Chapter 1

Tonight was the night. Cyberpunk: Noir was finally being released. The first true VR game in history was dropping at midnight tonight. I’d pre ordered my copy and my VR headset a year ago and had been looking forward to this for forever, watching online gameplay from the one thousand beta testers and reading anything I could get my hands on regarding the game. It looked absolutely amazing. Finally you could see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the game. It was the MMORPG to top all MMORPGs.

I was sitting on a bench at the bus stop, smoking a cigarette, and looking at my phone, while waiting for my bus to take me home from work. I’d get some warm clothes on, fill my thermos with coffee, and then head out to line up outside the store, where my friends and I had been taking turns holding our spot in line for two days near the front of a veritable tent city stretching a mile from the entrance of a Gamestop that guaranteed they would have two thousand headsets/games available on release day. We were going to be among the first to walk Noir City’s streets, and to say I was excited was an understatement. Isekai Gaming hadn’t even officially sold a single copy of the game yet and was already being heralded as the next great tech company. But I suppose when you crack actual VR that’s kind of a given..

I was scrolling through my phone, checking out some of the hidden easter eggs and random encounters beta testers had discovered. As an open world game you could go anywhere and do whatever you wanted, so people had discovered a lot of randomness. After all, Cyberpunk: Noir literally had the tagline ‘No Wrong Way To Play.’ At the moment I was reading the subtitles on a vlog that was telling me, while simultaneously showing me, how he’d discovered a desiccated finger poking up out of the duracrete floor of an apartment in the basement of megabuilding B9. The guy had hacked his way in through the door into the empty apartment, and had basically just been squatting there, so he’d have a safe place to sleep and store his loot. He’d found the finger under a pile of trash as he was cleaning up his new lair. This guy had gotten his hands on a sledgehammer, buffed his strength high enough to smash through the floor, and ended up digging up a mummified corpse that had thousands of creds on it as well as an intact nanomachine production organ that gave him better healing than he could find available for sale at any ripperdoc or store he’d checked.

I had read up on, or watched, vlogs of as many of these finds as I could get my hands on. Once the game reset from the beta and launched, it was going to be first come first served, so the race would be on. This was one of the best I’d found, but it would be tough to beat all the other gamers there.

I looked up from my phone as I heard the telltale rumble of my approaching bus grinding through the afternoon’s light snow. I pocketed my phone and flicked the remnants of my cigarette into the street. I stood up as it approached and noticed some moron kid, about ten years old, running across the icy street without bothering to check for traffic. My eyes widened as the kid slipped and fell, sliding to a stop on his face, directly in the bus’ path. The bus driver immediately leaned on his horn as he braked. The kid looked up in terror as the bus began sliding on the same large icy patch that the kid himself had slipped on.

Fuck fuck fuck, I thought to myself as I darted out in front of the bus and grabbed the kid by the back of his poofy red winter jacket and the back of his pants. I tossed him as hard as I could back to the safe sidewalk I’d foolishly vacated. The kid landed hard with a yelp of pain, at the feet of an old lady, the only other person at the bus stop. I found myself sliding backward on the ice from the inertia of throwing the kid. Oh good, I should just miss the- The bus clipped my right shoulder and threw me to the ground where I felt that same shoulder give a painful crunch.

OW! Fuck my life, that HURT! I groaned as I tried to get my uninjured arm under me to push myself back to my feet. I heard another horn blare out and looked up at a UPS truck barrelling in from the opposite direction the bus had come from. Oh shit, I was in the other lane. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK, I scrambled, trying to get out of the way, but the smooth ice, covered with a light dusting of snow, may as well have been frictionless. I couldn’t stand up, much less move to either side. In the end I tried to block the truck as best I could with my good arm, but realized it was pretty pointless given the speed of the truck. I glanced over to the kid I’d saved, he was laying on his side, staring at me with wide eyes. I gave him a grin and flipped him the middle finger just as the truck hit, and everything went black. God damn it, I really REALLY wanted to go to Noir City.

==

I gasped and lurched up with my arms flailing, trying to block the truck, only to slam my head into something hard. “OW! Fuck my life!” I shouted as I found myself sitting and cradling my head in my hands. My entire body felt incredibly weak for some reason. Well I was literally just hit by a bus…so I guess that makes sense.

“Mal! You’re awake! Are you okay?!” I heard a girl’s worried voice from my immediate left.

I groaned as I rubbed my forehead. “I feel like I just got hit by a bus and then a truck. I’m amazed I’m even alive.” I stated with some disbelief.

“Um…actually, Mal, you got shot in the head,” said the girl, uncertainly. Wait…what?!

I noticed, as I rubbed my forehead, that I did indeed have a small circular patch of raised skin that could indeed be considered consistent with the size and shape of a bullet hole. I opened my eyes in disbelief and looked around. The first thing I noted was that we were in a car and were whipping along at a good pace, on a road in poor disrepair, through a desert dotted with scrub brush, as the sun beat down out of a nearly cloudless sky. Uh…what the fuck?

The inside of the car was an odd contrast in high tech and the distinct feeling of being rather run down. Colorful stickers decorated the dashboard and bare metal ceiling of the vehicle, the same ceiling I’d just smashed my head into. What appeared to be trash, composed primarily of a large quantity of various wrappers, was burying my feet where I sat in the front passenger seat. Two high definition screens showed what seemed to be some kind of radar and a high quality GPS respectively. Above the screens, at the center of the dash, the word CHEVILIAN declared the car’s make. Wait…isn’t that a brand of car from Cyberpunk:Noir? I glanced to my left to see a young woman in her early twenties with long brown hair staring at me with an odd expression of excitement and concern on her face. She was wearing a red and white jacket that looked kind of like leather…maybe. If you squinted. Pleather? Hard to tell, and ultimately irrelevant. I shook off the inconsequential thought. What was more interesting was the metallic skull and crossbones on the jacket’s shoulder, which I was well aware would denote her as a member of The Pirates, a nomad crew outside Noir City. The revolver strapped to her hip was a bit jarring as well. I sighed as I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Ok…few questions…Who are you? Where are we going? And above all, what the fuck is going on?”

The look of worry intensified, erasing her previous excitement. “You don’t recognize me?” Apparently the blank look on my face answered that question for me. “I’m your sister…Sara?” That raised my eyebrows, I’d always been an only child. Of course I’d never been shot in the head either, and I was currently cruising along in a Chevilian…which shouldn’t exist. She continued, “We had a falling out with Max after he took over The Pirates. You shot Steve in the face, and he tagged you back as he went down. On the brighter side, he kept a hold of that trigger and killed Max and Stacey when he did. I took out Marci and Steph myself. Since then, I’ve been trying to keep you alive, while running solo through the badlands.Took me a good month to lose The Pirates. Jackson took over after max died, declared us persona non grata, and decided we needed to die.The only half-assed excuse for a ripper I could find dug the bullet out of your skull and set you up with that catheter and an IV. Ran out of fluid for the IV a couple days ago, and you’ve been looking worse and worse, so we’re heading to Noir City where they have real docs.” She looked at me intently. “What do you remember?”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Uh…” I couldn’t exactly tell her I wasn’t her brother and had memories from another world…parallel world…another plane of existence? Fuck, this shit is confusing. “I don’t remember a thing. It’s, what ya call it, amnesia? Huh, guess a bullet to the head will do that to a guy. Um…so, uh, what’s my name?” I asked, confused. Just hunching forward was making my weak abs burn, so I flopped backwards. My seat had already been reclined so I found myself all but laying down on the well cushioned plastic seat as my new sister explained things to me. My name was Malcolm Reynolds. I’d just turned 18 a month ago while in my coma that I’d been in for exactly one hundred days. Sara had about three grand worth of creds, which were the monetary unit I knew was used in Cyberpunk: Noir.

I wasn’t sure if I should be excited or freaked out that I was apparently in the game. Was I fucked up in a hospital somewhere and my friends stuck a VR set on my comatose head? Or was I actually here? Hmm, I know from reports on the beta that the sensation of pain was permanently and irrevocably tuned way way down so you couldn’t actually get hurt per say, And given my throbbing head and how the catheter in my dick is fucking killing me right now, I’m leaning against it being VR.

Sara explained that she should have enough cash to get me looked at by a cheap ripper doc and still be able to get an apartment with a parking spot for our car, which I was proudly told was a family heirloom that’d been in the family for three generations. Without even thinking about it, I sent Sara 1000 creds. I blinked at the -1000c hovering briefly in front of my eyes after doing so, even as she thanked me. That had been remarkably intuitive.

I found myself realizing that I had an actual heads up display overlaid on my vision showing various icons. The clock in the corner of my vision told me it was just past noon. I mentally clicked a compass icon off to the right and was shown a map that told me my location was about an hour outside of Noir City’s westernmost border at our current speed. With a thought the map zoomed out, and I saw Noir City hugging the western half of Lake Superior in the center of the continent. We’d be entering the city right about where Fargo, North Dakota used to exist. Clicking on an icon that looked like a phone brought up my contacts list. Huh, I really don’t know any of these people. The list turned red, adding the numbers to unknown contacts with a thought. Well, except for Sara I guess. Suddenly there was a single green contact at the top of the list labeled Sara Reynolds. Damn, this practically reads my mind. I clicked through a few more icons absently. There was a budgeting program with a cred sign icon, a letter C with a vertical line through it, that I may or may not use in the future. It informed me that I currently had 223 creds to my name after sending 1000c to Sara Reynolds. Potentially useful for keeping records I guess, though I literally have a cred count right above the clock in the corner of my vision. A camera icon yielded a folder of pictures and videos that I'd apparently recorded with my own eyes, alongside a program that would let me record more of them in the future.

Playing around in the HUD’s settings, after finding their gear shaped icon, I discovered that almost the entirety of my available digital storage in my head was full, which led me to track down a very large file. Ew, gross, ok so that was Malcolm’s porn stash. I deleted that and freed up almost half my available storage. Whoever this guy had been, he’d had a somewhat disturbing love of BDSM.

As I poked around, absently listening to Sara as she drove, I discovered an unremarkable file simply labeled GEMA. When I clicked on it, it brought up something I immediately recognized. It was the gamer interface that was used to monitor and level up your stats in Cyberpunk: Noir. When I opened the file three tabs had appeared: Cyberware, Inventory, and Character. The ‘Level 0’ in the top left corner wasn’t great, but if I could get that level up?... I clicked inventory, just out of curiosity. It brought up an empty grid next to what appeared to be a picture of me. My eyes widened. That’s not me. That…what the fuck? I was looking at what appeared to be an extremely skinny 18 year old Nathan FIllion with shoulder length hair and a bullet hole scar above his…my left eyebrow. I wouldn’t even recognize the actor if the old guy hadn’t been cast as the ripper with a heart of gold in the Cyberpunk:Noir movie coming out the day after the release of the game. That had led me to watching that old show Firefly, which was actually damn decent…but what the fuck. Why do I look like an old-ass actor? And is it significant that I have the same name as a character he played in a borderline ancient tv show?

This shit just gets crazier and crazier, I thought to myself.

Focusing on the pants he/I was wearing brought up a small box of text, telling me, ‘Comfortweave recycled plastic pants. As durable as they are comfortable, so not very. Comes with automold holster on the right thigh.’ Focusing in turn on the faded red T-shirt I was wearing gave me similar results, as it was also ComfortWeave brand, sans holster. The branding was even more obvious with a bright yellow CW inside an equally yellow circle in the center of my chest. I blinked as I realized I had a revolver of my own, identical to Sara’s, tucked securely into that holster on my thigh. Seems weird that my sister left me armed while in a coma for months, but I’m not complaining. Focusing on the gun on the inventory avatar’s hip told me, ‘Colt Overseer. 8 shots of pure stopping power. Accept no substitutes.’ I noticed the belt I was wearing was lined with bullets that were presumably for this weapon. Well good, at least I’m fucking armed. From what I know, Noir City is beyond dangerous.

I clicked out of the Inventory tab and checked Cyberware. It showed a translucent avatar this time that only showed the chrome and its placement inside me. I currently only had three pieces of chrome installed: a set of Aerotech synth lungs shown in the figure’s chest, a pair of Kobayashi eyes in its eye sockets, and what was shown as a basic internal agent, no name brand given, installed into the skull behind the ears. I guess that last one combined with the eyes was what was giving me my HUD? At least I could be fairly certain my eyes were good chrome. In the world of Cyberpunk: Noir, all the best chrome comes from Japan, or at least from Japanese corps. As soon as I thought about that, I realized how much higher definition everything was appearing as I looked out the window at the wispy clouds drifting high over the desert. Huh, ok that’s pretty cool, I thought to myself as I found I could zoom in about 2X.

Finally I clicked on Character. It was showing me what I was at this point expecting. Five main stats showed: Body, Reflexes, Tech, Net, and Cool. Noir had been based heavily on the older Cyberpunk: 2077 series of RPGs, which Isekai Gaming had purchased outright to avoid copyright infringement, and some of the beta testers had found areas that were populated by people that spoke in a manner any Cyberpunk: 2077 gamer would find incredibly familiar. So, though they did not take place in the same universe, they did share a lot of similarities, and this stat page was practically traditional. Down in the corner I saw a Skill Progression button and mentally clicked it. Nothing happened. Huh, I clicked on Body. Nothing happened. Is it because I haven’t done anything in the game yet? So many questions. Each of the stats showed the number 1 next to them, with the exception of Body which showed negative 1.

I was feeling overwhelmed, and not a little bit sore, as I felt my eyelids starting to droop. Sara had been talking at me more than to me while I went through my various icons and functions on my HUD and seemed to be cheerfully talking about how nice the road was this close to Noir City. “Sara, I realize it’s kinda weird to say, but I’m exhausted. Ironic, given I’ve been sleeping for over three months, but I need a nap. I’m going to crash for a bit. Can you wake me when we’re about to enter Noir City?” I asked.

She seemed almost startled that I’d spoken, then looked over at me with a smile and nodded, “Sure thing, Mal, get some rest. You know me, tend to chatter when I’m excited.”

I really didn’t, but I returned her smile and closed my eyes. Well I may have died, but I still get to walk the streets of Noir City. Could be worse.