Cyberpunk: Whispers of the Blackwall

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars…"

- Cooper, Interstellar

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"Stop staring at me," Sasha said, causing Santi to blink.

"Sorry," he said. "You're just... gorgeous, Sasha. Like, damn, choom. I don't know what else to say."

"Gonk," she muttered, looking everywhere except at him. Her grip on the little black clutch tightened. "Głupek (Idiot). You can't just say shit like that."

"You told me to stop staring," Santi said, shrugging. "But you didn't say anything about talking."

Sasha narrowed her eyes as she finally looked up at him. Neither of them moved, and a delivery drone buzzed past overhead. Santi stood on the sidewalk with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his new coat, and for a second, he couldn't remember a single thing his mother had told him that morning.

Then one of them surfaced. "A gentleman opens the door, mijo. Always. Even if she can open it herself, actually, especially if she can open it herself."

He walked to the passenger side of the Hozuki and opened the door. Sasha simply looked at him, then at the open door, then back at him. "Seriously?"

"Just trying to be a 'gentleman,'" Santi said.

"Yeah, right," Sasha scoffed, but something softened in her face. She let go of the rail and crossed the distance carefully in her heels, the slit in her dress opening and closing with every step, and she lowered herself into the bucket seat with as much grace as she could manage while getting into a race car in her current get-up. Then she looked down at the five-point harness hanging on either side of her, and her eyebrows went up.

"Santi, what in the seven hells is this?" She asked.

"Umm... It's a... harness?" Santi replied, confused by her question.

"Yeah, you don't say," she said, rolling her eyes. "But why is there a harness? Why are there five of them?"

"Because the car's built for drifting and racing," Santi said as he crouched down beside the open door. "Here, let me help you out."

He reached in and pulled the shoulder straps down over her, careful not to catch the fur stole or snag the thin fabric of her dress. He brought the lap belts across, then the strap that came up between her knees, and clicked all five into the central buckle with a snap. His hands were steady, but his heart was not. His chrome fingers brushed the bare skin of her shoulder as he tightened the straps, and he noticed her breath catch for half a second.

"Too tight?" he asked.

"No," she said quietly. "It's fine."

He pulled back, and for a moment, they were very close. He could smell her perfume, and she could smell his. Then he stood up and closed the door.

He stood on the sidewalk with his hand still resting on the roof of the car, and he looked up at the holo-ads painting the undersides of the clouds in pink and blue.

'Whoever's up there,' Santi thought. 'Whoever's listening. Thank you. For this. I don't know what I did to deserve it, but thank you.'

He walked around to the driver's side and got in, punching the address for Aurore into the GPS, which was 50 minutes away, then pulling on his harness and starting the car. The high pitch of the engine starting made Sasha flinch a little in her seat and then laugh under her breath.

"That's loud," she said.

"Oh yeah?" Santi asked. "You should hear it at the top of the rev range."

"I bet I'm going to," she chuckled.

But contrary to her expectations, Santi drove like a grandpa. He knew he was doing it, and he couldn't seem to stop. He kept the Hozuki within the speed limit, signaled every turn, and stopped a full car length behind every vehicle at every light. He could feel how much the car hated it, since the engine grumbled when it was at a low RPM. But a beautiful girl sat next to him, and it was as though his foot refused to obey his brain whenever he thought about pressing the throttle.

Neither of them said anything for a while. It was as if all of the afternoons spent together in a building full of tools and noise, talking about nothing and everything suddenly went out the window now that a nice dress and a suit were involved. Santi tried really hard not to sneak any glances at Sasha, forcing himself to keep his eyes on the road, while Sasha kept her eyes out the window as Watson slid past them.

Eventually, Sasha opened her clutch bag and pulled out a small black device about the size of a thumb drive, leaned forward against the harness, and squinted at the dashboard until she found the aux port. She plugged it in, and the car's display flickered and asked whether it should connect to a new audio source.

"What's that?" Santi asked.

"Music," Sasha answered as a warm, washed-out synth started playing. Then a drum machine came in, slow and steady, and a voice floated in over the top of it, dreamy and a little sad, singing like he was already halfway somewhere else.

Santi had already recognized the song before the singing even started.

"New Person, Same Old Mistakes," he said.

Sasha looked over at him. "You remember it."

"Yeah, Tame Impala. We found it in that dead server cluster under the old music archive," he said as he glanced at her. "The one where the ICE was so old it was basically decorative."

"And yet you spent three hours trying to figure out who the artist was, because the metadata was corrupted," Sasha said.

"And you found it in four minutes," Santi rolled his eyes.

"Because I'm smarter than you," Sasha said with a grin.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night," Santi teased and felt death stare at him from his right. "I mean, yeah, you were smarter than me."

She smiled at that and turned back to the window as the music filled the car.

The music loosened the stiffness in his shoulders, and his grip on the wheel eased. It was impossible to stay wound up while the song drifted along with its slow and hazy vibe. By the time it faded out, he was leaning back in his seat with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the shifter. Sasha had kicked off one of her heels and tucked her foot up under her on the seat, which should not have been possible in a five-point harness, but she had always been inexplicably flexible, and somehow managed to pull it off.

The next song started and ended, and then the next. Santi recognized some of them right away while others took a few bars. All of them were old, mostly from the 90s and 80s, from a world that no longer existed since the Datakrash had claimed most of them.

They were at a red light on the edge of Corpo Plaza, the towers rising up all around them like walls of glass, when Sasha reached over and pressed the button to roll down her window. The warm night air rushed in, smelling like rain and exhaust. Santi rolled his window down too, allowing the music to drift out into the street. He glanced around and saw a woman at a bus stop turn to look at them, then look away.

"Can I ask you something?" Sasha said.

"What's up," Santi said.

"What do you want?" She asked while looking out at the towers. "Like, after. When this war shit's done, if it's ever done, and you're done running gigs. What do you actually want?"

Santi thought about it. He thought about the Widowmaker, sitting on its lift, about his mother in the kitchen, and he thought, without meaning to, about a field of tall green grass under a sky so blue it hurt to look at, and machines like animals walking through a forest that nobody had cut down.

"I want my mom to be okay," he said. "That's first. Always. I want her to never have to work another day in her life if she doesn't want to... And I want to finish the Widowmaker. Drive it somewhere nobody's ever heard of."

"That's it?" Sasha asked, looking at him. "That's as far as your dreams go?"

"No," he replied while drumming his fingers on the wheel. "This is gonna sound stupid."

"Most things you say sound stupid," Sasha teased. "So say it anyway."

Santi let out a laugh at her comment before speaking. "I want to fix something. Something big. Like, the actual city. The air, the water, hell, the ground. Everything that's been poisoned and paved over and sold."

He paused and shook his head. "I don't even know what that means, and I don't know how I'd even start. But I saw something a while ago, and I can't stop thinking about it. A place where everything was green, and the air didn't taste like burning plastic. A place where nobody was trying to sell you anything. And I don't know if it's a foolish dream... but a part of me wants to see that here... Before I die."

Sasha was quiet for a little while.

"That doesn't sound stupid," she said finally.

"No?" Santi asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Well, it sounds insane, but it doesn't sound stupid," Sasha said as she rested her chin on her hand, her elbow propped on the open window. "You're the only person I know who'd look at Night City and think, 'I could fix that.'"

"Well, what about you?" Santi asked.

"What about me?" Sasha repeated, caught a bit off guard.

"Yeah," Santi affirmed. "What do you want?"

She watched the light, which was still red, and seemed lost in thought before answering. "I want a window."

"A window?" Santi asked, confused.

"A window that doesn't look out at another building," she said while smiling a little, but there was something sad around the edges of it. "My whole life, every window I've ever had looks out at a wall or another window... Or somebody else's laundry. I want to wake up one morning and look outside and see something far away. Like mountains or the ocean. I don't know, and honestly, I don't really care. I just want something far."

"That's it?" Santi said, repeating her words back to her. "That's as far as your dreams go?"

"For now," she said, shrugging. "And I want to be good enough at what I do that nobody ever gets to tell me what to do again."

"But you're already good enough," Santi said.

"Not yet. I'm not good enough to say no to anybody." She glanced over at him. "Not like you."

"I say no to people all the time," Santi said defensively.

"Yeah, and from what you told me, two people put a gun to your head for it," Sasha countered.

"That was one time," Santi said.

Sasha deadpanned at him. "It hasn't even been half a week, Santi."

Santi started chuckling, and the light finally turned green. The music kept on playing, and eventually Sasha joined Santi in his chuckling.

Aurore was at the base of a converted office tower two blocks off Corpo Plaza, behind a curving glass facade lit gold from inside, and the valet lane in front of it looked like a corpo exec's wet dream.

Santi slowed down as they pulled into the line and stared.

There was a whole row of Quadras, all polished chrome and matte paint, two pre-Datakrash restomods Porsches with their engines swapped out for something more aligned with the times, a Pagani that must have cost more than his entire building, with corpo plates idling at the curb while a man in a gray suit argued with a valet about where it should be parked.

They crept forward in the line, and through the glass facade of the restaurant, Santi could see the dining room, which was filled with white tablecloths with candles in little glass globes. There were waiters in black vests carrying silver trays, men in suits that most definitely cost more than the ten thousand eddies he'd spent that afternoon, and women in dresses that sparkled when they laughed, all of them with different mods to their bodies, as some had their skin replaced with gold or silver or some other material. They leaned toward each other over their wine glasses, smiling corpo smiles at corpo jokes.

A valet in a red jacket stepped out of his booth and started walking toward the Hozuki.

"Santi," Sasha said, prompting him to turn. She was at the restaurant, and when she turned back to him, her smirk was gone, and she looked like she was standing in front of a door she didn't want to walk through.

"What's wrong?" Santi asked.

"Nothing's wrong," she said while chewing on the inside of her cheek. "I just... do you actually want to go in there?"

Santi looked at the restaurant, then refocused on her.

"I mean, I kinda made a reservation," Santi said, shrugging.

"I know you did, and I appreciate it," she said, turning to face him as much as the harness would let her. "But look at them, Santi, look at those people. That's not us. We'd go in there, sit at a table, and we'd spend the whole night trying to figure out which fork to use, and pretending we know what wine is, and they'd all look at us like we snuck in through the kitchen."

Santi nodded slowly. "So... what do you want to do?"

"I don't know," Sasha groaned, throwing up her hands. "Something we actually like? You've been driving like a grandma this entire time. You have a car with, what..."

"Twelve hundred and forty horsepower," Santi finished for her.

"Twelve hundred and forty horsepower, and you've been doing forty in a forty zone," she said, sounding exhausted. "You signaled into a parking lot, Santi. Who even signals into a parking lot?"

"Responsible drivers," Santi said, thinking of his mother.

"Gonks," she corrected and tried to lean towards him. "Gonks signal into parking lots. How about we do something crazy and just rip through the streets? Let's drive so far out into the Badlands that we can actually see the stars for once in our lives. I've never seen the stars, Santi."

"What about the curfew?" Santi asked.

"The curfew can go fuck itself," Sasha said with a smile.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "I mean, you got all dressed up, and you look amazing. You probably spent all day getting ready."

"I did spend all day getting ready," she said. "And I'd spend all day getting ready again to sit in this car with you and do something real. That's better than pretending to be part of a crowd we were never part of in the first place."

The valet was closing in now, and Santi took a good look at Sasha. Her pale eyes, her black bangs, the way she was looking back at him without a smirk, simply waiting for him to do something.

"Okay," he said with a smile, and Sasha's face lit up.

And right then, the song ended, and the next one started, and the speakers filled up with a guitar riff.

"Back in Black," Santi said.

"By AC/DC," Sasha continued, already grinning. "We found it on that pirate radio server when we were fifteen, remember? There was all this corrupted ICE that kept trying to sell us penis enlargement pills?"

"The ICE was the least of our problems," Santi said with a laugh. "That server tried to brick my deck."

Sasha grinned. "And then I saved you."

"And then you saved me," Santi smiled back as realization hit him. Every single song she had played tonight had come from the abandoned corners of the Old Net, from dead servers and forgotten archives that they had found together, diving side by side through the rotting architecture beyond the edge of the modern Net, before either of them knew what this was going to turn into. She had built a map of every dive they had ever made together, and she had been playing it for him all night.

He looked at her, and she looked at him, and he could tell from her face that she knew exactly what he had just figured out.

The valet knocked on Santi's window, and he rolled it down the rest of the way and smiled at the man pleasantly. Then he gave the throttle a blip, causing the engine to roar as a loud pop accompanied by flames shot out the back exhausts. It rattled the glass facade of the restaurant and made some people on the sidewalk jump.

The valet smiled tightly. "Sir, please don't do that."

Santi smiled as he did it again.

"Sir..." the Valet tried to talk again but Santi pressed the launch control button on the wheel and put the music's volume all the way up. The dashboard flashed, and he held the brake down and buried the throttle, causing the engine to climb up into a scream and hold at sixty-five hundred RPM.

The whole car was vibrating like it was about to tear itself out of the ground. Everyone within a city block turned to look, and people inside the restaurant stopped what they were doing to see the commotion.

The valet took a step back as the song truly began.

"Back in black, I hit the sack

I've been too long, I'm glad to be back

Yes, I'm let loose from the noose

That's kept me hangin' about

I'm just a-lookin' at the sky, just a-gettin' me high

Forget the hearse, 'cause I'll never die

I got nine lives, cat's eyes

Abusin' every one of them and runnin' wild."

"Hey," Santi called out to him over the engine and the blasting music. "Go fuck yourself."

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Stones, let 'em rain down on ya boy!

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