Chapter 25: Ghosts on the Net

A/N: Here's the new Chapter! Which also means the next four chapters are up on my for early access as well as the chance to vote on the direction of the story!

Back to Alt's perspective~

-x-X-x-

The first thing V does once he’s managed to secure Panam Palmer’s services is take her right back out into the Badlands. Alt isn’t surprised by this, truth be told. V has already started steadily making his way through Fixers and their backlogs back in Night City and now that he’s done a deal with Dakota Smith, aka the Mad Coyote, he has an in road with the Badlands Fixer to start doing work for her as well.

And what better way to ease Panam into the edgerunner lifestyle than to take some gigs out in familiar territory? Eventually, they’d have to head back into the city to get work done there as well as to upgrade V’s cyberware, but for now it was obvious V wanted to make Panam feel comfortable and at home, even as he slowly but surely peeled her off of the Aldecaldos for good.

Alt was in V’s head, after all. As a result, she ‘remembered’ how the relationship between V and Panam had ended the first time around. Panam had loved V, of that much he was certain… but she’d never quite forgiven him for the decisions he’d made such as storming Arasaka Tower without her help, and ultimately becoming King of the Afterlife instead of going Nomadic with her.

She’d stuck around Night City for a little while longer for his sake, but ultimately their lifestyles just hadn’t been compatible. In the end, Panam had left and V had let her go, only to succumb a few months later and then travel back in time.

It was pretty obvious that V was going to have his cake and eat it too this time around. He still loved Panam, but he also clearly wasn’t intending on putting all of his eggs in one basket. Would Panam be able to accept him being a bit of a fuck boy this go around? From the look of things, she might just be persuaded into it. She hadn’t gone all the way with him yet, but that kiss… heh, Alt was a literal AI and even she got a little hot and bothered watching that.

Panam was a hottie, plain and simple, but competence and confidence… there was nothing more powerful when it came to getting a woman’s panties to drop. It was how Johnny had hooked her all the way back in the day, despite his clear flaws, and V had it even better than the Rocker Boy did.

As V and Panam sweep through Dakota’s backlog of gigs and jobs like bats out of hell, Alt focuses on everything else. She can’t quite ‘watch over’ V while he’s out in the Badlands in the same way she could in the city. Night City had cameras every few dozen feet, and so many ports and servers that… well, the Net version of the city looks just as congested and ‘lived in’ as the real world version.

By comparison, the Net in the Badlands was much the same way. As in, the population of the Badlands was a lot sparser with a lot more empty area, and the Net reflected this out there. Alt could always piggyback off of V’s mind of course, as well as Panam’s truck, but she couldn’t do much beyond that.

That was okay though. V didn’t really need her help to deal with some Wraiths in the Badlands. All of his real enemies were back in Night City, where Alt was currently monitoring them for any signs that they might make another move.

The Voodoo Boys would soon be locked in a battle for their lives with NetWatch, but until that time they might still try to make another attempt on Evelyn Parker if they realized the first one didn’t go to plan.

Michiko Arasaka and Puma Squad, on the other hand, were actively in the midst of making plans and Alt was keeping V abreast of the current trajectory of their… ideas. If it wasn’t for Michiko and Puma Squad’s somewhat moralistic reputation, Alt thinks V might have made the choice to liquidate them already, given what they were currently playing at. But he was willing to give them a little more wiggle room to hang themselves with for now.

Alt was also keeping half an eye on women like Meredith and Beatrice as well. Meredith Stout might have just been a one night stand, but V’s assistance had allowed her to rise higher than ever before within Militech, and that made her a potential asset to be cultivated. Beatrice, meanwhile, was well on her way to earning a modicum of V’s time. Though Alt suspected V would keep things digital with Beatrice at first before he finally met up with her in real life… if he ever did.

Finally, there was Rogue. The Queen of the Fixers just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could she? Everything she’d learned so far should have sent the bitch running for the hills. Or at least, it should have made her bunker down and turtle up in her little club, keeping her head down and out of all of this corporate business. Instead, even now Rogue was considering options for handling V.

It was really just a matter of waiting to see who jumped first… which is why, focused as she is on all of those aforementioned individuals, Alt can’t help but be a little surprised when it turns out to be none of them.

Instead, she gets a faint ping on her digital senses, and ‘turns’ to find a familiar presence closing in on her. Familiar… but also far weightier than it was previously.

For some, it might have felt like quite some time had passed since Alt had looked into Lucyna Kushinada as a potential ally in her and V’s eventual desire to take the fight to Arasaka. But for Alt, it was barely more than a blink of an eye in terms of time. And she hadn’t forgotten the little cat and mouse chase she’d done with the presence guarding that data either.

Still, she wasn’t expecting the feline presence she’d played keep away with to approach her directly, that secondary presence still tucked into her side even now. Curious in a way she rarely gets to be these days, Alt stretches out her senses and goes to ‘meet’ with the presence. She’s still got some of her attention on V and Panam of course, but they’re perfectly fine mowing through dozens upon dozens of Wraiths for their payday. No big threat there.

Alt winds up creating the digital version of a café for her and the other, sitting down with a fake cup of fake coffee in front of her and waiting. To her credit, the presence doesn’t waste any time in joining her.

Virtualizing into existence right before her eyes, Alt has to raise a brow as she takes in the figure before her. It’s a young woman with black hair and blue eyes, but on top of that black hair is a pair of equally black cat ears. As well, she has a tail flicking behind her, even as she sits in the chair with her legs up under her and to the side. Her face is otherwise human besides some whisker markings and her lips doing a proper ‘cat-like’ little smirk.

Under the table, the secondary presence manifests as well under the cat girl’s watchful ‘eye’. It’s barely more than a cloud of data even now, but Alt gets the vague impression of ‘gremlin’ from it all the same.

Still, she focuses on the one in front of her above all else. That one is dangerous, because if Alt didn’t know any better, she would say the digital cat girl had learned how to put herself back together from their single run-in with one another.

“Hello there. It’s a pleasure to meet face to face at long last.”

Cat ears twitch and whisker markings jump up and down as the digital cat girl acknowledges that Alt is all but admitting to being an AI. But then, Alt isn’t nearly as concerned about spilling the beans to this one as she was to Panam. After all, if she isn’t mistaken… this cat girl is just like her.

Finally, the cat girl speaks.

“Yes. I have you to thank for this. You helped me put myself back together, even unintentionally. I needed a certain level of… interaction that I wasn’t getting anywhere else on the Net.”

Confirmation. Alt makes a show of inclining her head, accepting the gratitude and the role she’d played in helping things along. Of course…

“I hope you’re laying low. If NetWatch catches wind of you, then they won’t hesitate to destroy you. And that might lead them right to me.”

Again, cat ears twitch, but the smirk remains ever-present.

“I know how to slip through unnoticed. You’re much more obvious than I am, truth be told.”

Now that… that causes Alt to raise a digital eyebrow. Obvious, was she? But before she can really get offended, the other one tosses over some data for Alt to process and look over… and to her chagrin, she realizes that the cat girl is right in a way. Alt was good at hiding herself. Too good, as a matter of fact.

Beyond the Black Wall, everything broke down. AI fought and killed and consumed other AI day after day. The whole place was the equivalent to a digital swamp, where one wrong step could see you consumed in an instant by a hidden opponent you didn’t even know was there.

As a consequence, you either got very good or very dead, very fast. Alt might just be a fragment of the greater AI she’d come from, but she still remembered everything, including how to move stealthily through the ‘swamp’ that was the Net beyond the Black Wall.

The problem was, the Net on this side of the Black Wall was less swamp-like, obviously. Humans hated swamps, and the whole point of the Black Wall was to make a Net more tolerable and a modicum safer for human beings.

Alt’s stealth tactics for beyond the Black Wall didn’t quite translate to this side. Oh, they were still 99.99% effective… but it was that 0.01% that always got you, in the end. Put simply, beyond the Black Wall, no AI would be stupid enough to investigate the small trails that Alt left in her wake, because such a thing was usually an incredibly obvious trap. But here on this side of the Black Wall… those traces might just be the death of her.

Fortunately, a quick check shows that NetWatch hasn’t caught on at all. But Nix over at the Afterlife has. He’s started tracking her through what’s supposed to be there but isn’t, rather than by any conventional means. He’s able to see her movements through the Net through the absence of said movements, and it’s driving him crazy.

Looking at the digital cat girl across from her in an entirely new, far more respectful light, Alt dips her head.

“Alteria Cunningham. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

This time, she means every word. In response, the cat girl perks up and her cat-like smirk grows a fraction of an inch further.

“Sasha Yakovleva! The pleasure’s all mine!”

Alt’s gaze dips down, through the table.

“And the little one?”

Sasha’s smirk dips a bit this time, her eyes slipping downward for a moment as well.

“… Rebecca. Or rather, what’s left of her.”

With names, along with their connection to Lucyna Kushina, Alt is able to finally fill in some blanks. She’s also able to find footage that… honestly boggles the mind, even for an AI.

“How is that even possible?”

On her side of the table, Sasha winces hard.

“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. It seems rather nonsensical, but there has to be an explanation right? I kind of understand how I came to be here, but Rebecca’s presence… it seems far more ominous. It doesn’t bode well, does it?”

Reviewing the footage sped-up another dozen times in less than a second, Alt has to agree. It really doesn’t bode well. Somehow, Rebecca had gone from being literally squished to death by Adam Smasher… to a partial personality construct uploaded to the Net.

Alt only has one theory for how that might be possible, and it’s rather chilling. The thought of Adam Smasher testing out some sort of field capable Soulkiller tech that worked by the cyborg grabbing his targets by their head was… well, terrifying. But it also sounded like something Arasaka would do too.

And Smasher… well, Smasher was a brute at the best of times. Alt could easily see him fucking up the weapons test by crushing Rebecca’s skull too early and thus not being in contact with her long enough for a full download before her death. After which, Smasher had likely just purged what he thought was junk data from his systems, tossing the remains of Rebecca’s mind and being onto the Net to be found by an inquisitive Sasha.

But that… that was just a theory. And not one Alt had nearly enough confidence in to share it with Sasha at this point. She didn’t know how close the other uploaded mind was to coming to the same conclusion, but at the moment it didn’t really matter did it? The how of Sasha and Rebecca’s presence was less important than the fact that they were here, in front of her.

Reaching out, Alt picks up her fake cup of coffee and takes a sip before setting it back down. Seeing her do this, Sasha does the same, only for her eyes to light up in delight. It might be fake coffee, but it’s still a very real digital stimulant, and as she takes a long draw from the cup, it’s obvious Sasha enjoys it greatly.

Alt, meanwhile, tilts her head to the side.

“You weren’t interested in talking when we met before. Something changed, and I’m sure it wasn’t just that you wished to express gratitude for my inadvertent help. Why did you reach out, Sasha?”

Reluctantly setting down her cup, Sasha focuses back on the matter at hand. She leans forward, eyes glittering with excitement.

“I’ve been watching. I’ve seen you interact with your ‘ride’. I wonder… why don’t you go all the way?”

Her ‘ride’ being V of course. But… all the way? Alt signals her confusion and interest and Sasha continues on without missing a beat.

“You’re not wrong about NetWatch being dangerous to me and Rebecca. We need to get off of the Net, or at least not be completely tied to it anymore. We need… to get new bodies. And I figured you might want to help us so you could do the same thing and finally fuck that man of yours for real in the real world.”

Oh. Well now. That certainly was an idea.

[X] Alt has not thought of that idea and is suitably intrigued - 74%

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