Day 20 - Mind Control - Cyberpunk

“Look, I can’t go into more detail for reasons it would take too long to explain. Just… don’t take the fucking Russian Job.”

The video playback clicked off and left V staring at a frozen picture of herself, the afterimage of the ending of the message sitting on the screen like burn-in. How do you even respond to yourself, assuming yourself is even listening?

There were two realities that had to simultaneously coexist at the moment. One being that she wasn’t supposed to take whatever the “Russian Job” was and the other that she needed desperately to take whatever the next job that popped into her inbox was. Rent was coming down like the final stage of a terminal illness, she had cyberware still to pay off, and those two things assumed, at some point along with them, she would have to eat. She needed to take any job other than the Russian Job. And if nothing else came in… she might take it anyway.

Waking up with a hole in your memory is a scary thing, less so when you have a few years experience of it. The mind was as expendable and modifiable a thing as the body these days. You could rent out headspace, sell it off, even reserve it. If you were working and your boss said he got the next few months where he could decide what it was he kept and what it was he didn’t, the pay would have to be pretty good, or at least better. That’s what you always thought of course. The pay was usually not better. But that was just the nature of the beast. If you were fortunate enough to find work that paid you proportionate to the abuses you took, you were set for life. If not, that was just Capitalism, wasn’t it? At the very least, that was Night City.

She had to do a quick body check at the very least, make sure there wasn’t anything extra or missing. Blackouts and memory holes in Night City ran the very real risk of things being more seriously out of order than a broken arm or new tattoo. Her skin was still the same color of brown, her hair was still roughly the same length, texture, and color. She didn’t suddenly have a new limb or less skin on one of her old ones. She still had a pussy between her legs, and both a smaller ass and tits than she might like. No elective or corrective surgery, no new tattoos, not even a haircut. Any changes would be reserved to her mind. And as scary as that was, it was one of the better outcomes to ask for.

Bank account check came next, the answer was unfortunately exactly what she’d expected. No charges, no expenses, still enough in the red to make her slightly nauseous. There was no point in stealing her identity or robbing her, she didn’t just have nothing to take, she had fucking nothing to take. She was going to have to start looking into less reputable work if something didn’t come in soon.

She had gotten as far as checking the expiration dates of her food to see how much time she’d potentially lost when she got a message ping on her deck. On the off-chance it was work, she had to open it.

“Comrade!” A strange voice came through. She paused the playback.

That, by all likelihood, was the Russian Job. The one she had been pretty clear to herself about not taking. However, she also hadn’t been forthcoming about what to do for money if she decided to decline it. Ultimately, she reasoned there was no harm in hearing them out, even if just to say no.

“Comrade! We hear from Judy that you’re good courier, very discreet. We have job we need you to do. No drugs, nothing dangerous, but cyberware that is… frowned upon. Would not be installed, digested in rubber container, then procured on site.”

Immediately, that was about as strong of a no as you could get. Obviously it would have been worse if it was actually getting installed for transit, but you could get just about anybody to do a gut job, you didn’t hire a good courier to do that unless the thing was red hot or there was something else you weren’t telling them.

“We are willing to pay… rubble equivalent to ten thousand eurodollar. You have conversion agent, yes?”

V winced, paused the video, and cursed. Of course the red junk money was worthless, but with the right black market connection you could pretty easily stomach getting paid in it. With the guy she knew, even the cut he would take, it was two months’ rent. That or one month’s rent, most of her cyberware debt gone, and enough money left over to eat more than kibble for the next week or so. It was also, and this was key, enough to demand her attention without being enough to be a red flag. It was the kind of high price that could make your foreseeable future a lot better but that somebody with connections and something to get done would actually pay. She thought back to the video message, how sure she’d seemed that she needed to not take the Russian Job.

She hit the reply button.

The address they gave her took her to a wearhouse near one of the clubs with a reputation for having a backroom that practiced the kind of shit that made the reign of Caligula look like a convent. V wasn’t a prude or anything, but she tended to avoid places where there was a serious risk of taking the wrong door and winding up with a bunch of masked faces staring at you. She also tried not to think about the implications of getting her work from places nearby. She especially tried not to think about the sanitary qualities of the condom-shaped rubber bag the Russkie shaped like a car handed her. Keyword tried.

“This is clean, right?”

“Cleaner now than it will be coming out,” It was the only thing he’d said the whole time.

“Right, reassuring.” She pinched her nose and threw it back as best she could. She was impressed she managed it without a real struggle. “No gag reflex, cool, huh?”

The red just looked at her until she left.

She’d done her best to look like she wasn’t sizing it up before she put it down, but she could tell even through the translucent sheen of the baggie that there wasn’t anything more than a beeper chip inside. A little cluster of circuits which sent out one complex signal or several simple ones on repeat until it eventually burned out. They also weren’t remotely illegal, so whatever the signal it was broadcasting would be the problem. She wondered if she wouldn’t start picking it up on her own cyberware like hearing a numbers station through her fillings, but the baggie seemed to be doing its job to both shield it from her gut and to shield her from it. Keyword seemed.

The delivery address they gave her seemed fishy, but they’d been smart enough to not give it to her until the package was already in her guts. It was about a half-hour walk to a place with no security. With every new step of the job, she was starting to feel more and more like she should have taken her own advice, her stomach turned. She tried to reason that it was just nerves, but then her head suddenly broke out in a massive clatter of noise.

V didn’t have to be able to see inside her stomach to know that the container had broken, likely on purpose, and the beeper was screaming inside of her now like the Russian Woodpecker. She fell to the sidewalk and clutched at her head, where the noise inside seemed to be bouncing around and off of the corners of her brain without being able to escape. She felt her mind trying to reel back from it, trying to pull away from the noise. To her surprise, there was a thread she could tug at that seemed to make it do just that. She held on the thought, pulling the thread, feeling her mind slide further and further back into her own head. She was getting up off of the ground without realizing it, then moving without thinking of it. If you did this kind of work, you’d been hacked before, but she’d never had this total of a control giveover. All the while, she had to keep focusing on keeping her mind away from the rattle and scream.

She made her way back to the warehouse without meaning to. Stepping back inside, there were three of them now where there had been one before. She walked up to the three of them placidly. One of them reached out and grabbed her cheek, and she kissed the tip of his thumb.

“Vera, darling, good to have you back!” One of them clapped her on the ass, and a strange giggle came from her mouth.

“Happy to be back!” Her own voice was strange in her ears, too high and too girlish. Like she was trying to sound like an airhead.

“Alexei,” One of them snapped to the other.

He pulled out an airhypo and V realized she was about to be drugged. She tried to slide back into place in her own head, but now that she’d given up her spot she realized she didn’t know how to get back. The hypo fired and a wave of pure, mind-reeling bliss fired up through her sinuses and down through her body. Her skin felt warm and begging to be touched like an ecstasy high, but her pussy in particular burned like she’d been edging for the past hour.

“Did you miss your Blue Velvet?”

“Yessssss,” She purred shamelessly, already reaching to start removing her clothes.

“So much so that you want to be paid in it?”

“Of course!” She giggled.

The men laughed and clapped each other on the back before leading her out of the back of the warehouse and into the back of the club.

Her mind instantly recoiled, even still heavily intoxicated and ready to accept just about anything and anybody into her arms. All of the girls had the same sort of glazed, drugged expression that she expected she did, and all of the men who weren’t club guys looked about a bad day at work away from total cyberpsychosis. Bodies with almost no skin remaining, massive physiques of muscles and steel that seemed like garish parodies of humanity instead of things that had once been them. Some of them looked more like certain animals than others. Some looked like some nightmare version of old action figures. They also all had the same empty, semi-soulless eyes.

They were leading her to one in the back that was maybe better off than most, but that still made her skin crawl. He was a probably seven or eight-foot tall metal behemoth with most of the skin of what had been his face stretched improperly around the edges of a metal-reinforced skull. A lot of his torso seemed to be on the higher-end of humanity that a total cyber freak would be willing to have, but both arms and both legs were seemingly completely cyber. He was smoking and drinking in ways she wouldn’t have thought possible given how little actual lip there was to his face, but perhaps strangest of all was his fully human and seemingly unmodified eyes. Even the majority of normal people, herself included, had some augmentation to those if nothing else. He seemed to be taking pride in his bloodshot, horrifyingly uncanny, but unmistakably human eyes.

She sat down in his lap and giggled, trailing her finger up his chest.

“Heya Mikey…” She whispered to him.

“Hey toots,” He had a voice like gears grinding against each other, “I missed you.”

“Ahh, it was only one night.” She giggled and pouted.

“Yeah,” He took a hit of a hypo, “But it was a long one.”

“Then we’ll just have to make the next three even longer.” She had started unfastening his pants.

His eyes weren’t the only part of him stubbornly human and unmodified, though he’d probably had a little test tube help judging by his size. What would have made him good porn star material back a hundred years ago made him about the edge of average for any man with insecurities and the money to act on them now. But just the feeling of something so completely skin, so untouched in her hands was borderline disturbing. It had also surged from nearly soft to fully hard in the span of about a second. Mikey gave her the hypo and she took another hip as she slid herself down on him. She was no size queen, and even his length and girth was enough that she would have blanched in most cases, but on the drugs her lips parted and swallowed him greedily in pure ecstasy. Not even hesitating or slowing. She realized both how quickly and how slowly they were moving compared to everybody else around them. The bouncers and guns, those who were relatively sober, seemed like they were moving as blurs around the edge of their vision. The other girls and psychos, riding the same body-burning high, moved like they did. Everything was a single large action that bled into the ones before and after it.

There was no point trying to draw distinction between orgasm and non-orgasm, one climax or another. Everything was such a radiant blur, bliss and need, relief and exhaustion, embrace and blow. Every time one of them began to lag, finished coming down from a particularly spectacular high, the other would be there to give them another hit of the hypo. Even the pains and discomforts were beautiful, the only thing they couldn’t bare was to not be touching, to be fucking. Every time they would change positions, slow for a moment for relief, it would be like a slow-dragging agony that they did their best to remedy. In a way, they were both victims, in a way they were each other’s worst enemies.

And it seemed like it would never end, until in some distant part of her mind an individual thought started to register. That she wanted to get up and go home and rest. It started as a twitch in her toes, one piece of autonomy which started to appear through the haze of drugs and the easily-overlooked hum of the beeper. But the toes soon became the foot, moving with its own volition. The foot became the leg. One of the bouncers must have noticed. At the peak of another cluster of climaxes, as the leg started to become both, they moved like the shadows that lived at the corners of her vision had come to live and stormed her all at once, hitting her with a hypo of something other than Blue Velvet. She felt the crash coming like a wrecking ball, and her exhausted and still-blissed out body rolled forward onto that warm, entirely human chest.

“See ya… in a bit Mikey…” She muttered like a tired child.

“Hah, see you soon…” His rough grumble of a voice shaking in his chest was the last thing she heard.

V shocked awake in her apartment and looked around. The edges of the high were still lingering, worn enough now for the horror of the thing and the sornesses of the body to come in. She was still dead exhausted, likely not more than an hour removed from wherever it was she had been. She dragged herself out of bed, drank water like she was dying in thirst, and tried to force herself to think clearly.

V could already feel the wiping starting to happen as she opened her deck to start recording her message. The beeper was dying, the last hums of it singing a tune now to hit something else that had been in her head for a length of time she could only guess. As soon as the deck opened, she watched the storage scan and about a hundred of the same, nearly identical message spread out roughly once every three days for the past few months. She groaned inwardly, but she had to do something, even if it was the same thing she’d done a hundred times before.

As soon as she started recording, she felt the details go fuzzy in her mind. She knew what she had to say, but she no longer understood why she had to say it. And all of the exhaustion of the past three days came crashing in toward her. She clicked and dragged the last video into this video’s slot. She could see the data loss. A copy of a copy of a copy.

“Look, I can’t go into more detail for reasons it would take too long to explain. Just… don’t take the fucking Russian Job.”

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