Cyberpunk: Whispers of the Blackwall

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

Operative Lord BlackDragon.

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

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When in doubt, flat out!

– Colin McRae

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I pressed the launch control button on the wheel and the dash flashed. I pressed the brake hard with my left foot and buried the throttle with my right. The engine climbed and held at sixty-five hundred RPM, the whole car trembling around me.

Behind us, a car pulled up and honked. Then another. Then a truck, laying on its horn. Somebody leaned out a window and screamed something about my mother, but I waited until the Shion had turned and disappeared around the first wide corner.

“Muchacho,” Muamar said, and his voice was shaking with excitement now. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…”

I let go of the brake, and the tires screamed for a second as the launch control fought to hook. Then they bit, and the car leaped off the line, slamming me into my seat. The engine screamed, and I watched the RPMS climb before pulling the sequential shifter back, pushing her into second and hearing the exhaust release a crack that sounded like a gunshot as the car kept pulling, and pulling, and pulling.

The digital speedometer quickly went past 60 mph and into 110 mph. I took the long curve at 120 mph, and the Shion finally came back into view and quickly grew in size until we blew right past it right on the oncoming lane at the end of the long curve while Muamar’s huscle stared at us through their window with their mouths hanging open.

We hit 150 mph before the first real turn came at me. I hit the brakes hard, felt the nose dip and the weight slam forward onto the front tires, loading them up. I came off the brake and back on the throttle, turning right while pulling back on the handbrake.

The rear of the car broke loose and swung out to the left.

The windshield filled with the turn, then the guardrail, then the view of the city spread out past it for a moment before I counter-steered and fed the throttle and held it. The Hozuki slid sideways through the hairpin, tires howling, and a car that was coming up the road slammed on its brakes, needlessly overreacting as I straightened the wheel, and the tires hooked up and fired us out of the corner.

Muamar was screaming like a kid on a roller coaster, both hands up against the roof, laughing so hard he could barely breathe. “¡ESO! ¡ESO, CABRÓN! ¡ASÍ SE MANEJA! (THAT’S IT! THAT’S IT, MOTHERFUCKER! THAT’S HOW YOU DRIVE!).”

The next hairpin came up fast, and I did it again. And again. And again. The switchbacks stacked down the face of the mountain one after another, and I took them one after another, throwing the car side to side, the tail swinging left, then right, then left again, the tires leaving long black arcs across the graying asphalt behind us.

At some point, I passed a road sign on the shoulder with a rusted green arrow pointing toward a place called Laguna Bend, and for half a second, I felt something cold settle in my chest, but then the next turn came, and it was gone.

BD to real life skill transition was not something that was supposed to be as efficient as it was for me, but by the time I reached the bottom of the mountain, my hands were moving on their own.

The switchbacks ran out and dumped us onto the highway ramp, and I merged into the commuter traffic doing over a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

The other cars might as well have been parked. I slipped between them, swimming from lane to lane, the sound of the race exhaust bouncing off the concrete barriers on either side. An NCPD cruiser was sitting in the right lane, doing the speed limit like a good citizen, and I flew past it so close I saw the officer’s coffee jump out of his cup.

Two seconds later, its lights came on.

“Puta madre, nos cayó la policía! (Motherfucker, the cops are onto us.)” Muamar yelled, twisting around in his harness to look back, but he was still laughing. “Push it! He’s coming! He’s coming!”

“Let’s see what this baby can truly do,” I said as I stepped on the throttle just as the highway opened up into a long straight, and I let the car run. We hit 170, then 180, and as the engine sang at the top of its lungs, the cruiser’s lights shrank in the mirror until they were a red and blue speck, and then they were gone. We flew past trucks, muscle cars, cabs, and a Militech Convoy so fast that it felt like it was going backward.

We reached 190 and then managed to push just barely past 200, topping out at 202 mph while being rock steady. The freedom, the thrill, the adrenaline- I had never felt so alive.

“This!” Muamar screamed over the engine. “THIS is how real men drive! Not those gonks in their little corpo boxes! THIS!”

The car wasn’t going to go any faster than this, and I knew that my exit was coming up, so I let off the throttle and started braking when some fucking shit-for-brains switched lanes without a thought in the world.

“Watch out!” Muamar shouted.

I panicked a bit and pulled too hard back into my lane on the left. A mistake.

The rear of the Hozuki came loose, and we slid sideways down the highway at around 170. The tires caught traction for a second and sent us toward the center wall, but I reacted quickly and yanked the steering wheel right, sending us on another slide and around the fucker that had switched lanes.

As we slid, I looked to my left and noticed that we were cutting across multiple lanes and on a collision course with a dump truck in the right lane, and the only thing that crossed my mind was pulling the steering wheel harder to the right. Thank fuck for physics, because pulling harder to the right made the front tires come out more, turned our rear even further, dropped our speed even more, and then violently threw us into a reverse turn back toward the left lane.

I glanced at our speedometer and noticed we had dropped to 117 mph, and pulled on the handbrake while throwing the steering wheel to the left, forcing the car to spin out and drop our speed even faster.

By the time I got her back under control, we were doing 32. I glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed the giant cloud of smoke we had left in our near-death experience when Muamar decided it was the perfect time to shout. “HELLS TO THE MOTHERFUCKING YEAH!!!!”

Funnily enough, we were right by the exit, and the smoke left behind allowed me to accelerate and cut across the four lanes and take the exit ramp without any fear of traffic. As the exit ramp turned, I pulled the handbrake one more time, sliding the Hozuki around the tight curve at the bottom of the ramp in one smooth arc. After all, I couldn’t just end the ride like that. Then I let it straighten out, rolled down a side street off the highway, and pulled into an empty lot behind a shuttered strip mall.

I killed the engine and the silence afterward was enormous. Neither of us moved for like a minute, and I could hear the engine ticking as it cooled. Shit, I could hear and feel my own pulse as my heart pounded. My hands were still on the wheel, and I realized I was grinning so wide that my face hurt.

Then Muamar unbuckled his harness, shoved the passenger door open, and practically fell out of the car. Then he started jumping, actually jumping, up and down on the lot, his shirt flapping while he sent his fists in the air.

“THAT WAS FUCKING INCREDIBLE!” He spun around and pointed at me as I climbed out of the car. “You! You drive like the devil himself! Where did you learn that? Where did you learn to drive like that?”

“BDs,” I said honestly.

“BDs! He says BDs!” Muamar threw his hands up to the sky like he was asking God to witness it. “I’ve been watching street races for over twenty years! You just made me feel so close to death that I feel alive! I knew I chose right. I fucking knew it! Thank you, thank you for the business, Fantasmita. Truly.”

I looked at the Hozuki, sitting in the lot with its engine still ticking.

“No, Muamar,” I said. “Thank you. That’s one hell of a ride.”

I dropped Muamar off in what was apparently his shop in Heywood before having to do the second important errand of the day. Going shopping.

I think I finally understood why my mother had made shopping sound like a military operation. I ended up having to go to like three different stores to find what I wanted. The first store didn’t have anything long enough for my arms. The second store had a clerk who looked at my white hair and my stitches and kept bugging me to make sure I was in the right place.

Thankfully, the third store was a quiet little tailor’s shop off Corpo Plaza with a little Hispanic old man behind the counter who took one look at me, said, “Ah. Tall,” and disappeared into the back.

When he came back, he was carrying a ton of black dress clothes.

By the end of the afternoon, I had a black dress shirt, tailored to fit across my chest and shoulders, pressed black slacks, a black belt with a brushed silver buckle, polished black dress shoes, and a long black overcoat that hung to my knees, lined in deep purple silk on the inside, with a purple pocket square folded into the breast pocket.

The old man helped me pair things up with a watch with a black face and a black steel band, a pair of thin rimless glasses to replace the gold ones, because the old man said gold was for gangers and fixers and I was neither, and a simple silver cross on a chain, which the old man added to the pile without asking, saying, “A man on a first date should have somebody watching over him.”

I didn’t argue with the guy since I kinda had no clue how shit worked when dressing “formally.” All in all, the getup cost me around ten thousand eddies. The old man had seen me raise an eyebrow at the price and thought I didn’t have the scratch for it. But when I told him I did, I just didn’t understand why simple shit cost so much, he went into a whole spiel about how much the materials cost, and yadi yada, how this one suit cost fifty grand, and at that point I had mentally checked out.

When I got home, I showered again. I combed my hair, which did absolutely nothing, because my hair had never once in my life done what I told it to. I sprayed some perfume I had liked and bought from the same store and got dressed. I left the top two buttons of the shirt undone, because the old man had told me buttoned all the way up made me look like a priest, and the cross sat against my chest where the collar opened.

When I came down the stairs, Mom was waiting at the bottom. She just looked at me with her hand over her mouth, her eyes beginning to water. She fixed my collar and straightened the pocket square, and pressed her palm against my cheek.

“Mi niño, te ves tan guapo (My child, you look so handsome),” she said finally, her voice on the verge of cracking. “Go before I start crying and ruin your coat.”

I gave her a bear hug, and she let herself be fully hugged by me before I broke away and got in my car.

It was just past six o’clock by the time I pulled up in front of Sasha’s building.

It was an older apartment block on the edge of Watson, five stories of concrete with laundry hanging from the balconies and a vending machine by the front door. The Hozuki looked absurd parked out front, gleaming white and purple next to a rusted delivery van and a dumpster.

I got out and stood by my car with my hands in my pockets as I messaged her that I was downstairs.

Me: I’m here.

Sasha: Coming down. Don’t laugh.

I switched my hands from my pants pockets to my coat pockets, not really sure what to do with them as I kept on looking at the door and feeling my heartbeat quicken with each passing second.

The front door of the building opened, and I almost forgot how to breathe when I saw her coming down the front steps carefully in her heels, one hand on the rail.

Her black bob was different from usual. The bangs were cut straight across her forehead, framing those pale blue and pink eyes perfectly. She had on a black choker around her throat with a small silver clasp that was connected to her dress, which was black, long, and fitted, falling all the way to her ankles, with a high slit up one side that showed her right leg every time she stepped.

A thick black fur stole hung off her shoulders, and her silver earrings dangled as she walked. Was she holding a small black… purse? Wallet? Well, she was holding something in one hand, and her black heels had thin straps around her ankles that glinted when she moved.

She reached the bottom of the steps and stopped in front of me, and looked up, and the corner of her mouth twitched into that little smirk.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, and I stood there completely speechless.

Image of Santi and Sasha

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Now, if you don’t send stones, I’m killing them both and ending the fic here 💀💀💀…

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