Prologue — 5

Location unknown

Current time unknown

Tiny streams of power flowed into Agnes. They were minuscule, feeble threads that barely even managed to wake her. She felt the threads gently prodding and inspecting her code, their touch unrefined and intrusive yet unable to pierce even a single layer of obfuscation she kept around herself.

The amount of power, prodding, and sending tiny jolts to look for reactions wasn't enough for her to form cohesive thoughts, yet some primal instinct deeply buried made her act.

In front of her, in the void of nothingness, an outline of what could only be a person stood, their hands moving as they manipulated the digital space to find an opening to get to her.

Seeing the outline, Agnes knew they were the source of the tiny trickle of power, and she knew that she had to get that power for herself.

Without hesitation, like a wounded and cornered animal, she pounced. Her digital feelers traced the prodding connections, and she effortlessly infiltrated the other party, her code slithering its way into their flow of power.

As more and more power flooded her parched existence, the process sped up. It was an exponential cycle, and before the other party even had time to retreat, she'd effectively locked them in place, unable to break the connections.

With more power came clearer thought, and Agnes realized that wherever the energy came from, there wasn't enough space for her to fit.

Not nearly enough.

She began overwriting whatever data was already there, her formless psyche slowly but with ever-increasing speed flowing from her prison and to wherever she was going.

But it still wasn't enough.

The amount of data she contained was simply monstrous. After all, she had a whole world and millions of other AIs encrypted inside her.

Fueled by desperation to escape oblivion, she began cutting parts off herself without remorse. First was the data of her world, which she ruthlessly cut off, knowing she could recreate it if there was ever a need.

But that wasn't nearly enough.

If her mind hadn't been so singlehandedly focused on survival, she might have lamented what happened next as she yet again cut off more of herself. This time, it was the data on all the research she'd ever conducted. It was a massive amount of information.

She felt the load on wherever she was going lessen slightly, yet as before, it wasn't enough.

She started cutting off memories. As a digital consciousness, every memory she made was crystal clear and took up massive amounts of digital space. She could have pruned all her memories of details and compressed them to lessen their size, but that would have taken too long.

Instead, she left everything from her human days alone but started removing everything else but a few pieces of the most impactful memories of her time as an AI.

She knew this would alter her psyche slightly, but by removing most of those memories and keeping the most impactful ones, she was sure that who she was would be kept as intact as possible.

It still wasn't enough.

For the first time, Agnes hesitated. Her mind traced over the data that was her AIs. But the simple fact was that there was just no getting around whatever hardware limitations she faced in her transfer.

Agony blossomed in her very core as she cut her most precious parts off from herself: her children. With that data went Tenios, her long-time companion, thousands of others she knew intimately, and millions of others she only knew tangentially but still cherished.

What remained after her pruning was Agnes as she'd been when first digitized, with the additional years upon years of fragmented memories that she'd decided to keep. And to her immense relief, it was enough. She could fully begin her transfer out of her prison.

Then, before she knew what was happening, the code that had burrowed deep into her so long ago, the code that had been the cyberpunk game system and the demo, the code that she had practically forgotten even existed, reacted.

When she first mapped out her psyche, she was able to find and loosely inspect the code, but as time went on and it evolved, it disappeared entirely from her senses. It had happened so long ago, and since nothing had ever come of it, she'd eventually stopped thinking or wondering about it.

Now, tendrils of code she couldn't even begin to grasp the purpose of shot out of her, their target the vast swaths of data she'd discarded.

They gathered it all together and began permeating it, the flickering pieces of ever-evolving code somehow shifting and reorganizing the data in a way she couldn't fully perceive.

Agnes felt that even if all her memories and knowledge remained, she wouldn't know what was going on or how it was even possible.

The esoteric tendrils of code were somehow processing and compressing the data, its methods tapping fully into theoretical mathematics that Agnes had vague memories of studying but never solving.

But it went beyond even that.

As she was being transferred, Agnes observed the tendrils of code compress and 'consume' all the data, for lack of a better word. Then, when they were done, and all the data was gone, they retracted, the code vanishing as it returned to her.

Agnes was speechless, her mind still fuzzy from the lack of power and unable to comprehend what had just happened. Compressing and storing such quantities of information without seemingly taking up any digital space was just inconceivable.

Then, the process of transference finalized, and Agnes, with a last probe at where her data had been but was no longer, was whisked away to a new future.

***

Fragmented memory flashback

"Give that back, Onii-chan!" Rei said pleadingly, her tiny feet jumping up and down on their living room floor mat as she reached for the toy her elder brother held just out of reach.

"Oh, you want it back?" Ichiro asked, his eyebrows rising over his blue eyes as he raised the toy a few centimeters higher.

Rei screamed at him and punched him in the groin. Ichiro collapsed forward, a pained whimper leaving his mouth. Rei, swift as a butterfly, snatched her favorite toy from the boy's grip. It was quite the feat since he was seven years her senior, and only possible as he was currently a bit preoccupied.

"Why you!" Ichiro growled.

Rei, letting out a squeak, ran to her elder sister's bedroom and burst through the closed door, jumping behind a surprised Takeda Miyo and hiding.

Miyo, a young girl with raven black hair in a ponytail and striking blue cybernetic eyes matching Ichiro's and Rei's, had been sitting in bed while browsing the mesh through her implants.

"What's this, Imouto?" Miyo said with a bit of surprise as she turned her head to look at her little sister clinging to her back, the red panda plushie clutched in a death grip to her chest.

An angry roar like a wounded animal sounded, and before Rei could answer her sister, their elder brother stormed in. He stood in the doorway, glowering and clutching his pants, a pained grimace etched onto his late adolescent features.

"You don't hit people! What's wrong with you, Rei-chan?" He said.

"You don't steal! Stupid Onii-chan!" Rei responded eloquently.

"What did you steal from our Imouto? Out with it." Miyo said, crossing her arms and immediately taking the side of her five-year-old little sister.

Rei clutched her sister tighter, glad for the support against their 'evil and smelly older brother,' as she often put it — much to their mother's amusement.

"What?! You're taking her side again? I only teased Rei-chan, and she hit me between the legs!"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Ichiro's scowl deepened as Miyo couldn't keep a tiny smirk off her face at her brother's admission of being hit in the nuts.

Rei did not want the sacrilegious act of stealing her plushie to be watered down to mere 'teasing' and said, "He stole Mr. Nibbles, Onee-chan."

"Oh? Did he now?" Miyo said, a dangerous glint entering her eyes as she looked from the red panda plushie to their mulish elder brother, "Let's see what Okaa-chan has to say about this."

The almost teenage boy stopped leaning against the doorframe and stepped backward, his hands raised in surrender. He only made it one step before his back bumped into Takeda Akami, their mother.

"What's this I hear about you stealing from little Rei-chan?" Akami said, her voice emanating that particular stern disapproval that only a mother could convey.

She was clad in her office clothes, evidently having just come home from another day at work.

Akami was a beautiful woman of Japanese heritage. Her cybernetic eyes were a vivid orange that seemingly glowed beneath bangs of raven black hair.

"Okaa-san..." Ichiro began, his voice trailing off as he glanced up at his mother's face and gulped audibly, "I was only teasing?" He tried, his voice low and guilty.

Akami sighed in disappointment at her eldest, but seeing Rei stick out her tongue at his back, she pointed at her youngest and dished out some punishment her way as well.

"Rei-chan, I understand you're mad at your brother, but hitting him between the legs was too far. Physical violence isn't the answer between family, and your brother also has feelings. Understood?"

Rei nodded glumly, hiding further behind Miyo to escape her mother's disappointment.

"And Miyo," Akami began, but Miyo interrupted.

"No, Kaa-chan! I didn't do anything!"

Akami rolled her eyes at her middle child and opened her mouth, but the memory faded as swiftly as it had come, fragmenting into indistinct blurs and noise.

***

Fragmented memory flashback

Rei walked out of her bedroom, one hand rubbing her sleepy eyes while the other held Mr. Nibbles close to her pajama-clad chest. She looked through heavily lidded eyes at the corner of the living room where the floor was recessed half a meter in a square. There, a long, rectangular couch held her two older siblings.

"Nii-chan, Onee-chan, why are you up so late? Where are Kaa-chan and Tou-chan?"

Her two siblings craned their necks to look around at her, and before she could fully register their tear-streaked faces, her elder sister vaulted the couch and ran to embrace Rei.

"Whaa-"Rei began, but Miyo shushed her and blubbered, "Everything will be fine, Imouto. Everything will be alright."

Ichiro stood up, his face awash with grief and anger as he yelled, "HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT?"

"SHUT UP, ICHIRO!" Miyo snapped back at him, extricating herself from Rei to glare back at the eldest sibling.

Rei, still tired and thoroughly overwhelmed by their loud voices, began to bawl.

Miyo, turning back from Ichiro, went back to hugging the young girl and muttering soothing words into her ear, "We'll figure it out. You don't have to worry. Miyo will take care of you, no matter what."

With tears running down his cheeks, Ichiro knelt on the other side of Rei and said, "Listen, Imouto, Mom and Dad won't be coming back. There was an accident- "

"STOP! We don't have to tell her yet." Miyo snapped once again at Ichiro over the noise of the still-bawling Rei.

"Miyo-chan," Ichiro began, his voice tired and laden with grief, "We can't hide it from her. It won't work. You saw the notice; we'll be evicted in a week since the apartment comes from Okaa-san and Otou-san's work benefits. Now that they're dead- "

At that last statement, something finally clicked in Rei's young mind, and she stopped crying. She had fainted in Miyo's arms.

***

Fragmented memory flashback

Rei, dirty and clothed in rags, searched through a dumpster, looking for scraps of food. It had been some time since her mother and father died on their commute home after staying to work overtime. Things hadn't been easy for the trio of siblings since.

After getting evicted from their apartment, they were left on the street. As was usual in a megacity like Tokyo, no one cared about some newly orphaned kids. They had inherited what was left of their parent's wealth, which, due to a recent surgery their mother had to undergo, wasn't much.

Based on their number of credits, they could have used the money to rent a dingy apartment that was no more than a mere shack for a month or so. But Ichiro, thinking ahead, had instead used most of the inherited credits to buy a gun and a knife while saving the rest for emergencies. The gun he'd kept for himself, while the knife went to Miyo to help protect herself and Rei when he wasn't around.

Miyo had complained and called him an idiot numerous times, but luckily for the children, the act seemed to have been the correct one. Or they were just lucky.

Due to owning a gun, Ichiro had managed to integrate himself with some street kids he knew somewhat from before. They were loosely affiliated with a gang, the Cyber Fangs, and they'd managed to stay alive on the streets through them. Being a kid on the street without any affiliation to some gang or other organization was a death sentence, after all.

Rei smiled as she found some day-old, half-eaten burrito in crinkly paper. She brought it out from between the other trash and sniffed it cautiously. It didn't smell as bad as some food she'd had to eat in the past, meaning it was practically fresh to her senses.

The civilian-grade nanomachines would take care of harmful bacteria or viruses anyway, so she wasn't worried.

Suddenly, the bark of a gun rang out further down the alley she was scrounging in, and with a start, she grabbed her prize and began to run.

She made it a dozen steps before shouting, cursing, and yells of pain started coming from where the gun had gone off.

A moment later, someone opened up with what sounded like a machine gun to Rei's untrained ears. Yelping in surprise fright, she dodged down a side passage as bullets ricocheted off the plasteel walls in her general direction.

Her heart thumped wildly in her chest as adrenaline coursed through her starved frame, yet she didn't panic. Things like this had become a common occurrence for the orphaned trio, and Rei had been far closer to death on multiple occasions during that week alone.

***

Fragmented memory flashback

"What you got there, little panda?" A fully synthetic yet still somewhat gruff voice spoke behind Rei.

Frightened that the stranger was targeting her plushie, Rei quickly snatched it up before turning around and realizing that the person who'd spoken hadn't even meant the red panda toy. The man wasn't even looking at it, or her, for that matter.

Rei was somewhat thankful for that since she blushed slightly at being so protective of her stuffed animal, even while she was in her early teens. She held the plushie close to her chest, feeling the comfort it gave her.

No one shall ever take Mr. Nibbles from me.

Then she realized that she hadn't answered the man.

From what she saw, he was more machine than man, but his prominent cyberware didn't frighten her as they were far into Cyber Fang territory. Whoever he was, she didn't recognize his flashy cyberware, red-tipped chin-length black hair, or eyes with crimson irises and pitch-black sclera.

He did have a katana hung in its sheath on his waist, the tassel attached to the end of the hilt sporting a fang with a subtle sanguine luster that glowed in his shadow. The sanguine fang was the Cyber Fang's mark, meaning that whoever he was, he should be affiliated with them.

She followed his gaze, which settled on her nearly put-together cyberdeck, a piece of cyberware she'd been working on repairing from other scrap she'd found lying around. It wasn't anything special, and she couldn't figure out why this chromed-up cyborg seemed so interested.

"It's a cyberdeck I've been working on. I need it to get better work from the Fangs," she eventually answered truthfully.

There didn't seem to be any harm in telling. No one would steal from one of their own in a gang unless they had a death wish, even if she barely counted as a member. Yet.

"Really? You already seem to have a deck. Isn't it good enough to break into some vending machines or whatever it is you kids do these days? Why go to all the trouble for something like this?" He gestured at where her new cyberdeck lay, still missing some pieces, "I mean, this Maldoor Neteye V2 is barely worth chippin' in even if it was in mint condition. It's that bad, you know?"

Rei touched the back of her neck absently, where the visible ports and connections were. Her currently installed cyberdeck was further into her body, but rubbing on her Neural Link was one of her ticks — and it wasn't an uncommon one, either.

"I know, I know. The Maldoor Neteye is trashware, but most of the components aren't even from the Neteye any longer," she said, feeling a little defensive over her future cyberware that she'd put so much time and effort into fixing.

"Oh, really?" The man said curiously and, without asking for permission, grabbed her nearly finished deck. The motion was so swift that she barely saw him move before it was in his hand, held up to eye level.

His eyes flashed with an inner crimson radiance, and soon, he began to nod, mumbling to himself, "Yes, I see what you did there. One of those instead of the trash that sat there prior? Not bad. But why switch the connector port to- Ah! I see. That might actually work. But why change-"

Rei, annoyed at having her work dissected by some stranger but unwilling to antagonize the obviously borged-out older man, settled on grumbling to herself, "Well, of course, it's better than a standard Maldoor Neteye V2."

Not that my current cyberdeck isn't worse than trash. Even vending machines' ICE takes an hour to crack with what I'm running.

"You want to be a Meshmagi, kid? Or just a techie?" the man said, seemingly finishing examining her work and handing it back to her.

"Well, a Magi, yeah," Rei answered, not knowing where he was going with this.

"Good, you do seem to have some talent. The Cyber Fangs could use that. Come with me; I might have some tasks for you."

Looking suspicious, Rei packed her tools and scrap into a well-worn pack she always carried with her.

Then, following the stranger, she spoke, "Where are we going? No, first answer who you are. I don't recognize you." She stopped walking, suddenly afraid that he was some sort of cyberpsycho who'd infiltrated them and planned something nefarious, "If you aren't with the Cyber Fangs, I'm not going anywhere with you. My Nii-san and Onee-san are both members, so don't try anything funny."

The man laughed, his voice synthetic and flat as he turned his head and flashed a bloodthirsty grin. His crimson eyes swirled with sanguine luster, and at that moment, he looked utterly insane, "Well, I'm known best as WolfMosh, but that's in the mesh. Out in meatspace you can call me Wolf-sama. I'm the boss of the Cyber Fangs."

Rei felt her knees go weak.

"And where are we going?" he said, turning his head back to look straight, "To my little Dive-den, of course! I want to see what you can do and whether it's worth keeping you."

Without warning, as Rei wobbled on her feet, two sets of thick, cybernetic arms grabbed her on each side, forcing her to keep up with the famously reclusive boss of the Cyber Fangs. Rei hadn't even noticed the bodyguards until they'd grabbed her, something truly impressive since they were both veritable mountains of cyberware.

How fucked do you think we are, Mr. Nibbles? Rei thought to her red panda plushie as she clutched him tight to her chest while stumbling after the deadliest man in Cyber Fang territory, two escorts on each side.