Chương 24: Chippin' In I

"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become." - Carl Jung The sky above Watson bled into a bruised purple as the evening rain began to fall in relentless sheets, hissing against the glowing holographic billboards of Kabuki, sending thick plumes of steam rising into the cold air. High above the chaotic, winding market streets, a lone figure moved across the slick rooftops with grace.

Night City had stretched Santiago out and forged him into something entirely unrecognizable from the grieving boy who had wept on a rotting porch in Santo Domingo.

He stood an imposing six feet tall, his body lean and packed with dense, functional muscle built from months of agonizing, unrelenting training in a freezing garage. His striking white hair, which he kept loose, clung to his forehead, plastered down by the rain. He took a running start, his boots splashing through a shallow pool of stagnant water on the roof of a towering tenement building. Ahead of him lay a yawning, thirty-foot gap dropping directly down into a garbage-choked alleyway.

A normal kid his age would have hesitated. A normal runner without reinforced tendons or hydraulic cyberlegs would have turned around to find another way down. But Santi didn't even break his stride. His Neural Link flared to life, feeding a stream of geometric data directly into his vision. Translucent green vectors helped him calculate the distance and wind resistance, and highlighted the exact point of optimal friction on the opposing ledge.

Meanwhile, his brain processed the mathematics of the jump in a fraction of a millisecond. He hit the edge of the roof and launched himself into the abyss. For a moment, he was entirely suspended in the air as the howling wind tore at his dark grey hoodie. The neon lights of the street below blurred into streaks of pink and cyan as he cleared the gap, dropping rapidly toward the lower roof of the adjacent building.

He hit the concrete ledge with pinpoint precision, immediately tucking his leading shoulder and executing a flawless, momentum-dispersing roll. The rough gravel of the rooftop scraped against his cargo pants, but he popped back up to his feet in a single, fluid motion, his kinetic energy perfectly preserved.

He pushed on, vaulting over a humming industrial air-conditioning unit, sliding underneath a low-hanging tangle of thick fiber-optic cables, and dropped down a short tier onto the metal grating of an external catwalk. Santi was in his element as the more gigs he pulled, the more the city became his vertical playground.

Over the past three months, the moniker of "Ghost" had grown in popularity amongst the encrypted local runner boards of Rancho Coronado, propelling him into a highly requested asset for physical dead drops and data extraction across the northern sectors of Night City. As he began to venture further out from Santo Domingo, Santi quickly realized that the job market in Little China and Kabuki offered a significantly higher ceiling for a runner with his specific skill set.

The low-rate fixers and clients in Watson didn't really care about where you slept or who you knew. They only cared if the biz was handled quietly, efficiently, and without drawing the attention of the badges, something that Santi was a master at, leaving no trace on the gigs he pulled. He reached the end of the catwalk, peering down over the railing into a narrow, bustling alleyway filled with steaming food stalls and gray-market tech vendors.

His target was a small, biometric drop-box bolted to the brick wall behind a noodle stand. He checked his surroundings, ensuring there were no Tyger Claw gangoons or NCPD surveillance drones sweeping the area, before swinging his long legs over the railing, gripping the slick metal piping of a drainage chute with his calloused hands, and sliding rapidly down the side of the building, his boots hitting the pavement with a controlled thud.

He pulled his hood lower over his face, blending seamlessly into the flow of pedestrian traffic. The smell of synthetic pork and cheap incense filled his nostrils. He casually brushed past a group of scavengers arguing over a stripped cyberarm. They turned to see him, but noticing that he packed no Chrome, they ignored him, allowing him to step into the shadows behind the noodle stand, and pulled an encrypted data shard from the inner pocket of his jacket.

The shard contained a wiped ledger trail for a local ripperdoc who had been siphoning high-end optical implants from a corporate supply line. It was a standard data-laundering gig, but it paid a preem two thousand eddies. Santi slotted the shard into the drop-box and waited for the small screen to flash green, authorizing the deposit.

A second later, his handheld cyberdeck, tucked in his sling bag, vibrated with a discreet ping, signalling that the funds had been successfully washed through his crypto-mixers and deposited into his secure account. He turned away from the drop-box, melting back into the crowd before the vendor even had the chance to notice he had been there. He was making incredible scratch.

Between the automated trickle of his vending machine daemons back in Santo Domingo and the physical gigs he was running out here in Watson, he was netting more eddies in a week than his mother used to make in two months of grueling, soul-crushing labor. Getting Julia to finally quit her second job at the liquor store had been a massive victory, a tangible validation of the dark path he had chosen to walk.

But as Santi navigated the neon-soaked labyrinth of Little China, a creeping sense of frustration gnawed at the back of his mind. He was fast, he was brilliant, and his coding architecture was lightyears ahead of the corporate script-kiddies he occasionally took jobs from. But he was still just a street-rat operating on the fringes. He was taking the scraps left behind by the real players of Night City. He wanted heavier gigs.

He wanted the kind of contracts that paid in five figures, the kind of jobs that required breaching fortified corporate mainframes or extracting highly classified data. But those jobs didn't get posted on anonymous, low-tier runner boards. Those were the kind of jobs that you could only access through the city's elite fixers. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Fortunately, his flawless track record had finally bought him an introduction.

A gray-market tech vendor he had done a localized firewall wipe for had been impressed enough with his speed to pass his contact ping along to one of the most notorious fixers in Watson: Wakako Okada. Santi had received the encrypted meeting coordinates an hour ago. He checked the translucent overlay in his vision, adjusting his trajectory toward Jig-Jig Street. The rain began to let up as he crossed into the bustling, hyper-sexualized heart of the district.

Towering holograms of joytoys danced suggestively in the air, bathing the crowded pavement in shades of neon pink and electric blue. The heavy, thumping bass of club music vibrated through the soles of his boots. Fixers, mercs, tourists, and gangoons rubbed shoulders in a chaotic and volatile melting pot. Santi ignored the solicitations of the street vendors and joytoys, and the aggressive stares of the Tyger Claw thugs guarding the alleyways.

He kept his posture relaxed but alert, his mind passively analyzing the threat levels of the people around him. He reached a brightly lit pachinko parlor nestled between a braindance arcade and a synthetic meat vendor, and realized that this was the location he had received. The deafening clatter of thousands of silver balls hitting metal pegs assaulted his ears as he pushed through the sliding glass doors.

The air inside was thick with cigarette smoke as Santi moved past the rows of mesmerized gamblers, heading directly for the beaded curtain at the back of the establishment. Two massive Tyger Claw enforcers, their arms heavily inked with dermal tattoos and augmented with chrome, stepped in front of the curtain, crossing their arms.

"I have a meeting," Santi said without showing a shred of intimidation, holding the gaze of the larger enforcer.

"The name's Ghost. Tell Wakako I'm here, she's expecting me." The enforcer stared down at the fourteen-year-old boy, taking in his rain-soaked hoodie, his scuffed boots, and the distinct lack of any visible, threatening cyberware. A cruel, mocking smirk tugged at the corners of the ganger's mouth, but he tapped the internal comms link on his ear anyway. A moment later, the enforcer stepped aside, gesturing lazily toward the curtain.

Santi pushed through the beads, stepping into a small, sparsely decorated office that smelled heavily of incense and green tea. Sitting behind a low, polished wooden desk was Wakako Okada. She was an older woman, her silver hair pulled back into an elegant style. She wore a traditional, high-collared jacket, and her posture radiated an aura of absolute authority. She held a long, slender smoking pipe and took a slow, deliberate drag as Santi stood before her.

Wakako did not speak immediately, allowing for her calculating eyes to sweep over him, taking in everything from his appearance. She noted his height, the broadness of his shoulders, and the cold, flat intensity of his violet eyes. But she also noted the lingering softness of his youth, the cheap, unarmored fabric of his street clothes, and the complete absence of any metallic lines on his neck or face.

"So," Wakako finally spoke with a silken purr that commanded the room.

"You are the phantom my associates have been whispering about. The elusive 'Ghost' who slips through localized municipal ICE without triggering a single tripwire."

"That's me," Santi replied, keeping his tone respectful but firm.

"I was told you were looking for an independent runner to handle a data extraction from a Biotechnica logistics hub." Wakako leaned forward slightly, resting her forearms on the desk. She let out a thin stream of gray smoke and narrowed her eyes.

"I am looking for a professional," Wakako corrected softly. She then gestured toward him with the stem of her pipe.

"You are a boy. A tall boy, perhaps, but a boy nonetheless. And more concerningly, you are entirely meat." Santi frowned slightly, his jaw tightening.

"My Chrome status doesn't affect the quality of my code. As you should have been informed, my daemon architecture is flawless, and my speeds are well within the required parameters for a corporate breach."

"Tch, tch, tch. Boy, Night City does not care about your code when a stray bullet finds its way into your unarmored chest," Wakako dismissed his defense with an elegant wave of her hand.

"You walk into my parlor wearing wet rags, carrying your deck in a canvas bag. Furthermore, you do not even possess a secure, fixer-grade Agent to establish encrypted, untraceable comms. I cannot funnel five-figure corporate bounties to an operative who relies on burner chips and public terminals."

"But I have a Neural Link," Santi argued, stepping forward, his pride stinging at the casual dismissal of his capabilities.

"I can hardline directly into any terminal you need breached. I don't need a heavy tactical setup-""Professionals," Wakako interrupted, her voice dropping to a freezing level that left absolutely no room for debate, "must at the very least have standards. You have undeniable talent, little Ghost. But talent without the proper chrome to support it makes you a liability. And I do not employ liabilities."

She sat back in her chair, taking another drag from her pipe, her eyes already dismissing him to look past to the beaded curtain.

"Come back and see me when you have invested in your own survival," Wakako finalized.

"Until then, stick to stealing spare change from the municipal transit networks. We are done here." Santi stood frozen for a fraction of a second, his hands balling into tight fists at his sides, feeling an urge to argue, to prove his processing power flaring violently in his chest. But he had more than enough sense to understand that Wakako Okada was not a woman you raised your voice to in her own parlor, not unless you wanted to leave in a body bag.

He unclenched his fists and offered a stiff, silent nod of acknowledgment before turning on his heel and pushing back through the beaded curtain. Santi barely registered the holograms or the thumping bass as he walked back through Jig-Jig Street. His ego was bruised, leaving a throbbing ache radiating from his chest. He was bringing home thousands of eddies a month. He had systematically altered the financial trajectory of his family.

But in the eyes of the real shot-callers of Night City, he was just a fragile, fleshy street-rat playing dress-up. You are entirely meat. Wakako's words echoed in his mind, and he hated how infuriatingly accurate they were. He had spent the last year downloading military-grade close-quarters combat skills, honing his organic muscles, but organic muscle couldn't deflect a nine-millimeter round. Organic reflexes, no matter how highly trained, couldn't out-draw a ganger wired with a Sandevistan.

If he wanted to take the next step, if he wanted to truly become someone in this city, he needed to upgrade his hardware. He needed to chip in. Santi paused at an intersection as the rainfall started to get stronger again. He looked around, analyzing the street signs, orienting himself to the southern edge of Little China, near the border of Kabuki. A faint spark of recognition flared in his memory as he recalled that he had been here before.

He altered his route, walking down a narrow, relatively quiet side street. Up ahead, a flickering neon sign spelled out CHAKRA HARMONY. The storefront window was still cluttered with the same cheap plastic esoterica, tarot cards, and synth-crystal healing pyramids he remembered from six years ago. The esoteric shop was just a front. Beneath it, accessible through the back alley, lay the clinic of the ripperdoc who had installed his Neural Link when he was eight years old.

Santi pushed the heavy glass door open, the small bell chiming weakly, but the sound was instantly drowned out by the overwhelming scent of patchouli and burning incense. The shop was empty, and the clerk was nowhere to be seen. He didn't stop to browse the crystals and walked straight through the narrow aisles of the shop, pushing open the back door and stepping out into the damp air of an enclosed back alley.