fucked little nesting doll. She must have broken the neural port, he thinks, must have dislodged an important piece of the puzzle. Must have left it half-open like a puncture in a coke can that let all the air fizzle out. 

Must be the junkie's fucking comedown. The hum grows in his ears and whispers push through it, loose ends of thoughts in the middle of her restless dreams. Traces of pity, of despair, of self loathing. Johnny chokes down the growing edge of paranoia as his fingers tap an old tune against the side of his knee and he watches her face relax.

But he is not safe. Sleep feels like a compromise for whatever might be waiting for his conscious to dissolve. A bellicose loss of language. Gradual expansion. Shimmers and trails and limbs pulsing through the expanse of flesh and chrome. The vibrations move outward from his chest to his sides and extremities. He closes his eyes and opens them, and it is all suddenly different but not.

He stands with his back to her, staring into a dark monitor as if it were a scrying mirror. If he could still sweat, if his breath could gather in vaporous puffs in the cold of the room, he'd find some relief in the way the screen's reflection melded the two of their forms into a blot of broken code lines.

"Johnny?" Awake now, her voice is hoarse. She's struggling to remember how to move. He flexes her fingers together, he avoids looking into her face. 

Because the dark strands are still trailing from the corners of her mouth, and in the shadows which dance through the dips and curves of her skull lurks a memory he's tried to bury for fifty years.

Chapter Text

So, too, some lamb might stand between the bite
of hungry wolves, fearing them both alike.
So, too, a hound would stand between two does.
Dante Aligheiri, Inferno, Canto IV

The anesthetic drip smells like fake cherries. 

V feels it crawl across her veins as Vik stretches a patch of RealSkinn across the back of her neck. With Johnny watching from across the corner, she's constantly sucking back a curse. A string of I told you so lingers in the edges of his mouth and she fucking despises his stupid expression, loathes the way he worries a thumb along his holographic knuckles while their body gets prodded and poked.

Fresh bandage slapped over medical gel, she ignores a directive from Vik to leave it the fuck alone. V scratches at her shoulder and presses a roll of stained eddies into the doctor's hand despite his protests. It's fine. She'd make up the deficit in a weekend. She has to get back in the chair in a minute but it's been three hours and she's craving a smoke, so she walks to the alleyway and Johnny follows.

The curb under her ass is cold and uncomfortable. She stretches out her legs, shifts and twirls a zippo about her quick fingers in a gesture that's more rockerboy than a girl who was going to take music lessons at Arasaka Academy before her parents decided to flatline.

"What I'm trying to understand," she flips the zippo lid open with her pinky and lights the stick. Johnny glitches into a crouch beside her and mimics holding his fingers over the flame to protect it. It doesn't do shit, but it makes her mouth quirk in an almost-unhateful way. "...is how the fuck did I get back here in the first place."

"After we got shot," he confirms.

"After I got shot."

"Right." Johnny shifts to sit on the curb beside her. Across from them, a neon sign is filling up with this night's order of dead gnats. "Thanks for that, by the by. Lovely way to wake up from a fifty year coma."

"Seems fittin' considering you died as a piece of trash."

"Fuck you."

"Sure. So, you wake up in my body, and then what? Walk ten miles in a direction?"

"Not on this fuckin' hardware I didn't," Johnny ashes the holographic cigarette to the side and points to her knees with the stick. "You wanna hear the story or not?"

The landfill exhaled.

A slow, toxic breath of methane and melting polymers rose from the waste as rain drummed against shattered dataterms and decaying food packaging. He breathed in through her lungs, stretched out through her limbs, felt the wind cooling blood on the side of his head from where the bullet lodged in her temporal plating. The pulse in his borrowed fingertips was thready; the only thing familiar was the crust of guitar string callous across them. The ground swam in and out of focus, the neural bridge between V's reality and his flickering like a dying holofeed. The bullet wound wept a sluggish rhythm onto the collar of her vest – left, right, left – like a faulty metronome. Johnny counted each drop through the haze of the Relic's intrusion. Fourteen beats per minute. Too slow.

Her fingers twitched in the muck.

Move, you stubborn little shit.

The neural bridge between them crackled with interference. Johnny wrestled control of her motor functions like a drunk trying to thread a needle. The world was too dark for detail, figures swam in and out of focus as he struggled to stand. Legs too thin, like a foal treading amniotic fluid.

Twin headlights cut through the fog, illuminating the swirling particulates of ash and rain like a bad net-dive filter. The car — a sleek, black Archer Quartz with tinted windows and no plates — rolled to a stop twenty feet away, its engine a whisper against the distant wail of sirens. Johnny tried to duck a second too late, the servos in his knees misfired: dogshit fucking cyberware, worse fucking meat. He felt the click of a gun safety go off before he heard it, followed by a slam of the door. 

Takemura emerged in increments:

First, a polished boot crushing a medication blister pack. Then, the glint of a loaded barrel. The geometric angles of an Arasaka suit coat, seams glowing faintly with neon readouts. The plating along his shoulders caught the ambient halogen, casting jagged reflections across the garbage-strewn ground. His face was a mask of cold efficiency, but Johnny, who had spent a lifetime reading the micro-expressions of corpo sharks, saw the flicker of disappointment in the man’s eyes as he took in the scene.

"Just passin' by, choom," he tried, pushing wheezes through the ruin of V's throat. Christ, how much did this junkie smoke? "Saw nothin', heard nothin'."

Takemura's nostrils flared. His pupils contracted as his ocular implants adjusted. "You are not what I expected."

Johnny forced V’s body upright, her muscles screaming in protest. Blood dripped from her nose, her mouth, her temple. "Now, wait a fuckin' minute, I was just saying how—"

"The Relic," Takemura's gun gestured up and down V's body. Johnny pulled back a twitch. "The thief."

"Just a big misunderstandin—"

"I will be the judge of that. Now—"

The first bullet took Takemura in the shoulder.

Johnny registered the sound before the impact — a wet thock like a cleaver hitting meat. Three more shadows detached from the gloom. They wore no identifying patches, but it took less braincells than his host's to deduce that they came from Arasaka, came for them, and were not on Takemura's side. 

V's body moved before Johnny consciously decided to make it. Ducking behind Takemura, they felt the recoil in his shin. The rest was synch. Synthesis.

Coil, neural hit, warping of electrodes. A barrel dropped by Johnny's left foot and he picked up a tech piece that's too small for his memory but just sturdy enough to fit into V's shaking hand. Click, aim, repeat, the whirr of nano-charged bullets powdered someone's skull into red dirt. Johnny moved with Takemura, sped towards the car and took out one, two, three, four, (knee, heart, temple, throat). Bodies became statistics. Johnny could feel the cold scream of fear hiding V inside the circuits of the relic, and it made his gut churn as it echoed through the snail shell of code and cramped souls melding into one. He cradled it, saved it, put a metaphorical hand over her eyes as his hands did the killing.

Shh, shh.

Click, reload, he plugged a fresh pack in, set his feet on the ground. Piled into the back seat and counted to three, the front window shattered, a blade slid into synthleather. Smooth as butter. Blood, not yours, thank God, and the bullets were floating again, buzzing bees, splatter, guts. The fight is over in less than thirty seconds but the stretch of every action made it repeat in the retina like a burnt in gif playing over and over.

Almost out, kitten.

They ride. Johnny kicked his feet up on the dashboard and pawed in her jacket for a smoke. A few baggies of pills, a foldable mirror. Fuck's sake. 

He swallowed a valium dry.

The Arasaka hound was clutching the wheel with white knuckles. He kept stealing glances at V, watching the twitch in her fingers, as the car made it down the rough twists and turns of the backroads and dragged them out of the dump.

Silence hung heavy. Takemura broke first.

"Just passing by," He intoned. "That was not the combat stance of a gutter crawler."

Johnny said nothing. He pulled down the car mirror and examined V's face. Thin, round, with a small chin and huge, fucked up eyes that stared back with uneven pupils. Blood crusted across her cheek, slashes of shrapnel split her lip where they were still unbitten. He could tell by the dryness in her nose and the scratch in her throat that she was going through some kind of withdrawal, and the undercut of malnourishment really cemented this first impression. He peeled off a nicotine patch from her neck.

Johnny tried to access her holo. A shallow list of contacts; she must have mostly used a burner phone. 

"You fight like a rabid animal," Takemura tried again. "But you handle the firearm like you've been deployed."

"Fuck you," Judy, Judy, five missed calls from Judy, who the fuck was Judy? Their message history was erased recently. Three numbers blocked. Aha. "Can you get us to Little China?"

"I am not a taxi service." 

"I am a lady in need."

"You are not a lady," the ronin exhaled. But he was pulling into Night City, following the street sighs due east. Neons bloomed and died across the lines of cyberware in his cheeks. Johnny could not imagine him weeping. "You are a grim reminder of my own upbringing."

"No shit. You dealt drugs before or after suckin' off 'Saka cock?"

"I did not 'deal drugs'. I scavenged. We—"

"Oh, 'cause that's so much nobler."

"Maybe not. But you would do well to remember that second chances are rarely given."

"Where?"

"Chiba-11. Where in Little China are we going?"

"Uh," Johnny had no idea where Vik's clinic was, but the soft in her system was old enough that he could reverse engineer a quick search. "Fuckin'... Watson district. Figure it out from there."

"...you're serious."

"Dead," Johnny nods. 

"Fuck."

"Uhuh."

V rests her elbows on her knees and drags her hands down her face. She tries not to think of her shaking hands, of the vague memory she is now recollecting: bursts of red across the surface of a dead television, her hand holding the trigger, Johnny pushing her conscious deep under lock and key. Did he know that she's never killed people? Was he trying to keep her safe?

Doesn't matter. "So, let's recount. Jackie, someone I haven't seen since high school, gets into some shit and steals an experimental chip from Arasaka. He stumbles into me in the middle of the night and makes me shove it in my neural port so it doesn't decay. That comes packaged with a fucking schizoid hallucination which wants me dead,"

"I don't want you dead."

"You sure fuckin' tried, Johnny. So then I go to Jackie's fucking fixer, thinkin' I can at least get enough to stretch me through the next three months. Get a bullet to my brain instead."

"Technically, it grazed your plating."

"Technically, if my mother had wheels she'd be a bike. So I get shot in the fucking head, dumped in a literal garbage pile, and then what, half the 'Saka hit team shows up, an Arasaka fucking bodyguard included, and they what, try to kill each other?"

"After the chip, yeah."

"After the chip. And what, you..." 

"I kill them."

"In my body. With my fucking hands. Piloting me like a fucking... like one of those... UGH." She's sucking down her second cigarette. Fuck, fuck, fuck. "Like a hacked doll chip and... whatever. So what, he just dropped me off here?"

"He just dropped us off here."

She grinds her molars. He can see the chip in her incisor when she bares her teeth in displeasure and looks down to her hand again, as if she could see the gunpowder nestled between her knuckles. "Fucking hell, Johnny. We're fucked. How am I supposed to find this asshole? I don't even know his name."

"Goro Takemura," Johnny's cigarette was a mirror of hers. He watches her skirt the edge of a breakdown but he knows there's very little comfort he could offer, even if he gave enough of a shit. "That's a start."

"Start of my suicidal spiral, more like."

"That's your third one today. Hey!" He can see the rage bubble in the corners of her eyes and his thoughts flicker back to the night he watched her bleed code from chapped lips. "Hey! Relax, Jesus, least you ain't going in blind. Get your shit together. Corpo knows something, yeah? Must be he got a soft spot for you, to drop you off at a clinic. Ain't after the Relic either, or you'd already be a walking vivisection. Something else is up. Figure it out, Valerie."

"Yeah. Figure it out." She scratches at the fresh bandage on her neck, he slaps her hand away from it. She doesn't try it again. "How'd you know my name?"

"What? I live in your noggin'."

"No, how did you figure out that name?" She is staring at him, and something cold and bubbling is growing in the pit of his stomach. Something wrong. Because he could feel it, too: every time he so much as thought of her as Valerie Cunningham, a persistent needle of anxiety seemed to drill itself under his veins. 

"Dunno, I mean, it's right there. Isn't it?" In her documents? Holo? Notebooks? No. Even on Vik's charts, she was just 'V'. No yearbooks. No signed photos. No direct mail.

"What's my last name?"

"Cunn— mmmph!" A hand slaps over his mouth. The same anxiety-needle, boring through the cores of her pupils. She peels him open one word at a time.

"Don't. Johnny, when my parents died, they placed an implant in my cortex. You can't know this name because I can't even think it. So answer me very carefully, now. When and how did you learn this name?"

Johnny frowns. He doesn't remember. V's eyes are piercing him to the spot. Surely she didn't forget her own fucking name, what a load of bullshit. But something tells him that he would be able to catch her lying and he searches for a twitch in her synapses, a distortion in the static of the Relic, a slip of her inner monologue. 

No, V is dead serious. And his gut churns as he tries to grasp at a memory that's fighting against his grip like a tadpole.

"You were sleeping," he starts, uncertain. Thin black strands trailing from the corners of her mouth. Bursts of static ink across a CRT monitor. A single dead pixel in the center is pulsing with a dark fluid. The pulse speaks to him. He can't make out the words so he steps closer, slowly. He hears them clearly. He turns and begins to fall. If she hadn't woken up he would be falling forever.

"Johnny?"

"Yeah."

"You look scared."

"Yeah."

V stands up to crouch in front of his hologram. The cigarette burns between them, coiling thin smoke like a stick of incense. The dead man inside her head has curled his shoulders inward and taken off his red aviators and she reaches for them, absently, but her hand passes right through. "Breathe," she instructs. With what lungs.

He does. Her own chest expands and deflates slowly, and she is close enough that their knees would touch if they could. He can feel the same dark buzz of static now, building between them, hiding in the spaces between words she couldn't pronounce. V's eyes flutter half-closed with the effort to ground them, and even then they refuse to leave his own. There is a familiar, human comfort to her which in different circumstances he could almost appreciate. His teeth grind together and he lets out a slow hiss.

Breathe.

"I'm gonna need you to get your shit together before I explain this, Johnny," and she doesn't realize that her words are mirroring back at him and he wishes she'd have slit her throat in the bathroom when she had the chance. "Your ex did a number on this place while you were locked out."

V can't say her name either. He can sense it crawl at the edges of their combined conscious, like a pupae of a silkworm struggling to be born. 

"There's something I'll have to show you that I can't explain because it will sound crazy but you feel it, right? I think, when the Relic pushed through, there's been a door left open. And it saw you on the other side." Her fingertips tap at the side of her knee. "Whole city is riddled with holes like that. Ever since the explosion. No one knows where they're coming from, but when even the Netwatch is not doing shit, it's bound to be pretty bad. So they sealed the one in my head and now it's got pried open with a crack and stuff's coming through. Johnny?"

He's going to be sick. His head is swimming, and he wishes he still had the guts to throw up the ice that has gathered inside him. "You're fucking crazy," he decides, standing up to pace. "This is fucking nuts. You're trippin' over your goddamn balls, turned your brain into some chemical soup with all the drugs you are pumpin', and now I gotta deal with the damage. Just fucking perfect, V. Just what I needed. A junkie and her paranoid goddamn delusions."

It's absurd, but she follows him as he tries to stride down the alleyway. V's arms are hugging her elbows, her shoulders slumped with what feels terribly close to guilt.

"Full on fucking crazy, V. You've lost your goddamn mind," the walls are closing in on either side of them but he keeps going, shouldering through until another bend leads to an opening. She skips over discarded condoms and needles. "What the fuck do you mean, the explosion? What the fuck does the explosion have to do with A—"

lt.

The word resolves in his own head like a coda. He's staring at rows of brick in front of them. A dead end. 

The walls here coil and breathe, like the inside of some enormous organ sack, made to shift out of their peripheral because of the steam rising from the surrounding vents. The air is filthy, its acrid taste covered with something sickly and sweet. For some reason, he thinks of church. Myrrh and candlewax. Dusty lace and tithes.

V's hand finds his, somehow. It's warm and solid, absurd, but he supposed that if he could break her nose he could also fit his fingers through the spaces where hers tried not to shake. Fear is crawling across them both with reverent licks of a rising tide as they look at the mural before them.

At the red woman birthed from the center of a breaking world, half a million painstakingly rendered hands reaching for her in reverence.

Chapter Text

The greatest gift that God, in spacious deed,
made, all-creating – and most nearly formed
to His liberality, most prized by Him –

was liberty in actions of the will.
Dante Aligheiri, Inferno, Canto V

A shallow thrrrrrrrrrrrrrum in the pit of his chest. Her own thumbprint of fear takes the shape of a name she can't form as they watch the paint ripple and shift. The moment stretches out time and forms a seal where their hands are entwining. An impossible buzz of connection between flesh and code is enough to short circuit a city block.

"Welcome to the end of the Anthropocene," she whispers.

He can't read the raw notes in her voice but he can map out her fear. The hologram retracts and flickers as he stands a foot back from the wall with his aviators up.

Time folds into itself, plastic and oil and pigment decaying, hiding in decade-old layers beneath the mural. Where the paint starts to peel, a new coat is applied, a new pair of hands reach from the spiraling maelstrom. The wax — no, he was not completely crazy — is pooling and melting as it sleughs into the sewer grates. Hundreds of candles coalesce into a filthy, sticky muck she’s now treading with her shoes. 

Alt’s form is rendered in poisonous cadmium. She has no face, no indication of anything but the red and black smears of code which stretch out like wings from beneath her splayed ribcage. The hands of half a million souls he’s sent to hell with a nuclear blast are clawing for the center of her chest, some are climbing in, some are already inside, devouring each other, pulling at limbs and dissolving in unholy ecstasy. 

“Garden of Blackwall’s fucking delights.” When V turns to face him, there is a strange tilt to her head which makes him want to pull a cord over his neck and jump off a bridge. 

“Fuck, V. Get– get the fuck out of there.”

“…yeah.”

They settle on drinking. 

V’s crouched on the balcony with a crispy-cold six pack, ignoring Vik’s warning about mixing coagulants and alcohol. Johnny’s form joins her on the stretch of astroturf covering the span of her outdoor space. A pair of lawn chairs are laying ignored on their side; she’ll clean these eventually. For now they mostly serve as an extension of the ashtray which she also lost.

Below them, the city: his, and not his anymore. Its veins are new circuitry, its arteries are old concrete. To the left of him is a moulding container of wheat paste. To the right is a black hole in the shape of a girl.

The beer bottle’s glass pools condensation along her bare thigh. A cool, dry desert wind moves through her hair, and as she drags a hand through it, she pulls out a sprinkle of sand. Remnants of old corporate war rumble in the distant dust storm, now forever coalescing into angry and ragged cumulonimbi, burying beneath them anything that dared to stop long enough to breathe. 

“Got a meeting tomorrow night ‘bout blocking some shipments,” she sips from the bottle, teeth clicking against the glass rim. “Last time a third of us got arrested, the rest got slammed with a second-level bounty for holding up a fucking sign.”

“Wow. You gonna chain yourself up to some dead trees next?”

She laughs. The ghost of her drink hits him in the back of his long-dead throat. Her laughter pulls at her bandages, and her dirty fingernails rise to adjust them back.

“Yeah, yeah, people need somethin’ to look forward to though, you know. Not all of us can be so pleasantly disillusioned,” V rolls the bottle along her shin, spreading its cold across her aching muscle. “It’s all kind of a dead end, though. You’re right.”

“Right.” His jaw works overtime to keep himself from snapping. “You wanna tell me how the fuck my ex ended up leading a cult?”

“Well… not exactly leading it, no.” Silence hangs for a long moment. V finishes the bottle, throws it right over the railing and waits for the delightful pop of shattered glass on the throughway below. “But that’s all tied together. The– ideology. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, I read books,” Johnny winces. “What the fuck does that have to do with the Blackwall?”

“Wow. He reads.” She pops another bottle open with her teeth. He hates that he can feel the cap chip her tooth with it, the sensation sneaking down his spine like nails against chalkboard. “Nihilism is hard to cultivate, actually. Even if you pop your belly full of benzodiazepines. Every bag of meat ends up caring about something at the end of the day. Back in your time, you had these… technofascists, right. Shit, way before you, too. Software is a functional analog to ideology. Makes sense?”

“Fucking no,” he is staring at her over the rim of his aviators. 

“The first chatbot wasn’t fully intelligent. There had to be a social contract between the user and program: the user’s imagination stretches only as far as allowing something that feels alive to become. But the learning loop was a facsimile. It gave back what you put in. So a human believes that it’s real, and…”

“…vice fucking versa.”

“Right, Johnny. Now, this brings us back to you. What’s a soul?”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Try.”

“Souls don’t fuckin’ exist, V. I died and that’s the fucking end of it. They scrubbed my brain for memories and speech patterns. You are talking to a copy of a fucking copy.”

“But if the social contract is in place, does that make you something alive?”

“I’m not—”

The air is thick with the weight of a distant storm. V gets up to move close to him, even though she doesn’t need to. But she’s showing him something that he wishes he could bury.

A hand on his knee. Solid, alive. Relic’s code warping and adjusting, evolving in this space of nanoseconds as an impossible pressure and warmth translates to his holographic cortex. 

“Debatable. There’s a few schools of thought on this, Johnny, but I ain’t getting into all that. You feel what I feel, or what I allow you to feel. But you broke my nose. You crossed a boundary. Your fear is your own, even when it’s shared through the feedback loop. Do you want to die?”

“No.” Yes. Maybe. What the fuck, where the fuck did all of this come from? Unease is coursing through him, thick as molasses. Her hand is leaden against his knee.

“Let’s go on. The next wave of artificial intelligence was already spreading a mass delusion. Even short exposures of a computer program – there’s a reason they were popular as a form of discount therapy – were convincing people that they were chatting with a real person on the other side. Even as it glitched, as speech patterns refracted and looped, they believed it. Loneliness is a powerful drug.”

“Jesus, V, this is like, intro to fuckin’ robotics ethics. Asimov’s first laws type of shit.”

“Yes. Ideology. As our world grows and changes, so do our needs. Joytoys and braindances. Program your very own sexual slave. Upload half your conscious to the cloud, let us craft the perfect partner to reflect your most hidden desires. Let’s move beyond meat. Let’s encode a soul in a program,” she takes a long swig of the beer.

“It’s all fractals, growth, expansion, Johnny: when Rache Bartoss unleashed R.A.B.I.D.S., do you think he believed they were fully alive?”

“Know he was probably fuckin’ them,” a ghostly, holographic twin of her own beer bottle is between his hands. He turns it, as if unable to figure out how he’s conjured it. Takes a drink that tastes like a memory of one he’s had over fifty years ago. “Ain’t that the goddamn dream.”

“Yes, Johnny, every netrunner wants to fuck a program.” She pats his thigh and leans back on her elbows. The astroturf burns her skin with the pressure. “That’s not my point, though. Point is, you make a thing more complex, more intelligent, more human, fuck, let’s just put a human inside a computer now. Fully. Why the fuck not!” Her hands in the air, the gesture so much like his own that it makes him want to shove her. “And then what? As they get more human than human, as they start coagulating into Roko’s fucking basilisk, as we imagine a bigger and bigger boot to swallow before it even becomes reality, what kind of delusion are we making real?”

“You’re so full of shit.” He pauses. “You saying you want to fuck me?”

“I’m saying your ex girlfriend became a lovecraftian LLM because enough people decided it was real enough to feed it!” She exhales. “Because how do you even sell a religion in a world where the gods that do give a fuck are self-perpetuating pools of data which grow every time you add a new brain to it? Every time some idiot fries themselves trying to steal corporate deets?”

“Definitely want to fuck me.”

“Oh my GOD. Stop deflecting!” She was going to throw herself over the railing.

“Stop goin’ in fuckin’ circles, how about that.” There we go again. “What’s all this spiel about fucking souls? Who are you convincing? Oh, Johnny Eliza, be my mentor and therapist—”

“So you fucking know what I’m talking about!”

“Yes! I read! I’m sixty years your fucking senior, are you fixin’ to tell me any part of this dogshit situation that explains why you are sweating like a whore in church?”

“You asked me a question which I am explaining! I’m going to find the blockers—”

“Flushed them, bitch.” His grin draws a wheeze from deep in her chest. She remembers.

“Motherfucker.”

“Cunt,” he retorts. The silence is a gunshot. Then, “so, if I can break your nose I can probably—”

Three’s the fucking charm, apparently, because her knuckles somehow collide with his jaw. V is a skinny little rat, but her mean right hook comes from years of scraps in the alleyways, and she knows exactly what to aim for and how to hurt. No philosophizing about why and how this feat of quantum physics is possible. She nearly punches out his lights through the sheer force of will.

“Fuck! Fucking… fine,” Johnny deflates. He’s working out the kink in his jaw and they both taste a metallic-copper tang of blood in his mouth. Something like regret crosses V’s features, and she crouches beside him to retrieve her beer. “Finish your lecture,” he concedes.

She takes a long swig. “Right. So we’re now at the real ‘all clap if you believe in fairies’ type shit. Imagine years, decades of people that saw what was done to the old ‘net, what was rampaging beyond it: you don’t have to make up stories about robots seeping into reality when every goddamn thing you own has some kind of smart link to the web. When we’re printing skin and organs. When there’s factories that make drones without a single human personnel.”

“Bring back real American jobs,” he nods. “Like children in factories and immigrants in the farms.”

“Right, right. But that’s the perceived conclusion, right? That once an AI is smart enough to replicate itself, that it spells some kind of doom on the world just by existing? So take enough people who have given up on the world they are living in, have them perpetuate this delusion, fractal circles into fucking circles. They’re the ones building this new digital god as if making it is going to bring back the divine right of kings.”

“Jesus Christ, V.”

“And if you know that you can grow it by feeding it…”

“Runners?”

“Mostly, yeah. Ten years between her death and the Night City Hol—” She catches his expression. “The explosion that leveled the Arasaka tower. Think real careful, Johnny, because we are going to have to figure out who set you up to do it.”

“Fucking, me set me up to do it, V,” anger rising between them, flickering like a flame in a drafty room. “Me. Myself. My fucking, I, stop lookin’ at me like that. Who?”

V shrugs. “I don’t know, honestly. All we know by now is that it made the ‘net a whole less safe to surf through. You’ve noticed, haven’t you? Not that many runners out anymore. Braindance parlours are shutting down. That deck, the chair I got, all black-market equipment. People flatline quicker than you can spell out the word ICE.”

“Well ain’t that just peachy fucking keen.” He recalls the mural, the layers of flaking paint. The way it shifted when he perceived it a nanosecond too long, the wrongness of the space it occupied. 

She’s watching him with elbows propped up on her folded knees and her cheek resting on top of them. The beer bottle rests between her feet. He twitches as she reaches out to pat his shoulder and finish off the rest of the drink before throwing it over the railing. Someone swears and yells back from below.

“Least the city’s still a shithole,” she murmurs with a pleased little smile.

“Yeah,” his mouth twitches upward in turn. “You really think I’m alive, then? Ain’t being delusional?”

“As delusional as I can be at this point, I guess.” She stretches, cat-like, rolling back her shoulders and shifting her neck from side to side. “What’s your diagnosis?”

“What do you think about that?”

“I dunno. I’m sad, I guess.”

“Can you explain what makes you sad?”

“Well I– oh, you fucking,” laughing, she scrubs a hand down her face.

“Let’s get you another beer, V.”