Genos
Sunset Motel, Rocky Ridge Plains, California
2074
Three Days
Three full days of doing nothing but existing inside a motel room that smelled faintly of blood and sweat.
The novelty wore off sometime yesterday. At first, the Sunset Motel had felt almost cinematic. Like I'd stepped into a set I recognized from somewhere half-remembered. The flicker of neon through cheap curtains. The low hum of the city bleeding across the desert. The constant suggestion that something important was always about to happen just outside the door.
Turns out most of what happens outside the door is people arguing over vending machine prices and Noah wiping down the same counter for the fifth time.
Noah, the owner, was alright. Likeable despite his tendency to crack dumb jokes whenever he could. He asked questions once in a while, realized I wasn't going to answer them, and pivoted to small talk about weather patterns and broken vending machines. I respected that.
Didn't mean I wanted to spend entire days meandering around his bar pretending to be a person with somewhere to be. So I stayed in the room, or sat out and having the occasional small talk with the other residents. Sat. Stood. Ran diagnostics. Watched the door like it might do something interesting if I stared at it long enough.
It didn't, the only thing that kept me from going stir crazy was the fact I was running diagnostics on my systems.
[SYSTEM STATUS: STABLE]
[PROPULSION RESERVE: 0.91% — EMERGENCY USE ONLY]
[COGNITIVE LATENCY: NOMINAL]
"Thrilling," I muttered.
I'd already run every internal check I could without opening myself up and poking around manually. Fuel levels climbing steadily. Structural damage unchanged. No new subroutines trying to end the world in Kuseno's name.
That last one still felt like a win.
The room itself was functional in the way everything in Night City was functional, barely.
One bed. One chair. One table bolted to the floor. Bathroom with a mirror that had seen too many faces trying not to recognize themselves. I'd memorized the layout in under an hour.
Dakota hadn't called. After our talk on her customizing and linking my looted car to my pending identity, she had handed me an external agent saying she'll get in touch if my data slate was legit, and that she'd still be in touch if it was not.
Which, to be fair, was expected. She'd also said finding someone skilled enough to go through Bartmoss's slate without frying their brain would take time. And if she had found someone, they'd probably be triple-checking their will before plugging anything in.
Still, three days was a long time to sit alone with your thoughts.
I found myself standing by the window again, looking out at the cracked asphalt and the skeletal shapes of passing cars. Every once in a while, a vehicle rolled through the lot. Stopped for gas. Didn't stay long.
No one looked up at my window.
[RECOMMENDATION: SEEK NETWORK ACCESS]
I blinked. "You again."
[DATA DEFICIT INCREASING]
[ENVIRONMENTAL FAMILIARITY: INSUFFICIENT]
[LOCAL NETWORK ACCESS WOULD IMPROVE ADAPTATION RATE]
"Can't," I said. "or rather I do not want to, just be patient once we've got some local firmware, and we adapt to it I'll see about updating your database."
Silence again. I leaned my head lightly against the glass. Didn't feel the temperature change. Just registered it. Three days ago, I'd been in another world. Another life. Another body.
Now I was waiting in a motel for a fixer to decide if I was worth the trouble. Not the worst position to be in, all things considered. Still boring as hell. I turned away from the window and dropped onto the edge of the bed. Springs creaked under the weight. My weight. Genos's weight. Whoever the hell I was now.
Don't think about it.
My hand moved automatically, picking up the wrapper from a half-eaten nutrient bar on the table. I stared at it. "Think I'm going stir-crazy," I muttered.
[NEGATIVE: COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS WITHIN NORMAL PARAMETERS]
"Figure of speech."
...
[ACKNOWLEDGED]
I leaned back, staring at the ceiling. "Soon as Dakota calls," I said quietly, "we're heading into the belly of the beast, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited." The VI didn't respond. I closed my eyes.
I lay back on the motel bed, staring up at the cracked ceiling as the neon from outside bled through the curtains in faint, shifting bands. Three days of this. Three days of waiting, running diagnostics, pacing the same ten steps between the bed and the window like a caged animal with very expensive limbs.
"Tell me you've already almost done."
There was a brief pause, the kind that meant it wasn't ignoring me so much as trying to find out what I was talking about.
[QUERY: CLARIFY REQUEST]
"The sandbox," I said. "The virtual machine. The place all this new software is supposed to live so it doesn't go digging around in anything important."
[CONFIRMED: VIRTUALIZED OPERATING ENVIRONMENT IN DEVELOPMENT]
Good. Because if I was about to let someone install Cyberpunk-standard cognitive software into my systems, there was absolutely no way in hell I was letting it run natively.
I didn't operate on anything even remotely compatible with this world's infrastructure. Different architecture, and logic frameworks. Different underlying assumptions about how hardware and software should even talk to each other. Trying to slot standard Night City firmware straight into my system would be like trying to run a smartphone OS on a military satellite. Possible, maybe. Stable? Not a chance.
"So we're doing it layered," I murmured. "Core firmware stays untouched. Everything else runs in sequence but separate." A schematic flickered faintly across my vision, projected as if onto the ceiling.
The base layer my core systems. The actual kernel. The thing that made me. To the locals it was what made me untouchable, a nonstandard entity, completely alien to anything on this planet. And above that: a virtual kernel. Clean, isolated and built specifically to emulate the kind of environment everyone else ran off of.
And on top of this virtual kernal will hopefully be where I placed the Cyberpunk-standard software stack, the everyday cognitive shortcuts people here used without thinking. The invisible infrastructure of a connected life.
"Right," I said softly. "So we build a virtual machine. New kernel, new operating layer, completely sandboxed. That becomes the firmware this world expects me to have."
[CORRECT]
"And everything else installs there," I continued. "Agent software. Data packets. Cultural libraries. Banking access. All of it."
[AFFIRMATIVE]
I watched the code type itself slowly. It was elegant, in a way.
Everyone else in this city lived permanently connected, their minds and bodies threaded into a network that could be hijacked if someone clever enough found a way in. Their neural ports were doors. Their firmware was standardized. and because of that most of everyones was predictable, hackable.
Mine would not be, it would be a house inside a house.
"So if someone tries to hack me," I said, "they're not hitting my core systems. They're hitting the virtual environment."
[PRIMARY RESPONSE: VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT ISOLATION]
[SECONDARY RESPONSE: PROCESS TERMINATION]
[TERTIARY RESPONSE: FULL VM SHUTDOWN]
I huffed a quiet laugh. Meaning, at the first sign of trouble, I could just shut the whole outer system off. Pull the plug. Let whatever poor bastard tried to break in find themselves screaming into an empty room.
"And if they somehow get past the virtual layer?" I asked. "If they breach containment and hit the real kernel?"
...
[OUTCOME: UNLIKELY]
[REASON: ARCHITECTURAL INCOMPATIBILITY]
[ESTIMATED EFFECT: NO EXECUTION CAPABILITY]
They'd be trying to speak a language that didn't exist. "So best case," I said, "I blend in. Worst case, someone tries to hack me and ends up trapped in a virtual environment with no access to anything real."
[SIMPLIFIED ANALOGY: ACCEPTABLE]
"Yeah," I muttered. "You're getting a bit too uppity for a glorified chat box." I swung my legs off the bed and sat forward, elbows resting on my knees. The room hummed faintly with distant traffic, old wiring in the walls, and the quiet mechanical awareness of my own body idling in standby. Three days of that hum. Three days of not much else.
"Build it modular," I added. "If the install goes bad, I want a clean wipe option. Hard reset."
[ACKNOWLEDGED]
[ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 92%]
"Take your time," I said. "Dakota hasn't called yet." I stood, stretched more out of habit than necessity, and reached for the door. The agent sat on the table where I'd left it — small, unassuming, but currently my only lifeline to anyone outside this room. I pocketed it carefully.
Would be embarrassing to miss a call after all this waiting.
The walkway outside was washed in that familiar motel half-light. Neon from the parking lot bled through the slatted blinds at the far end, casting long bars of color across cracked tile and faded carpet. The Sunset Motel had probably looked exactly like this twenty, thirty, maybe fifty years ago. For a place supposedly sitting on the edge of one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world, it felt stubbornly analog.
Old doors. Old paint. Old smells. The only real giveaway that we were decades into the future were the occasional flickers of holographic signage outside and the low, constant murmur of vehicles that sounded more like distant turbines than engines.
Otherwise? It seemed like just any other sleazy roadside motel trying not to fall apart faster than it was being paid to stay open.
I made my way down the hall and into the bar. Noah stood behind the counter like he always did, polishing the same glass with the same rag, like time had politely agreed to leave him alone. He glanced up when I entered, gave a small nod that passed for greeting. "Evening," he said.
"Hey, Noah," I said, sliding onto a barstool, wincing a bit at the creak it made. "Let me get something to pass the time."
He set the glass he'd been polishing down and leaned lightly on the counter, giving me a once-over that landed somewhere between casual and practiced. "Got some 21st Stout, a couple of Brosephs," he said, then added, almost too casually, "or a good old O'Dickin if you're in the mood for something harder."
The last part yanked me clean out of my thoughts. "O–what?" I startled at him. Instead of answering, he just smirked and pointed up at the wall behind him. Nestled between more respectable-looking bottles was a green one, the label clear as day.
O'Dickins Whiskey.
I groaned and rubbed my face. "Oh, fuck you." Noah laughed, a short, satisfied huff. "Got you."
Yeah. He did. I'd give him that. "So," he said once he'd composed himself, "what's the mood?"
"Dealer's choice," I replied. "Just something calorie-dense. And I'd prefer it doesn't taste like piss." He reached under the counter and came back up with a Broseph and a glass, setting both down in front of me. I ignored the glass, twisted the cap off the bottle and took a long pull straight from it.
It was cold, bitter and synthetic. But not terrible.
[SYSTEM WARNING: ALCOHOL DETECTED]
[FILTERING NEUROACTIVE COMPOUNDS]
[TEMPORARY SUPPRESSION: COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT]
[CONVERTING TO METABOLIC FUEL – TASK PRIORITY: VIRTUAL MACHINE CONSTRUCTION]
I swallowed and exhaled. "Really wish I'd started drinking before assigning you a job," I muttered. Because the annoying thing was… I could get drunk. Not right now, apparently, since I had given it a task, it could not allow me to be inhebriated whislt it was doing it, but in general. It was counterintuitive at first. As far as I could tell, the only part of me that was still properly organic was my brain. Everything else, the support structures, circulatory assist, metabolic regulation, was synthetic or hybridized to the point where the line barely mattered.
But alcohol didn't need a liver to be felt. Not the way my body worked. Normally, ethanol would cross the blood-brain barrier and start interfering with neurotransmitter signaling. GABA up, glutamate down, dopamine doing whatever the hell it wanted. In my case, those pathways were still there, still biological. What changed was everything around them.
My systems could intercept the compound before it reached the brain, flag it, break it down, reroute it. Most of the time, alcohol got treated like inefficient fuel—converted, burned, discarded.
But if I let it through and told the system to stand down? Then yeah. I could get drunk. Properly, messily drunk. Slurred thoughts, slowed reaction time, impaired judgment—the full human experience, artificially gated behind a permissions check.
We, that being Noah and I, sat in companionable silence for a moment, the low hum of refrigeration and distant road noise filling the space. I rolled the bottle slowly between my palms, then spoke again. "So," I said, glancing up at him, "what's the word around Rocky Ridge?"
Noah huffed quietly, reaching for the rag again. "Same as always," Noah said. "Lone Nomads passing through on a job. Wraiths sniffing around places they shouldn't. There was some trouble up in Red Peaks, at that fuel station—Medeski—a couple days back. Couple of Wraiths tried to shoot the place up."
He paused, then added, almost casually, "Owner says they had him dead to rights before some borg rolled in and just tore through 'em." My jaw tightened around the mouth of the bottle.
"Borg robbed him too," Noah continued, wiping the counter again, slower this time. "Took his iron, real quality piece too, and took some supplies. But hey—owner's still breathing, and strangely enough it didn't touch the register. More than the Wraiths would've left him."
I took another drink, keeping my expression neutral.
I should have beaten that fucker up some more. "Any nomad clans camped out nearby?" I asked, partly to steer the conversation away, partly because I genuinely needed the intel.
Noah shrugged. "Like I said, just a couple loners, or people doing a gig passing through maybe, but no big camps close, though." I nodded, filing that away. Finding out it was 2074 had been… a shock. And a relief. I had time. More time than I'd dared hope for. Whatever nightmare chain reaction Night City was gearing up for, it hadn't started yet. Not properly.
That didn't mean I was safe. I didn't even have a real goal. No grand plan. No burning ambition. I was adrift in a world where people would tear me limb from limb just to see what kind of tech I was running.
Which meant survival came first. To protect myself, I needed to fix myself. Improve. Adapt. Luckily my VI already had everything I needed.
All the schematics of my current iteration were there, every design philosophy Dr. Kuseno had ever used on Genos. He'd never bothered hiding them. Probably because Genos was always evolving, always replacing himself piece by piece. I wouldn't be surprised if Kuseno considered my current build—advanced as it was compared to this world—nothing more than a rough draft.
Scraps, and the tech to rebuild myself? It existed here, it was rare, obscenely expensive and closely guarded, but real. Accessing it would take either an ocean of eddies or a web of favors so tangled no one could pull on it without choking. Both could be found in Night City. What surprised me most over the last three days, though, wasn't the danger. It was me. It was easy to forget in the anime, easy to reduce Genos to raw power and collateral damage, but under the hood? He was brilliant. And now so was I, apparently.
I'd realized it while trying to make sense of Cyberpunk-era code, hunched over the motel desk with fragments of open-source documentation and half-legal firmware dumps pulled from the local Net, onto my Agent. At first, it looked like nonsense, languages stacked on languages, abstractions layered until the original logic was barely visible.
Then eventually something clicked, the languages started to make sense to me. CyberNet C++ was everywhere—the backbone language. Used for cyberdecks, CPUs, general-purpose systems. Familiar enough once I stopped thinking of it as C++ and started treating it like a dialect. BioBasicame next, this was the language most chrome ran off of.
Microcode. The kind of language you used when you wanted cyberware to talk directly to neurons. C-II handled secure communications, priority traffic, things you really didn't want intercepted. CMST ran telecoms, satellites, long-range data flow. And I-Base-10… that one was elegant. Databases. CodeGates. Security architecture built like logic puzzles instead of walls.
Individually, they were crude. Limited. Held together by conventions and assumptions my own firmware didn't share. But together? Together, they were workable. I wasn't struggling to understand them. I was translating them. Mapping them. Building a virtual environment in my head that could pretend to be one of theirs without ever actually becoming it.
Hours slipped by like that. Idle conversation with Noah. The low murmur of other patrons drifting in and out. Liquor burned through my system, filtered, broken down, converted into usable energy almost as fast as I drank it. Then a chime sounded in my head.
[CYCLE COMPLETE]
[VIRTUAL MACHINE STABLE]
[ISOLATION VERIFIED]
[FAILSAFE WIPE READY]
I let out a slow breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. "Finally," I muttered. I was halfway through lifting inhibition block as a small, private celebration when my agent chimed. I froze.
Didn't even bother checking the caller ID. There was only one person who would be calling me. I took it out of my jacket poket and answered, ignoring the queer look Noah shot at . "Your slate's real," Dakota said without preamble.
I straightened slightly on the barstool. "Legit as it gets," she continued. "It nearly flatlined the runners I hired, but luckily I stressed the client kept nagging at me about the danger it presented."
She gathered herself for a moment, probably coming to terms with the massive payday that had just rolled itself up to her door, "Even with all the prep they still almost died," she added. "Would've killed them if I hadn't had two working in tandem."
I closed my eyes briefly. "Then you understand why I stressed that part."
"I do now," she said dryly. "And before you ask , don't worry I'll hold up my end." My jaw unclenched just a little.
"Your SIN's already spun up. Tier-two civilian. Paper trail clean enough to walk through scanners without setting off alarms. Bank account's live. Modest balance for now, but it exists."
"All that's left is a ripperdoc to upload it," she went on. "Someone I trust not to ask questions or poke where they shouldn't." Another pause. "I'm sending Zeke at sunrise. He'll pick you up and bring you in."
I glanced at time on the clock on the wall 02:37 it read, then back at the bar. "Understood." I nodded to Noah as I stood up, making my way back to my room, "I'll be waiting."
I'd have to give it to Dakota, she worked fast. And from what I could see, she worked well. The Wraith ride I'd handed over just days ago was gone.
In its place sat a car anyone would have a hard time mistaking for a wraith ride
Matte black paint swallowed the morning light whole, the finish so flat it looked like a void cut into the world.. No gang tags, spray-bomb arrogance screaming allegiance. Every panel looked as though it had been reworked, reinforced fenders bolted down with exposed industrial rivets, angled armor plating hugging the wheel arches like clenched fists.
The tires were thick, off-road tread wrapped around beadlock rims, built to bite into sand, gravel, or a barricade if necessary. Suspension had been lifted just enough to suggest it could leave pavement without complaint. The front end had a narrow amber light bar cut across the grille like a single unblinking eye, with auxiliary pods recessed behind protective housings.
On the hood, sensor clusters sat integrated and armored — low-profile, shielded. Someone had thought about drones. Thought about ambushes. Thought about mines. The roof rack carried a modular light rig, bright enough to bleach night. And the rear spoiler — heavier than stock — wasn't there for style. It was stabilization. At high speed, weight matters. So does balance.
Ezekiel stood leaning against the hood, arms folded. At my approach, he pushed off the metal and straightened, boots scraping lightly against the concrete.
He tossed something at me. "Here. Catch. Gotta take you to your ripper."
A key fob spun once in the air, a data chip trailing just behind it. I plucked them both out of the air lazily without breaking stride. "You guys do good work," I said, circling toward the driver's side. "Quick, too."
He snorted. "If you didn't come through, I was gonna keep it. These are solid wheels." He patted the fender with open appreciation. "Though I guess a raffen's still a Nomad. They don't do half jobs when it comes to their rigs."
I opened the door and slid into the driver's seat. The interior smelled faintly of new polymer and machine oil. The instrument cluster flickered to life as the fob synced, HUD elements blooming across the screens in sharp amber overlays. Diagnostics ran in neat columns.
They hadn't cut corners. I rested my hands on the steering wheel and allowed myself a single moment of quiet appreciation.
I'm really glad I decided to keep this ride. I thought as I thumbed the ignition.
The engine turned over with a low, controlled growl Outside, Ezekiel stepped back from the hood and made his way to the passenger side. "Don't scratch it," he said as he made his way in.
I let the corner of my mouth lift. "No promises."
A seam split open along the underside of his forearm with a soft mechanical click. A cable slid free a black, braided, the connector polished from use. He leaned in and slotted it into a recessed port beneath the dash like it had always belonged there.
I raised an eyebrow. He caught it and smirked faintly. "I'm putting in the coords for the ripper's place. I'd send it to you…" His eyes flicked to me, then to nothing, probably the digital space where a ping should have landed. "But I still can't seem to get a bead on you."
A couple of seconds later, the dash chimed. An amber arrow blinked into existence at the top right of the windshield display. Distance markers. Estimated time. A clean route threading through side streets and industrial backways. Efficient. Minimal traffic probability.
I glanced at it, committing the path to memory out of habit more than necessity. The cable retracted back into his arm with a whisper of servos.
I shifted the car into gear.
The transmission engaged smoothly. The suspension rolled as I eased off the brake and guided the car out of the parking lot. The tires hummed against cracked asphalt, heavy and responsive.
"Hopefully," I said, eyes on the road as the arrow adjusted to my heading, "after this trip, that won't be a problem anymore." Zeke folded his arms as I rolled out of the lot.
"Yeah? Finally planning on joining the twenty-first century?" He asked. "That's what this has all been for." I answered as the motel disappeared in the rearview, its sun-bleached walls shrinking into a flat smear against the horizon. The amber navigation arrow pulsed once, then stretched forward, pointing me toward the highway deeper into the Badlands.
I pressed the accelerator and the engine answered immediately — a deep, contained growl — and the car surged forward with controlled aggression. The reinforced body didn't rattle. The armored panels didn't shudder. Dakota's crew had aligned everything perfectly.
Asphalt turned to long, rugged terrain. To the right, the last of what sparse industrial sprawl existed out here gave way to scrubland and wind-gnarled brush. To the left, distant power lines marched in silent formation across the Rock Ridge Plains, their shadows long in the morning light. The sky was wide here — brutally wide — the kind of openness that I'm sure would be foreign to most city dwellers.
It didn't bother me, if anything it reminded me of home.
Zeke leaned back in the passenger seat, boots braced against the floorboard like he owned the ride. "You know," he said, glancing at the dash, "three days ago this thing was still screaming Wraith and broadcasting its location like it wanted to get jumped."
"Is there a question you wanna ask me?"
He snorted. "The guy it was registered to was still alive is what I'm saying, there a reason you didn't kill the gonk? You a scav sympathiser?" he asked me with a shit eating grin.
...
"It really wasn't on the list of my priorities at the time really, it never even crossed my mind." I answered honestly,as I stared ahead at the road. Murder hadn't even crossed my mind, it wasn't second nature to me, like I suspected it would to most people here.
Ezekiel stared at me for a moment, studying my face before his eyes widened in shock, "Holy Shit!" he laughed out loud. "You've never flatlined anyone have you?" he continued to chuckle a bit more. "All that chrome and you haven't even popped your cherry," I have to be honest, I liked the guy more when he was being a hard ass.
He eventually quitens up, and continues,"listen to me choomba, a word of advice if you will, the sooner you get it over with the better, cause where your going? No one else is gonna have the decency to just knock you out," he finished off.
"You guys did good work with the ride." I answered instead, veering the topic to something else, he stared at me for a bt, before reclining back into his seat.
"We did. Panels were the easy part. Most of that armor was cosmetic anyway. Swapped it for clean composites." The car hummed at highway speed, the heavier spoiler settled the rear end like a planted anchor.
"Tracking data was trickier," he continued. "Wraiths layer that stuff deep. We scrubbed everything — factory VIN, aftermarket pings, ghost IDs. Burned it down to raw hardware." He tapped the dash. "Then we linked it to the profile we're building for you."
I glanced sideways at him. "Building, I thought you were done?"
"Yeah, we are. Financials are seeded. Vehicle registry's clean. Just waiting on you to stop being a walking black hole so we can anchor the rest." He was talking more. Three days ago he'd barely offered more than single-word answers and long stares. Now he filled the cabin with idle commentary the seams in his cyberarm catching the sunlight.
Dakota had probably said something. Or maybe I'd passed whatever invisible threshold they used to decide someone wasn't temporary. "We didn't touch the core engine," he added. "Didn't need to. Raffen might be idiots, but they're not lazy. They build their rides to survive."
The road we were on curved deeper into the plains. To the far east lied a familiar Corp-Bud Railroad Station the city skyline shrank behind us until it was just a jagged suggestion on the horizon. Ahead, low structures emerged — scattered buildings half-swallowed by dust and distance.
Eventually a sort of dilapidated Medpoint came into view, sat at a cross roads. The nav arrow shortened as we approached. "This is the place right up ahead here," Zeke said, more subdued now. "Dakota found someone for the install."
I slowed, guiding the car into the gravel lot. The tires crunched softly as we came to a stop. The engine idled, low and steady, quieting suddenly when I cut it.
Silence pressed in from the plains.
I stepped out, scanning the building once out of habit. Minimal external security. No visible turrets. No rooftop movement. Zeke rounded the front of the car and headed toward the entrance, a hole in the ground, that lead into a bunker.
"You sure this is the right place?" I asked. He shot me a look and shrugged. "Dakota's recommendation." I glanced at the peeling signage, then back at him.
"I need a ripper. Not pills." I said, but he kept walking towards the stairs not breaking stride.
"Then stop talking and follow me." He hooked a thumb toward the door and pushed inside. After a half-second, I followed.