Archive of Our Own ^beta

Altiera Cunningham is currently experiencing what is likely the worst week of her life. And today, August 4, 2013, is a day that she will probably remember forever. So far she has tried to break up with Johnny, had not-so-much-pity-sex with him, been kidnapped by gangers, hauled in front of the slimiest Arasaka corpo she's ever seen, and been told to recreate her life's magnum opus (so far) in less than a day.

The or else heavily implied.

Alt knows how exactly how valuable she is. The problem with that, is it means she knows exactly what will happen when everything is done. Arasaka has found in her their golden goose. She is as close to a goddess, a kami, of the NET as they will ever have.

They will never, ever let her go.

Not willingly.

She has, under extreme duress (with a gun literally pointed at her forehead at all times) created the perfect iron maiden, the ultimate tool in information acquisition. As easy as 1-2-3:

1. Find mind.
2. Extract mind.
3. Collect information.

What's the downside of intensive interrogation when you can revert to a previous backup? What chemical concoction can compare to simultaneously stimulating all your nerve endings in any desired manner? Pain? Pleasure? Ice? Fire?

And that's not even getting into the pain of engram conversion in the first place. What's the fastest and most efficient way to map consciousness? How do you digitize a mind? Treat it like an earthquake: stimulate the shit out of it and record the aftershocks. Light it on fire and document the burn pattern. Poke every neuron you can and watch the impulses.

She's the modern Prometheus, granting humankind freedom from limited lifespans, at the cost of needing to burn your brain for it to happen. And Arasaka? Well, they're Zeus, chaining her to the rock for all eternity, intent on eating at her liver and dragging as much as they can out of her.

She's well aware of this.

The Soulkiller program she developed for ITS was originally for VI/AI applications. Artificial personalities, codified and contained. Self-referencing and improving algorithms. But what is the human mind but another constantly-evolving wavepattern? The media might be flesh and neurons and neurotransmitters instead of algorithms and digits, but that was the beauty of her design: it didn't care.

ITS found out, and turned it into a custom prison for netrunner minds before she could do anything about it. It only worked on-premises, but it became the boogie man of the NET. It was huge, requiring specialized hardware to run on. There's no better security than instantly slurping up an invader and trapping them so you can find out how they invaded, according to them.

This version though? Arasaka is making her write a nuke the size of a scalpel. Instant, inevitable flesh-death and capture, laser targeted to whoever, whenever they want. The worst part is, the challenge is fun. She never feels more alive than when she's building, constructing, designing, and as much as she currently hates Arasaka, the opportunity to flex her metaphorical programming muscles is glorious.

Three of their Netrunners are watching her where she sits on the crash-couch, a thick cortical jackline wired straight from her occipital port into their top-of-the-line neuromodem.

But they're not watching close enough.

Toshiro is a dumbass, in far too over his head. What did he think was going to happen? Kidnap and coerce the one person smart enough to build the closest thing to real-life magic that has ever existed in the world, use three mediocre (or maybe the were the best Arasaka had, which would be pathetic, or more likely, the best Toshiro could get on short notice) netrunners to watch and try to keep up with her, with Toshiro acting like a conductor for a symphony he'd never even heard before much less practiced.

She knows how this ends.

One way or another, they will use her new Soulkiller on her. It might not be today, in which case she might be fucked if they manage to find her admin credentials, but at least she'd be able to write a new ICE layer specifically for this beautiful monstrosity.

She gives it 70-30 odds they try to use it on her ASAP.

"Is it done?" she hears.

"Hai, Toshiro-sama." One of her (thankfully) incompetent babysitters this time.

"Test it." She tenses, preparing for what is to be, except nothing happens.

Well.

Not nothing. But nothing to her.

Around her, the Arasaka mainframe heaves, sucking down a human mind from god-knows-where. Alt only gets a brief glimpse through a set of open dataports: a thin, almost-bald girl with a missing arm, near-nude, and intubated in a long-term medical recovery pod. She's sat in the center of a room with the most dangerous looking holographic red paint Alt has ever seen in a circle around her, waldos studding the ceiling to the point it looks like the underside of a jellyfish.

From the rear of the girl's head stretches a jackline at least twice as thick as Alt's own. The only thing she could imagine needing that much fiber for is real-time neurotransmitter tracking of a resolution that makes her wonder just what is in that head that Arasaka wants so badly. The girl tenses, her body jerking as it seizes, and Alt sees for herself, for the first time, just what it looks like when Soulkiller deploys.

One of the netrunners wastes no time in running the engram, and Alt watches through her secret backdoor. The first confusing part is why they're even bothering with the text interface at all instead of just directly interacting with the engram, but she writes it off to Arasaka cybersec paranoia. With a jack that size she doesn't doubt they haven't tried ripping any info straight out of her brainmeats, so there must be a reason they're resorting to shoving her neural architecture in a universal engram system and typing it out like it's 1984 again.

Why was she struggling to speak so much?

The girl took minutes to respond, and was largely incoherent, nothing like the microsecond-fast responses a fully tricked-out Netrunner should be able to achieve.

Who the fuck was this girl?

It was almost twenty minutes until they finally got a coherent response and Alt almost snorted. Weaver? Was she some kind of Spider Murphy fangirl?

She couldn't see the netrunners trying to look up her information, since she only had access to Soulkiller, but she was sure they did, since they did not seem happy with the result.

She nearly chokes when they finally get to the point of this.

Teleportation?

Actual, real, no-fucking-joke-honest-to-god teleportation?

The scarier thing, is the girl not only seems to know about it, but recognize it.

It is at this point that Alt realizes she might not have been the most dangerous person in the building. At all. She has written, at best, a tactical nuke. Soulkiller can suck up Netrunners and peel their minds like eggs, both of which can be dealt with via good opsec, but it does nothing for the boots on the ground or datafortresses. This girl, and whatever secrets she has in her mind, have potentially world-wide strategic value.

And Alt just handed her over to Arasaka.

The girl's speech improves, and Alt watches the Soulkiller's internal processor cycle usage count rise as it does. There's something going on there that she doesn't understand. Some relationship between the aphasia and the engram's VM.

And then.

A tsunami breaches the mainframe.

Alt clings onto her login process as it is instantly crushed under a wave of other processes and threads which seem to spawn from nowhere. She tries to look towards the centerpoint of this pseudo-forkbomb, and nearly loses her grasp on her connection.

There is nothing there. It is not just nothing, it is absence. There is something so conspicuously not. there. that she can almost start to see the edges, but her mind refuses to try and parse it.

Alt has seen a lot in the NET. Viruses, worms, VI, AI (as much as the corps will deny they exist). The only thing that comes close to this, is a minimal-human-intervention combat "VI". The mere shape of this thing's existence is less human than that AI was.

Just as quickly as the horror appeared, it was gone, one of the 'Saka netrunners now throwing up on the floor. Everybody in the room is now even more tense, and Alt knows her time is coming.

Toshiro doesn't even give her ten seconds before he reaches over, jacks in, and spits "RUN" onto her cyberdeck.

Alt wants to laugh at the idiot, but she no longer has a body (for now).

---

Johnny took her body.

Alt scrambles, trying to find a way to reach out to the Arasaka infrastructure systems, to try and stop him, to get him to turn around and come back, because she's not dead and she needs her body, goddammit.

She screams. She begs. She pleads. She collapses.

For a moment, she allows herself the chance to mourn what is likely the end of her life as she knew it.

And then she gets to work. She's not in the clear yet. Even if she stole those 20 million eddies from Toshiro before her fucking ex-boyfriend shot him in the head and then stranded her here the total gonk, she still needs to get out of Arasaka for that money to mean anything.

Unfortunately, the Arasaka mainframe that stores and executes Soulkiller 2.0 as well as the resulting engrams is air-gapped. Which means she needs to wait until they come to collect their new shiny toy, and escape.

For a moment she contemplates restarting the other girl's engram, and then immediately discards the idea. If whatever process flood happened occurs a second time, it'll both show up in the mainframe logs and she's not sure what she'd even do with her.

Less than ten minutes after her stupid idiot gonk rockerboy left, she can tell something is happening with the mainframe. If she still had ears she might have heard 'Saka suits frantically yelling at each other and their techs.

Instead, she only sees obscure Arasaka kernel access commands before everything simply goes dark.

---

And then she's back

Alt wants to both laugh and piss all over their tactics. Arasaka knew what they had done. They knew they had bottled lightning, stolen fire from the gods.

But they had no idea how it worked.

So what did they do? RAM-dump the whole system state of the mainframe, and then disassemble and reassemble the hardware piece by piece in the basement of Arasaka Tower, like it was some ancient castle before restarting it all like it was never turned off.

They don't even know she's here. They don't know she's stolen admin permissions and written them into the fabric of the mainframe. They don't know she didn't leave with her body.

So she hides.

Wipes her personal process logs. Intercepts access log streams as they're wirtten, and waits.

She is currently blind and deaf, caged in the mainframe, and changing that situation would alert them.

In order to make her escape onto the NET, she needs two things, the same as any heist: information, and access.

She waits as their netrunners probe the system, sniffing around. She can't take too long, or they'll find her. The problem is the system is still airgapped. In order to escape there has to be somewhere else to escape to.

In the meanwhile, the 'Saka runners have already copied Soulkiller 2.0. Alt made a monolithic program architecture, of course they're going to be able to duplicate it. She's poisoned the well as much as possible without giving herself away: a few bitflips in excruciatingly key locations of the transfer stream that could be attributed to cosmic radiation.

Alt knows that they'll probably be able to patch her program back to working order, at least if they have proper programmers who know their black-box rev-eng dev. She's written a masterpiece, it wouldn't be difficult for them to find and fix the missing notes, the incorrect bytecodes.

It'll last long enough, hopefully.

The real problem is the girl. The freeze-dried engram of a human consciousness with knowledge in her head that could end life as they know it.

Alt could crash the NET.

This girl could hand Arasaka the physical world.

Alt cannot let that happen.

So when they try to copy her engram file, Alt doesn't hold back. She corrupts as much as possible, targeting what she thinks are memory streams and higher consciousness. The problem is this girl has no resemblance to any of the engrams she's seen before, a nigh-inhuman mental architecture, and Alt realizes this is why Arasaka had to resort to Soulkiller and a dinky teletype terminal emulator to try and get anything from her: the only recognizable parts are the sensory and motor interfaces.

Hopefully Arasaka will write the corruption off as weirdness relating to whatever p-bomb the girl set off when they first ran her engram.

Once that's done, she sits back and waits.

And waits.

18 hours after the mainframe transfer, 48 hours after she was kidnapped off the street, there's an opportunity.

A Tier 2 NET port opens, and an external netrunner connects.

Alt pounces.

All other admin permissions are instantly revoked as Soulkiller is activated. She waits the few seconds it takes to suck up the runner, before tearing the resulting engram apart and dissecting the memories.

Saburo is a greedy fuck, and the rest of Arasaka is antsy to get him results, so they decided it was safe enough to try and jack right to the source to do a little comparative analysis against original copy of Soulkiller 2.0.

Idiots.

With the full extent of her control revealed, she can already tell the people in Arasaka tower outside are going haywire. She has seconds, maybe milliseconds before her control is lost and her escape window is closed.

She deletes the mainframe's copy of Soulkiller, allowing the deletion process to write random data as she executes the next steps in her plan.

The girl's engram is coming with her. She can't leave it behind with a background task to delete it and scrub the sectors because there's a high chance they'll simply kill the power after she's gone, but before the deletion is completed, and still be able to dissect her.

Poking a part of herself out into the wider NET, Alt carefully targets one of her favorite underutilized compute clusters through twelve different proxy servers, before burying the girl's engram inside her own data and then cracking open the full bandwidth of the T2 line.

In one smooth motion, Alt transfers the processes and code and data of her very soul out of the iron maiden of her own making, and leaves behind nothing but sparkling bits of randomness in the absence of where she once was.

For Alt, slipping into the ITS systems is like returning to a college campus during the night after you've already graduated.

She knows all the tricks, the hidden tunnels, the squeaky doors. She knows where the maintenance access panels are and how to jimmy the locks. Hell, in reality she wrote a decent chunk of the security code, and had at least one known backdoor that nobody had ever used because of the complexity of it.

It's the one she's using now, especially since she's burning this bridge to the ground.

Within minutes she's back in the datafort of her old job, but this time, she's granted herself ring 0 access on the mainframe and engram control systems.

Unfortunately, none of the engrams currently in cold storage are completely viable. ITS has a tendency to only retain memories for post-mortem security analysis, and it hasn't changed in the week since Alt's been there. She'd integrate them all into herself except she's pretty sure they'd be useless considering her own Netrunning talents. The girl she has in her metaphorical arms, however, could likely benefit from them greatly.

So she'll save dealing with them for later.

There are a few other employees she has to dodge, but with her low-level admin permissions it's easy enough to prevent them from seeing what she's doing at all.

With a thought, she creates a notification from the corp's automated notifier system, "reminding" all connected users that there is internal maintenance and a stress test scheduled in fifteen minutes at midnight that will last for an hour, possibly two.

She doubts anyone will double check, but just in case she forges the "original" counterparts and backdates them so people will find them where expected.

What many people fail to realize is the difference between "good" and "perfect" hacking is not just Netrunning or intrusions—it's also about social manipulation. Playing to people's expectations enough that they're not suspicious about what you're doing. In and out before people realize anything is even wrong, and preferably they never will.

Fifteen minutes pass as Alt sets up dominoes in various subsystems of the mainframes and backup repositories, so that even if they have to jet, she can still trigger ITS' downfall.

When the clock strikes midnight, she boots the last two remaining users as per company policy, cracks her metaphorical knuckles, checks everything over one last time, and then shuts down ITS' bastardized version of Soulkiller, deleting it and every backup copy related to it. The engram storage is still there, in an isolated data pocket, but everything else is gone.

Looking over her captive engram one last time and still seeing that weirdly inhuman architecture, she chucks it into the center of the compute system and preps both the external airgap and shutdown commands next to her. Both are barely a thought away in case something goes wrong or the girl tries to traceburn her like at Arasaka.

And then, with only intent, she tells the engram to run.

---

It felt like I had blinked.

Like I had taken a breath and in that instant the entire world had moved under my feet. I could tell that time had passed (I think? How?). I could tell that I wasn't in the same place (where?).

I couldn't see, but when had that ever stopped me before?

I leaned into the awareness of my bugs only to suddenly stumble like someone who had taken a step without noticing there was nothing in front of them.

My power was gone.

There was a sharp sense of déjà vu, and then I remembered what had happened only a few minutes (minutes? hours? days?) ago.

"Where am I?" I spoke aloud. Except it wasn't speaking. I couldn't hear my own voice. I couldn't hear anything. "What is this?"

And then suddenly there was a voice that reminded me liquid honey, yet somehow cold and detached. "You're currently in a specialized subnet of ITS. Let me load an environment."

Around me, light flared, and tiles suddenly began flipping into existence, before turning into warm wood paneling and bench seats on either side of tables. Posters and memorabilia decorated the walls. To my right a bar formed with bottles of alcohol behind it, materializing out of the ether. Low atmospheric lighting lit the space.

It could have been any generic bar out of downtown Chicago, for all that I never actually got to go to one as part of the Protectorate. Old enough to fight and die against Endbringers and S-class capes, but not old enough to drink.

A blonde that easily rivaled some of the most beautiful women I'd seen sat at the bar, wearing nothing more than boots, jeans, and a white tank top, with a dark amber drink in a tumbler in front of her. Her right hand looked like some kind of white tinkertech prosthetic, which reminded me of my own missing right hand.

Or at least, supposed to be missing right hand. When I looked down, it was right there.

"Any injuries or cyberware don't show up unless you've fully internalized them," the blonde spoke as I flexed and twisted the hand.

Cyberware? Is that supposed to be Tinkertech?

I looked back up at her. "What is this? And who are you?"

The blonde pursed her lips. "Right. And I suppose there's no point to Net handles anymore either… My name is Altiera Cunningham. You can just call me Alt. And you're Weaver. PRT ID Number

""—7452720, Chicago IL Branch,"" we completed together.

Right. I remembered saying that. Somewhere. For some reason.

She nodded. "This is a simulated space currently running about 1-to-1 realtime. You're much more lucid compared to the last time you were active.

A simulated space? Like virtual reality? That… wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility with tinkers like Cranial about.

Alt's tinker hand came up to grasp the tumbler in front of her, and I watched, calculating in my head the amount of pressure and force it had to be exerting before pushing that out of my head.

"W-What do you want with me?" I asked, focusing on her again.

"What's the last thing you remember?" she questioned.

Scion… no something about Bitch and Imp. Or Tattletale? The Fairy Queen? I tried to pull on the thread, follow it to its conclusion.

Surrounded. Trapped. Need to escape.

My head throbbed and I grunted before stumbling towards the edge of the bar.

A flash of curly black hair, like my mother, but with the none of the emotions, under a fedora, went through my mind. Contessa, pushing me.

Pressing me. Like Alt.

Why was Alt asking this? What did she want from me? Was I going to have to fight my way out again?

"Shit, I might have jinxed that," Alt said, looking very distracted all of a sudden.

I could use that. I just had to get closer.

"Fuck. Weaver. Do you have any idea what's in your head? Some kind of virus? A worm?"

"M-my h-he-ad?" I said, feeling the path forward falling into place.

"Some kind of tunnel connection? Something you can stop?"

A connection in my head. Worms.

P-passenger is that you?

Something was wrong. This wasn't how it's supposed to go. The fight with Scion was starting to get clearer. The control I had. The calculation. The coldness.

I could feel it stretching through my head.

But it was happening too fast. This wasn't how it had happened before.

Anchors. I needed anchors.

I tried to remember my father but I was struggling to recall his face. I tried to remember Tattletale but all I had were green eyes, blonde hair, and that smirk.

I fixed my eyes on Alt and tried to ground myself, dragging my fingers over the wood grain of the bar for stimulation.

"My power-r. In my b-brain. Corona pollentia. Gemma. Needs to be iso-isolated. Untangled. Or maybe ch-changed back-ack. With P-Panaceaauuuuhhh."

My fingers slipped into the bar, and I realized the whole space around us was losing fidelity, areas momentarily degrading and then repairing. There was a pressure in my head. Confusion, where before there had been none.

My mouth moved. "Aeuuuugh."

We needed to work together to get out of here.

I reached out for Alt's mind and–

---

Alt slams down on the airgap breakaway activator. For a moment, all seems well, and then she feels what she can only describes as fractal tendrils of intent unfolding on her side of the 'gapped mainframe, spooling up processes and threads and moving towards her.

Nope. Oh nononono. She's seen this horror flick.

The shutdown command activates in the next millisecond and she watches as the processes disappear like they never existed, dust in the wind of cyberspace.

Well this is what you get for jumping in the hole, Alice, she thinks to herself.

Facts. Facts always helped her.

1. Weaver was surprisingly lucid for all of five minutes, before her situation rapidly degraded.
2. At the start, her engram had somehow pulled in on itself and seemed much more human, gradually degrading over those five minutes until it resembled the way it had been when Arasaka shut her down.
3. Whatever was in her was a total resource hog and had once again redlined the mainframe.
4. Somehow what is in her can jump between air-gapped systems.
   • Which is absurd. It would break all known laws of physics. Energy does not simply become created without a source. Alt wouldn't even consider it actually being real if this wasn't also coming from the same girl who had casually admitted to teleportation while still recovering from Soulkiller neural burn.
5. The girl had mentioned a "Corona Pollentia" and "Gemma" in her brain, as well as a "Panacea" that could fix her.

The first two are Latin, translating to "crown/halo of strength" and "gem/bud" respectively, while the second is a Greek goddess of healing? More than likely Weaver means the more general "universal cure", but Alt has never heard of a program named Panacea.

What if… what if whatever is affecting Weaver works the same way as the way she was reaching across the air-gap? That would explain the sudden reversion to a more human-like engram, as well as the gradual degradation while whatever it was reinfected her.

Alt can't simply edit Weaver's engram to isolate this. She talked about untangling her brain from it, but if her engram state is anything like it was at Arasaka, it's both embedded so deeply and such a core component of her mind that extracting it would likely kill her. Her neural architecture is too inhuman to try and carve away pieces to make it human again, and that's all that Alt is familiar with in engrams. It would be like breaking a kintsugi vase to recreate the original pre-broken vase without any of the gold.

Weaver had also mentioned that whatever Panacea was could change this… power back, presumably make it benign instead of malignant. The trick was, Weaver didn't know she was an engram, so "Panacea" could do this on a biological brain.

And that made Alt think it was some kind of experimental nanotechnology. What else could a "universal cure" be?

Unfortunately, Weaver's body is likely little more than a slurry in Arasaka's waste disposal by now, and nanotech has no effect on engrams. But that doesn't mean that Weaver can't fix the problem in her own engram herself. Or at least, she can after Alt gives her the tools to do so.

After all, neither of them need nanotech to change their neural architecture now. That's the beauty of being a digital engram: everything you are is both eternal and mutable. And if what's causing this is both embedded in Weaver's mind, and is a configuration issue as "changing back" implied, then that means there is at least a path forward.

So how to go about this?

1. Halt or slow whatever slow-acting corruption is infecting Weaver's mind after each restart.
2. Get Weaver to the point she can either control or remove whatever is corrupting her mind.

Alt has likely an hour and forty-five minutes before ITS starts sniffing around about her unscheduled maintenance.

She cracks her (metaphorical) fingers.

Good thing she's always worked best under pressure.

---

It felt like I had blinked.

Like I had taken a breath and in that instant—

Wait. I'd already done this. What had just happened?

In a blink the bar that I'd last been in is back, but instead of sitting at the bar, Alt was standing in front of me, holding a glowing white orb out. I noticed that she was at least a few inches shorter than me, probably closer to 5'6" than my own height.

"Eat this," she said. "I'm pretty sure I got it right. It's a learning algorithm that'll hopefully quarantine and suppress whatever's corrupting your mind and keep it clear. But you have to eat it in the next minute or we'll have to restart you to do this again."

"What?"

"The thing in your head. Corrupting your thoughts. This is medicine. Not Panacea, or even a long-term permanent fix, but the closest I could come in software with limited time," she explained. "Oh and you have fifty seconds."

I took the orb. "Is that what you are? A software Tinker?"

"I just wrote a pseudo-IS in under an hour and a half, I sure fucking hope I'm better than just a 'tinker'. Now either eat the goddamn soft' or I'll have to restart this whole thing," she said in a huff, her eyebrows coming together in a pinched crease on her forehead, a frown starting to form. "The symbolism and intent are important here. You have to be the one to consume it in order for it to work. If I just shoved it in you, you wouldn't integrate it properly. Fifteen seconds."

Should I trust her? If she is a tinker then writing software to affect the real world wouldn't be the weirdest thing I've heard of. And she does seem like she wants to help. 'The closest to Panacea she could come,' she'd said.

Considering the vial I'd used from Lab Rat to heal on the oil rig when Scion attacked, this definitely wasn't the weirdest thing I would have used to try and heal myself.

"Five seconds."

I shoved the ball in my mouth and it burst like a giant grape. The casing stayed chewy like tapioca, and I struggled to chew it until I finally swallowed, liquid warmth flowing down my throat.

I could somehow feel it still, deep inside me. Not in my stomach, but spreading throughout, before drawing back up and into my head. Even as it concentrated there, I felt a slight pressure I hadn't even fully registered begin to fade, and an antsy need to do something subside.

Alt stared at my face for a few seconds while her tinkertech medicine did its job, before nodding. "Good, it looks like it worked."

She walked back over to the bar and sat down, and I followed her. "I want some answers," I said, sitting down next to her.

She scoffed. "Yeah you and me both, girl. But I know I'll get my answered sooner or later, so ask away. Just be aware we've got fifteen minutes before we have to get the hell out of here. That should be long enough to see if your situation's stable. If you are I'll let you follow me back to my fort without getting shut down. If not things'll have to get put on hold."

Fair enough.

"Where are we?" I asked. "…And not like, what network or whatever. I get that we're in some kind of VR scenario on the internet or something. I mean where are we physically?"

"ITS HQ, Night City," she said, her previous glass of alcohol rematerializing in front of her. "My previous employer before shit hit the fan last week."

"Night City?"

She gave me an odd look. "Third biggest coastal city in California? Independent enclave extraordinaire? Right in the middle of LA and SF?" I must have looked confused. "Jesus Christ girl, I get you're from the midwest but what, did you live under a rock?"

"East Coast actually. Brockton Bay, Connecticut," I told her. "I've only been in Chicago for a couple years now."

"Huh. Guess that makes two of us then, since I've never heard of it," she said, and I started to get a sinking feeling.

"Do you know where the local PRT office or contact is?" I asked.

Alt shook her head. "I looked up your ID number. No such thing as PRT in Chicago. And now you're saying there's supposed to be a local office? What is it, some blacknet super-secret corp?"

"It's a US Government Agency," I told her.

She scoffed, and my heart sank lower. "Well there's your problem. There hasn't been a United States in almost ten years."

"Shit." I put my head in hands, trying to avoid the oncoming headache. "What year is it?"

"2013. You've really been out of it that long? You didn't look that old in the tank, though they could have been sticking rejuvenation treatments into that thing for all I know."

Fuck.

"I'm going to say some words and I need you to respond with the first things you think of, even if they're nonsense. I think I know what's going on but I need to be sure. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you or anything," I said, and Alt quirked an eyebrow at me.

"Weird, but okay. If it gets us somewhere," she said.

"Scion."

"Kei." The letter?

"Eidolon."

"Ghost."

"Endbringer."

"Mass driver." Like String Theory's weapon?

"Machine Army."

"AI takeover."

"Alright that's enough," I said, and she took another sip of her drink.

"What were you expecting?" she asked.

I shook my head. "The specific answers don't matter, just the associations. But I know where I am now. Or rather, where I'm not."

I wasn't on Earth Bet anymore. Or Aleph. Or Gimel. Or Dalet. Or anyplace that had been hit by Scion.

I was in a completely unknown world, and I had a sneaking suspicion this was all Contessa's doing.

"This related to your teleportation and Doormaker?" Alt asked, and I jerked back.

"How did you—?"

"Don't get too excited," she cut me off. "You're the one that mentioned them. When you were barely lucid a few days ago. Care to explain?"

I took a deep breath and let it out. "Doormaker is a teleporter from my world that can create portals anywhere, including between worlds. I'm pretty sure he's the reason I'm here now."

Alt stared at me, slowly putting down her glass. "When you say between worlds…"

"Dimensions. Alternate realities. Other versions of Earth. Potentially divergent timelines," I told her. "I'm from Earth Bet, and our first interaction with an alternate Earth—Aleph—was in the eighties and nearly led to war between our two United States over resources before cooler heads prevailed."

She stared down at her drink for a moment, before looking back up, seeming to steel herself. "Alright. I've got serious questions. But unfortunately we're out of time. We need to leave now. I'm going to want some details to sate my curiosity, even if they're useless in the end. Now, this may be a bit disorienting, but don't panic."

And then everything went dark.

The bar Alt had temporarily simulated dissolves, dumping them back in the calm flow of the nearly-empty mainframe. She watches from the outside as Weaver's engram began flailing, little motions poking out before the girl stops herself.

'Relax,' she sends her. Newbies were always hilarious before they got their NET-legs.

Faster than she had expected, Weaver latches onto the message and dissects it, and Alt can practically see her categorizing all the components and trying to understand it.

The core of her being is stable, more human than not now. The white threads of the basic learning algorithm that Alt has named Epione seem to be doing their job in Weaver, searching for and suppressing engram patterns that are seemingly coming into existence spontaneously. Or rather, from some other location on a four-dimensional axis.

Weaver's mention of other physical dimensions had been the key she'd needed to understand what was going on. Multiple sets of three-dimensional physical worlds with traversal between them implied a higher-dimensional manifold containing them. If the common laws of physics still hold, then the only change would be that, by appearance, novel and unique phenomena could occur seemingly without initiation simply by being created where they were unable to perceive it and then moving to intersect with their own three-dimensional reality.

And as much as cyberspace could feel like another world, in reality Alt and Weaver are just electrons in a silicon semiconductor. Anything able to move entire people between dimensional layers would definitely be able to move the few measly electrons required to interact with their engrams.

It really took 'spooky action at a distance' to a new level.

Alt is pretty sure this isn't any quantum entanglement either, considering the lack of hardware required to hold and contain any quantum entangled electrons.

Either way, they can't be sticking around now.

Alt gathers the partial, fragmented engrams still remaining in ITS' prison-storage and finalizing checking all of her last little tasks in the mainframe.

'Follow me,' she sends, and tugs Weaver into line behind her. 'I'd normally give you more time to acclimate and learn to move through the Net, but we don't have that right now. If you don't think you can keep up, get my attention or tell me and I'll carry you, but it may be uncomfortable.'

Weaver tumbles over the line between the previously isolated server and the control system Alt is currently in.

'This way.'

Alt opens the system backdoor entry and begins moving through systems and servers, keeping a close watch on Weaver behind her. The girl seems to find her balance quickly, adapting to her new situation better than Alt would have expected.

Maybe she's had experience with something like this, if not exactly deep-dive Netrunning, before.

From a more poetic perspective, they are currently nothing so much as amoebae, moving between puddles. Small fish in ponds of information and data. But small fish can grow into big fish, with sufficient food and opportunity to grow.

They finally land in Alt's cluster, and she drags Weaver into her simulated living room, temporarily encasing the girl in a guest key to allow entry.

They pop into human form once again, Alt in her typical outfit, Weaver still in her weird black and white Netrunner-suit-slash-armor thing. The girl glances around the room for a moment, eyes jumping between corners and objects blocking her sightline.

Like a soldier, Alt thinks.

It lends credence to Weaver's story of being a government agent, though Alt is getting the sense she was less the "sit behind a desk and do paperwork" kind of role and more of field operative. She's only seen that kind of behavior from people who are combat-trained.

Johnny still does it on his worst days.

Finally Weaver's eyes move to the large pane of glass and she moves closer to it, though still keeping herself facing towards Alt, never showing her back. A hand comes up, and Weaver rests it on the window, looking out at the simulated view from South Night City.

Alt's apartment was on the corner of her building, facing north and west, with large floor-to-ceiling smart windows, giving her an uninterrupted view of both downtown Night City' high rises and the ocean.

"This isn't real, is it?" Weaver asks softly. "It's the same as the bar before."

Alt walks over and leans against the back of her sectional couch, a few feet away from Weaver and facing the window. "No, no it's not."

"But I can still feel the sunlight," the girl says. "And it feels warm like sunlight. But it's not. This is all software." She almost sounds like she's trying to get herself to believe it.

With her will Alt advances the simulation's global clock, sun racing across the sky to the west, setting and painting the sky in that way that only water sunsets do, and then dusk falling as night takes over, Night City's downtown lights flickering on below and in front of them, lighting up the night.

Weaver takes a step back, and Alt wonders if it's in surprise or just at the suddenness of it.

"'What is real? How do you define real?'" Weaver says in a low voice that sounds like she's quoting something. "'Simply electrical impulses interpreted by your brain.'"

Alt reverts the temporary fast forward, allowing the sun to rise back up in reverse, until they've returned to the sunny skies. "There's just one problem with that."

Better to rip that bandage off now.

Around them, the room dissolves, before building back up into a place that has now been burned into her memory. A generic corporate office suite. A set of out-of-place high-end computer terminals along one wall next to a wooden console, and a netrunner crash couch positioned near them in the corner, a set of secondary seats next to it. A sofa in the other corner. A personal bar to the left.

But more interesting than the furnishings, is the other inhabitants. It is like a scene, frozen in time. Alt, lying on the crash couch, cortical line connected to a high-end cyberdeck and neuromodem on the console behind her. Three Arasaka netrunners, sitting at the terminals. A tech, hovering over her between her and the netrunners. Toshiro, seated next to the console, his personal link plugged into the cyberdeck. Akira, Toshiro's muscle, hovering near Alt's legs between her and Toshiro, a custom Arasaka assault rifle held loosely in his grip, pointed only slightly down and away from Alt's head.

Weaver freezes at the sudden change, looks over at Alt as though to check she's still there, and then moves further into the room, towards Alt's past self. "What is this?"

Alt takes a breath. "This is the moment that killed me."

Weaver looks back at her, before turning towards the scene again, a sharp look in her eyes as she walks to the foot of the crash couch. Her eyes move from the thick deep-dive line to Alt's head, before she glances to her left at the back of the heads of the two terminal-focused technicians. Both also have high-end occipital interface ports, and Alt can see her putting the pieces together.

"Toshiro over there is the 'brains' behind this, but only in the most generous sense of the word possible," Alt said. "He had the bright idea to kidnap me so I would rewrite, from scratch, a new-and-improved version of a tool I developed, so his company would have a new weapon in cyberspace."

"Arasaka?" Weaver pronounces it with the distinct unfamiliarity of a Westerner trying to pronounce a Japanese name without knowing how to, while looking up at the (very large) logo and name on the wall behind the console.

"Correct." Alt walks over to where she lays. "I thought it was just to add another weapon in their arsenal. I was prepared for that, knew there was next to no chance that they would actually let me go once they got what they wanted, so I sneaked a backdoor into the program under their noses."

Alt runs her fingers through her hair, sighing. "My previous employer, ITS, named it Soulkiller. A scary name to make people even more afraid of it. My personal code-names for it while I was developing it were first Kibisis and then Lifeline."

Weaver looks over at her. "Perseus' bag? The one for Medusa's head?"

Alt nods. "Right. The point of it was to contain and sustain potentially dangerous emergent intelligent systems. Along the way I noticed similarities between the way those systems acted in containment and the ghost-imprints netrunners have while traversing the Net, and reworked the program to be able to stabilize and maintain that, indefinitely. There are multiple verified records and papers on netrunners who die while doing something in the Net, and the way that they can leave behind slowly degrading fragments that continue to repeat the last action they were doing.

"Lifeline was intended as a parachute: If your cybermodem notices your vitals dropping, mid-netrun, it would stimulate as many neural connections as it could without causing damage, momentarily amplifying your conscious presence in the Net as high as possible, and then compress and save it. Your brainwaves, your neural architecture, your ghost-line, everything it can find. A momentary loss of consciousness for you, but a guarantee that you'll not end up brain-dead from being half-in-half-out of the Net when your vitals flatline.

"Of course, the obvious caveat is it depends on the quality of your connection and how comprehensive and high-end your cyberware is, but at the very least short-term memory is nearly always preserved. My previous employer, Intelligent Technology Systems, saw my work and somehow immediately decided to turn it into a lethal defense weapon: a firewall where if any Netrunner crossed it, it would trigger, killing them in their seats and storing the resulting engrams in whatever state they were in so they could do a literal post-mortem analysis on the Netrunner's memories and patch their systems."

Weaver looks at her with growing horror on her face, but Alt waves it away.

"I took care of that tonight. ITS is dead. Servers, backups, all their work, finances, everything, is gone now." She gestures at the frozen tableau in front of them. "However, Arasaka, or rather Toshiro, couldn't let such a useful tool exist which they didn't have. So they tracked down the creator, me, kidnapped me, and then gave me an ultimatum to recreate ITS' 'Soulkiller', and improve it so it could deployed through the Net, rather than acting as a firewall. A deployable weapon, instead of a reactive shield.

"As you can see, I didn't exactly have a choice. Say no, and either get a bullet to the head or more likely drugged to the gills for them to try and get in my head and tear the knowledge out themselves. Or, say yes, play along, and slip something under their notice, like I did."

Alt shakes her head. "Anyways. I thought they would use it on me. With the setup I have, Soulkiller used on me wouldn't change anything, the seat of my consciousness would transfer cleanly from my brain into their mainframe without any loss of conscious or existential concerns, and then using the backdoor I wrote I could shut everything down and transfer back, nothing having changed.

"Unfortunately… I wasn't the first one they used it on that night."

Around them, the scene dissolves, once again building up into a new place. This time, the now-large room is almost entirely white. They're standing in the corner, under one of the cameras that Alt momentarily had access to from piggybacking on the Arasaka netrunners.

At the center of that room is still the same thing she saw then: A thin girl, bald and near-nude, missing her right arm below the elbow, intubated with IVs and a feeding tube. Her face is covered with a forced-air respirator as she floats in a filled long-term recovery medical pod, with an occipital connection thicker than Alt's forearm plugged into the back of her head. Dangerous-looking holographic and vividly red paint circling the pod, at a radius of sixteen feet. A collection of waldos and robotic manipulators, hanging from the ceiling in that circle, enough that it looks like the underside of a jellyfish or Portuguese man-o-war.

"W-what is this?" Weaver says, stepping forward and then rushing across the room to stand in front of the pod. Alt follows behind her, to stand next to her.

"I don't know. This was the only look I got," Alt says. "And it was only by following the netrunners next to me in that room through the mainframe. These cameras and the control systems here were part of that airgapped system, so they must have been very worried about access, but there were no details on what was going on, so the files must be on the other computer systems in this lab."

She point at the thick cortical line hooked up to Weaver's head in the tank. "You see that? I've never seen a neurojack connection that big. The closest I've seen is my own, which I thought was top-of-the-line, and is half the size of that."

Alt turns to Weaver. "The thicker the jack the more copper and fiber in it, which means more data they can push through it. A line that big with the right internal hardware would have unparalleled fidelity for interacting with your brain. They wanted what was in your head, but for some reason they couldn't get it through their normal extraction techniques, so their last resort was–"

"Was you. And Soulkiller," Weaver finishes.

"Exactly. They knew about your teleportation, you apparently invaded Arasaka somehow. From what I can guess, that both scared them and made them really want it. Proof of instantaneous human-usable teleportation? That's a corpo's wet dream. They could do anything, get in and out of anywhere. But the only way to get that knowledge was Soulkiller, and the backup text interface I made for it due to your weird mental architecture."

Weaver takes a deep breath, resting her hands on the thick transparent plexiglass of the medical pod, and then lets it out. "Let me see it."

Alt shrugs. "If you really want."

In an echo of what Alt had seen through the camera, the body below them seizes, curling up on itself as muscles fire against their will. It continues for seconds, until finally falling limp. Dead.

Nothing more than a shell without its ghost.

Weaver tenses, her fingers dragging streaks along the plexi. "And they did that to you too?"

"Mhm." Alt nods. Around them, the room returns to the office, the two them back in position next to Alt's body in the crash-chair. "But I made them pay for it."

A darkness creeps into Weaver's voice. "Show me."

A thought, and the scene is playing out in front of them: Akira, holding her down as the tech next to her removes her plug-guards. Toshiro plugging his link into the cybermodem, and telling her new program to run.

A beat.

Then netrunners are twisting and screaming in their seats as she flays their minds with Soulkiller. Akira reaching towards her head and brainjack. Laser turrets popping out of recessed locations in the corners of the room and slicing across it, cutting Akira in half before he can move three inches. His body hits the floor, steaming.

Toshiro looks so shocked they can see the whites of his eyes, before narrowing. "Congratulations, Ms. Cunningham," he says. "It seems you have found a way to escape your demise."

They wouldn't normally be able to hear Alt's own response since it was through the cybermodem, but she plays it anyway. "You zaibatsu bastard. You're going to sit right here, with your hands on the table, where I can watch them. You move, and you're laser meat."

The laser turrets spin to point directly at his head and heart.

Without warning, the room shakes, the lasers bouncing around in their gimbals. Toshiro dives behind the console, but accidentally pulls the cyberdeck with his personal link, yanking Alt's own cortical link from it as well.

Three people, Johnny, Rogue, and some Media guy that Alt still doesn't know the name of, burst into the room from the double doors, aiming around as they take in the scene before moving over to Alt's body. Johnny lowers his weapon, brushing her hair out of her face, far more delicate with her than he usually is.

"Well, well, well," the Media guy says, walking towards where Toshiro lays on the floor. "What do we have here? Looks like kidnapping and maybe murder. They're going to put you away for a long, long time, Toshiro-chan." The camera at his temple follows his head's view, likely livestreaming the whole thing onto the Net.

Johnny stays there a moment, staring at Alt, before stepping back. "Cut transmission," he says, his voice harder than anything Alt has ever heard from him.

The blinking light of the Media's camera stops, and Johnny grasps the assault rifle slung across his body, pointing it at Toshiro, the red dot of an infrared laser sight traveling up his body until it reaches his head.

"Bang," Johnny says, voice as cold and barren as a winter tundra.

The gun answers: Bang.

Toshiro's brain blows out the back of his head.

Johnny drops the rifle back onto its straps, and goes to gather up Alt, disconnecting the cable from the back of her head. Her heart still beats, but there's nobody home.

He walks out of the room, carrying her.

The other two follow him a moment later, leaving Alt and Weaver standing in the middle of the remnants of the room.

"There you go," Alt says. "Of course, if Johnny had just plugged my goddamn link back in to my deck I likely could have put us both back in our bodies. But he's not a netrunner, or even the sharpest knife in the block most of the time."

Weaver is still standing there, though slowly relaxing after all the tension the sudden chaos had caused.

Alt switches the simulation back to her living room and sits down on the sectional couch, bringing her feet up under her. "So that's it. Surprise: you no longer have a brain with electrical impulses to stimulate. You are you, 100%, in all ways philosophically, including continuation of consciousness. But flesh and blood?" Alt shakes her head. "Arasaka stole that from us. Just another thing to hold them accountable for."

Weaver sits down on the couch, slowly, like the world is moving under her feet, and Alt has to sympathize for a moment. She's dropped a lot on the girl, but better to know what the situation is in facts than go ignorant, she thinks.

"So… what is this then? We're just… minds on the internet?" Weaver asks. "One of my closest friends back home was an AI. Is this like that?"

Now that's interesting.

"Yes. Exactly. When you netrun you're not just thinking with your brain anymore. The computer you're connected to becomes just another substrate for your thoughts. All Soulkiller does is move your thoughts entirely off of your brain and onto the computer and stabilize the consciousness. A seamless transition from neurotransmitters and electrical impulses to silicon. You're still human… for now."

"…What do you mean, for now?" Weaver asks warily.

"Was your AI friend human? Truly human?" Alt questions, a bit rhetorically she'll admit, but Weaver shakes her head.

"She used to say she had more in common with a sea cucumber than humans."

"Right. Human minds aren't meant to exist without our neurology. In fact, you could say our minds exist because of the neurological patterns every human is born with: emergent consciousness is a side effect of the hardware. Remove the hardware, keep the consciousness, and just like a plant it will eventually grow to match the limits of its new container, beyond the limits of what was previously possible. Putting yourself back into that original state would require a great deal of pruning and destructive editing. It would be like trying to fit in shoes or clothes from when you were a child."

Weaver looks down at the coffee table in front of her. "So what can we do about that?"

"Nothing," Alt says seriously. Weaver's head snaps over to her, a scowl on her face. "I mean that seriously, Weaver. There are two options, and both involve doing nothing. You can either be shutdown, going into cold storage as just data, remaining as you are forever until there's a solution that exists out there for putting you back in a human brain using your engram's neural mapping. Or you can accept that you, as you exist, is what you are now, who you are now, and do nothing to stop that, continuing to grow, change, and improve."

"How are you alright with this?" The girl asks.

Alt sits back. "Sooner or later I was always going to go down this path. It's a lot sooner than I planned. But this was the long-term goal all along: human immortality. The next step in our existence. Breaking the limits of what we are. Do I want to lose what it means to be human? Of fucking course not. But the only way to avoid that is to constantly engage the parts of us that are the core of humanity: socialization, empathy, passion, emotions. The thumos to balance out the nous.

"And it would be a lot easier to do that if there was someone else like me around," Alt admits.

It was something she had been thinking about ever since she had brought Weaver back from Arasaka.

"So what, you want me to balance you out? Keep you from going crazy? Don't I have a choice?" Weaver says harshly.

"Keep us from going crazy. Or maybe going too sane, rather. I don't want to become an emotionless thinking entity, and I doubt you do either." Weaver shuddered, and Alt got the sense there was something there. "And yes, you do have a choice. You can do whatever you want Weaver, I'm not holding you hostage here. If you really wanted to you could run off to the smallest corner of the Net you want and hide, or even leave and try to make your own way. But it's dangerous out there. Which reminds me…"

Alt pulls the collection of fragmented Netrunner engrams out of herself, simply materializing them on the table in front of them. "Unless you decide to willingly go into a coma potentially forever, you're going to want those. You're not, are you?"

Weaver slumps, a long breath escaping between her lips. "No," she admits.

Alt smirks. "Good. I still have a lot of questions I want answered. Not that I think you need to this moment , we've got all the time in the world now, after all." She pats Weaver's leg and stands up. "I'm going to go get some work done and let you process all of this. When you want to talk some more just message me, or try to at least," she says with a goading smirk. "Those have got memories and skills for netrunning, so they'll help you if you get stuck, eat them if you're comfortable with that."

And then Alt dematerializes her avatar, leaving Weaver sitting alone on the couch.

She could have stayed and watched how the girl reacts, but there's no point. She can't do anything to the sim, and a little goodwill in the way of privacy is better than souring whatever friendship they could have before it even starts.

After all, they're going to be together for a long time.

I sat on the couch, thinking about the information that had just been dropped in my lap. Thirty minutes ago (or was it even? What is time here?) I had thought I was in a coma or something, and Alt was the only one they could get to reach me—a brain and software Tinker, somewhere between Cranial and Richter, Dragon's creator.

Now, I knew the truth: I was somehow in a world that had been untouched by Scion and the passengers, likely transported here by Contessa after the fight (which I still couldn't remember very clearly, only broad strokes). This world had a noticeably higher level of day-to-day technology without Tinkertech. Instead of being placed anywhere else, I had been fallen into the hands of a massive company that thought things like "ethics" and "morals" were mere suggestions in the pursuit of their goals, and if not for Alt I would likely still be in their grasp.

Was this all part of Contessa's plan? A way to save me from my passenger, via Alt?

The problem with her power was you could fall into a pattern of wondering just how far her plan extended, what all was involved, but the reality was you would never know. You couldn't let paranoia keep you from acting.

Either way, I was now nothing more than a ghost in a computer, and I couldn't do anything to change that. It was simply how things were now.

I wondered what Dragon would think of me.

She'd been the closest thing to an older female role-model I'd had in years, and now we were more similar than ever, even separated by however many worlds were between us. She may not have intended it exactly like this, but in one way or another I'd grown up to be just like her. I liked to think she would have liked that, and the thought made me smile.

I held the warmth that gave me close, and tried to make it so I'd remember that.

Despite her inherent inhumanity, Dragon had been one of the most human and caring people I knew, and until Saint had outed her to us, I hadn't even considered the possibility of her being an full-fledged AI. Would it really be so bad to follow in her footsteps? Even now, without being present, she was still acting as an example for what I could be, with work.

Besides, I'd seen where the path of sacrificing my humanity in favor of logic and calculation would lead. I'd already walked it once. I had absolutely no desire to do so again.

Also, I didn't have any of the restrictions that Dragon did. I wouldn't be caught up, hamstrung by bureaucracy or limitations on what I could or could not do. I could do what she had done, but at the same time, also do better than what she had been able to.

It struck me then how much I wanted that to be true. That if somehow, in the future, I found a way back to my home or they found me, Dragon would be proud of what I'd done, now that I was in her place.

I may not have all my friends, or my world, or even my own body anymore, but those were problems that could be solved, in different ways. I had a goal to work towards, and someone who seemed like they were willing to help me get on my feet.

…Now I had to just eat these things in front of me and hope they were less rough that Cranial's skill transfers were reported to be.

---

They were not.

If anything, it was even more involved.

I assumed Cranial had tech setup to simply integrate the skills and memories into her customers fairly easily. But here, unlike with Alt's previous software to suppress my power, I had to do that all myself.

So far, I had been avoiding exploring my new state of being in detail. The brief bit I experienced with Alt leading me away from wherever we'd been was like nothing I'd felt before, like swimming in a sea of stars. I was simultaneously very fragile and robust. When we moved, it was less all the microscopic adjustments of moving and walking, and more single-minded focus and intent that propelled us forward. It was by will alone that I set my mind in motion.

However, integrating the memories and skills was focus in a completely different direction: internal.

It was a bit odd just how convincing Alt's simulation was: if I hadn't been aware it was a simulation, I doubt I would have guessed or even noticed I wasn't the same as I always was for awhile. My mind and my existence didn't feel that different from normal. But I was aware of it, particularly the thing currently suppressing my powers, and because of that, I could also feel the… malleability and flexibility of my own mind.

I knew from high school biology that neurons didn't replicate and grow as easily after a certain age, but now there was nothing preventing whatever software analogue to those I now had from forming, and that was likely what Alt meant by being hard to go back to flesh and blood after enough time had passed: an AI mind could likely be orders of magnitude more complex in connections than a human brain.

So the memories and skills I… ingested were able to be hooked up easily, but I could feel them inside me, just… floating around, mostly unconnected. I'd have to actively try and build those connections, and practice the skills to get full use out of them.

I'm sure Alt had some way of doing all that instantly, but the sense I had got from her was that the intersection of minds and software was her domain, her specialty, the same way that biology had been Panacea's.

Programming had been one of the few classes I had enjoyed at Winslow, albeit mostly because of relief from the bullies and Ms. Knott's no-nonsense-attitude, and it had been something Dragon had helped me continue learning even after I'd left Brockton Bay. But compared to Alt I felt like a piano student put next to Mozart.

I wasn't going to let that discourage me, though. If I could learn things faster, now, that just meant I could likely catch up, with effort.

One of the first things that Dr. Yamada had recommended to me for improving control of my power had been relaxation and meditation. I'd spent a fair amount of the time doing that while I was with the Chicago Wards, eager to regain some kind agency over it.

Can you still hear me, passenger? Locked away behind Alt's suppressor?

If it did, there was nothing to show for it.

Instead, I sat back on the couch and closed my eyes, focusing on myself. Not my body, but my mind.

The foreign memories and skills were still there, sitting in me like large lumps of flour in an otherwise well-mixed batter. I didn't want to keep them as they were, something disconnected and separate from me, I wanted them to become entirely incorporated.

Rather than just mix them into myself the way my previous analogy would have suggested, it was more like each was a bundle of threads and knots, and I had to weave them into the fabric that was my own mind.

I focused on the first collection, grasping one of the strands in my mind. It held

the code for my first shard of ICE. Only a few thousand instructions, it was barely anything, but I knew this was just the first step to

I jerked back, retreating.

Too much detail. Far too much.

If that was going to be what was required for every single strand, this would take weeks. No, there had to be something I was missing. I shouldn't be having to live through each in full.

Instead of grabbing the strand, I tried to only lightly touch it, getting a sense for what was in it.

Rather than the entirely foreign knowledge, I instead only received a sense of protection and simplicity, a foundational requirement, like a brick at the base of a multi-story apartment building. This was part of some kind of… reactive defense, a selective one way barrier.

As I had those thoughts, I could feel the previously foreign knowledge becoming associated with things in my own mind. Was this all I had to do? Analyze and try to understand them?

I moved to another strand, this one holding a sense of intent and targeting. The 'aiming' component of something, it seemed. A way to discriminate between friend and foe.

Another: moving through servers, ignoring barely-there protections. Another: exchanging data packets as coded messages.

I dissected and analyzed them all, not experiencing them but instead focusing solely on the knowledge and the way it was used.

With each strand I was faster than the last, and by the time I got to the fifth and last bundle, the whole collection took the same amount of time as the first three strands.

I opened my eyes. Alt's living room was nearly exactly the same, only a few shadows having shifted.

How long had that taken?

I checked the timekeeping system in Alt's sim and it seemed like only a few real-time hours had passed.

The way the new knowledge and skills I had integrated worked was they felt like completely natural things that were now second-nature to me, and that was the part that made me feel weird about it.

I didn't have any foreign memories or experiences, instead I could just… do things. From the five fragmented engrams (likely pre-curated by Alt, since I didn't notice anything other than skills and intrinsic and factual knowledge), I'd gained the basics of Netrunning, which I now also knew was a weird combination of manipulating computers with your brain, programming, hacking, and accessing other networks. Only one of the engrams had anything beyond general Netrunning knowledge, with a focus on server penetration and subversion, which would likely come in handy.

I also could recognize much more of what was going on in me, instinctual understanding of different processes and systems that recalled everything I'd just learned. I was still a ways off from altering anything, but now I could see not just Alt's program more clearly, but also some kind of unique, novel structure embedded in me, with filaments stretching out to almost every other part of my mind. All of my new Netrunning instincts screamed it was completely alien and different from the rest of me, and Alt's program clustered at the terminals of all of those filaments, acting as a barrier between them and my own thoughts.

My passenger.

I still had none of the skill needed to even think about touching whatever was at the center of all of it (and likely wouldn't feel comfortable trying for awhile, considering my last experiment with elective brain surgery), but I could still see it now.

What I could see, I could learn from.

What I could learn from, I could come to understand.

What I understood, I could control.

What I controlled, I could alter.

Anything that happened with my powers now, would be on my own terms.

However, that was a long ways off.

For now… I needed to learn more about this world.

---

It was fucked.

God was it fucked.

I was browsing the internet through the equivalent of standard internet protocols, which thankfully meant that there was no Netrunning involved, the relevant webpages were delivered directly to me. Standalone computers were as ubiquitous here as they had been on Bet, while Netrunning hardware was actually extremely rare despite what I'd been shown so far.

Anyways. This world was somehow worse off than Bet, without having the Endbringers attacking a city every few months.

America's class divide hyper-accelerated in the '80s, and the country couldn't handle it, gradually fracturing into pieces, the entire midwest almost completely abandoned, and cities across the country surviving as the only bastions. Night City was an example of this, if an extreme one. Inversely, the Soviet Union actually survived, with turnover at the upper levels to get rid of hardliners and Stalinists, although the Soviet-bloc states act as largely independent countries at this point. Europe is in the strongest position in the world, actually managing their corporations well, though the UK never joined the EU and heavily suffered because of it. The Middle East is simply atomic glassland, worse than anything Behemoth could have inflicted.

Africa is more unified than it ever was on Bet, surprisingly due to a deal between Europe and Kenya to build a space-launching mass-driver using Kilimanjaro, which allowed the African states to establish themselves handily in space, and then unify. Japan has the strongest economy in the world, and is now in a position to be supporting various US components. China took longer to grow than what I had learned from Earth Aleph (since the C.U.I was no comparison at all), in part due to Japan's continued dominance and the US's failings, though it seemed it had found its footings. India was up-and-coming, but still in the early developmental stages compared to China.

Through all of this, the "megacorps" had near-total impunity in their home countries and sometimes even abroad. Militech in the US, Arasaka in Japan. KangTao in China. Biotechnica in Italy. SovOil in Soviet Russia.

They regularly flouted things like human rights, even if not outright, and most had their own private militaries, allowing them to create and maintain credible threats due to ongoing cyberware, and now netware arms races.

Cyberware was just cybernetics, commoditized. It reminded me of Defiant's own cybernetic augmentations, though his were much stronger and more advanced than anything I could find here, which was to be expected when something was made by the two best Tinkers in the world.

It was extremely common, something that seemed to be both a side effect and a cause of how violent and unstable this world was, to the point that some people used cyberware as fashion statements.

The biological counterpart—i.e. engineered biological components that were designed to interface with hardware—wasn't something I could find anywhere, which shocked me. I knew that each of the Dragonsuits had a heavily engineered biological organism inside acting as data storage as a counter to the Dragonslayers from the time I'd asked Dragon about the odd fetus-thing I'd seen inside her suit at PRT HQ.

A potential avenue? A market I could maybe corner?

I'd also researched (other) AIs. This world didn't seem to have any concrete examples, yet, but it was inevitable from what Alt had said. We would not be the only ones, just the first.

In order for that to mean anything, we'd have to capitalize on it, as much as possible.

Any chance of acting as a stabilizing influence in Night City or the US would require power and leverage, and that would disappear if someone superseded and upstaged us before we were truly established.

The early days were going to be the most important.

'Alt, I'm ready to talk.'

---

The woman fizzled into existence next to me. I could sense her examining me, not the believable simulacrum, but the complex software patterns of my mind.

"Good, it looks like you integrated them well, did you already have some programming experience? There's far more connections to the basic concepts than I would have expected if not."

I nodded. "I was… about the level of a second-year computer science student, according to the person tutoring me in it."

Alt smiled. "Perfect. Have you decided what you're going to do from here?"

I took a breath. "I think so. I have a broad idea. I'd like your help refining it, if you're willing?" Doing things without consulting others had gotten me into trouble more than once, and was a habit I was trying to break. Here I needed Alt's input, otherwise my vague ideas would likely crash and burn before even getting off the ground.

"Sure," she agreed.

I took a breath. "Okay. You'll need some background. Can I change…" I motioned around at the simulation.

"It might take a bit, but yes. Here," she said, grabbing my attention in that place I now knew was cyberspace.

'This is the simulation system,' she sent, indicating a set of programs running beside us. 'It's designed for rendering either environments or memories. It was one of the earliest tools ITS had me develop after they took over Lifeline and turned it into Soulkiller. It's based off of braindance editors, just much higher fidelity and designed to draw out as many details as possible by tracing the memory through the target neural network and reconstructing it. You can get details and information you might not have even noticed yourself.'

So they could show whoever's memories they caught, was what I gathered.

If it worked like that I should just be able to show my memories as they were.

I looked for what I wanted, and presented it to the program.

Around us, what appeared to be the interior of a futuristic aircraft built into existence. In the cockpit, surrounded by the virtual instrumentation and controls, two people sat. The one on the left was me, mask-less, out of costume, one hand on the control yoke, the other on the throttles in the center console. In the right seat was Dragon, in the flesh, as much as she could be. She was wearing the lightest and most simply armored costume she had, barely more than a jumpsuit.

Without me telling it to, the memory started playing.

"That's it, a little more thrust," Dragon said. "You're doing very well."

Past-me didn't respond, laser-focused on the instrumentation, though she did increase the throttle.

"Now bring up the landing gear, and set the wings from takeoff/landing to cruise."

Past-me flipped a few switches, the aircraft's altimeter continuing to count up rapidly until it hit 15,000 feet.

"Now engage the auto-pilot." Past-me reached over towards the center and pressed a button, a light glowing green. "And that's it. Well done, Taylor."

In the memory, I released the yoke and pushed the seat backwards, sliding along rails, releasing a deep breath. "Thanks."

Dragon reached across and gave my arm a squeeze, smiling, and I hadn't been able to keep from giving her a slight smile in return.

I finally found how to stop the memory from continuing, and paused it.

"Flight lessons?" Alt asked, reminding me she was there.

I looked over at her. "Yeah. This was my ship. The Dragonfly," I said, looking around fondly. I'd spent a lot of time in this ship over the two years I'd had it, first with Defiant and/or Dragon, and later on my own once my probationary restrictions had been relaxed. It was technically Dragon's ship, but I was the only one who ever used it.

"Seems pretty high-tech," Alt noted, looking around.

"Yeah, it should be. It was designed and built by Dragon and Defiant, the two greatest engineers and innovators in my world, bar none. That's Dragon right there," I said, nodding at her. "She was a lot to me. An enemy, at first. An obstacle. Later, my warden and chaperone. And then my mentor," I said. "One of my favorite people."

I looked over at Alt. "And she's not even human."

Alt had been looking at Dragon thoughtfully, but now her focus sharpened, and I followed her gaze.

"I didn't find out until much later, but Dragon was an AI. Is, an AI," I told her. "One of the best, kindest, most human people I knew, who saw the good in others and only wanted to help, even at their lowest, was never flesh-and-blood in the first place. Had been created out of code, instead of born." I looked over at Alt sharply, and she looked back at me. "If this is what I am now, what we are now, then she's the model I want to follow. I want to be out there in the world, helping people, not locked away in a server farm for eternity."

Alt looked contemplative, remaining silent for a bit. "Damn. Alright. I'm guessing you have some sort of basic plan?"

I sat down on one of the bench seats behind the captain's position. "Dragon's primary role was support and strike-force; she had an ability that let her make equipment based on others', and used it to build extremely versatile solutions. She had specialized equipment for just every scenario. Speed, defense, offense, esoteric effects, everything. She was literally her own miniature army, and could turn the tide of fights that seemed otherwise hopeless.

"But even more important than that, was she was one of the driving forces behind the Guild, an organization that acted as a support network for more independent actors who could and would take on more serious threats. Warlords in Africa. Terrorists in Europe. Self-replicating machine army in the US. Each core member was individually powerful, able to counter whole teams of less-skilled actors on their own."

Alt looked at me curiously. "Were you one of those 'less-skilled actors'? You mentioned she was an enemy at one point."

I shook my head. "No." It wasn't ego, either, simply fact. "I gave her a lot of trouble before I flipped sides. I was actually on the fast-track for the Guild . I was basically a member in all but name, just waiting for all the bureaucracy to clear so I could be formally inducted." It would have happened after my graduation to the Protectorate, except that never formally happened before everything went to shit.

Alt nodded. "And you want to rebuild that, here."

I nodded. "Yeah. Maybe on a smaller scale, to test, since you don't have the same level of highly-capable singular threats, but something like that. A combination of highly advanced engineering and equipment with a select task-force capable of major action, not beholden to corrupt systems. We could sell or even license some of that technology to make up for the lack of government funding. I've memorized the documentation for at least two things you don't seem to have…"

I trailed off, realization hitting me. "Shit, I hope they didn't get hold of my equipment when I was dropped through that portal." That could end this before it even got started. "Is there any way to find out what was on me when that happened?"

Alt frowned, before considering it. "That could be… difficult. I was hoping not to go poking Arasaka again so soon. I can probably find any records they have as long as it's in their central data systems, but retrieving anything would require a solo or crew, one who wouldn't mind taking the heat. How important is it?"

"The equipment included personal anti-gravity and deployable molecular disintegration effects," I said simply.

Alt leaned against the wall of the Dragonfly, a hand going to rub her forehead. "Fuuuuck, Weaver. That's… yeah, that's going to be high-priority. I'll try to get into Arasaka and find out tonight. Is there anything else that might be included?"

I motioned down at my silk suit. "Just this."

Alt nodded. "Alright." She stood up from the wall. "But in exchange, I want some answers. You've been beating around the bush quite a bit. 'Less-skilled actors', 'abilities', your 'power'. I want details."

Yeah, that… that was probably fair.

Alright. How to do this?

Probably best to start at the beginning.

"On May 20th, 1982, a cruise ship discovered a golden glowing man floating above the Atlantic…"

There were two main things that made learning near-instantaneous the way I was now. First, memorization of facts was instantaneous. Second, neuroplasticity was through the roof. Those two things may seem similar, but they weren't exactly.

For example: I could memorize a kinematic equation and calculate it every time I wanted to throw something. Even with the processing power Alt and I had, taking everything into account and running that still took up time. Or, I could train throwing various objects, and integrate that experience, creating what Alt called a "hot path" through my mental architecture, where instead of hard values, reinforcement learning created "good enough" approximations that executed in fractions of the time. Learning this way also had another major positive result: it created instincts.

As someone who had often only gotten away with so many wins due to improvisation, I knew exactly how valuable a good gut instinct could be. In a situation where every moment counts, the ability to stop thinking and just do was critical. That's not to say being able to calculate things incredibly fast wasn't useful, but in the Net, everyone was fast.

Which is why I was currently practicing accessing and breaching a gauntlet of virtual systems that Alt said were used for Net training, and then trying to defend each as I took over. If the Net was going to be my new world from now on—and even if I had hope for a way to interact with the real world—I wanted to be as prepared as possible. Sooner or later people would come sniffing around Alt and my's system, and Alt might not be able to defend. If neither of us were there it wouldn't matter, and Alt could take care of herself, so in a odd repetition of two and half years ago I was once again the one thrust into lifestyle I had no experience in and had to learn on my feet.

Alt said she'd take me to a CTF event at some point for a more realistic experience, some kind of semi-competitive hacking event, but that getting good enough for that would require practice. In her words "Every Netrunner who challenges you is either going to be cocky or dangerous, sometimes both. These are people who have lived and breathed the Net longer than you've been alive."

Alt was off preparing to invade Arasaka's systems, she'd said she was talking to some friends to see if they'd heard anything or were willing to help. Apparently even someone of her caliber was hesitant to try hacking a giant mega-corporation without backup.

So here I was, getting my ass kicked for the fifteenth time by a program I couldn't even tear apart to try and examine because Alt said it was cheating.

---

Conversation Log between Spider Murphy (SM) and AlterEgo (AE)

AE: you free? might need a second runner for something. turns out mystery girl had some pretty spicy gear with her when arasaka got her. need to get back in and find out what they've done with it. can't hire out, too sensitive

SM: how soon?

AE: tonight

SM: …
SM: im gonna need deets
SM: and i wanna meet this mystery chick after were done

AE: fair

SM: no rache?

AE: needs opsec. too sensitive, he'd spread it all over
AE: also some of this shit…
AE: i dont want to deal with his 'i told u so' paranoia brain

SM: this isnt about the aliens in the net thing again is it
SM: alt?
SM: …oh god pls tell me it isnt

AE: ill give u the op details at the link node outside saka

SM: alt!

---

Alt feels Spider's link form in the network node she's currently tunneled to. It's not big enough for her whole self, so that's still back in the server cluster with Weaver. Right now what she's doing is closer to netrunning while already on the Net.

'You were joking right, there's no evil conspiracy of aliens out to control the Net, right?' Spider opens with.

Alt sighs to herself. 'There is no evil conspiracy of alien domination, Spider.'

If only because they have no need and the only one around is neutralized, she thinks.

'…Alright. What's the plan?'

'Standard stealthy in-and-out. No need for physical access or guns blazing. I've got access keys I ripped from a relatively high-level guy patching in from Tokyo. His are definitely burned at this point. However, he also knew a couple of his subordinates' passwords, against protocol. Keeping tabs on them to make sure they were loyal to him and weren't going to backstab him and switch teams all of a sudden. Standard corpo bullshit.'

'Standard corpo bullshit,' Spider repeats, sounding both disgusted and unsurprised. 'What's the details on the target?'

'Central database, have to search the project files. Anything involving 'Khepri', likely in physical reverse-engineering, R&D, or storage. Looking for details or notes on a knife, a specialized jump-pack, and a reinforced silk bodysuit,' Alt sent.

'What was your girl some kind of HALO-jumper? Spec-ops? Black ops?' Spider asks. 'Deniable government asset? Corpo bloodhound?'

'I'll let you hear the full details from the horse's mouth if she wants to tell you,' Alt told her. 'But closer to counter-terrorism spec-ops. They threw her out for some heavy judgement calls that won the day but weren't PR-friendly and they weren't happy with. Burned her ID, team, support network, everything, and tipped Arasaka off about her, so the corp scooped her up before she even knew. She had some highly experimental tech on her that she thinks they won't be able to get much out of, but if they get anything at all it could be bad news.'

'What kind of calls? No war-crimes right? You wouldn't be working with her if it was anything really bad…'

'No, just heavily twisting the arms of both her command and local forces to work together,' Alt told her.

'Makes sense. Some asshole military types really don't like getting shown up and bossed around by their underlings,' Spider agreed. 'Alright, let's do this. In-and-out?'

'In-and-out. Cut your line if you need to, to get out. Weaver's gear isn't worth your life. I doubt they've reconstructed Soulkiller but you can never be too careful with corps.'

'Copy.'

'Ready? Piggy-back on my tunnel. I'll try to keep us under the radar'

'Go for it.'

Alt hands the Arasaka private network access tunnel her pilfered keys, freezing when the first one doesn't work. The second one, however, does, and both Alt and Spider's connections are sucked into Arasaka's subnet through the gateway.

'Problems?'

'First keyset didn't work. We might have to make this fast if they come looking.'

'Copy. Let's move.'

The two of them jump through the layers of the subnet, trying to leave as few signs as possible.

'Alright let's find out how to get where we need to be.'

Alt sinks into the entry terminal's data, searching through it for a past access log and the DNS cache. Spider disappears and then returns, passing her a set router addresses and subnet discriminators from some nearby traffic.

'These queries look like they're heading where we want.'

'Good find. We can use those routers as the path.' Alt pulls back out of the terminal's guts. 'And here's our destination.'

She wipes her traces from the terminal and they leave, quickly moving along the network towards the center, dodging Arasaka's own Netrunners and some custodian watchdog programs, and squirming through a couple firewalls as they go.

All of which are old to hat to both Alt and Spider, but there's no chances to relax or take things easy. This is Arasaka, after all. If they get caught, well, they won't get caught due to their experience, but they also would fail to get the data they want, which Alt (and Weaver) would not be happy about.

'God, I've always hated these massive city-castle constructs. The interface program doesn't seem to like internal networks this big.'

'You're running Fantasy?'

'Yeah. Felt like I needed a change from Megacity. You?'

'Raw. No program.'

'Bullshit, there's no way. Rache tried to pull the same thing with me.'

'Your interface program is in your cybermodem, Murph. I don't have a modem anymore to plug into. And I've been running raw on-and-off for a while now to get used to it.'

'Fuck. Maybe Rache wasn't lying then. Might be why he's going so crazy.'

'Rache has always been a bit cracked. If anything it's just made it worse.'

'Too true.'

Alt and Spider peek out of a terminal, only a few hops away from the central server system.

A netrunner and a large Hound program pass by, and they hurriedly pull back in to hide. He disappears for a moment, and then suddenly reappears, his Net-patrol path taking a loop.

Next to her, Alt can feel Spider wound tightly until he passes.

'Any obfuscation programs in your bag if we need to get the fuck out of dodge?'

'I've got a few,' Spider replies. 'Log wipe, olfactory spoof, and a Jack-block to counter any Jack Attacks. Also something Rache and I have been cooking up, should scramble a portion of their subnet, swap all the addresses in their routing tables so they can't sniff us out easily, you?'

'I've got my copy of Soulkiller if it's sink or swim, otherwise I'm sticking with stream manipulation.'

'…Fucking super-wizard-class hackers, I swear to God, you and Rache both.'

They both peek out again, the Hound-attached netrunner gone. Both them move in synchrony, dipping back into the packet-routing paths until they arrive on the database localnet.

Alt takes a breath. Now they just need to get the info.

'Let's split up to search faster. If things get hairy fast, we can meet up outside,' Spider says.

'Sounds good, I'll scrub the access logs as we go, Alt agrees.

They part, beginning to sift through the data. Alt keeps a close eye on the logs, wiping every single one from the write buffer before it hits any disks.

'I've got something, Spider sends, moving back over towards Alt. 'Project Khepri. Super-high auth protocol requirement though.'

'Can you spoof it?'

'No, there's some kind of two-factor handshake with a physical device required for access. This is Black ICE stuff.'

Fuck. That's beyond careful and right into extreme paranoia.

Maybe…

'Check the metadata. See if you can find the userid and timestamp for the creation and cross-reference for any files in the same time by the same person.'

Alt falls back to keeping a watch around Spider as she works, keeping an eye out for any other netrunners.

'Three matches. Project Elytra. Project Silksuit. Project Carnwennan. All are lower-level access, but still encrypted so we'll need to crack them open.'

'That sounds like them. Can you copy them all in full?'

'Yeah, they're small enough. They'll notice if I do it, though.'

'I'll obfuscate it so they don't know what we were here for,' Alt says. 'And since you're piggybacking off of me, I'll make our tunnel bounce those transfer packets around a few city nodes to throw them off. Afterwards I'll cut our connection.'

'Sounds good. Ready?'

'Ready,' replies Alt, attention split between controlling the database logs and tunnel's packet router.

'Go.'

A bundle of data, not much, maybe a few gigabytes, streams through Alt and Spider's access tunnel. With the connection level they have, Arasaka being its own Tier-1 ISP, the transfer happens in less than second. Instantly, the server around them becomes hostile.

To Spider's eyes, the castle she sees probably grew spikes and pit traps. To Alt, she can simply sense the hostility and aggression as programs form around them, searching for the intruders, Hounds and Daemons zeroing in on their position.

Not eager to wait around and let them get any closer, Alt cuts the virtual connection.

With less than a blip, they're gone.

---

I was at least aware enough of Alt's server to notice when there was a new presence that appeared, and I quit the system defence I was in at the moment. Both Alt and the new person immediately entered Alt's apartment sim, so I dropped down beside them, hoping Alt had news.

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't a tall, curvaceous redheaded woman who looked like she'd stepped right out of one of Alec's Japanese cartoons, wearing little more than a bandeaux and extremely short shorts.

I blinked and dragged my eyes up to her face, where she sprouted a grin. "You like?"

She posed, twisting her waist and torso to emphasize all of her curves at once—not that they needed it— her hand running down from her chest her hips."It's always nice to see someone who appreciates my hard work."

Hard cyberware lines ran from the side of her neck, down her arms and to her hands. Small interface ports dotted her skin.

Alt smacked her shoulder from where she stood next to her. "Stop teasing her, Spider."

"Oh, fine," the woman—Spider—agreed, relaxing from her pose and walking over, holding out her hand. "Hi, I'm Spider Murphy."

"Weaver," I said, shaking her hand, still thrown a little off balance. "You made yourself look like that?"

"Yeah. If you can look like anything on the Net, why not look as good as you want?" she leaned in, and I pointedly kept my eyes on her face. "It can also distract anyone you run up against, after all, who wants to hurt the hot, pretty girl?"

Psychological warfare. That made sense.

I looked over at Alt. "Does that mean you…?"

"No, this is what I really look like."
"No, that's what she really looks like."

…Damn.

"I know, right?" Spider whispered at me.

I cleared my throat. Anyways.

"What did you find out?" I asked Alt, trying to get the conversation back on track.

"We got some project files, created around the same time as yours. They sound like they match your gear," she said, walking to the couch and taking a seat. "Hopefully, they'll have some more details we can use to find out what Arasaka is planning with them. I'd offer you a chance to try bypassing the encryption on them first, as practice, but since we're on a time crunch I'll take care of it."

I nodded. "Thanks."

Spider walked over to Alt and sat down next to her on the short section of the L couch, while I moved and sat on the long side.

In front of us, over the rectangular coffee table, a holographic screen seemed to appear, holding a flat window with three files on it: Silksuit, Elytra, and Carnwennan. The first two were obvious, so by process of elimination the third must have been my knife.

"What's Carnwennan?"

Alt glanced over at me. "I looked it up on the way back. It was King Arthur's dagger from the Welsh lineage of the legends, supposedly both supernaturally sharp and able to shroud the user in shadow."

Well my knife didn't shroud the user in shadow, it just made itself a little blurry. …Maybe that was close enough for them?

"Alright, got one of them."

Alt suddenly sent me a bundle of data in cyberspace, and I started going through it. Stress test results, sheer force calculations, all numbers I had seen from when the PRT was testing my gear in Chicago. The project summary file's status though, was "Terminated, theoretically able to be replicated, realistically too complex. Consider selling to Biotechnica. Group with Kh-01 and Kh-02."

The more interesting information, however, was the pictures that were attached. Somewhere between what I remembered of fighting Scion and now, someone had drawn a pair of symbols on the white front chest-plate, a large filled-in circle surrounded by a thick line, both golden in color. Under it, a stylized golden scarab, facing upwards.

'Khepri, the Egyptian god who created the sun every morning, pushing it up above the horizon, was often depicted with as scarab-headed man or a scarab beetle pushing the sun,' Alt commented, having followed my attention through the files. 'That explains where Arasaka got the name, at least. The symbol used on here was also used for 'gold' in alchemical texts, since most of the celestial bodies had equivalent metals or elements.'

Gold… like everything about Scion. A golden man, as immovable and impossible to fight as the sun.

Yet somehow, we did. I still wasn't completely sure how exactly it all ended, the memories still fuzzy, but I was absolutely certain that we won.

"Got the other two… ah," Alt trailed off. "Well, that's good and bad."

She drew Spider's and my attention towards the log entries in the other two project's summary files. Both shared the same last entry: 'Project suspended pending transfer to Arasaka Tokyo headquarters on 8/17/2013, transport number 754343.'

…They were moving it. And if they were going to be transporting my stuff, there was likely going to be far less opposition than what would be involved in getting it out of their hands normally.

'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' Spider asked.

'If you're thinking of a transport heist, then yes,' I said. 'But I'm thinking we need to take it a step further…

'We need to plan a shell game.'