Cyberpunk: Whispers of the Blackwall

The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:

Novices Sen and Arth.

Operative Andrew DUGUID.

Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.

—

“There’s a point at 7,000 RPM… where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. Just disappears. And all that’s left is a body moving through space and time. 7,000 RPM. That’s where you meet it. You feel it coming. It creeps up on you, close in your ear. Asks you a question. The only question that matters. Who are you?”

– Carroll Shelby in Ford v Ferrari (2019)

—

It was almost nine in the morning when I woke up. I had slept for maybe four hours, and still had the phantom feeling of a steering wheel in my hands.

Last night I had decided to stay up until around five, just lying on my bed with my BD wreath on, burning through all of the racing BDs I had one after another. I experienced driving rear-wheel drive cars, all-wheel drive, track days, mountain runs, underground street races that had probably gotten somebody arrested.

I’d had most of those BDs for years, and I had learned to drive with them before I first got my hands on the Galena, riding along inside the heads of drivers who had ages learning how to make a car do things it wasn’t supposed to do. But I had never really used those skills.

I mean, it’s not like you can just throw a G240 sideways and do a hairpin turn. You can try, and I had, once, and the Galena had made a noise like a dying animal, and I almost slammed into a light post. After that, I’d kept the BDs for the fun of feeling it and driven the G240 like regular.

However, I had been devouring them as of late. The Widowmaker was getting closer to being completed day after day, so I kinda had to know how to handle a ride like that, though I’m sure it has no rival. Anyways, I really dove into them last night, cranking up the sensitivity as high as I could so that I could truly feel the weight of the car transferring, the throttle control, feathering the brake to load the front tires before a turn and then counter-steering into a slide while holding it on the edge.

I could feel the car hanging sideways at a hundred miles an hour while the driver’s hands made a thousand tiny corrections that I’m damn sure were just muscle memory at that point, and I felt all of it. And every time a BD ended, I started it again, and every time I started it again, a little more of what that driver knew stopped being his and started being mine.

My brain had always been good at soaking things up and learning quickly, and last night it felt like it was starving for more. I threw myself off the bed and showered fast, careful not to rip any of my stitches, and threw on a hoodie and some jeans. When I came out into the kitchen, Mom had already made breakfast. Egg sandwiches on toasted rolls, stacked on a plate in the middle of the table, still steaming.

Man, seeing this always reminded me that I was rich. That avian flu shit wasn’t stopping me from eating good.

“Siéntate, mijo,” she said from the stove. “You’re going to sit down and eat like a person today.”

I was halfway into a chair when my Agent pinged.

Muamar: Your baby is ready, Fantasmita. Bus stop on the far side of the Petrochem Dam dataterm. Come see her. Bring your eyes.

‘Sit down? Fuck that, I had better things to get to,’ I thought as I stood back up.

“Santiago,” Mom called out.

“Sorry, Ma,” I apologized, and grabbed three sandwiches off the plate and stacked them in one hand, then opened the fridge and pulled out two bottles of Naranjita Classic with the other. “Gotta go. I’ll be back later.”

“Go where?” Mom asked.

“To pick up the car I bought,” I said with half a sandwich in my mouth.

She turned around with the spatula still in her hand. “The car you bought?”

“For the date,” I said, swallowing the chunk I had in my mouth. “I told you about it last night.”

“You told me you were buying a car. But there is no way it’s available this quickly,” she said while narrowing her eyes. “How are you going to register it? Insurance? Plates? Is it even clean, or did it belong to some gangster?”

‘Well, it did belong to some Tyger Claw ganger, but I’m sure choom wasn’t gonna miss it. Actually, he probably is,’ I thought to myself.

“Don’t worry about it, Ma,” I said instead. “I’ve got things handled.”

She deadpanned at me for a while before letting out a long sigh and turning back to the stove. “Fine. Go. But you better eat those sandwiches.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said and gave her a mock salute with the two drinks in my hand before bolting to the stairs.

I dogged down the sandwiches while I waited for the cab to pull up and started drinking the Naranjita while we rode out past Rancho Coronado and up into the hills, climbing the switchbacks while the city spread out behind us, and by the time I finished the second Naranjita, we were pulling into a wide paved overlook at the top of the ridge.

It was a good lookout point with a big flat stretch of concrete, walled off at the edge with a low retaining wall covered in graffiti, a couple of planters with dying palm trees, and trash bags piled up against the wall in the corners. And parked right on the sidewalk, like it owned the place, was a white Mizutani Shion MZ2 with a carbon fiber hood and carbon accents running down the sides. Behind it was another ride covered completely in a gray tarp.

That had to be my ride. And leaning against one of the planters with his arms crossed, wearing an attention-seeking shirt with a wide smile, was Muamar Reyes. There were two other guys to the right of the Shion in dark jackets, hands in their pockets, looking everywhere but at me. They were trying very hard not to look like huscle, which made them look like the most obvious huscle I had ever seen in my life.

I paid the cab and got out, noticing as Muamar seemed to short-circuit and then come back to himself.

“¡No me digas! Look at this!” He pushed off the planter and walked toward me with his arms out. “The ghost has a face! And what a face, amigo. All this time hiding behind a mask, and you look like you walked out of one of those dramas my little hermanita watches.”

“Morning, Muamar,” I said.

“And look at the size of you!” He said as he grabbed my shoulder with one hand and squeezed it. “You using roids? Last time I saw you, you looked like a broom with a jacket on, and now you’re a refrigerator. What are you eating?”

“My mom’s cooking,” I said truthfully.

“Then I’m going to need to get me some of that. Come. Come, come,” he said as he threw an arm around my waist and steered me toward the retaining wall. “Before you see her, I want to show you something.”

We stopped at the edge where the concrete rose up into 3-foot-tall walls.

And beyond it, Night City was laid out. I could see pretty much everything from here. The city rose from its houses to megabuildings, and past all of that I could make out Militech’s building somewhere in the city center while a ton of holo-ads flickered on the sides of other buildings.

“Preem view, but why is this the pick-up location?” I asked.

“Because this is one of the highest points in the whole city,” Muamar said, spreading his hand across the view. “From up here, you can see everything. Every road, highway, and every street you are ever going to drive… A man should see the roads he is going to rip through before he rips through them. It’s respect, you understand? You look at her first. Then you take her.”

I chuckled a bit. “Yeah, that’s real poetic, Muamar.”

“I am a very poetic man,” he said proudly and then pointed down to the left where you could barely see a road that wound back and forth in a tight series of switchbacks. “And also, those curves. They are very good for testing what a driver is made of.”

Behind me, I heard fabric rustle and started to turn.

“Ah ah ah!” Muamar grabbed my arm. “Not yet. Not yet, amigo. Patience is key for a moment like this.”

He walked me away from the wall, ensuring I kept my back against my new ride, leading me like he was leading a blindfolded man to a surprise party. When we reached the curb, he stopped.

“Okay,” he said, nodding to himself and smiling. “Turn around.”

I obeyed, and though I had seen the pictures and had designed the paint job myself, I was still kind of blown away.

The Hozuki sat just right in the morning light, being hit at just the right angle that it would’ve hurt to look at if I didn’t have Kiroshis. It was glossy white with matte black running along the lower edges of the body kit, the splitter, and the side skirts. Two thick purple racing stripes ran over the hood and the roof, all the way back to the massive rear wing. The widebody fenders flared out over deep-dish black wheels. The vertical intake lights on either side of the front bumper glowed a soft violet, and the kanji on the rear doors had been repainted in that same purple. ホズキ.

IMAGE HERE

Now it looked like something that had been built to hunt. It looked like it belonged to me.

“Well?” Muamar said.

I didn’t say anything, walking over and running my hand across the hood. The paint was smooth and cool under my palm. Behind me, I heard one of the huscle chuckle under his breath.

“Yeah,” Muamar said softly, and I could hear him grinning. “That’s what I thought.”

He dug into his shirt pocket and held out his hand with two key chips. They were sleek and white, each one stamped with the Mizutani crest in purple to match the car.

“One for you,” he said. “One for when you lose the first one.”

“Thanks,” I said while taking the key chips.

“And this.” He opened the door of his Shion MZ2 and took out a tablet and handed it to me. “Registration. I did most of it already. With the new laws they passed for the war, the city wants every vehicle on the books, but they also want it fast, so it is easier now than it has ever been. Just put in your SIN and your address. I’ll cover the fee. Your plates will be mailed to you in a few days.”

I took the tablet, entered my SIN and address, and handed it back.

“Done,” I said.

“Done!” Muamar clapped his hands together. “Now. Let’s go.”

“Let’s go?” I did a double take.

He was already walking around to the passenger side. “You think I sell a car like this and don’t ride in it? I need to know I made the right choice, muchacho. I need to see what you do with her.”

“Sure, I guess,” I said as I opened the driver’s door and got in.

The seat had been adjusted for somebody a lot shorter than me, so I slid it all the way back, and even then my knees came up a little higher than I liked, but I could fix that. The interior was a bit tight, nothing I couldn’t also work with, and it had bucket seats with five-point harnesses, a roll cage running along the inside of the roof and the doors, and a flat-bottomed steering wheel wrapped in suede.

And as I settled in, I noticed the sequential shifter beside my right knee, tall and angled toward me. Right behind it was a hydraulic handbrake in the shape of a long vertical lever with a red grip. I remembered approaching the car and seeing that the front tires were tilting inward at the top, just a little.

This car had been built to slide on command.

Muamar dropped into the passenger seat beside me, pulled his harness on, and looked over at me with the biggest grin I had ever seen on a grown man.

I stepped on the clutch, then shifted my foot to also step on the brake and pressed the start button. The engine caught and came to life with a sound that went straight into my chest. It had a high metallic pitch that climbed and fell as it settled into idle, as if the engine wanted to be live near the top of its rev range at all times and resented every second it spent anywhere else. It sounded like it was begging to be let loose.

“Ay, Dios,” Muamar whispered, leaning back into his seat. “Listen to her. Isn’t that enticing? Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard?”

I barely heard him as I pulled my harness over my shoulders and buckled it, and I wrapped my hands around the wheel, and something settled over me that I had only ever felt before while jacked into a network. It kind of felt like that dream on that past world with Aloy.

I felt an unnerving calm and peace as the world peeled away to the edges of my attention. The only thing that existed was the wheel, the pedals, the shifter, the road, the engine, and me.

Up ahead, Muamar’s huscle had climbed into the Shion. Its engine started, and it pulled off the sidewalk and onto the road, starting to head downhill.

I followed it out onto the road and stopped, waiting for the Shion to keep going and get further.

“What are you doing?” Muamar asked.

“What do you think?” I asked, turning to give Muamar a shit-eating grin.

—

Drive it like you stole it! Send stones for, idk, just send them…

There you can find everything I’ve ever written, as I’m writing it.