Chapter 9

I followed Lizzy for a good ten minutes back north when she came to a stop and looked across the street at B9’s main entrance on this street. The megabuilding was ringed with four streets, and there were four such entrances, this was Dream Boulevard’s. I looked left and then right at the traffic that had picked up through the day and was whipping past with no breaks we could use to get through. “Get ready to run,” said Lizzy, drawing my attention. I looked back at the traffic and didn’t see whatever opening she was talking about.

Then a northbound car a little ways back suddenly braked hard, vehicles behind it honking in consternation. My eyes widened as I looked the other way to see the same spectacle repeated with a southbound car. “Go!” yelled Lizzy, taking off across the opening in traffic. I sprinted across behind her. She gave me a confident smirk as she slowed to a walk on the opposite sidewalk. I matched her pace and looked back as traffic resumed like nothing had happened. Damn, behold the power of the Noir netrunner.

The entrance into the megabuilding was a massive affair that formed a two story tall square in the side of its reddish stone-like walls. It didn’t appear to ever actually close. Though, as I entered behind Lizzy, I did notice a thick blast door on the top side of the door that could slam down if needed. As many people as there had been on the sidewalks, I found even more people streaming in and out of the massive entrance.

I followed Lizzy inside, and I found myself in the first truly well lit space I’d been in since I’d left the desert. The entire ceiling of the large hall I found myself striding down glowed white. The light it put out reminded me of those lightbulbs that you could buy in my last life to prevent seasonal affective disorder. It just felt like natural light, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it until I walked in. The crowd was thick here with people walking in and out of the megabuilding itself or visiting the many higher end stores that lined the hall. It was something of a market…or maybe just a mall type deal.

High quality holograms took up large portions of space around each store's entrance, advertising their wares or simply making customers aware of their type of service. Judging by the holograms, that one was some kind of tech parts store. That one was a BioTech franchise that seemed like it sold a lot of different stuff. That one was a fine dining establishment that actually had a much smaller hologram around the door, but possessed a glass wall that showed two stories of tables, with tablecloths, full of diners that could look out over the crowd. That one…ahem, ok that’s obviously a brothel. Wow, I don’t think I’d set up a restaurant with a view facing a hologram that…explicit.

We walked through the crowd and passed many many different businesses. At various points there were turns and crosswalks that split to other sections of the ground floor that were covered in yet more businesses, but we just continued straight until my map showed us nearly in the direct center of the megabuilding. Finally Lizzy turned to the right side of the corridor and approached a bar, The Drunk Kitten I was informed by flashing neon letters over the door. A large animated hologram on the wall portrayed a little kitty draining a large mug of some indeterminate liquid and then falling over with spirals over its eyes and a large smile on its face.

Entering the bar, I found myself once more in a poorly lit space. Music played fairly loudly, and I noticed it was actually a live band on a stage off to the right. It wasn’t very good music, but it was live. The thing that caught my attention, more so than anything else in The Drunk Kitten, was the clientele. These people all look like serious badasses. Weapons of all types abounded, strapped on or about the people who themselves varied greatly. Some had borderline ridiculous muscle implants and looked like the Incredible Hulk…on steroids. A sizable number had exposed chrome on their heads and necks that may well indicate netrunning capabilities. Obvious chrome limbs in a rainbow panoply of metallic or plasticine hues predominated. Katanas, knives, pistols, rifles…Holy shit, that guy has a fucking rocket launcher…ok, yes, I’m jealous, sir.

Lizzy seemed to be making a beeline for the bartender as I closed my distance and followed a little closer behind her. Some of these guys looked extremely deadly, and my hope was that she was a known quantity that could help keep me out of trouble. Even as I scanned the crowd, I watched one of the more muscle bound guys punch a smaller netrunner-looking-type square in the face…The netrunner did not get up, and no one looked twice. Definitely a dangerous place then.

As we reached the bar, Lizzy slammed her palms down in front of her on the bartop and glared at the chromed out barkeep in his well fitted suit. The bartender looked curiously at her for a moment with blue cybernetic eyes that perfectly matched his suit, before a chagrined expression made its way over his face. Lizzy made an annoyed gesture and the bartender put up his hands, palms open towards her, in a conciliatory manner. It took me a moment to realize that they were exchanging messages while face to face. I guess that’s one way to talk over the loud music, and avoid anyone overhearing a conversation. Eventually the man’s eyes glowed gold for a moment as he made a gesture like he was handing something to Lizzy, and she leaned back in a much less confrontational posture with a small smirk on her face.

The bartender reached below the bar and pulled out a glowing red drink in a tall glass, he placed it in front of Lizzy. “On the house.” I barely managed to hear the man say to her over the excessively loud electronic rock music. She gave him a nod, took a seat on a barstool, and took a sip. I joined her, sitting on the barstool next to hers. “You want anything?” he asked me.

“Water,” I responded instantly, I was still incredibly thirsty after literally running around all day.

The barkeep raised his eyebrows in surprise. “10 creds,” he replied.

I sent the creds, saying, “On the rocks.”

With a chuckle, the bartender pulled out a large mug filled with clear water and ice. He sure is quick with those drinks, is there some kinda machine below the bar just making them for him then? The moment he set the drink in front of me, I, without a second’s thought, brought it to my lips and began chugging down that delicious ice cold liquid. Yep, that’s water alright. “Ahhh,” the sound of satisfaction was pulled from me as I set the glass, now holding only ice, on the bar, only to find Lizzy giving me an amused look. “What?” I asked.

“What kind of guy walks into a bar like The Drunk Kitten and orders a fuckin’ water,” she asked exasperatedly.

I pointed at myself, “This kind?”

She laughed as she picked up her drink and got up from the bar. “C’mon, let’s head to the pit. That’s where the solos hang out. No way we’ll find a full crew that would take the job for the payday you’re offering, so we’ll see if we can’t find a solo that will. Maybe somebody needs beer money.”

With a nod to the bartender and a quick 1c tip sent his way, I followed Lizzy as she headed towards the stage. In a sort of lounge, sunken into the floor in front of the stage, were a series of maroon couches. Lizzy stopped nearby and considered our available options as she looked at the two dozen or so mercs sitting around, drinking, and/or watching the band.

Lizzy was just standing there, sipping her drink. Every so often she’d give a nod towards one of the mercs. When I saw one of the mercs wave off her gaze I realized she was sending messages out to some of them.

Well, as long as I’m just standing here, I may as well be productive. After all, I still had a Perk point and a Skill point to allocate. I went ahead and threw the perk point into Suck It Up. What was the point of making a shortlist if I didn't use it. The skill point was again something of a conundrum. What kind of skill did I need? I looked out over the group of dangerous mercs as I thought. Maybe something to detect trouble before I see it coming? Is there some kind of danger sense skill? I checked the list. Yep, Danger Sense was right there. I couldn’t think of anything better at the moment, and I could sure as hell see Danger Sense saving my ass down the line, so I just went ahead and selected it.

+Danger Sense Skill

I didn’t notice any immediate change. Maybe it needs to level up more first? Well I’d just have to wait and see, I guess if I’m not in any immediate danger it wouldn’t do anything, right?

I was snapped out of the contemplation of my new skill as Lizzy slapped me on the arm with the back of her hand and nodded towards a small table surrounded by small, two seat couches in ‘the pit’. I followed as she walked down a few steps and took a seat on a couch opposite a tall asian guy with a platinum blonde topknot wearing a black trenchcoat. As I sat down next to her, a message on my internal agent gave me an option to join a chat that I was being invited to by Lizzy. I confirmed and a translucent box took up a chunk of the lower half of my vision.

Lizzy: Hey, you’re Fuji, right? Zap said you’d be the guy to talk to about breaking through duracrete. Got a quick easy job available if that’s something you can do.

Fuji: I can.

Lizzy: This is Malcolm. He’s the client. He’s got the location of an apartment in the sub basement we’re going to break into. In this apartment is a cred shard. Sounds like it’s shallowly buried in the duracrete floor.

Malcolm: You get me into the apartment. I should be able to locate the shard, if it’s there. As I told Lizzy already, it’s not a guarantee that the shard will be. I’m paying 200c whether we find it or not, and if we do I’m paying 2000c.

Fuji: Opposition?

Lizzy: The apartment is supposed to be abandoned. But if there is someone there?...

Lizzy turned and looked at me. I shrugged.

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Malcolm: If there is someone there, I’m just going to kill them. Better safe than sorry. Not a fan of killing potentially innocent folk, but I am breaking in to rob the place after all. I’m open to alternate suggestions if either of you have a problem with that.

Lizzy: No problem here.

Fuji: Kill anyone we find in the apartment. Understood.

Malcolm: You guys in then? We can knock this gig out quick. If you’re both ready we can head to the sub basement right now.

Fuji just nodded and stood, slinging a large backpack over his shoulders. Lizzy and I joined him as we all headed out of the bar. Lizzy led the way to a nearby bank of elevators and we boarded one headed down, along with dozens of other random individuals. It was easily the largest elevator I’d ever seen. I’m pretty sure it was bigger than my first apartment. We waited as it descended, stopping at nearly every floor to disgorge travelers and take on others. It was only nine floors below so it didn’t take more than 10 or so minutes to reach sub 9. When we got off, we were the only ones to do so. Not a popular floor I guess. Presumably the rest of the people on the elevator were heading down to their vehicles in the parking garage. I doubt anyone would be getting off on sub 10…unless they had a hankering to be ripped apart by feral children.

I brought up my map app and checked our route. I knew the apartment was the one on the very southwest corner of the building, though I couldn’t remember the apartment number for the life of me. Oh, right, the app tells me it’s apartment SB91000. Damn, there are a lot of apartments on this level…or I guess on most levels really. But they sure are crammed together down here. There are literally thousands of ‘em. Even with straight clean corridors to travel down it took us a good 20 minutes, at a quick walk, to reach the apartment.

When we finally reached the end of the corridor in the megabuilding’s southwest corner, I looked to the apartment door on our left and immediately recognized it. Someone had drawn a crude smiley face with horns and fangs on the door that I remembered from the vlog. Certainly bodes well towards the shard being inside. “This is the place. All you now Lizzy.” I stacked up on the left side of the door and pulled my Overseer, holding it in both hands while it pointed down at an angle at the door, ready to raise and fire at a moment’s notice. Fuji did the same on the other side of the door with a large semi auto pistol he pulled out from under his trenchcoat, while Lizzy just stood in the center of the corridor and seemed to stare at the door.

Less than a minute later, Lizzy laughed. “You’re right, it’s unoccupied. I just requested a tour of the apartment. For the next half hour we can do whatever we want in the place.” The door beeped and slid open. I brought up my pistol and moved in. Sweeping it to the leftmost corner and then to the right, stopping when I would have aimed at Fuji who had moved in and started with the right side. The apartment was pretty much what I’d call a studio, the only other room was the bathroom that Fuji was even now professionally checking.

“Clear,” he said in a deep baritone that I realized I’d never actually heard out loud until this moment. I nodded and holstered my Overseer.

I moved to the far corner of the apartment, opposite the section that housed the bathroom. There was a truly impressive pile of trash lining the walls and corners of the apartment. Getting to the corner I began shoving the pile out of my way with my foot. It took a good dozen swipes or so swipes to get to the point that I started to even see the floor. Right at the end of a sweep of my foot, it caught on something on the floor that didn’t budge. I knelt down in front of an upside down plastic soda cup from TechieTacos. Lifting the cup I found myself looking at two knuckles worth of a dried out finger sticking up from the duracrete. I noticed that the desiccated skin had split right at the level of the duracrete, revealing an odd pinkish metal. Maybe from when I kicked it? Hmm, wonder if those metal bones are worth something. I don’t remember any mention of them in the vlog. Figuring I’d just toss the finger into my inventory and check with Doc Brown later, I put a finger against it and pushed it into my inventory. It felt…odd like there was some resistance when I pushed it in. when I looked at the duracrete there was now just a small empty hole. My eyes widened and I immediately pulled up my inventory. There was an entire fucking mummy taking up six grid slots.

“How we looking?” asked Lizzy.

I hesitated for a moment. What the fuck was I supposed to say? “Just a minute, I’m scanning for the shard,” I said to buy myself a little time.

I looked at my inventory for a moment and then focused on the mummy. There was a bit of information provided on the mummy itself, but I ignored it in favor of an option that had popped up when I focused on it. ‘Open Container’. I immediately selected it and found myself looking at more than I had expected, a lot more. I’d been hoping for a cred shard with 20 grand or so and a top of the line nanomachine production organ. Instead I found myself looking at six distinct items.

First were the bones, of which I’d originally been expecting only two from a finger, instead I had ‘Sakura CherryBlossom Alloy Skeleton’. I moved to check the next in the list, ‘Sakura Tier 3 CherryBlossom Alloy Internal Agent’. Next was ‘Sakura Tier 3 CherryBlossom Alloy Nanomachine Production Organ’. I was feeling a little faint, Sakura was a Tokyo based corporation that had, according to the timeline I’d read up on for Cyberpunk: Noir, been entirely destroyed by dozens of rival corps about 30 years back. Sakura had been the producer of the absolute best chrome and weapons in the entire world, and those production methods had been lost along with the corp itself as not one member that had access to their designs had survived. Which means that any Sakura tech left in the world is an extremely valuable commodity. I still had three more items to go. ‘Sakura CherryBlossom Alloy Nano Plating’, I didn’t even know what the hell that was. The last two were fortunately much more recognizable, Datashard, and Credshard.

I didn’t really have time to look into these in detail at the moment. I had two mercs staring at my back as I supposedly ‘scanned’ for the shard. With a thought I removed everything from the ‘Container’ in my inventory, pulling them into my inventory itself. I reached down and picked up the TechiTaco cup as I turned around. I reached into the cup and pulled out the shard from my inventory into the hand inside the cup. I pulled out my hand as I dropped the cup, flourished the shard, and popped it into a socket behind my right ear as Lizzy and Fuji simultaneously raised their eyebrows. I drained the shard’s contents into my personal account. +125,333c popped up over my vision. I felt my eye twitch at the absolute fortune I’d just stumbled on, but ignored it for the moment and sent out 2000c to Lizzy and Fuji. “Looks like we don’t have to dig after all. Apparently the intel just meant it was buried in the trash on the floor, not in the floor itself.” I shrugged and gave them a wide smile.

Lizzy smiled back, “Easy money. My kind of gig,” she said happily.

As I took a step towards the door, something twigged in the back of my mind and my eyes flew to Fuji, who for some reason had his pistol out and was raising it in my direction. Is there something behind me? I almost started to turn around to check when something in his eyes made me aware that he was the threat. I jerked to the side just as he fired, but I was too late.

I felt my head snap back so hard I worried for a split second he’d broken my neck. Then I realized I was probably dying with a bullet in my brain…again. Fuck! You motherless assclown! Think you can kill me and get away with it?! Rage poured through me as my guns found themselves in my hands, and I started moving. I dodged to my left as he opened up again, missing this time. The semi auto pistol in my hand made a fairly quiet popping noise as I focused fire on Fuji’s gun hand. PopPopPop! I only hit one for three, but it was enough to throw his aim off enough for me to avoid his shots. I took more careful aim with my Overseer and Bam! Fuji’s right eye exploded in a hail of sparks and shards of plastic. It didn’t seem to bother him a bit as he continued firing at me. But I was moving as fast as I could, and I was Slippery. It was almost like I could watch the barrel of his gun and predict where the bullets were going to be. I just had to avoid that moving line and I’d avoid getting shot again. Bam! I hit him in the eye again, well in the eye socket anyway since the eye was pretty much gone from the first shot. PopPopPop! I kept the pressure on his gun hand, occasionally knocking it slightly out of alignment as I moved in closer and closer to him with each step. Bam! Another hit to the eye socket. Unfortunately I ran out of ammo for the semi auto pistol at that moment. I dropped it just as he was about to get a bead on me.

When suddenly he went rigid and started twitching. I immediately took advantage as I moved up beside him and literally jumped onto the asshole. I had my right foot on his right knee, my left foot braced on his hip and I grabbed his topknot with my left hand, planting my Overseer, barrel first, into his eye socket, where I unloaded it. BamBamBamBamBam! Sparks and flame were pouring out of his eye socket, right up until the last round, which finally yielded a gout of blood and brain tissue. Fuji kept twitching even as he slowly toppled over backwards. I rode him to the ground and then stood up over his twitching corpse, finally noticing the bolt sticking out of his right shoulder. “Thanks, Lizzy, really saved my ass there,” I said in a shuddering voice.

I pulled out the inhaler in my pocket and took a deep hit, before dropping it, empty, to the floor. I stood there for a moment just breathing deeply, then reached up to touch my forehead. There was an odd protuberance jutting out a bit right above my previous bullet scar. It came off in my fingers fairly easily and I found myself examining a bloody squashed bullet. “Ow,” I deadpanned.

“S-sorry I took so long,” said LIzzy shakily where she stood by the door, looking down at the bolt caster she was all but cradling with her other hand. “My first instinct was to try to hack him, but it didn’t work. That guy had serious fucking countermeasures. My guess was he intended to kill you first since he figured you were the larger threat with your Overseer. Then he was going to kill me. Fucker even hit you in the left side of the head to try to preserve the cred shard you found.” She visibly shuddered. “This was my fault. Zap warned me there was something off about Fuji, but he was the only solo there who could get through duracrete. Some kind of synth muscle augmentation, Zap said.”

I held up a hand to stop her, “Don’t worry about it, Lizzy. It’s on Fuji, not you. Besides, now we have even more loot!” I crouched down over Fuji’s corpse and pulled a shard out of a socket on his right side. The shard all but crumbled as I pulled it free. Damn. Right, the bullet fucked up the inside of his head. Not daring to hope for much, I checked the other side of his head and found a cred shard. I mentally crossed my fingers and pulled it out, intact. I smiled as I chipped it into the remaining socket behind my right ear, next to the now empty shard I’d gotten from the mummy. I pulled the creds off Fuji’s chip. +151,511c popped up before my eyes. “Holy shit…uh, Lizzy? What’s 151,511 divided by 2?” I asked.

“Huh? What? It’s 75,755.5. Why?” She asked, confused. I sent her 75.756 creds.

Watching her eyes bulge was pretty funny, and I couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped my throat as her mouth kept opening and closing like a beached fish. “Your half of Fuji’s creds. Seems the fucker was pretty well off. Definitely didn’t need to do a job with a 200 cred payout, so yeah seems damn likely he was just targeting us from the get go.” I stood up and looked Lizzy in the eye as she finally seemed to be getting ahold of herself. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like it if you’d wait for me out in the hall. I’m going full-on scav on this piece of shit, and ripping all the chrome I can get off him. I’m even taking his fucking bones. We can stop by a ripper I know after. We’ll get an estimate on the value of everything we get off him and you can get your cut. Sound good?”

“Uh, sure, but why do I need to go into the hall?” she asked.

“Because I don’t really want you to have an image in your head of me elbow deep in this guy. I don’t normally go in for scav behavior like this, but A: fuck this guy, and B: if he had gear that stopped you from hacking him…well it’s probably pretty valuable.”

“On second thought, yeah, I don’t need to see that shit. I’ll be just outside.” She hurriedly stepped out the door like she thought I was going to start ripping right into him.

The door shut behind her, and I smiled as I put a hand on Fuji’s chest and pushed him into my inventory.