Chapter 1: Waking in Chrome
POV: Tom
The first sensation wasn't sight or sound—it was the taste of chrome.
Metallic. Sharp. Like licking a battery while drowning in recycled air. Tom's mouth felt stuffed with aluminum foil, his tongue thick and unresponsive. He tried to open his eyes and immediately regretted the decision as neon light stabbed through his skull like heated knives.
"What the—" His voice came out as a rasp, throat raw as sandpaper.
He was lying on his back in what smelled like a dumpster's fever dream. Rotting food, industrial chemicals, and something that might have been piss created an olfactory cocktail that made his stomach lurch. Tom rolled to his side and dry-heaved, his body convulsing with muscle memory of a hangover he couldn't remember earning.
When the retching stopped, he forced his eyes open again—carefully this time. The world swam into focus in segments: cracked concrete beneath his cheek, a wall covered in Japanese characters and gang tags, neon signs blazing overhead in colors that didn't exist in nature.
"No." The word escaped as barely a whisper.
But there it was. Night City. The impossible skyline of glass and chrome and dreams turned nightmare, exactly as he'd spent countless hours exploring in Cyberpunk 2077. Except this wasn't his monitor. This wasn't his game.
This was real.
Tom scrambled backward against the alley wall, his heart hammering against his ribs. His hands pressed against cold concrete while his mind raced through a catalog of rational explanations. Extremely vivid dream. Psychotic break. Elaborate VR setup. Anything except the impossible truth staring at him through twenty-story holographic advertisements.
He looked down at his arms and the world tilted sideways.
Chrome. Gleaming silver metal traced patterns beneath his skin like veins made of liquid mercury. From his wrists to his elbows, his arms looked like they belonged to someone else—someone who'd undergone extensive cyberware installation. The metal moved as he flexed his fingers, shifting and adjusting with organic fluidity.
"I never..." Tom's voice caught. He'd never had cyberware. Hell, he'd never even had surgery more complicated than wisdom tooth extraction. Yet here he was, wearing what looked like military-grade body modification like it had grown there naturally.
A small cut on his palm caught his attention—probably from falling wherever he'd fallen from. As he watched, the wound began to close. Not healing. Sealing. Like watching time-lapse footage of metal healing itself, the cut drew shut until unmarked skin remained.
Tom pressed his back harder against the wall. "This isn't happening. This isn't real."
But his stomach was growling with genuine hunger, and the stench of the alley was too sharp to be imagined. The neon burned his eyes with authentic intensity, and the chrome in his arms responded to his movements with perfect synchronization.
He was here. Actually, impossibly here.
Think. The last thing he remembered was his apartment. His computer. Loading up Cyberpunk 2077 for another playthrough. Then... nothing. A gap between sitting at his desk and waking up in this alley wearing someone else's augmentations.
"Okay," Tom whispered to himself, the word barely audible over the distant hum of traffic and the buzz of neon signs. "Okay. Either I'm having the most detailed psychotic break in human history, or..." He swallowed hard. "Or I'm actually here. And if I'm actually here, I need to not die in the next five minutes."
His game knowledge kicked in like muscle memory. Night City was a predator that ate the unprepared. Wandering around confused and lost was a death sentence. He needed food, shelter, and some way to understand what the hell had happened to his body.
Tom pushed himself to his feet, legs shaky but functional. The movement felt strange—too fluid, too coordinated. Like his body was operating on enhanced reflexes he'd never possessed. He flexed his fingers experimentally and watched chrome shift beneath synthetic skin.
Adaptive cyberware. The term surfaced from nowhere, as if his brain had access to information it shouldn't possess. He knew, somehow, that the metal in his arms was learning. Evolving. Building defenses against damage.
Which raised the terrifying question: what kind of damage had required such defenses?
The hunger pangs struck harder, and Tom stumbled toward the alley mouth. He needed food before he needed answers. Everything else was academic if he starved to death.
Night City's streets opened before him like a mechanical canyon. The familiar-yet-alien landscape stretched in all directions—megabuildings piercing the sky like concrete and glass spears, hover cars streaming between levels, people walking past with casual augmentations that would have been science fiction miracles in his world.
His world. The thought sent another wave of vertigo through him. If this was real, if he was actually here, then where was there? What had happened to Tom Adler the software engineer who lived in a one-bedroom apartment and whose biggest daily decision was whether to order pizza or Chinese food?
A vending machine caught his attention—one of Night City's omnipresent food dispensers. Tom approached it cautiously, checking his pockets for eddies he probably didn't have. Empty, as expected. But as his hand touched the machine's interface panel, something extraordinary happened.
The vending machine's electronic systems flooded his consciousness like water rushing into a dry riverbed. He could feel its inventory levels, its payment processing, its connection to the city's network. Information flowed through him with startling clarity—stock quantities, maintenance schedules, even the machine's crude AI decision tree.
Without consciously deciding to do anything, Tom's will pressed against the machine's payment system. Dispense. Free. No charge.
A soft chime, and a protein bar dropped into the dispensing tray.
Tom stared at the food, then at his hand, then back at the food. He'd just hacked a vending machine. With his mind. Through touch alone.
Techno-Sovereignty. Another term that materialized from whatever database his brain had become. The ability to control technology through direct neural interface, evolved far beyond anything that should be possible with standard wetware.
He grabbed the protein bar with trembling hands and tore it open. The taste was synthetic and vaguely meat-flavored, but his body devoured it with desperate hunger. As he ate, Tom tried to process what was happening to him.
He was in Night City. He had military-grade adaptive cyberware and some form of advanced technological control. His body was healing damage and evolving defenses automatically. And he had no memory of how any of this had happened.
Either someone had kidnapped him, performed experimental surgery, and dumped him in the most elaborate virtual reality system ever created, or...
Or I died. The thought hit him like a physical blow. I died, and something—someone—brought me here. Gave me this body. These abilities.
The protein bar turned to ash in his mouth.
A whistle echoed from the alley mouth—sharp, mocking, and distinctly unfriendly. Tom turned to see three figures emerging from the shadows. Tyger Claws, if his game knowledge was accurate. Red and gold gang colors, excessive chrome, and expressions that suggested tourism wasn't welcome in their territory.
"Hey, gaijin," the leader called out, his voice carrying the particular tone of someone looking forward to violence. "You lost?"
Tom's enhanced reflexes catalogued details with disturbing clarity. The leader's cyber-arm, obviously weapon-enhanced. The second gangster's optical implants, probably recording everything. The third one's stance, weight on his back foot, ready to spring into motion.
They weren't asking for directions.
"Just passing through," Tom said, proud that his voice came out steadier than he felt.
The leader laughed. "Nobody passes through Tyger Claw territory without paying toll. You got eddies, or you got chrome we can salvage."
Running. Tom's game knowledge screamed at him to run. Three-on-one against chromed gang members was suicide for an unaugmented civilian. Except he wasn't unaugmented anymore, was he?
The gangsters spread out to block his escape routes. Standard tactical positioning. Tom found himself analyzing their formation with knowledge he'd never learned, considering angles of attack and defensive positioning with the dispassionate clarity of enhanced combat software.
"I don't want trouble," Tom said, taking a step backward.
"Trouble wants you," the leader replied, drawing a blade that gleamed with monomolecular sharpness.
The attack came fast—faster than human reflexes should allow. But as the blade swept toward Tom's chest, time seemed to slow. Not literally, but his perception shifted, allowing him to track the weapon's path with crystal clarity. His body moved without conscious decision, twisting away from the strike.
The blade caught his shoulder instead of his heart, slicing through fabric and skin. Tom gasped at the sharp pain—but beneath the wound, he felt something extraordinary happening. Chrome spread across the injury site like living metal, forming protective plating even as the cut began to seal.
The gangster stared in shock. "What the hell—"
Tom didn't wait for him to finish the sentence. Whatever had happened to him, whatever he'd become, survival was the priority. He grabbed the gangster's wrist—the one holding the knife—and squeezed.
His augmented strength crushed chrome and bone with equal ease.
The gangster screamed and dropped the blade. Tom shoved him backward into his companions and ran.
His legs carried him faster than they should have, chrome-enhanced muscles propelling him through Night City's maze of alleys and side streets with inhuman speed. Behind him, shouts and curses faded into the urban din.
Tom didn't stop running until his lungs burned and his legs trembled with exhaustion. He collapsed in a different alley, this one blessedly empty, and examined his shoulder. The wound was gone. Completely gone. In its place was a patch of chrome-tinted skin that looked like it had been there for years.
Adaptive cyberware. His body was learning from damage, building defenses, evolving countermeasures. The next blade that hit him there would face resistance. Maybe complete immunity.
Tom leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Whatever had brought him here, whatever had done this to him, he was alive. Changed, augmented, possibly not entirely human anymore, but alive.
And in Night City, that was victory enough for one day.
The chrome patterns beneath his skin pulsed with soft blue light—a heartbeat made visible, a rhythm that belonged to neither man nor machine but something caught between them. Tom opened his eyes and looked up at the neon-stained sky, where advertising drones painted promises in light across the darkness.
I'm here, he thought. I don't know how or why, but I'm here. And I'm going to survive this.
The city hummed around him like a living thing, and deep in his cybernetic nervous system, something hummed back.
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