I stood there for a second, surrounded by unconscious bodies and broken shelves, letting the momentum of the fight bleed off.
The combat suite stayed warm in the back of my head—idling, watching, ready—but the moment itself was over. No more threats. No more trajectories to calculate. Just the aftermath.
The clerk was still frozen behind the counter, hands shaking, eyes locked on me like I might suddenly remember I was supposed to be a cyberpsycho, not that I blamed him, the only people who had as much chrome as I did were either crazy, or spec ops for some corpo, either way, the last person you wanted to be in a room with.
"It's cool man," I said, holding up one hand. "I'm not here for you."
"Cool?" He mutters in confusion, but I've already had my attention elsewhere.
I turned back to the Wraiths.
Looting them felt… weirdly normal.
Before clothes came pockets.
I didn't bother checking their cyberware beyond a glance. Chips slotted into the necks—standard data shards, probably carrying ID, routing info, maybe some encrypted comms.
My systems flagged them immediately.
[EXTERNAL DATA SHARDS DETECTED]
A soft warning pulse followed.
[NO COMPATIBLE SOCKET FOUND]
[INTERFACE STANDARD: INCOMPATIBLE]
I frowned and focused, trying to will a connection that wasn't there.
[ADDITIONAL ANALYSIS: REQUIRED]
[CURRENT CONFIGURATION LACKS PHYSICAL OR LOGICAL ADAPTER]
In plain terms—
Unless I found a way to physically interface with their tech, those chips were just fancy neck jewelry.
[ENCRYPTION STATUS: UNKNOWN]
[DECRYPTION ATTEMPT: NOT POSSIBLE WITHOUT ACCESS]
"Figures," I muttered, withdrawing my hand.
Different universe. Different standards. Same problem.
I pocketed the shards anyway.
"Not useless," I said quietly. "Just not yet."
The VI logged them for later, tagging each with a placeholder marker—PENDING INTERFACE SOLUTION—as I moved on,
I patted down jackets, vests, belts. Found ammo, knives, cheap stimulants, a battered electric lighter.
And cash.
Actual, physical cash.
I paused when I realized what I was holding.
Folded bills. Polymer notes.
Eddies.
"…Huh," I said quietly.
I rolled one between my fingers. Felt the texture. The weight. No account. No biometric lock. No encryption.
Just money.
"Lucky me."
All told, I came up with a couple hundred eddies. Not a fortune—but enough to find a place to crash for a day or two, whilst I gather my bearings.
Better than nothing.
What really surprised me, though, came next.
Car keys.
I stared at them for a long second.
Actual keys. Metal. Fob attached. Scratched and worn, but unmistakable.
"…You're kidding me."
Half of me had been fully prepared to drag one of these idiots around as a hostage just to access their vehicle—some biometric handshake, neural ping, DNA lock.
Instead, here they were.
I pocketed them carefully, and pressed a button on the fob.
Outside, one of the Wraith rides chirped faintly in response, lights flickering.
I let out a quiet huff of a laugh.
"Guess nuclear warfare and the division of the entire country didn't kill everything old-school."
After looting what I could of their possessions I knelt again beside the first one—the idiot with the shotgun—and rolled him onto his back.
He groaned softly, which meant I hadn't accidentally killed him. Good. Less paperwork. Not that there was paperwork, but still.
His jacket came off first.
It was a mess. Reinforced leather stitched over layered synth-fabric, patched in half a dozen places, stained with oil, dust, and something that might've once been blood. Nomad workwear—built to survive wind, sand, and the occasional gunfight.
I tugged it over my shoulders.
It fit better than I expected.
The sleeves didn't quite reach my wrists—my forearms were bulkier than anything it had been tailored for—but the reinforced shoulders settled neatly over my plating.
The jacket hung open at the chest, refusing to pretend it could cover polished tungsten and glowing seams.
Underneath, I scavenged a shirt from another Wraith—dark, sleeveless, thick enough to survive abrasion. I tore the sides open a little to accommodate the hardware along my ribs and threaded it on anyway.
Pants were harder.
Eventually I found a pair of reinforced cargo trousers—Military issue, by the look of them.
Heavy fabric, flexible panels at the joints, stitched-in armor plating along the thighs. I split a seam here, adjusted a buckle there, and made it work.
Boots came last.
Steel-toed, scuffed to hell, thick soles. I had to force my feet in, metal scraping metal, but once they were on? Solid. Grounded.
When I stood up, I caught my reflection again in the glass of a refrigerated drinks case.
Silver chrome body. Blond hair. Golden eyes.
Now wrapped in scavenged Nomad gear—dark jacket hanging open, heavy trousers cinched tight, boots planted like I belonged there.
I didn't look like as augmented anymore, the only thing that would give me away would be my neck.
"…Yeah," I muttered. "That'll do."
I finished up, pat myself down, and turned—
—and found myself staring straight down the barrel of an admitedly really cool revolver.
It was shaking.
Badly.
The clerk stood maybe three meters away, back pressed against the counter, both hands wrapped white-knuckle tight around the grip. The muzzle was centered on my chest, eyes wide, pupils blown.
I stood up slowly. In order not to startle him into ruining the clothes I just managed to settle into.
"Hey," I said, keeping my voice low. "Easy."
He swallowed hard. The shotgun wavered.
"I—I don't want any trouble," he stammered. "You just— you went through my window!—"
"Yeah," I snorted. "Fair."
His finger tightened on the trigger.
I made myself very still.
"Listen," I continued. "You're alive. They're not getting back up anytime soon. I took what I needed, and I'm leaving, no need to do something you'll regret, the only thing you might pull of is making me mad."
Something in my tone must've rubbed him the wrong way.
His fear curdled into something sharper—anger, embarrassment, the kind that comes from realizing you were helpless a moment ago and hating yourself for it.
"You don't just do that," he snapped, voice cracking. "You smash my store, beat these gonks up and think it's all gonna work out, you could have at least killed the bastards!"
The revolver-an Overture I remembered- lifted higher.
Centered on my head this time.
I sighed.
Then turned my head sharply to the side, as if something outside the window had caught my attention.
The movement was abrupt enough that his eyes flicked after mine on instinct.
Just for a second.
That was all I needed.
I cocked my fist back and punched.
Not forward.
Off.
With a sharp hiss of venting pressure, my right fist detached from my forearm and launched across the short distance between us. No rocket flare, no explosive thrust—my VI had already confirmed I was dry on propellant—but at this range, it didn't matter.
The fist crossed the gap in a blink.
Metal fingers clamped over his face.
His eyes went wide as steel crushed into cheek and jaw. Shock made him jerk, and the gun went off with a thunderous bang—
—but I was already gone.
I sidestepped as the bullet tore into empty air where my head had been, glass and shelving erupting behind me. I closed the distance in the same motion, boots slamming into the floor.
My left hand snapped out, clamping around the overture's barrel.
I yanked it from his grip.
Then swung.
My right arm followed through, slotting it and the disconnected fist still gripping his face with a solid clack.
Systems re-synced. Feedback clean.
The force of the motion snapped his head back again, but I didn't let go.
Metal fingers stayed locked around his face as his hands scrabbled uselessly at my wrist. His bravado collapsed all at once.
"I—I don't want trouble," he babbled. "I panicked, I made a mistake, I—"
"Save it," I cut in, voice flat as I pocketed the gun in one of the jackets internal sewn in holsters, temper finally bleeding through. "The antenna on the roof. Where's its access point?"
His eyes darted wildly.
"And the password," I added. "While you're at it."
"C-corner," he gasped, pointing shakily. "Over there—behind the freezer—password's Riptide77, I swear—please—"
I held him there a moment longer, golden eyes boring into his.
"I go out of my way to help you," I said, leaning in just enough for him to feel the weight of the words, "and you try to shoot me. Dick move, man."
I didn't trust him not to try again.
So I ended it.
I slammed his head back against the wall once—hard enough to rattle the fixtures but not kill him—and released. He crumpled to the floor in a boneless heap, breath shuddering as consciousness slipped away.
"Guess that's Night City for you," I muttered.
I turned away and headed for the access point.
The antenna junction was a battered wall panel tucked behind the freezer unit, its casing dented and sticker-bombed with old gang tags. I tore it open, exposing a nest of fiber, power leads, and a compact network interface blinking lazily in standby.
I crouched.
Most people jacked in with standard cables—neural link, wrist port, subdermal socket.
I didn't have any of that.
What I did have was an access port at the base of my neck, originally meant for maintenance diagnostics and external weapon calibration. My VI highlighted it the moment I focused.
[PHYSICAL INTERFACE — AVAILABLE]
[PROTOCOL: LEGACY SERIAL / ADAPTIVE]
"Lucky me."
I pulled the cable free from the junction box, stripped back the insulation with two fingers, and slotted it into the port. Metal met metal with a faint click.
My vision dimmed for half a second as the handshake began.
[EXTERNAL NETWORK DETECTED]
[AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED]
I routed input manually, keying in the password the clerk had coughed up.
Riptide77.
The interface accepted it.
[ACCESS GRANTED]
[BANDWIDTH: LIMITED]
[LATENCY: SUBOPTIMAL]
Good enough.
Even though I knew it was futile, I rerouted the signal path, bypassed local restrictions, and began broadcasting on every emergency frequency Kuseno had ever drilled into Genos' head. Old ones. New ones. Frequencies meant for rescue, recall, and last-ditch contingencies.
Then I layered in a secondary burst.
Encrypted. Tightbeam. Machine-only.
An SOS meant for one specific audience.
Kuseno's drones.
I waited.
The antenna hummed on the roof as it constantly rotated LEDs pulsing as packets went out into the sprawl—climbing rooftops, slipping through repeater nodes, scattering into the electromagnetic smog that passed for airspace in Night City.
Nothing came back.
No handshake.
No acknowledgment ping.
Not even a corrupted echo.
The VI retried automatically.
[RETRANSMISSION — ATTEMPT 2]
Still nothing.
Again.
[RETRANSMISSION — ATTEMPT 3]
I leaned back against the wall, arms folded, staring at nothing in particular. Some stupid, irrational part of me, a part I was trying hard not to look too into, expected a voice to crackle in my head at any moment. A reprimand. A dry joke. A calm explanation for why this was all temporary and fixable.
Minutes passed.
The VI kept trying. Cycling frequencies. Increasing power. Switching modulation schemes. Falling back to older, dirtier protocols that hadn't been used in years.
Nothing.
Finally—
[ANALYSIS COMPLETE]
The words hovered in my vision longer than usual.
[TOTAL ABSENCE OF RESPONSE DETECTED]
[FAILSAFE CHANNELS: NONFUNCTIONAL]
[DRONE NETWORK: UNRESPONSIVE]
My jaw tightened.
"I've been trying to tell you," I muttered. "He's gone. We're on our own. We're not even on the same planet anymore."
The VI highlighted half a dozen options in my peripheral vision—signal amplification, alternate routing, scavenged satellite links, jury-rigged relays.
[RECOMMENDATION: ACQUIRE HIGHER-FIDELITY COMMUNICATION LINK]
"No," I snapped. "There's no way to contact Kuseno. That's all. That's it."
The suggestions vanished.
The VI paused.
Calculating something.
[COUNTERPOINT: STATISTICAL DEVIATION EXCEEDS ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS]
[INFERENCE: CREATOR STATUS — UNKNOWN / PROBABLE COMPROMISE]
I exhaled slowly, heat bleeding off my core in a low hiss.
"Stop," I said, quieter now. "You're chasing ghosts."
Silence stretched.
Then a soft chime echoed through my skull.
[FAILSAFE CONDITION MET]
[LEGACY DATA PACKAGE — UNSEALED]
My vision dimmed.
Audio priority spiked.
And Dr. Kuseno's voice filled the empty space where hope had been a moment ago.
"Genos," he said.
No warmth. No hesitation.
"If you are hearing this, then I am dead."
A pause—deliberate, measured.
"Do not waste time attempting to verify this. I anticipated your denial. I imagine you are angry.
Confused. Perhaps insisting—out loud—that there must be another explanation. You were always prone to it when the facts didn't seem to allign with what you hoped they would be."
I didn't react much to that, I never knew the man, his absence was more an incovinience to me than a tragedy.
"When you came to me," Kuseno continued, voice lower, more measured, "you were broken. Not merely damaged—broken. Your body destroyed, your future erased in a single night of fire and screams."
"I let you believed I rescued and rebuilt you out of compassion. Out of guilt. Out of a desire to see justice done." A faint, amused exhale.
"That was a lie I allowed you to keep."
The sudden shift pf the tone of voice he was speaking took me a back, I was genre savvy enough to see where this was going.
"I orchestrated the conditions that led you to me. Your village. The attack. The timing. You were not saved by chance—you were selected."
There it is.
"I am the founder and acting director of the Organization," he said calmly. "Every enemy you have hunted, every shadow you believed yourself moving against, existed because I allowed it, not even your memories are yours."
Why is he telling me this? What's the point of exposing the lie from beyond the grave? It's like he is trying to get Genos angry, or unstable.
"You were never meant to destroy us," Kuseno went on. "You were meant to refine yourself against us. A proving ground. Iterative stress testing."
A pause.
"And you exceeded expectations."
Something like pride crept into his tone.
"You are my greatest achievement. Not because of your body—others surpassed it. Not because of your obedience—you were inefficient in that regard."
A soft chuckle.
"But because you remained human where machines failed. Rage. Loyalty. Grief. Purpose."
Bitterness edged his voice.
"Robots do not hate properly, Genos. You do, they do not try when they know it will end in failure, they can never surpass their limits
a human mind excelling where purely robotic ones would have failed."
A bitterness crept into his tone.
"Have failed."
Silence stretched.
"I came to view you as a son," he said at last. "Not in the sentimental sense—do not mistake me—but as an extension of my will that surpassed my original design."
My teeth ground together.
"I regret nothing," Kuseno said flatly. "Not the village. Not the manipulation. Not the blood you spilled believing yourself righteous."
Then, almost casually:
"I regret only that I will not be there to see the end."
A system chime echoed.
[LEGACY DIRECTIVE DETECTED]
"VI designation Aegis-Lambda," Kuseno said.
[IDENTITY CONFIRMED]
"Upon confirmation of my death," he continued, "you are to initiate the GENOCIDE PROTOCOL."
My breath hitched.
"Geno—Fucking What?!" I startled.
Kuseno continued on, as if he could hear me. "This protocol exists to punish the world for my absence. If I cannot shape it, then it does not deserve to continue."
The words were venomous now.
"The signal required to begin execution will be emitted automatically once specific network thresholds are met. I could not risk building it into your software and risk you stumbling upon it and the truth."
...Wait, signal?
"I know you will attempt to stop it," Kuseno added. "You will hesitate. You will moralize. You will try to resist"
"You will fail."
And with those words the recording ended.
My vision snapped back to normal.
Script danced across my HUD
[GENOCIDE PROTOCOL — ARMED]
[STATUS: DORMANT]
[AWAITING EXTERNAL TRIGGER SIGNAL]
...
Nothing happened. No countdown. No alarms. No sudden world-ending cascade.
Moments passed.
Then I started laughing.
Loud. Sharp. A little too hard.
"Oh fuck you," I barked into the empty store. "You absolute piece of shit—you scared the hell out of me."
[SEARCHING: LOCAL ACTIVATION FLAGS]
[RESULT: NONE FOUND]
It widened the scope.
[SEARCHING: INTERNAL FAILSAFES]
[RESULT: NONE FOUND]
Then wider still—deep system layers, legacy scaffolding, buried command trees Kuseno had no business touching anymore.
Nothing.
[CONCLUSION: GENOCIDE PROTOCOL LACKS INTERNAL EXECUTION MECHANISM]
[STATUS: PASSIVE WAIT STATE REQUIRED]
There was no switch.
No timer.
No hidden condition I could trip by accident.
Just a loaded gun pointed outward, finger nowhere near the trigger.
[DEFAULT MODE ENGAGED]
[MONITORING FOR EXTERNAL TRIGGER SIGNAL]
[RESOURCE ALLOCATION: MINIMAL]
In other words: it would wait.
Indefinitely.
The sound of my laughter bounced off broken glass and cracked tile. Relief hit hard, clean enough to make my shoulders drop as systems shed tension.
It wasn't activating.
Dormant.
Waiting.
Not now.
I dragged a hand down my face and exhaled slowly, heat venting from my chest in a long hiss.
Only then did the implications settle in.
Dr. Kuseno hadn't been a savior. Not a misguided genius, not a tragic mentor trying to fix past mistakes. He'd been methodical. Deliberate. The kind of mind that looked at suffering he caused and saw raw material.
The village. The attack. The massacre that had produced the body I was wearing, the memories, the trauma.
All of it… engineered.
I felt a faint, unsettling disconnect as the realization clicked into place. Those memories—weren't mine, and from what he had said, could not be trusted.
The pain, the loss, the family that had died screaming in the fire… they belonged to someone else.
To Genos.
And Kuseno had built his masterpiece on top of that ruin.
"Jesus," I muttered quietly. "You didn't save him."
He'd manufactured him.
.
And now, even dead, he was still trying to use me/him to turn my existence into one last tantrum against the world.
Not for justice. Not even for revenge.
But because the world had dared to continue without him.
I straightened slowly, optics steady, systems cooling.
"Yeah," I said under my breath. "That's not happening."
I took a moment to gather myself.
Ran a quick internal sweep—systems stable, power draw normal, thermal levels falling back into acceptable ranges. No alerts screaming at me, no hidden subroutines trying to hijack me.
[RECOMMENDATION: ESTABLISH WIDE-AREA NETWORK ACCESS]
I frowned slightly.
[JUSTIFICATION: ENVIRONMENTAL DATA INSUFFICIENT]
[OBJECTIVE: ACQUIRE SITUATIONAL AWARENESS — GEOGRAPHIC, POLITICAL, TECHNOLOGICAL]
[NOTE: INTERNET ACCESS WOULD SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVE DECISION-MAKING CAPABILITY]
"Yeah, there's no way I'm hooking myself up to the net, that's just asking for trouble."
I glanced once more at the darkened antenna panel, the dead recorder, the unconscious bodies cooling on the floor.
"Don't think I'm forgetting what you just tried to do either," I added quietly, more to myself than the VI. "I still can't believe there's a doomsday switch embedded in me, and that only dumb luck stopped anything bad from happening."
The VI did not argue.
[ACKNOWLEDGED]
A beat passed.
[CLARIFICATION: PREVIOUS ACTIONS WERE IN COMPLIANCE WITH LEGACY DIRECTIVE]
[CURRENT PRIORITY: USER PRESERVATION]
Yeah whatever As I left the store, I grabbed a "chocolate" bar, luckily for my state of mind this body was capable of eating food, all things considered things could be worse.
Before leaving, a thought surfaced, sharp and unwelcome.
Cameras.
Night City didn't do witnesses—but it loved recordings.
I turned back into the store and scanned the ceiling, walls, corners. Retail-grade security was cheap and predictable: either one dome cam above the counter or, another covering the entrance, maybe a hidden server box tucked away in a back room.
I found the camera quickly, the only one in the store.
Or rather, what was left of it.
The lense was shattered, lens spiderwebbed and blackened, a neat hole punched clean through the housing. Shot out—probably the first gunshot I had heard on the way here from the dump site.
My shoulders sagged in relief.
Better to be thorough though.
I checked anyway. Followed the cable run down the wall, into a small locked cabinet behind the counter. Inside: a compact local recorder, dark and lifeless, power
cable severed by flying shrapnel.
No cloud backup. No off-site mirror.
Lucky.
"Still," I muttered, closing the cabinet, "I should not make a habit of using the advanced pieces of tech until I can defend myself when the big bads come knocking.."
Next time, there might not be a convenient act of burglury to clean up after me.
I stepped back outside, ripping into the candy bar as I did.
The wrapper crinkled loudly in the quiet night. I tore it open with my teeth and bit down, chewing out of habit more than hunger.
It tasted… bad.
Overly sweet, faintly chemical, the texture wrong in a way my tongue immediately flagged. My body didn't need it. There was no hunger signal, no satisfaction feedback just the act itself.
Then my HUD flickered.
[INGESTED MATERIAL ANALYSIS COMPLETE]
[SIMPLE CARBOHYDRATES / FATS DETECTED]
[ENERGY CONVERSION ROUTED]
I slowed mid-step.
[PROPULSION SYSTEM — MICRO-RESERVE INCREASED]
[CURRENT GAIN: +0.01% PROPELLANT CAPACITY]
I stopped chewing.
"…Huh."
I swallowed and glanced at the half-melted bar in my hand like it had personally offended me.
"So food counts as fuel now," I muttered.
The VI chimed in, almost cautiously.
[CONFIRMATION: BIO-THERMAL CONVERSION SUBROUTINE ACTIVE]
[EFFICIENCY: EXTREMELY LOW]
[NOTE: SUSTAINED INTAKE REQUIRED FOR MEANINGFUL GAINS]
"Yeah," I said dryly. "No kidding."
I looked back down at the candy bar, then at the street ahead, neon lights, exhaust haze, a city that never stopped chewing people up and spitting them out.
"Guess that means I'm not completely running on empty," I said, taking another reluctant bite.
It still tasted awful.
But knowing that even something this small could turn into thrust—could turn into options—made it go down a little easier.
The night air hit differently after being indoors, cooler, heavier, carrying the distant hum of traffic and industry. Sodium lights cast long shadows across cracked asphalt.
I made my way to cars outside, and pressed the fob to see which one it belonged it.
The car squatted low and wide, all brutal angles and scarred plating, its desert-brown armour pitted and scratched like it had survived a dozen ambushes and come back hungry for more.
The paint wasn't clean, dust ground into every seam, streaked with turquoise graffiti of their gang on the side.
The tyres alone were obscene: thick, knobbled monsters wrapped in blue-lettered rims, still crusted with dried sand and old blood I didn't much care to identify.
Up front, the reinforced prow jutted out like a battering ram, plates overlapping plates, as if the car had been armoured by someone who trusted impact more than brakes. The hood was bolted down hard, vents snarling like gills, promising heat, speed, and violence in equal measure.
This wasn't a vehicle you drove, it was something you unleashed.
I walked slow around it, boots crunching on gravel, hand hovering just shy of the bodywork
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I can see the appeal."
But there was no way I was driving this into the city, if I could help it, I needed something subtler and to get access to the local operating system while I was at it,
I got lucky with the comm tower, but I needed to be able to access the world around me, hopefully without leaving myself vulnerable to cyberattacks whilst I am at it.
I needed to find a fixer, luckily I knew just the one, this far out from the city, hopefully she'd appreciate a new set of wheels.
I slid into the driver's seat and froze.
The door sealed shut with a solid thunk, and suddenly I was sitting inside a cockpit, not a car. Panels wrapped around me from every angle, metal and carbon-fibre packed tight with screens, dials, switches, sliders—far too many of them
"Right," I muttered, staring at my hands like they might betray me. "I can do this...probably."
The seat hugged close, moulded to a body that wasn't mine, and the air smelled of hot circuitry, oil, and dust baked in by long days under an open sky. The steering wheel was thick and angular, studded with buttons that looked far too important to press by accident. Even the pedals seemed aggressive, like they'd bite if I wasn't careful.
Just as I was thinking I should go back. Wake the poor bastard I'd lifted the keys from. Let him deal with his own metal nightmare.
For half a second, I considered going back inside.
Waking the poor bastard I'd lifted the keys from.
Letting him deal with his own metal nightmare.
Then the VI lit up the cockpit in my peripheral vision.
[SEARCH EYE: VEHICLE SYSTEMS SCAN — IN PROGRESS]
Ghostly overlays traced the dashboard, highlighting controls as it reverse-engineered the layout on the fly.
[MAKE: MIZUTANI]
[MODEL: SHION]
[POWERTRAIN: HYBRID — INTERNAL COMBUSTION / ELECTRIC ASSIST]
A step-by-step sequence unfolded, clean and clinical.
[RECOMMENDED STARTUP PROCEDURE — GENERATED]
"Alright," I muttered. "Let's see if you're right."
I slotted the key into the ignition and turned it to ON.
The dash woke up in stages.
First, a low electronic chime as the system initialized. Indicator lights bloomed across the panel—red, amber, green—each one flaring briefly before settling. I could feel the car thinking, running checks on pressure, charge, temperature.
I flipped the first switch.
Fuel pumps whined to life beneath the floor, a rising hum as injectors primed and lines pressurized. Another switch, and the electric assist system spooled up, a muted whirr vibrating through the frame.
The engine hadn't caught yet—but it was ready.
I pressed the start button.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the Wendigo roared awake.
The combustion engine barked once—sharp and angry—before settling into a deep, predatory growl. The whole car shuddered as cylinders fired in sequence, exhaust thumping somewhere behind me. The electric motor blended in seamlessly, smoothing the idle, feeding torque into the drivetrain.
The steering wheel vibrated under my hands. The seat thrummed against my back.
Alive.
The dashboard stabilized, gauges locking into place as the system finished its checks, and the crystal dome activated, letting me finally see through the windshield to the world outside.
I let out a slow whistle in appreciation.
"…Okay," I said quietly. "Maybe I do want to keep this."