The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Wunderwaffles and Nashir.
Operative Somebody Sad.
Director DeadZoneXD!
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
- Abraham Lincoln
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They were barely two blocks from Vik's clinic when Santi pulled up Arturo Vargas's contact on his Agent and hit the line. The call connected on the second ring, and a familiar voice answered as the sound of a sports broadcast played somewhere in the background.
"Ghost, my man, calling me back so soon?" Arturo said. "It hasn't even been a day, and I just can't help but wonder what it could be. Por el amor de Dios, don't tell me the warehouse blew up or something."
"I think you'd already know if something happened to the warehouse, Arturo. I need you to find me a truck," Santi said, keeping his tone casual, yet professional as Julia navigated the congested streets of Little China toward the expressway. "I need a Kaukaz Bratsk U4020 with an enclosed cargo bed and loading tools. I need it parked outside my unit by three this afternoon, four at the latest."
There was a pause on the other end, followed by the sound of a chair creaking as Arturo shifted his weight. "A Bratsk? Damn, kid, that's a full-size rig. You moving the entire warehouse or something?"
"None of your business," Santi dismissed his question. "Can you get me one or not?"
"Can I get you one?" Arturo asked, sounding mildly offended. "Choom, I got four of them sitting in a lot behind my Rancho facility, but only one that matches your necessities. She ain't pretty, but she runs clean, though price-wise, it'll run you five hundred eddies a day for the rental."
Santi thought about it for a second and nodded to himself. "Done deal."
"Whoa, hold on, hold on," Arturo said. "There's a catch, amigo. The Bratsk requires a Class-C commercial operator's license to drive legally in Night City. Now, I don't care if you got one or not, but the Badges sure do. If they pull you over in a commercial rig without the proper docs, that's impound, fines, and questions that neither of us want to answer."
Santi rolled his eyes as he already knew where this was going. "How much?"
"Two hundred extra," Arturo replied. "It'll be off the books. I got a buddy at the DMV processing center in Arroyo who can flag the vehicle registration as a pre-approved corporate logistics run for the day. If a badge scans the plates, it'll ping back as a routine Petrochem freight delivery, clean and simple."
"So that'll be seven hundred total. Fine," Santi said with a bit of fabricated reluctance. "You want me to transfer the eddies now or on delivery?"
"I'll never say no to upfront eddies," Arturo said. "And Ghost? She'll be parked outside your unit by three. Keys in the wheel well and everything."
Santi executed the transfer, routing the seven hundred eddies through the Aiden protocol out of habit, even though the amount was small enough that a direct transfer would have been fine, but old habits died hard, especially the ones that kept your identity hidden.
"Pleasure doing biz," Santi said.
"No, haha, pleasure is all mine, kid," Arturo said with an audible grin. "Stay frosty, my ghostly friend."
The line cut, and Santi leaned back in the passenger seat, mentally running through the plans for the evening. The drop with Meredith Stout was at ten tonight, and it'd take place on that decommissioned Petrochem freight terminal off Edgewood Street. That gave him roughly eleven hours to secure the truck, learn how to drive it, load the goods, and get everything into position.
Eleven hours sounded like plenty of time. But anyone with common sense knew that eleven hours in Night City was an eternity for things to go sideways.
"Who were you talking with?" Julia asked, glancing at him as they merged onto the expressway.
"Arturo," Santi replied. "The guy who rented me the warehouse. I'm getting a truck to move some of the cargo today."
"And you know how to drive a truck, how?" Julia asked.
Santi scratched the back of his head as he answered. "Well, I don't know how to do so yet. But it can't be that hard."
Julia deadpanned at him. "Santiago. You're telling me you just rented a truck you don't know how to drive."
"I'm going to learn, Ma," Santi said. "I just need to find a BD for it."
"Ay Dios mío," Julia muttered, turning her attention back to the road while shaking her head. "Your father would have had a heart attack."
Santi chuckled as he pictured how his father would've reacted based on the stuff he'd done as a child. "Pa would've been impressed."
"Ale would've smacked you upside the head and then been impressed," Julia corrected with a small smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
While Julia drove, Santi closed his eyes and dipped into the local commercial subnet. The Kabuki network fell away as they crossed into Santo Domingo's grid, and the architecture shifted in the Kiroshis' display. Whereas Kabuki's Net was a dense and chaotic neon jungle, overloaded with competing data streams from a thousand storefronts and pachinko parlors, Santo Domingo's grid was different. The data nodes were larger and spaced further apart, and the connection pathways were thicker, carrying the immense bandwidth of power plants, factory control systems, and other logistics networks from the solar farms in the Jackson Plains that kept Night City's lights on, to Biotechnica's farms.
And he could see all of it. Instead of the blurry, internally constructed approximation he had been forcing his brain to render for years, he was able to see the actual architecture, projected in clean, 16K high-definition clarity across his retinal display. Every node and every ICE barrier were rendered in colors and geometric structures that his ganic vision had never been able to perceive.
'Yeah,' he thought to himself. 'I was definitely handicapping myself.'
He navigated to the commercial BD marketplaces that operated in the grey space between legal and illegal on Santo Domingo's subnet. The braindance market in Night City was massive, and while the corporate storefronts sold sanitized, consumer-grade experiences like "A Day at the Beach" or "Skydiving Over the Badlands," the real market operated underground, selling anything from combat training BDs, to surgical procedure tutorials, language acquisition packages, and, if you knew where to look, automotive operation simulations.
He needed a specific BD. Not just "how to drive a truck," but a Kaukaz Bratsk U4020 operational experience, and since the Bratsk was a beast of a vehicle with a hydraulic rear cargo lift that required its own set of operational knowledge, driving it wasn't like driving a regular car Galena. It was closer to piloting a small building than anything.
Unfortunately for Santi, his usual BD vendors didn't carry anything as menial as learning how to operate a Bratsk, since honestly, who the fuck wanted to learn how to drive one? But as he expanded his search radius, pulling up vendor listings across the Santo Domingo and Arroyo subnet nodes, one certain storefront he hadn't seen before caught his attention.
The vendor page was well-organized and specialized exclusively in automotive content. Driving simulations for every major vehicle class in Night City. Mechanic tutorials covering engine rebuilds, transmission swaps, suspension tuning, and ECU calibration. Racing BDs recorded from actual street racers running the circuits in Japantown and the Badlands. And, sitting right there in the commercial vehicle category was a Kaukaz Bratsk U4020 full operational BD.
Santi pulled up the seller's profile, noticing that the vendor's handle was "El Capitan." Whoever this gonk was, they were hew to the subnet, at least on the commercial side. The account was only three months old, but the BD catalogue was extensive and priced competitively. The reviews from buyers were solid, averaging 4.8 out of 5 across forty-seven transactions. Whoever this person was, they knew their shit.
He pinged the vendor through the subnet's encrypted messaging system.
[Ghost]: You carry a Bratsk U4020 operational BD. Full sim or partial?
Santi received the response faster than expected.
[El Capitan]: Full sim, amigo. Sixty minutes of real-world operational data recorded from an actual licensed operator. Covers startup sequence, all fourteen gears, highway and urban driving, reverse maneuvering, and full hydraulic lift operation for the rear cargo bed. I'm selling you the real deal.
[Ghost]: Who recorded it?
[El Capitan]: Yours truly. Well, a colleague of mine. I work in logistics, so getting seat time in a Bratsk isn't exactly hard. Figured there was a market for people who needed to operate commercial rigs without going through the six-week DMV certification process.
[Ghost]: Smart hustle. Your catalogue seems solid enough, and you cover a lot of ground for a three-month-old vendor.
[El Capitan]: Appreciate that. But what can I say? Cars are my thing. Always have been. The BD biz is just a side project. My day job covers the bills, but this is where the passion lives.
Santi stared at the message for a moment, then opened his eyes in meatspace and looked over at Julia. "Ma, I found the BD I need. The seller seems legit. I'm going to hop on a call with him to verify the product before I buy."
Julia nodded without taking her eyes off the road. "Just don't go spending a fortune on it."
Santi closed his eyes again, navigated back to the vendor's storefront, and sent a follow-up message.
[Ghost]: You do voice calls? I want to verify the BD quality before I drop eddies on it.
[El Capitan]: Sure thing. Give me a sec to route through a line.
Thirty seconds later, Santi's Agent chimed with an incoming encrypted call. He accepted, and a warm, energetic male voice filled his audio feed.
"Ghost, right?" a man said on the other end of the line. "Nice to put a voice to the handle. Name's not your biz, but I go by El Capitan. I'm just a guy who loves cars and figured out how to make some scratch off that love."
"What's the day job you mentioned?" Santi asked, his voice pitched low.
"Petrochem," El Capitan said, without a hint of shame. "I do supply chain logistics, coordinate CHOOH2 transport routes across the Santo Domingo district. I'll be honest and admit I ain't the biggest fan of corpos myself, but it pays the rent and gets me access to just about every commercial vehicle Petrochem operates while giving me enough downtime to record BDs during my shifts. The company doesn't know, obviously. If they did, they'd probably fire me, sue me, and then fire me again."
Santi let out a genuine chuckle. "A corpo running a side hustle selling BDs. That's a new one."
"Hey, a man's gotta eat," El Capitan laughed. "And let me tell you, the corporate salary ain't what they promise you in the recruitment vids. But enough about my sad life. You said you wanted to verify the Bratsk BD. What do you need to know?"
"Recording quality and Sensory depth," Santi said. "For that, I need full proprioceptive data, not just visual and audio. I want to feel my foot on the accelerator, the clutch engagement, the steering resistance, and the weight distribution during turns. If I'm learning to drive this thing from a BD, I want to get the full experience."
"Oh, you're a purist," El Capitan said, a smile in his voice. "I respect that. The Bratsk BD is recorded at full sensory depth. Proprioceptive, vestibular, haptic, whatever it is you want, you'll get. You'll feel the fourteen-speed transmission click through every gear. You'll feel the steering pull when the cargo bed is loaded versus empty. And the hydraulic lift sequence at the end? I recorded that with a full twenty-ton payload, so you'll get the real-world resistance data. You have my word that you'll get the real deal and the actual experience of operating the rig."
Santi was sold, but he wasn't about to let the conversation end there. Not when he was talking to someone who clearly lived and breathed engines.
"What else do you carry in terms of builds?" He asked. "I saw you've got mechanic BDs. You do engine rebuilds?"
"Do I do engine rebuilds?" El Capitan repeated, sounding almost insulted. "Amigo, I've got full teardown-and-reassembly BDs for the Quadra Type-66, the Thorton Mackinaw, the Mizutani Shion, and I'm currently recording one for the Rayfield Caliburn, which, let me tell you, was not easy to get access to. The Caliburn's ECU alone has more encryption than most corpo servers. Took me two weeks just to get the diagnostic suite running without tripping the anti-tampering protocols."
"What about CHOOH2 conversions?" Santi asked. "To be a little more specific, I'm talking about retrofitting pre-Krash combustion engines to run on synthetic fuel?"
There was a pause. "Now that's a question you don't hear every day. Most people want to go the other direction, converting modern rigs to run on alternative power sources. Pre-Krash conversions... you're talking about old muscle cars, aren't you?"
"Maybe," Santi said.
"Oh, man," El Capitan breathed, and Santi could hear the genuine excitement bleeding through the corpo's professionalism. "You've got a pre-Krash ride? What is it? A Quadra ancestor? One of those old Chevys?"
"Something rarer," Santi said, a smile creeping across his face.
"Don't do this to me, Ghost," El Capitan said. "You can't dangle that in front of a gearhead and then go cryptic."
"Let's just say it's a '70s V8 with a lot of potential and leave it there," Santi said with a slight grin.
"A '70s V8..." El Capitan trailed off, and Santi could practically hear the man's brain cycling through the database of pre-Krash muscle cars. "If you've actually got one, you're sitting on a goldmine. And yeah, I've got a BD for CHOOH2 conversions on big-block V8 engines. Recorded it from a Badlands mechanic who's been doing them for twenty years. Full teardown, fuel rail conversion, injector swap, ECU fabrication from scratch. It's my best-selling niche product."
"How much for the Bratsk BD and the V8 conversion BD?"
"Bratsk is five hundred eddies. V8 conversion is eight hundred. Total's thirteen hundred. And before you even think about asking, let me stop you right there." El Capitan's tone shifted a bit, still maintaining its friendliness. "I don't care how much of a passion we share when it comes to cars, Ghost. I ain't giving you a discount. These BDs are priced fairly, the quality is top-tier, and my margins are already tight enough that my accountant, which is also me, would have a stroke."
Santi laughed. A real, genuine laugh that surprised even him. "Alright, alright. Fair enough. Sending the eddies now."
He executed the transfer of thirteen hundred eddies, and his Agent chimed with the incoming BD files a moment later. Two high-density braindance packages, each tagged with El Capitan's vendor signature and a satisfaction guarantee.
"Pleasure doing biz, Ghost," El Capitan said. "And hey, if you ever want to talk shop about that V8 build, you know where to find me. I'm serious. I'd kill to see a pre-Krash muscle car running on CHOOH2. That's bucket-list stuff right there."
"I'll keep that in mind," Santi said. "And by the way, Capitan, you're selling yourself short, real short. I'd be charging upwards of twenty five hundred eddies for the V8 engine BD."
"Well, prices can increase later on, but you have to start somewhere," El Capitan said.
"Fair enough," Santi agreed. "Be seeing you, Capitan."
"Nova. Pleasure doing biz, amigo," El Capitan said.
Santi cut the line and opened his eyes in the passenger seat, a faint smile still lingering on his face as the familiar facades of Rancho Coronado scrolled past the Galena's windows.
"You look happy," Julia observed.
"Just met a gearhead corpo selling car BDs out of his Petrochem cubicle," Santi said. "Reminded me that not every corpo in this city is a soulless corpo."
"Give him time," Julia said dryly as she thought of her dead husband.
They stopped at the house just long enough for Santi to grab his BD wreath from the desk in his bedroom and for Julia to heat up a container of leftovers in the microwave. They ate standing up in the kitchen, passing the single fork back and forth, and within twenty minutes, they were back in the Galena heading toward Arroyo.
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Stones... aren't they lovely? If you agree, let me see yours...
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).