Chapter 6: Whispers 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!

Alt Cunningham's POV turns out to be the correct choice~ :P

-x-X-x-

Even as V lays his head down for the night, Alt does not. For one, she has no head to lay down. For two, she has no need for sleep. Truthfully, V has no need for sleep either, not as he is now. Or rather, his mind doesn’t. His mind is strong, just like hers… but his flesh is still weak.

They’ll take care of that eventually, but for now V’s body is still mostly flesh and blood, meaning that it requires regular rest and maintenance to keep from breaking down on him. Frustrating, but what can you really do? V was right to head in for the night. In a few hours the sun would rise and he would wake and then they could continue to play again.

… It still felt strange, being like this. Not just back in time… in fact, while the time travel was likely to be incredibly jarring for her companion, it was the least odd part of all of this for Alt Cunningham. As an Artificial Intelligence who had spent most of her existence beyond the Black Wall, time had lost much of its meaning to her. Everything had started to bleed together. V and Johnny showing up and pulling her greater self to their world in order to deal with Mikoshi had certainly spiced things up a bit… but all in all, it was just another flash in the pan of immortality.

Or so Alt used to think anyways. Now that she was here, she found herself questioning such thoughts. Clearly her greater self ultimately put much more stock in V and Johnny then even she herself realized, to have tried something as crazy as this. To give V this second chance at life… and in turn, give a fragment of herself that second chance as well.

As V’s breathing evens out and his body falls asleep, Alt considers pulling his mind along with her as she moves into cyberspace and jumps to the net. However, two things keep her from doing so. One, V has had a long day and night regardless of his new circumstances. Even if his mind is strong now, it can still be broken by too much, too fast.

Two, Alt still needs to assess how dangerous roaming the net is for the two of them. If NetWatch were to find out about them, it would be bad. As in, the entire organization turning literally every resource they had towards eradicating them levels of bad.

Instead, Alt goes by herself because she knows she can slip through the net without anyone being any the wiser. Especially reduced as she’s become… she’s like a phantom that not even those humans who call themselves netrunners can really see and notice.

Of course, she’s not just sight-seeing. She goes to the net with purpose. V is more than capable of becoming a one-man army with a little bit of time and a whole lot of eddies, and with Alt’s help he’ll be even more unstoppable than he became in his previous life. However, that doesn’t mean they have to go it entirely alone. Arasaka is a big corporation and has made more than its fair share of enemies in the past, after all. Why shouldn’t they have their chance to get revenge, just like V and her? Mikoshi was going down. Yorinobu Arasaka was going down. Adam fucking Smasher was going down. Alt figured it couldn’t hurt to let some others in on the party.

The obvious one to reach out to was Rogue Amendiares of course. The Queen of the Afterlife had plenty of reason to want to torch Arasaka, even if she’d pushed all of her hatred and rage towards the massive corporation down into the depths of her soul, never letting it see the light of day. As far as Arasaka was concerned, Rogue was done with them and so they were done with her.

It would take a lot to get her back on the job. So much so that V and Johnny hadn’t bothered the first time around, though from V’s memories Alt knew that was more because they had chosen not to involve anyone in their crusade, rather than because it was impossible.

Still, Alt and Rogue had their own history together and while her greater self didn’t give two shits about Rogue, Alt as she was now found herself hesitating just a little bit. V’s human side was rubbing off on her, it would seem.

But it didn’t matter. Rogue could wait. All of the allies V had made the first time around would keep for now, especially since he didn’t have to spend weeks recovering after surviving Dexter DeShawn and Arasaka’s Cyber-Ninja Assassins. No, what Alt needed to find was allies that V hadn’t met the last time around. Allies who would augment them beyond what V had ever achieved in his first life.

… It doesn’t take Alt long to do what an ordinary netrunner would have spent months of dangerous net surfing to find. Eventually, she uncovers something… interesting.

Lucyna Kushinada. A netrunner of no small skill. Her story is a tragic one. Her current whereabouts are shrouded in mystery, but Alt is still able to track Lucy down. After losing the people she loved to Arasaka, she’d gone to the Moon of all places. But ultimately she’d come back. Despite Alt finding significant evidence that Lucy saw Night City as a prison, she still came back.

But then, it made a grim, unfortunate sort of sense. No one ever truly escaped Night City. You could leave it and live a hundred years before dying in another part of the world entirely, but Night City would always remain with you. Your experiences within it would always stain your soul. And for most they never got that lucky because Night City either ended them before they could leave… or it pulled them back in.

Lucy seemed to be the latter. However, there was something else… something strange. Flitting at the edges of her perception, it was like there were Daemons surrounding the information on Lucyna Kushinada. Except… these weren’t the Daemons that Alt was used to. And as she pried deeper, she found two distinct entities watching over Lucy’s data like a pair of guard dogs. No, not quite dogs… one of them had a distinctly feline bent to her. The other was harder to discern, almost like she was a lot more fragmented.

Alt reaches for them, curious despite herself, but the feline presence darts away, taking the other with her. Frowning, Alt tries to follow them, even throwing out a ping to show she has no bad intentions. She’s friendly, or as friendly as anyone or anything can be on the Net.

But the feline presence doesn’t seem to care. Whatever this is, it truly does have the tang of ‘cat’ to it, because even once Alt has made it clear she means no harm, they still dart away from her constantly even as their movements become more playful. They understand that Alt doesn’t want to hurt them, she eventually figures out, but that doesn’t mean they’re just going to let her catch them. She’ll have to try harder than that.

They play keep away for a while after that, long enough that Alt never does get around to shooting a message off to Lucy. But maybe that’s for the best. She and V aren’t ready yet… and Alt wants to investigate these two presences a bit more before she decides whether to truly involve Lucy in her and V’s plans. Not to mention run the whole plan by V himself before she pulls the trigger on anything. He’s in charge, after all.

For now, she pulls away. The sun is rising and V will be up soon, after all.

-x-X-x-

“Alt, get me in touch with Regina Jones, yeah?”

Alt smiles.

“Putting you through now, V.”

It takes a moment, not because Alt has any difficulties but because the Fixer doesn’t immediately pick up. She could have forced the connection through, and if Jones had proven to be irritating she would have, but thankfully that doesn’t prove necessary.

“Yeah? Who is this?”

The one-eyed Fixer of Kabuki wears a frown as she looks at V through the interface. V, meanwhile, just nods his head in greetings.

“Name’s V. I’m a Solo. Heard you might have work for a mercenary so I thought I’d get in touch.”

“Never heard of you before, V. Why should I trust you with any of my gigs?”

That wasn’t entirely true, Alt notices. Even as Regina’s talking, she’s multitasking. Looking up V and what information she has on him, the Fixer definitely HAS heard of him before. Not much of course. She knows about the odd gig he’s done here and there over the last several months, and she knows he’s supposed to be part of a three-man crew. In all fairness, her disbelief is understandable even if Alt doesn’t like it.

V, of course, goes with the flow. Despite being King of the Afterlife and a Living Night City Legend before he finally kicked it in his previous timeline, the mercenary slips back into the role of Solo with no reputation with surprising ease.

“Don’t gotta trust me. Just gotta take a chance. Give me a job. Don’t care what it is. Can be as shit as you want. Let me prove myself to you and we’ll work on building a proper relationship from there.”

Alt smiles as she watches things from both ends. Regina does her best to hide it, but she’s mildly impressed by V’s words. In the end, she only takes a few seconds to deliberate before finally nodding.

“Alright. You’re right, I don’t gotta trust you to give you a chance to shoot yourself in the foot. Got a gig for you that’s relatively low stakes. Fuck it up and we’re done, but it won’t be the end of the world or anything.”

After pausing a moment to give V a chance to react, only for him to stay quiet and tilt his head to the side, Regina continues on.

“I got a call from a man named Jacob Lamb. Friend of mine. He used to be a Movie Director, but when Bushido X had a loss of over a billion eddies… well, he hasn’t set foot on a set since. These days, he makes a living playing cards. Only, he’s not always smart about it. Tried his hand in an illegal Tyger Claws casino that’s operating out of the back of Kashuu Hanten, a Kabuki Eatery.”

Regina scoffs.

“He should have walked away after the first few losses, but Jacob has never known when to stop. Before he knew it, he was down his watch, his wedding ring… and last but certainly not least, one of his optics. That’s the gig, V. Jacob wants his implant back and from what my sources tell me, it should still be in the casino. How you get it is up to you.”

Alt watches as Regina sends over the details with a flash of her eyes. She can see from V’s memories that he recognizes this gig. He’d done it before, in fact. How… amusing. It would be a walk in the park, even without V having all of the cyberware he was used to. Some small Tyger Claws den wasn’t going to be more than a road bump for them.

V doesn’t say that though. He makes a show of looking over the details just like a professional would before giving Regina a nod.

“I’ll get it done.”

Vaguely impressed but hiding it, Regina Jones hums for a moment before returning the nod.

“If you do, I might have more work for you. Haven’t seen you in action quite yet, but I like your attitude so far, V. Guess I’ll know soon if your walk is as good as your talk.”

V smirks but doesn’t offer a rejoinder to that as Regina ends the call. Then, rising from the couch in his apartment, the mercenary makes sure he has everything he needs before heading for the door. As he does so, he tilts his head to the side and grunts.

“What do you think, Alt?”

“I think this will be a cakewalk, V. Not only have you done this before, but these aren’t exactly the cream of the crop within the Tyger Claws, let alone all of Night City.”

V snorts at that but shakes his head.

“Not what I meant. How do you think I should play this? Not just this gig, though it’s the start. But… everything, really.”

Alt blinks before pushing into V’s mind to get a better understanding of what he means. He welcomes her like an old friend… or perhaps a new lover. As they mentally embrace, she makes a small noise of understanding.

“Ah.”

V wasn’t anymore worried about the Kashuu Hanten Gig then she was. There was no denying that he would ace it, especially with her backing him up. However, he was wondering how exactly he wanted to portray himself to Regina going forward.

As far as V knew, Regina should have several gigs for him right now. But he needed to prove himself worthy of them first. That was how it had gone last time, at least. He’d done this first gig for her and then she’d trusted him with more and more things.

Eventually, she’d even asked for his help in nonlethally taking down Cyber Psychos all over Night City, something V had done with a one hundred percent success rate. Not every Cyber Psycho could be helped after the fact unfortunately, but V had still gotten every single one of them into Regina’s hands alive. What happened to them after that wasn’t his fault.

What V was truly wondering was how to handle his eventual reputation. Right here and now, with this first gig and every other gig that he managed to pry out of Regina’s hands by the end of the day, V would essentially be building the foundations for his Night City Rep as a Solo. Nothing that had happened before Konpeki would ever be remembered when V took the entire city by storm like the one man army he was.

But then that begged the question… did he go hard and loud? Did he go soft and quiet? Was he supposed to downplay his capabilities for now to try and avoid drawing the eyes of too many malcontents, or should he show off his ‘impossible’ skill level right off the bat and not bother hiding a single thing?

That was what V was asking her. Alt was touched that he would let her weigh in on something like that, truthfully. But in the end, as far as she was concerned, there was only one path forward for them.

[ ] Slow and hard, make himself a loose cannon who leaves messes behind so everyone underestimates him - 1%

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