An Engineer In Night City

Kiwi puts the finishing touches on the newest update to Wube Inc.'s server, turning it into a true data fortress. Despite her initial inexperience, she's proud of her work, and how this challenging job pushed her to the limits and helped her improve her skills. Having finally finished the last major task for the day she believes she deserves a smoke break and exits the room.

What was once a small single-room office grew into a small three-story building, though Mark plans to upgrade the office space again once they hire new workers. With Wube Inc.'s rapid growth, she's certain it won't take long for him to build a new compound for them.

After a short walk, she's standing in front of the pier, smoking her favorite brand of cigar, when an unwanted call blinks in her contact list. She debates between ghosting him or not, but her sense of duty wins this time. "Faraday, to what I owed the pleasure."

"Your sarcasm is not needed, Kiwi. I need you to do a favor for me."

"What kind of favor Faraday, I don't have all day to run errands for you anymore."

"Oh, really, are you getting comfortable in your new 'job?' I thought Netrunners like yourself liked freedom too much to tie yourself down to a corporation."

Kiwi grunts in annoyance. "Most corpos are awful to work at. What do you want, Faraday? I'm on my break, make it quick."

"I would watch your tone around me, I'm not going to stay a mere Fixer for long. I am destined for greatness, and soon everyone will see it."

'Haven't heard him say things like that in a while,' Kiwi thought, 'something important must have happened at Militech.'

"And I still have to return to work to keep my 'cover,' Faraday, so if you just called to brag, I'm ending the call."

"As a matter of fact," he insists, "I do have a job for you. I need you to gather information on the Engineer's movements. Do a good job and I will pay handsomely for it."

"I don't work on maybes Faraday, you know that. Give me a real offer or you can fuck off."

The fixer sounds irritated to Kiwi's ears, but he doesn't lash out against her attitude immediately, meaning that Faraday's customary composure has been compromised. "I am placing a bounty on any good information you have regarding the movements of the Engineer. His schedule, when he enters and leaves the city, when he eats, everything. I'm offering a minimum of fifty thousand eurodollars for the first useful report."

"Useful is a bit vague," the Netrunner points out, "what if I give you his schedule and you call it useless? Are you going to stifle my pay?"

The man on the other side of the line doesn't answer right away. After a few seconds pass he brings up a file in front of Kiwi. "If you do this for me, I will also burn those files and we will be even."

The files in question are the police reports of her activities as a Netrunner that could put her in hot water with the law enforcement of Night City. Faraday once helped her clean up her records while keeping the old files as insurance against her. As an Edgerunner it is especially important to keep their records sanitized to avoid having their public assets taken away. Edgernners who fall down the edge of criminality have a much worse time on their hands.

"Fine, I will do your dirty job, but that's going to be the last one I will do for you. Now, if you have nothing else, I'm getting late for my next shift." She doesn't wait for his response and closes the chat.

When she returns to the office building, she meets with Gloria making her rounds, looking after some of the workers who are too stubborn to check up on her, and reminding some of them to take the exams they're missing.

"Oh, hello Kiwi, how are you doing?" The single mother and resident doctor greet the Netrunner. Kiwi didn't want to meet with anyone yet, but she couldn't just brush past the other woman.

"I'm fine, just the usual."

Gloria stares at Kiwi for a moment before narrowing her eyes. "Are you using that weird chrome to cut off your emotions again?"

"No," Kiwi lied naturally, which confirmed Gloria's suspicions.

"Look, I don't have the authority to check on your private chrome configurations unless it's affecting your work, but I worry about you, you know? You already get stressed enough dealing with the gonks trying to harm and steal from your 'baby.'"

"It's part of the job," Kiwi replies noncommittedly, "the same way you have to deal with gonks too afraid of a couple of scans and a few needles. It's almost like there's still anybody in this world that didn't go under the knife at least once in their lives."

"Sometimes I wonder who they survived until today," the older woman agrees with the blonde. "Anyway, I can tell that something is eating at you. Why don't you ask Mark to help you? He's always happy to help those he considers friends."

Kiwi wants to refute Gloria's statement, but she can't. Mark gives the impression of being a naive, trusting gonk for a time, but he's not the kind of man to suffer betrayal and people fucking him over. The fate of the disgraced Dex DeShawn is an example of that.

"It's complicated," Kiwi admits, "but I will talk with him. It will reach his ears eventually anyway."

Gloria gives a reassuring squeeze on the taller woman's hand, before continuing with her duties.

Despite knowing better, the little pep talk did help Kiwi clear her mind. With newfound resolve, she calls Mark for a meeting to discuss how to milk Faraday twice for cash.

…

Lucyna Kushinada, a newcomer to Night Cit was adopted by Kiwi when the veteran Netrunner found her diving around the various forums and other bulleting boards on the city net. While she was skilled, she committed various beginner mistakes on the city's net thanks to being a foreigner.

Despite the older Netrunner philosophy of never trusting anyone in Night City, Lucy quickly came to trust Kiwi as an older sister figure, partially due to her constant habit of running away from Arasaka and subconsciously developing a need for companionship of any kind. With Kiwi, Lucy found a peer in her profession who could achieve more than the younger runner despite the better chrome thanks to the older woman's experience.

When Kiwi invited Lucy to an unscheduled visit away from Night City, the ex-Arasaka corpo kid was intrigued because jobs outside the limits of Night City are rare. It was also the first time that she knew that Kiwi had a day job instead of being a full-time Edgerunner. She came to learn that it initially started with the experienced woman working on a contract for a fixer in Pacifica, but then the "undercover job" became more attractive to her. Lucy never expected that kind of attitude from Kiwi, and that made her curious about her employer.

Then Lucy discovers the woman works for the fucking Engineer. Even someone who arrived in Night City recently understands that the Engineer's ascension from nobody to the butcher of Maelstrom was abnormal.

Meeting the man felt like deep diving into the Net for the young woman, starting with an initial wariness, then to respectful suspicion at the Engineer's show of force when he brought his employees to an exhibition away from the city, to terror once she saw the massive complex that stretched for miles in the Badlands with no end in sight, then to awe as he casually sent a rocket to space.

Then, to once again unbalance the prodigy Netrunner, he offered Lucy a job in the company. Now, she could either accept the offer from a potential ally of Arasaka according to her research, or snub the scary man to his face. Lucy thought she should have followed Kiwi's advice about not trusting anyone in Night City because Lucy felt like Kiwi had set her up with her invitation. At least she could spend some time with that gonk David. The teenager was an interesting boy in Lucy's opinion, and she came to meet his mother and the woman who singlehandedly raised him, Lucy could see the similarities between them.

However, nothing prepared Lucy for the utter bullshit of the Engineer one day pulling her aside from her new job at Human Resources and confessing that he "cut a deal with Arasaka to stop pursuing her." How did he know that Arasaka was chasing her, despite never uttering a word about it since stepping foot in the city? According to him, he looked at her name on some databases while doing a background check and found that her family is still looking after her. How did he acquire that information? Using his new satellite network to connect to international Nets, of course. When he got a proposal of cooperation between Wube and Arasaka, he asked the corporation to stop her manhunt and overlook past crimes. They accepted.

Lucy didn't know how to react to the revelation, since running away from Arasaka and their agents consumed most of her life, with her wish to escape to the moon being a distant hope that she could one day outrun the reach of the titanic corporation.

It was when she was about to have a mental breakdown that life threw David at her when the teenager went flying in Lucy's direction while David was testing one of the Engineer's equipment. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and Lucy extracted a favor from the younger boy to the amusement of the Engineer.

Lucy might get flak from Mrs. Martinez about her budding relationship with her son, despite the two of them swear they're good friends, but she can't help but feel attracted by him. Out of the inner circle of the Engineer's friends, David was the most approachable of the group, and also the cutest. She needed to have an anchor to make the world make sense again.

…

"And what we learned today, you gonk?" The Factory medic asks her patient after patching the idiot's injuries.

""Always wear your PPE"" They both repeat together. "I'm sorry ma'am. It won't happen again."

"A likely story," the doctor snorts before kicking him out of the clinic, "now shoo, thanks to you I have paperwork to fill." The worker doesn't need to be told twice and leaves the office. However, he will need to attend a seminar with the chief of workplace security of his turn for the next week to see if the lesson finally sticks into his head. While it is cheaper to fire a fool like him, he's also used to creating a system to predict the employee's idiocy and improve the overall workspace safety.

In Mark's words, "We're not using them as guinea pigs, we're observing natural selection to improve our processes." It is an uncharacteristically cold statement from the otherwise compassionate Engineer, but he made sure that all employees were trained in the proper safety procedures and he marked all dangerous areas to avoid incidents, a rare level of standard for Night City, and he argues that if they insist into acting carelessly then they will become examples for future training videos.

Gloria rolls her shoulder, feeling the fatigue of the day, and looking ahead for the end of her shift. Despite being tired, she feels leagues better than she did in her previous job at Meat Wagon. She now gets to sleep at least eight hours a day, and she could send off her son to school instead of waking up to an empty house most of the time. Mark's initial offer was generous, and she figured that she could save up money in case the venture didn't work. She asked for three months of salary in advance, which was admittedly a lot more than her previous wage at the EMT corporation. What made her accept the deal, however, was that Wube Inc. would foot the bill for David's education, paying for his tuition in advance.

That alone made signing that contract worth it. The rest was a superfluous bonus, though she won't say no to the foodstuff care package that she received recently.

At the sound of her office door being knocked, Gloria stops daydreaming and calls for the person to enter. It's a woman with red hair shaved in the side, a disturbingly common hairstyle shared between rebel cyberpunks to loyal corpo execs, wearing a designer red blazer with grey accents, expensive-looking black slacks, and a pair of black flops.

"I was told to come here to give my medical records?" The mysterious woman asks with a carefully set neutral tone.

"Ah, yes. It's required for all new hires, miss…"

"You can call me V, Dr. Gloria, and I know how the procedure works, thank you." Gloria switches gears, recognizing a longstanding corpo due to her experience.

"Alright, right this way. We also require a quick physical exam for all new employees, but since you brought your medical history we can skip over most of the immediate tests." Gloria motions for V to sit at a nearby table examination table, "Now, what kind of job you were hired for?"

"Oh, I'm not technically an employee of Wube Inc. I'm a representative of Arasaka in their exchange program."

"Exchange program?"

Having known about the Engineer's relationship with his workers, and as a favor to her friend Jackie, V decides to play nice with the woman. "Arasaka has a tradition of exchanging representatives between companies with close ties and interests, as a Japanese tradition. Usually, this tradition is restricted between companies in Japan due to the similar culture, but sometimes the directors might decide to extend this courtesy to other corporations. Wube Inc. received this privilege recently."

Despite only being a doctor at the Factory, she felt pride at how the place she helped run grew to such a degree. "That's wonderful. I wonder who was the lucky person that will go to Arasaka."

"I heard it was someone named 'David Martinez.'"

Gloria's heart skipped a beat for a moment, and if she hadn't had medical treatment when she joined the company, she would had a heart attack upon listening to the news.

"Excuse me, ma'am, did I upset you?" V asks with slight concern, and Gloria touches her cheeks with trembling hands, finding tears.

"No, no, you didn't upset me." She takes a deep, steadying breath to recompose herself, only partially succeeding. "It's just, I'm so happy."

"I will see my son reach the top of Arasaka Tower before I die, that's all."