Chapter 1: Sofie
I
Sofie
Night City, 2075
Darkness enveloped her as the digital light of cyberspace faded away into the deepest recesses of her mind. Slowly, the lights in the room came on. Sofie was illuminated by a trio of monitors suspended above her by mechanical arms. She lay in a tub of lukewarm water, as steam rose from her skin. Prepared to deep dive into the net for several hours, she had filled the tub with ice to prevent permanent brain damage. She always felt a little woozy after diving, regardless.
After her disconnect routine, checking her vitals, running virus scans, and ensuring that every bit of data was in its proper place, Sofie rose from the tub. Water dripped into the rubber mat next to the tub as Sofie reached for a towel. She wrapped it around herself as she slipped a pair of plastic slippers onto her feet and shuffled sleepily to the shower. Cold water washed over her, cooling her overworked implants and jolting her awake faster than any coffee or energy drink.
She reached for one of the coffee packets sitting on the counter anyway and emptied the packet into a cup filled with tap water, stirred it and set the cup inside the microwave. As it hummed to life, Sofie walked across the room and began collecting scattered articles of clothing from the floor, a chair, and her bed. She tossed them into the laundry machine hidden behind a sliding wall panel then opened the dryer nestled above it and began to dress.
When she retrieved her coffee, Sofie was wearing a pair of blue athletic shorts with pink trim and a black tank top with a faded band logo. Sipping her coffee and burning her tongue, Sofie sat at her desk. The arms carrying her monitors slid around each other as the screens came to rest in a pyramid above the keyboard.
Two years ago, when Sofie had arrived in Night City, she had been a fugitive on the run from one of Norway’s largest corps. Now she lived under the protective shadow of the Wire Hounds—Ruthless lords of Megabuilding H5—expecting that one of her “siblings” might appear at any time. So far no one had come for her, but she knew it was only a matter of time. Mother would not abide one of her “little ones” exercising even a modicum of independence.
The screens in front of Sofie flickered as lines of code scrolled across them. Her system would scrub every news outlet and social media site in Night City for even a telltale sign of Ymir Skandatek’s presence. It also checked every camera feed that wasn’t coated in multiple layers of ICE for anything resembling the logo, or the armored clothing that Sofie had been wearing when she went rogue. She had stuffed it in a locker under her bed as soon as she had found a suitable replacement and created the image recognition system profile to scan for another set of the stuff.
The scroll of her code came to a halt as a popup appeared reading MATCH NOT FOUND. Sofie breathed a sigh of relief and leaned back in the chair, pushing herself back from the desk and allowing the chair to spin in place until it came to a stop. She drained the rest of her coffee and tossed it into the waste bin next to the door as she stood and walked over. She stooped to tie up the trash bag, replaced it with a new one, then pressed her palm to the scanner next to the door.
Stepping out of her apartment, Sofie was engulfed in a world of sound and lights. She could hear the echo of advertisements playing on giant screens throughout the megastructure and the wider city outside. Neon signs glowed along the walkways declaring that some units in the building were shops of various persuasions.
Though the building was controlled by the Wire Hounds, most of the people who lived here were regular N.C. citizens. The Hounds ran the tower like a fortress crossed with a corporation—efficient, brutal, profitable. In the Atrium, citizens flowed past armed enforcers in neon green, while signs bearing snarling dog skulls and tangled wires watched from the walls.
Many of the megabuilding’s tenants were headed home from a long day of work. Only a few were leaving their homes for the evening like Sofie was. Interspersed among the crowds, Sofie could spot men and women sporting the gang’s colors and weapons.
For the most part, as long as nobody in the building started causing trouble for the gangers, they left everyone alone and otherwise acted as guards within the building. They might step in to break up fights, but mostly they kept people out of the zones that the gang had deemed “employees only.”
When Sofie had first taken up lodgings on the gang’s turf, she had paid the standard fare, a steep fifteen-hundred Eurodollars every month. That was before they had discovered her talents as a runner. She had first paid with a stash of Eddies held over from her time between fleeing Ymir Skandatek and leaving Europe for good.
After she’d defected from “the family” Sofie had been taken in by Marek Albrecht, a former Militech soldier. He was the one who taught her how to manage on her own. They worked independently, but something between them had flickered into a brief romance, until Albrecht left.
Sofie shook her head, scattering thoughts of Marek to the wind. She smiled at the tattooed woman standing guard as she opened the door and entered into one of the off-limits areas. The gangers had discovered her skill as a runner a few months after Sofie had moved in, following a job gone wrong.
Sofie had received the contract through a fixer. The job was simple: Feed a scavenger crew the wrong drop point for their goods and let another crew take it from there. Sofie figured it’d be easy Eddies, and she could keep those nasty fuckers from taking any more innocent lives just for their chrome. Instead, Sofie found a trap set by one of her “siblings,” the other eight kids given to or taken by Ymir Skandatek and made into operatives for their “mother” the CEO, Yrsa Hrafnsdottir.
The others had given in to the corp’s mental conditioning, only Sofie had been able to break free. If it had been her mental fortitude or just a failure of their system in her instance she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know whether the trap was set to capture and return her to the fold, or just an attempt to end her then and there. She didn’t even know which of her former family had carried out the hit.
She had just barely escaped by faking a flatline through her Biomon signal and committing an unsafe jack-out from the net with a DeckKrash daemon turned on its master. She’d almost fried her brain and only just managed to call a Trauma Team to her rescue. That was how she met Nina.
Nina Jiang stayed with Sofie long after her duty called her to once she’d been delivered to the hospital. She’d never been able to articulate why exactly, but she had anyway. After Sofie was discharged Nina stuck around and offered something new to Sofie: calm. Late-night conversations turned into rooftop dinners, then something more. Nina made Sofie believe that maybe she could be more than a weapon.
But truth has a way of bleeding through scars. Nina found traces of Ymir Skandatek software in Sofie’s gear and the walls Sofie had started to lower went right back up. Their parting wasn’t explosive—it was the slow death of something fragile that couldn’t survive secrecy.
Sofie shook her head again as she walked down the hall to the server room. Why were her thoughts so clouded today? She probably just needed to completely disconnect from the net for a day or two and get some extra sleep. As she reached the door to the server room, she heard a sound behind her and turned to see Ares leaving one of the rooms she had passed on her way here.
He waved as she spotted him, then reached into his pocket and retrieved his Agent, shaking it back and forth in a familiar gesture: “I’ll be free if you want to check in.”
Ares was the one who had first recognized Sofie’s talents. Unlike most of the Wire Hounds—snarlers in synth-leather with kill protocols wired to their reflexes—Ares had a calm presence, a softness that didn’t quite belong to a gang known for scorched wire and split skulls. He’d been posted as floor lead, part of a quieter breed of Hounds known as the Stray Eyes—watchful, patient, and far more dangerous than they looked.
When Sofie missed rent for the first time, still reeling from the collapse of things with Nina, it wasn’t a snarl or threat that greeted her, but a knock and a quiet offer: “Need help?” It was a kindness out of place in Night City, and completely alien among the Hounds.
But Ares saw what others didn’t. He vouched for her. Pulled the right strings. Got her into the system. Soon she was reinforcing ICE across the Hounds’ turf, consulting on data fort layout and node security and Derezzing malware as if on instinct. The green dog’s head meant protection now, not paranoia.
That was the irony of it. Ares, the one with the conscience, wore the collar but never really belonged. Sofie, the runaway weapon—haunted, hardened, and half machine—fit the hounds like chrome in a socket.
She smiled as she lifted her hand to her cheek, thumb and little finger extended to vaguely mimic answering a call on her own Agent. Ares seemed satisfied and tucked his device back into his pocket as he turned to leave. Sofie heard the door leading back into the atrium close behind him as she entered the server room.
The room had two other occupants: A large rack of computers wired together in sequence to form the hardware basis of the building’s data fort, and a Techie with an overabundance of tools, gadgets, and half finished projects stuffed into the pockets of his tool belt and coveralls. The young man had a shaved head revealing the thin silver seams indicating a few neural implants across his skull. His arms were both artificial, each containing several hidden compartment hiding a plethora of tools. Sofie had seen him produce everything from small screwdrivers to an entire cyber hand from within. The hand had been stocked with even more tools and could be swapped out in just a few seconds, for either his right or left thanks to the specially designed fingers and thumb that bent both ways.
He was deep in concentration fiddling with a small cube covered in exposed wires and other electronic components and jumped as soon as Sofie spoke, “Anything out of the ordinary today, Matthew?”
“Nope, nothing at all,” he said as he regained his composure, “did you bring it?”
“Sure,” Sofie poked at one of the chip sockets behind her right ear and ejected a data shard.
“You’re the best!” Matthew’s eyes lit up as she produced the shard, then literally lit up again as he executed a mental command and wired her the agreed upon number of Eddies. Sofie had been living rent free, thanks to the deal Ares had struck with their bosses, but she had started to grow bored without any additional work. Besides, what kind of gonk turns down a few extra Eddies in her pocket for just as easy a task as copying a bunch of old samurai flicks? It’s not like the movies had even been stolen, just duplicated and put on another drive.
Matthew’s grin shone as he popped the shard into one of the slots behind his ear. Sofie could hear him muttering excitedly to himself as she left the server room. Her empty stomach grumbled as she reentered the Atrium. Time to refuel.
But what to eat?
She had a few packages of instant noodles, some freeze dried “fruit,” and a few other assorted bits of junk food lying around the apartment, but none of it seemed appealing. Weaving through the crowded common area, she found the elevator and stepped inside. The doors slid shut as she tapped the button indicating the ground floor.
Tom’s Diner. She decided as her stomach growled again. It was a short walk to the little restaurant tucked away in an alleyway. Tom’s Diner was usually a good choice when Sofie needed food. The place seamlessly blended the feeling of eating in an all night diner from a hundred years ago with the current obsession with all sorts of tech. Tables between red syn-leather booths lined the outer wall, where the occupants could look out the large window. On the other side of the diner, stools allowed visitors to sit at the bar where they could talk to the owner as he cooked, or look up into the several television screens mounted on the wall. The TVs mostly played JustAds, but occasionally a news story would pop up, though the channel was immediately changed whenever said stories covered anything corporate. Especially if that corp was Arasaka.
A radio in the corner played a steady stream of old rock and pop songs. Occasionally the radio DJ would take over the mic for a few minutes and rail against the corps or talk about various conspiracy theories, or as he called them, Night City Mysteries. Sofie never lent any weight to stuff like that. After all, the Arasaka family being vampires was a reassuring thought compared to the things she knew those at the top of the corporate world were actually doing. In the darkness, she had been unable to resist as the men in their fancy suits had strapped her down on the ripper’s table. She had screamed and begged, to no avail. She had been eviscerated and rebuilt, the implants in her skull and spine had shrieked inside her head for months before she’d learned to tune them out. Her eyes were blinded by the multitudes of information that filled her field of vision. Her arms had been taken from her and replaced with a pair that looked identical, save for the thin silver seams crisscrossing the Realskinn hiding metal and wires beneath. Worst of all was the Sandevistan. Attuning her senses to the speedware had taken weeks. First the implant had dulled her senses as everything around her became a blur of light and motion. Later it drew time out into an infinite plane before her, every second becoming an unending aeon. Eventually she’d learned how to use the thing, but only activated it as a last resort.
Sofie had never once added further implants to her body of her own volition. As useful as she found the tech and teachings of her old life, she’d also seen firsthand the havoc that chrome could wreak on the body or mind of those who were not careful: Cyberpsychosis. Sofie sat in one of the booths in the back, with a clear view of the door. She ordered her breakfast and paid up front when the waitress, a woman in a yellow dress and white apron approached the table. Sofie stared out the window. This booth had just the perfect angle that she could see straight through the bustling city to the edge of Del Coronado Bay, and Morro Rock. Sofie had arrived in Night City via the NCX Spaceport two years ago, with nothing but the clothes on her back, the chrome in her head, and two thousand eurodollars tucked inside an empty socket in her right arm. She’d spent nearly everything she’d save while working with Marek to get here, taking a spaceplane in Low Earth Orbit. She’d found her apartment quickly with the help of a large “Vacancy” sign displayed in vivid green on the side of the megabuilding, and had paid for her first month in cash.
The first job she took in Night City had been a glorified IT department call. Some old lady in the megabuilding had locked herself out of her Agent and posted an actual paper ad in the halls. Sofie had taken the job, cracked the Agent in seconds with a ten-line program, and had netted herself enough cash to pay another month’s rent. She’d given the old lady her number in case she needed help again and left. So far, no calls. Following this, Sofie had started looking for work in various bars around town, met a number of fixers, and chosen a few sites on the net that seemed like they might turn something up. She created Daemons to probe these sites for jobs and try to snatch up any work that fell within her skillset. The fixers were hit or miss. Some seemed like they’d turn around and stab new clients in the back without hesitation, others seemed like they might stab her in the front. In Chinatown, Sofie took a job from a woman named Wakako Okada, to collect all the locations of scavenger hideouts in the Watson District off of a data fort that had frankly been in disarray. The ICE was so thin a child could have cracked it. Sofie got in and out without so much as the threat of an alarm going off. That gig had not only paid pretty well, but had opened her up to further work from Okada, who proved herself to be loyal and did not stab her contacts without very good reasons. It was the other fixer who’d turned out to be an issue.
Sofie hated to dwell on the clusterfuck of a gig, but as she finished her meal and stepped back onto the bustling street she found herself lost in thought anyway.
Mikhail Rennick, formerly a mid-tier fixer in Vista Del Rey had been the first to make the backstabbing play. After paying well for a couple gigs, he’d approached her with another of the usual fare: Plant a false route in the archives of a scav gang’s ledger, lead them into an ambush, and once the second crew had taken them out, she’d be paid a clean 6K.
Sofie’s first indication that the job was a setup came far too late. A lag spike rocked the data fort as she injected the falsified data, followed by a surge in Black ICE Daemons in the server. A synthetic fear response coiled itself around her brain, freezing her pointer thread and leaving her almost defenseless. Her saving grace was the cursed Sandevistan speedware the Ymir rippers had affixed to her spine. By activating it as soon as the Daemon flooding her mind with fear reached its limit, she was able to escape. Her mind dashed through the data fort, looking through every camera connected to it, searching to find a means of escape. She detonated an explosive device on the floor above her, a smart grenade foolishly left atop a cabinet near a CHOOH2 canister. She immediately turned to her own code, exploiting a flaw in her Biomon to fake a flatline and hide the rest of her life signs. Finally, she unleashed her DeckKrash daemon into her own cyberdeck and forcefully ejected herself from the data fort.
The maneuver had almost fried her brain as powerful electricity surged through her skull and she’d barely managed to dial the Trauma Team dispatch number before passing out. Needless to say: she didn’t get paid. But she never heard from Rennick again, and this event led her to meeting Nina and although that was only good for a short time, it was still good.
Sofie walked several blocks, cut through an alley, and emerged on the far side of the block. She turned and entered the storefront directly to her right. It hadn’t been until much later that she’d discovered that Rennick’s shit gig had been a trap lain by one of her siblings. She’d made the discovery in this very room.
“Hey Doc? You in here?” Sofie’s call echoed through the darkened room. It was a workshop littered with cybernetics. Some were laid out in nice displays, some were still in the packaging, others were half disassembled and strewn across various workbenches.
The sound of several pieces of machinery being tripped over clued Sofie in to where Navarro was hidden in the workshop. A tall woman with deeply tanned skin and wild hair tied into a messy braid emerged from a pile of prosthetics, adjusting a pair of tech-goggles that made her look like a deranged insect skittering out of the dark.
Elise Navarro was the only ripperdoc Sofie had ever gone to since her arrival in Night City. Nina had introduced them after Sofie had been released from the N.C. medical center. Navarro had helped her repair all the damage wrought upon her hardware during the botched gig. She’d even given Sofie advice when she’d started dating Nina and even though that was in the past, she always tried to get Sofie to try again, even if it just felt like an obligatory ritual anymore. “There’s my girl! What can I do for you today?” The lenses embedded in Elise’s goggles shifted focus as she leaned around a hanging pair of legs.
“Just want you to check me out and make sure all my chrome’s in good shape.”
“The usual then. Alright girl, just hop up on the chair and I’ll have a look,” Elise managed not to trip again s she stepped over a large box in her path, and grabbing an air-hypo from one of the many desks scattered around the workshop she turned back to Sofie, “Still sure you don’t want to expand your gallery? I’ve got some preem new toys from—”
“Nah, I’m good, Doc,” Sofie’s answer was always the same. Every bit of metal in her body had been placed there at her “mother’s” command. She’d never wished for any of it and no matter how much she had grown to enjoy her excursions into the digital world, she had no intention of cutting away more of herself.
Sofie settled into the comfortable chair centered in the workspace. It reclined as she relaxed, screens lowered from the ceiling and flickered to life, populating themselves with information drawn from her systems as Navarro inserted a plug into one of the slots behind Sofie’s left ear.
“Fine, fine. I remember what you told me last time: ’Not unless it’s absolutely necessary.’ I know,” She grinned coyly, “but you can’t blame me for trying, right? I gotta make rent somehow.”
The ripper’s quick fingers flew across the keys of her cyberdeck as she ran diagnostics reports for every individual piece of hardware in Sofie’s body. Evidently everything was in perfect condition or at least close enough, because she kept talking as she worked.
“Saw Nina the other day. Came in after a job with a nasty chunk ripped outta her arm. Said some Maelstrom goon clipped her with an old set of Wolvers. Girl’s lucky that was the only thing missing. I keep telling her she needs to find a different line of work, that she’s gonna get zeroed by some cyberpsycho nut job one of these days but no she’s much too committed to her job.
“If only you two were still together you could talk some sense into her for me. I mean she had almost come around before you…” She trailed off as she caught glimpse of the growing sadness in Sofie’s eyes. “Shit. Sorry, kid. I went a bit overboard there. I know ya’ll ended it with good reason.”
“It’s okay,” Sofie lied. But it wasn’t. She wasn’t.
Nina had found traces of Ymir Skandatek in Sofie’s gear when she had decided to check her vitals via her biomon one night when Sofie had been particularly agitated and twitchy in her sleep. Nina had figured she was just having nightmares again, not an uncommon occurrence for Sofie, but when she witnessed first hand as the runner’s Sandevistan implant was firing in her sleep and prolonging the nightmares she’d decided to go digging. What she found scared her more than being charged down by any gang goon or cyberpsycho ever could.
“Look, I know the real reason you keep coming back isn’t to make sure all your implants are still on the up and up,” Navarro frowned at Sofie. She lifted the goggles over her brow to look Sofie in the eyes, “You’d know best considering you can feel them inside you, how they react to you, in addition to the maintenance readouts. No, you want me to keep an eye out just in case there’s still any Ymir code floating around in there and I’ll keep looking, gladly. But after we spent two days scrubbing you clean, I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about. The backups you had me make have been thoroughly checked for anything designed to linger, the chrome itself has been cleaned of branding and serial numbers. You’re gonna be fine kid, and I still think Nina’d have you back if you were willing to try again.”
Sofie just smiled sadly as she slid out of the chair, “Thanks, Doc. I’ll see you again soon.”
Elise clicked her tongue as Sofie walked out of the workshop the same way she always did, slowly and seemingly lost in thought. She’d keep hold of whatever secrets she wanted, especially when it was so important to one of her best customers, who also happened to mean an awful lot to one of her closest friends, no matter how much it seemed to hurt them both.
Back on the street, Sofie began the journey home. She passed an alley where several people huddled under cardboard boxes and tarps. An AV flew overhead, engines roaring as it quickly weaved between the skyscraper above. Several bikers in gaudy neon clothes sped down the road. In the distance sirens wailed, gunshots echoed, and explosive blasts ricocheted around the city. This was the usual ambience of Night City. Sofie didn’t exactly love it, but it was leagues better than the low rhythmic hum of the Ymir server room and the crackling voice of Mother Yrsa over the speakers of the Náströnd complex.
Náströnd. The Corpse Shore. Where Sofie had been reborn as Muspelheim. Where she’d learned every skill she knew, where she’d practiced operating her implants, relearned to write with metal fingers. Where she had been unable to sleep without taking drugs or plugging her brain into a computer. Where she’d learned the truth.
