Future Freaks Me Out 2

That ass…

Fucking insane, honestly.

Niko doubted there were any doors in this whole city built with the dimensions of a six-foot-eight Icelandic Amazon in mind, so watching Dorio duck her head and angle her shoulders to get out of his shop just highlighted the ridiculous mechanics of her brick-shithouse build.

That broad back took up the whole doorway on its own, freshly reworked chrome settling in under her jacket, and the woman had an ass that filled out those tight black shorts that was unfair for a woman that had eight inches and a hundred pounds on him even before the cyberware.

Beast of a woman. And that was more about the bad attitude than the heavy servos. Great ass, though. Top-tier structure on that thing.

Niko watched her go for another second, blue eyes tracking the shift of her weight as the heavy shop door finally hissed shut behind her and sealed the alleyway out.

The little front room went quiet again, or as quiet as anything in Night City ever got. Neon hum from the outside of Vista Del Rey bled in with the faint sound of people drunk and disorderly in the middle of the afternoon, thin plaster walls doing shit for dick to stop most of it. Distant unending traffic also grinded its way through, the chaos of the overpass managing to reach him all the way here in his little hideaway. 

He was used to it by now, though.

It made sense, given all the people crammed into the city. It was almost familiar, for some reason; the urban static of too many people, too much shit, and too little breathable air. with the neon hum bleeding in through thin walls. His place was packed down in one of the shittier places in the sprawl of Night City, a weird middle zone where a run-down back alley room could be allowed to exist without too much trouble.

Too small to hold any real haul and with barely a sign to attract anyone who didn’t already know about him. And, for now, he preferred it that way.

Well… Niko’s eyes dragged down to the ripper-doc chair Dorio had just climbed out of, taking in the room he knew by the back of his hand by now.

Heavy metal shelving lined one wall, holding everything from cables to basic med supplies and random spare parts that he might need. On top of that, there were some cheap little tech odds and ends he could flip for a steep markup for anyone who didn’t know better. 

The whole place still felt like he’d broken into somebody else’s life, though, and it was only because he just kept going long enough for him to start pretending like it belonged to him.

Can’t believe it’s already been half a year in this shitheap. Literally, it’d been almost six months to the day since he blinked awake on this same exact crusty floor; blinked awake with the world’s worst hangover and almost no memory.

Not “foggy.” Not “pieces missing from a rough night from too much vodka.”

No, his head had been as empty as a freshly formatted drive when he came to like a dumped corpse, every joint aching and tongue tasting like pennies and sawdust.

He’d come to lying on the floor like a corpse nobody had bothered to refrigerate, every joint in his body aching, mouth tasting like old pennies and poison. That had been weird enough for the first five minutes, barely knowing anything but his name and having nothing to that name but the clothes on his back, a backpack by his side, and a gun in his hand.

It was the world’s weirdest starter kit.

Ping. 

An orange holo flickered to life on his arm as Niko snorted softly, the sound catching in the back of his throat. Right. That too.

How could he forget the weirdest part?

Because even back then, stupid and half-dead on his feet, he’d been absolutely sure of at least one thing:

Mass Effect wasn’t real. It was a video game, and one that he didn’t even remember playing. Just code and pixels and voice actors doing their best.

And yet the omnitool had been real enough to burn a grid of orange light into his retinas when he stared at it like a crazy person. The weight of the gun in his hand had been real enough. The dirty room had been real enough.

And he still didn’t know how any of it fit together. Even six months later, everything in his life felt like it belonged to three different boxes.

What he did know was that he wasn’t in Mass Effect, and he definitely wasn’t anywhere on the East Coast that he recognized. 

No, the time was 2074. 

And the place was somewhere called Night City. 

The future had finally shown up — with flying cars and super-tech — and in a big way. But it had shown up incredibly ugly and smelled like burning plastic. With pollution rampant to the point the sky was almost a permanent haze the color of a bruise, hyper-capitalism feeding the people into a meat-grinder, and literal trash piled up buildings high, nothing about this was pretty or shining or glorious. Half the planet poisoned, the other half burned to ash and the third half half bought up by corporate suits richer than God and stupider than sheep. 

Still, though, tech was cool.

So there was that, at least; neural-ports, optics, and fucking Gorilla Arms. All the cyberware was as cool as it sounded and just as fascinating. On top of that, it only took a couple months of study before he could pull it all apart and put it back together to the point it ran better.

Crazy that people just trusted some random nobody with tools to work on their bodies.

But what did he care? As long as it made him some good… eddies, right?

Right.

Stll hate that fuckin’ word. Niko scoffed at the quiet room, leaning back against the heavy base of the ripper chair as he scrubbed a gloved hand down his face. Not like it matters anyway. 

Just like the shitty name, none of that was a problem he could take a wrench to and fix.

His stomach rumbled, the sound loud and hollow, pulling his attention back down.

“Okay,” Nikolai pushed himself off the chair. “That I can fix.”

Eyes in front, the self-made ripper headed for the sealed door in the back of the shop. A cracked keycard came free from his pocket, Niko swiping it down the mag-reader mounted on the steel-frame. Immediately, the locking bolts retracted and he pushed it open, stepping into the windowless back room.

Steel shut firmly behind him, Niko not even looking back as he crossed the scuffed concrete all the way to the reinforced metal locker bolted to the far wall. A single finger keyed six digits into the physical keypad and with a beep, the locker door popped open with a hiss of air.

And there it was — | Vend-O-Matic | — staring back at him with a black-and-white smiley face on the front.

Night City loved vending machines.

Food, guns, booze, ammo, ones that would jerk you off and probably one that’d kill you if you looked hard enough. 

Most of them were dogshit, especially the food. Niko still remembered the first burrito he’d bought in this city. He especially remembered how he immediately spit it out onto the street because it was definitely a crime against God and livestock. 

Worse than blended dog food, drywall paste, and sadness into a tube.

This machine, though?

This one was magic.

Or close enough.

The thing had been here since day zero, tucked into this back room and hidden up in the locker like it belonged there. More than that, everything that came out of it was actually good. Not exactly fresh, but better than any of the chemical-cooked shit from the outside. 

Good food, as long as he could afford it.

Which, thanks to his last few months as a general techhead, he could.

There was still other weird shit about the whole thing, like weirder than usual. For one, there was absolutely no way the vending machine was big enough to hold everything it said it had inside on the screen. Simple geometry said no fucking way in the slightest. But considering the thing had spit out the two-hundred-something pound medical chair Dorio’d been knocked out in just a few minutes ago, he really couldn’t really question anything about it.

Niko rolled his eyes at the smiley face and lifted his left arm, waving the glowing omnitool across the scanner. The machine chirped happily, bright and cheerful, as his balance dropped a couple digits.

“Yeah, yeah,” He leaned up against the locker. “You little capitalist miracle. Give it out.”

He punched at the touchscreen, picking out a plate of something called Boarstloaf and a tall cup of Purpleberry Punch.

A second later, a heavy clunk sounded from deep inside the body of the machine, before both items plopped down.  The Boarstloaf sat on the cardboard tray, looking and smelling pretty much exactly like an over-seasoned kinda-lumpy meatloaf, brownish-pink gravy already pooling around the edges. The oversized plastic cup of punch was freezing cold from the looks of it, condensation already forming. Yeah, that’s purple stuff.

“I love this thing.” And he was dead serious about that.

He’d commit actual murder not to eat the outside food.

Niko bumped the heavy cabinet shut with his hip, sealed the private room back up with a swipe of the card, and headed back out to the front of the shop, already tearing a piece of the hot meatloaf off with a plastic fork and taking a bite. Mmm… kinda like pork.

Salty, a little lumpy, and way too heavy on the garlic but still way too good for this city. Finn leaned up against the counter and ate under the flickering front-room light, enjoying the luxury of not being bothered by anyone for maybe thirty whole seconds.

The front door chose that moment to hiss open, Niko’s eyes going up mid-chew as his fork froze halfway to his mouth. What now?

It was a who more than a what, and the who was some twitchy-looking weirdo in a shitty jacket and with worse posture. looked up mid-chew to see a twitchy-looking weirdo in a shitty jacket and with worse posture. Barely any chrome on him, the guy’s eyes were beady and moving too fast to be normal.

Huh. Niko swallowed the bite of loaf, heavy food sitting warm in his stomach. The fork met the counter, even as he kept the ice-cold cup of purple drink loose in his left hand. 

The guy locked eyes with him, boots tracking mud on the concrete. “Y-y-you the ripperdoc?”

“Yeah.” Niko stepped around the counter, calm as anything. “What you need, man?”

“All your fuckin’ eddies.” The guy yanked out a neon-bright Slaught-O-Matic, the hot-pink weapon rising like its holder had been practicing the move in a mirror. 

But Niko was already moving.

He launched himself hard to the side as soon as the arm went up, left arm whipping out in a tight arc. The drink flew free from his hand, a good fourty-four onces of of ice-cold sugar water splashing into the man’s wide bloodshot eyes as the heavy cup hit him full in the face. The mugger flinched back on instinct, a curse leaving his lips. 

Niko closed distance before the gunman could recover, slapping the shitty psistol sideways with one hand as he pushed forward with the other, his whole body weight put to work. The pistol tore loose from weak fingers and clattered away across the concrete the same moment the guy hit the plaster with a choked grunt.

A hard forearm slammed across the guy’s chest, one arm pinning him against the wall even as the skinny bastard kicked, twisted and panicked for freedom.

But the ripperdoc was just too strong; always had been as far as the blank slate of his memory could tell him. Stronger than he should be, even.

The gunman’s eyes went wider, whites showing all around as his mouth fell open with babbles Niko didn’t bother listening to. A hand reached down with his free hand, a pistol palmed as he raised it higher.

Up close, the robber smelled like sweat, panic, and terminally bad decisions.

“C’mon, man.” Niko shook his head, looking down his nose at the struggling idiot. “This was all you.”

A loud shot cracked through the little shop.

For a second the only sound was the ringing in his ears and the wet little patter of spilled soda still dripping from the wall as the dead body slid down the plaster like the literal dead weight it was.

Niko stared at the corpse, before his eyes dropped down to stare at his ruined drink on the floor.

“That…” A sigh left him. “…was ten fuckin’ eddies of soda.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

You’re A Man Now – 100 GP

Commit your first murder in Night City.

FAIL: What’s This Do? (200): The technology used in the frontier can be so complex and advanced it takes years for even the most brilliant minds to understand. Really now? That’s good, you needed something to do after lunch today. Now, even if you’re in a dropship in the middle of a firefight, you can decipher the inner workings of technology so long as you have the controls to scre- I mean analyze.

GP: 100