Jack stumbled, tripping into a puddle newly formed in the rain Jack must have missed the start of. The sudden chill shocked him out of his musings as much as the blow to his temple.
It had broken skin, a slow flow of blood dripping down as he pushed himself to his knees, trying to reorientate.
The figure standing over him was someone he once had the unfortunate luck to call a friend. Mostly just some dumb gonk who managed to woo his way into a small time gang, but it got him an old set of gorilla arms. As Jack had just learnt, It didn’t make the metal any softer.
“What ‘ave I told you about comin’ down to these parts again gonk!”
A soft chuckling came form just a few feet away, and to Jack it was the call of an angel.
Propped up on the back of the gonks Nazaré was a woman wearing a sleek helmet and one of the new bright red plastic windbreakers over a generic black motercycle suit.
Carefull honey~, the poor lead head might become slow!” she taunted, miming the blow to her helmet. “Ughh... lets get a move on, the rains gonna ruin my hair.”
Her name was Hinata, and, at one point, she was Jacks output.
“Yeah, yeah just lets me deal with Jackie boy real quick.”
Her current other half was a larger and bulkier man than Jack, but he was sure that due to his chrome more that it was any workouts. He was also wearing it proudly with an open jacket and tank top, no doubt to try to flex on anyone he doesn’t like.
Usually that meant Jack.
“You must’ve taken me for some leadhead if your still out here daring to cross me so openly!” he shouted.
“This is your last warning. I find you again and I’ll flatline you, pathetic fuck, and drag your body out so the scavs can make modern art of your corpse! Maybe there’s even enough chrome on you to repair my gorilla arms.” he spit, “Got that?”
“...crystal.”
“Oh I hope you didn’t!” he added with a laugh. “Now Ghost off!!”
Not waiting any longer in the now heavy rain, he hopped onto the front of the bike and rather recklessly sped through the alleyways and back onto the main roads.
Slightly disorientated still, and still bleeding from his temple, Jack managed to get to his feet. Walking back with his mind working a million miles an hour in both anger and despair he didn’t even notice the rain soaking through his clothes.
‘Fuck them, they want to call me slow? I’ll show them slow when I put bullet between their eyes!!
Oh and they’ll see it coming! That’ll be the worse part!’ Jack thought.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
‘I just need the stupid program up and running and then they’ll all be fucked!...
Shit! I’m back at square one with this waste of a cyberdeck. ‘Oh, it can hold 5 Quickhacks at once!’ like that helps!! ‘You can queue up two hack at once i-’
It all clicked suddenly in the blueprints of his mind.
Whatever that blow had knocked loose he wasn’t sure but all the pieces started to fall into place on how it would be vialbe- no, easy to upturn Night City with a single hack.
Though Jack cared only for revenge.
If it can load up two quick hacks into its system to run...
He can split the program into multiple pieces to bypass the packet size issues! Sure no one in their right mind would make a custom OS for such a delicate and brain interfacing cyberware but whata little more brain damage by this point? He’s got too many people to murder in cold blood! Can’t be wasting time on something as stupid as safety, besides, Jack doubted he have enough chrome to really worry about Cyberpsychosis!
Jack was in full sprint, both mentally and physically as he raced back to he small apartment before the ‘inspiration’ faded.
He shoved open the door to a dull room of nothing to note, just another run down rotten dump people called a home in 2070, or maybe just in Night City, but he could never afford to travel.
He crashed into his seat and worked with a psychotic focus, not even his rampant paranoia could distract from that.
----------------------------------------
It has been 36 hours of straight of almost unbroken work.
The rain had continued relentlessly still, but it couldn’t deter him. He had somewhere to be, some people to meet. And he knew exactly where they would be waiting tonight.
The code was complete, and completely revolutionary.
Jack wasn’t so far gone to call himself an unbridled genius, he recognised that he was simply the first one to come up with this new idea. There aren’t even any problems that don’t simply require more time to come up with solutions, or better cyberware but that would solve itself in time.
Jack made most of his income for a while fixing up bad code and hacks, and would have continued if anything well paying didn’t require either a degree or jumping head first into solo life and putting his neck out for a choppin’.
Some gonks tend to blame even those who worked on the hacks that flatline their family or gang, and he was not prepared to defend against some borged out psyco hunting him down daily.
Jack made a slight detour to one of the last pieces of green, undeveloped plots in the whole city.
It was a very personal and special place for Jack, and one he only ever shared with one other person outside his family. It was his father that showed it to him, as he knew the old corpo who owned it, and it’s where he would bring Jack every New Years yo watch the shows.
He knew the two of them would be waiting there.
Hinata had sold its existence off to her new Input about two years ago.
They loved to taunt him by keeping him away from there.
It’s where his parents columbarium is.
Both his new program and and unbridled rage heated up within him as he reached the sectioned off area. His targets were just in his view, and it was but a moment more before they noticed him too.
“I FUCKING WARNED YOU!” the first hapless sack of rot screamed, haphazardly drawing his Unity and taking aim as Jack closed in.
This was his masterpiece
He called it L.A.G
Light Augment Ghost
The name really said it all...
But it still seemed so surreal.
Jacks hand rested on his own Iron, an Arasaka JKE-X2 Kenshin, cost quite a lot of eddies and today it gets a real world test drive.
If either side sweated from the immense tension filling the air, it was lost in the downpour, and maybe if the clouds didn’t darken everything the saw so much, they would have caught Jacks form flicker ever so slightly around the rain.
Maybe maybe maybe...
Jack could feel his cyberdeck heating up massively under the load of LAG, cooled by the rain causing the very issues with its process.
He felt pure power in his veins, watching it all play out like bored god, rasing his pistol in one fluid motion unflinching. Two shots rang out in quick succession, neither from Jacks Kenshin.
“Well, I hated knowing you, bye b-” Hinata stilled eyes widening in impossible shock as Jacks form shifted like the universe had glitched, lurching forward in an instant.
His Iron was pressed gently against her Inputs head, right on the same temple he had hit Jack.
She didn’t even register the shot until everything in his skull splashed against her.
Jack took a few steps towards her as she fell to her knees, scrambling back in an instinctual fear.
“ah, aaah... I had no part in this! I tried to talk him out of it I swear! You must believe me!!“ Hinata eventually gasped out though her shock and horror.
He stared impassively, his own dead organic eyes into hers, cold, mechanical, pleading.
*BANG*