My phone buzzed… fucking hell, what time is it… Nah. I’m not getting out of bed today before 1PM for less than a six-figure sum. Fuck you…

  “C’mon, V,” Johnny appeared on the end table, “Been asleep for 10 hours now.”

  “Yeah… kicknntheVoodooBoyss… asss… reeeally gonnaaa… do that to you… Now let me sleeeep…”

  “See, this is why you need some actual decent fuckin’ Cyberware, so you don’t sit around hibernatin’ every two seconds cause you can’t control your calorie burn rate.”

  “Fuck… you… Johnny…”

  “Yeah, fuck you too. By the way, still got the food rotting on the counter. What’s left of it.”

  “Gee… thanks Dad…” I groaned, “…Fine…” I rubbed my eyes and parted my hair, sitting up and collecting my phone, “Now who the fuck’s messaging… Oh, Takemura…” Johnny teleported himself next to me, looking over at my phone along with me.

  It reads: “The Fox hunts in the island den. It feasts upon its meal in the giant’s shadow. But another emerges, a white tiger. Its den located after the fifth bamboo in its homeland’s hamlet. This tiger is cautious, quenching its thirst at the watering hole, awaiting your arrival. It takes shelter in the cherry blossoms, only emerging at sundown, when it knows the water is not poisoned.”

  “God, what is that fuckin’ crap,” Johnny rolled his eyes and leaned back on the couch, “You fuckin’ Japanese.”

  “It’s a code,” I told him.

  “Yeah, obviously. What’s it say?”

  “Well, it tells me a few things,” I brushed my hair back with my hand as I re-read his message, “The Fox hunts. When I was at Arasaka, our company was called the Hunting Foxes. Means he looked into my backstory, probably knows more about me than I do at this point.”

  “Joy, so he holds us at a disadvantage,” Johnny sneered, his upper lip lifting in disdain. Can’t say I disagree with him.

  “The island thing is in reference to me taking out the Voodoo Boys, must’ve hit the screamsheets. And the blossoms can only mean one place: the Cherry Blossom market in Japantown. Go to the wharf there at night, make sure we’re not followed, and wait for him to contact us.”

  “Right, so lemme get this straight,” Johnny said as I got up and walked over to the bathroom, “We’re gonna make contact with Saburo Arasaka’s personal bodyguard to see if he’s got any better ideas than the literal best netrunner in all of Night City and inventor of Soulkiller, am I right?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Johnny, and I don’t like it either,” I said while brushing my teeth. Nice thing about thinking about talking with Johnny – doesn’t matter what I’m doing with my mouth. “But we have to keep our options open. You can’t seriously tell me you feel good about being soulkilled. And I don’t feel like having to go through that as well, not if I can help it.”

  “You might not have a choice if we keep wastin’ time like this,” Johnny pointed out, “It’s not like you have all the time in the world.”

  “I know, I know,” I conceded, washing my mouth out and looking over at him, “But you know what’s weird, is that I haven’t noticed any real deterioration in my memory. Hell, I didn’t notice any changes in my behavior until you tried to get me to smoke. And I resisted that just fine.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So what if it’s all bullshit?” I shrugged, “What if this is the first time anything like this has ever occurred before and no one really knows what’ll happen with any certainty?”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant, you figure that all out yourself?” he chuckled sardonically, “V, genius for figurin’ out that the Relic is complicated.”

  “Johnny, just listen, okay? I’m not saying it’s not doing anything. Just that maybe there’s more to this thing than people give it credit for. Everyone keeps talking about it like it’s this inevitable deadline, but we’re already several weeks over Vik’s predictions. And Hellman’s not exactly the most reliable source, considering the guy tried to get me to sign on with Kang Tao. So far, Alt’s engram has been our best lead, and it didn’t tell me any timeline because this ‘wasn’t its problem’, so it said.”

  Johnny paused and thought about what I’d told him. “Okay, so, where’s that leave us?”

  “With more time than we thought we had, but less idea of what to do with it, basically.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I mean, I’m no neurologist, but I can say that I remember everything I wrote down in my journal. I remember my parents, where I grew up, where I worked. It’s not just the muscle memory, but my historical memory that’s not really changed. If anything, it’s not taking things away so much as adding to it. Like… uh, like a mixed drink, I guess.”

  Fuck, I just realized what day it was… I’m supposed to meet Judy tomorrow morning. I am getting no sleep tonight. “Interesting theory,” Johnny pondered, “Guess we got some work to do.”

  “That we do.” Man, I need a haircut again. Think I used too much chemical supplement on my TechHair, was growing out of control. I threw on a quick outfit and headed downstairs to grab some more food to eat from the Megabuilding market. Naturals like myself need extremely dense diets after putting in that much work. The nanosurgeons repairing the subdermal armor and skin tissue, the muscle fibers needing rebuilding – it all came at a price, and that price was thousands of calories. People have suggested me to implant an internal battery pack, but I’d rather not have another potential weakness to exploit. You can quickhack batteries, can’t quickhack a person’s cells. I’d need it to be a completely custom job… Eh, I can’t be bothered right now.

  “Gimme four boats of takoyaki, please,” I ordered from the scop stand.

  “Four?” the guy said, looking at me like I was certifiably insane.

  “Yeah.”

  I took a quick glance up at the news… something about a parade. Wait, the Aratama Matsuri… it’s still on?

  “On the TV. What’s that?” Johnny asked me.

  “A projection created by tiny lightbulbs, but that’s not important right now.”

  “V…”

  “Come on, you’re no fun,” I grimaced, “It’s the Aratama Matsuri. Big parade that happens every few years in Japantown. I wasn’t expecting it to be held this year considering the recent events.”

  “The… Wild Spirit Festival?” Johnny translated.

  “Eh, there’s no real English equivalent…” I thought to myself, “Oh, thank you.” The vendor handed me the four boats of takoyaki and I immediately devoured one in almost a single shot, giving the poor man pause.

  “So what’s it celebrate?” Johnny said, leaning up on a free stool.

  “It’s not really a celebration in the strict sense of the word. An aratama is a type of spirit. It’s short-hand for Ara-Mitama, basically the embodiment of mischief, violence, and a renegade demeanor.”

  “Heh, I’m likin’ it already.”

  “Johnny…” I groaned.

  “Right, right, sorry. You’re on a diatribe. Please. Continue.”

  “You know what, why do I even bother. I’m just trying to be nice and educate you about my culture. You know, something fun. You might even learn something, Heaven forbid. But no, you just always gotta fuck everything up, don’t you? Do you enjoy this or something?”

  “What, pissin’ you off?” he shuffled around a bit, “Yeah, has its perks.”

  “Great, so whatever happened to me needing to trust you more? Or was that just you trying to manipulate me again?”

  “I ain’t tryin’a manipulate you into doin’ anything, ‘cept shutting up cause I couldn’t care less about this fuckin’ crap.”

  “Yeah, see, I’m gonna have to call bullshit on that,” I shot him a horrid look as I ate, “I don’t buy that a guy whose entire band image was that of a samurai doesn’t care less about Japanese culture.”

  “Honestly, we just called it Samurai cause Nance came up with the name and we all thought it sounded cool,” he shrugged, “Turned out to make a pretty sick lookin’ logo, too. Can’t complain.”

  “So you don’t see any parallels here between our situation at all?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “See, now I’m less inclined to explain it. Are you gonna keep giving me a hard time or what?”

  “Nah, you got my attention,” he grinned, “Pinky swear.”

  “God dammit, do you just appropriate whatever other people say because you know it’ll piss me off?” I lashed back at him, “Because I can do the same. You’re an ass. Oh, and a fucking genocidal terrorist with Alzheimer’s. Am I missing anything?”

  “So it’s genocidal now, huh?” he scoffed, “That’s a new one.”

  “Yeah, funnily enough, that’s what happens when you kill that many people in one shot. They called it the Night City Holocaust for a reason.”

  “Dunno, seem to be doin’ just fine to me.”

  “What?!” I audibly shouted.

  “You heard me. Mikoshi’s still up. Soulkiller’s commercialized–”

  “Alt’s dead.”

  “Hey now, you didn’t have to go–”

  “Oh yes I did,” I rudely interrupted him, “Here, let me show you something.”

  I collected my dogtags from my car’s glovebox and headed out of the parking garage on foot, taking the NCART station instead. “You’re coming with me on my daily morning commute.”

  “Oh, fun, goin’ back to work already?” he said as he sat down across from me. Lucky him to find a free spot – hardly any on this monorail at peak hours. “Back in my day, all this was still underground.”

  “That’s right,” I nodded, “Night Corp rebuilt everything above-ground as part of the cleanup process. See, when the bombs were detonated, it collapsed most of the tunnels. Everything either flooded or was filled in by the ground above. Periodic sinkholes would open up in the city for decades after, sometimes uncovering various mass graves of commuters. This monorail was built on the tomb of thousands.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Fuck…” Johnny mumbled, hanging his head down nearly between his legs.

  We rode the rest of the way in silence, getting off at the hub station at Memorial Park. “Welcome to NCART’s headquarters,” I said as I walked up the multi-story walkways to the main exit corridor. The card reader automatically read my dogtags and let me proceed free of charge.”

  “You’re not worried that Arasaka’d pick us up for this little publicity tour?” Johnny asked, motioning down to the reader acknowledging my service.

  “Not at all,” I said with confidence, “Two reasons. Firstly, the database doesn’t cross-check old warrants, just active ones. Otherwise it’d overload from ninety percent of its userbase getting tagged. Second, the automated protocols only flag me as a veteran, not as a disgruntled ex-employee. It doesn’t know my name, just my rank. Names are considered ‘proprietary corporate information.’ It just assumes that if you’re carrying these tags, you belong here.”

  “Man, who wrote that fuckin’ crap, a five year old?”

  “In all likelihood, probably,” I shrugged indifferently, “Hell, one of my assistants gave a forged set of credentials to his mom once so she could bring him lunch and keep him company. Far as I’m aware, nobody caught on to that.”

  “Bah,” he huffed, “Workin’ there must’ve been torture.”

  “Eh, wasn’t that bad,” I flagrantly lied, “Early on, most of the stuff I did was overseas wet-work. But my boss saw fit to ‘promote’ me to a desk-job. Which at the time I thought I’d just won the lottery, heh…”

  “But…?”

  “But I never felt so fucking miserable and stressed out in my life. And if it wasn’t for Jackie, hell, I’d probably have gone right back in through that front door and been soulkilled or something.”

  “Yeah, and look at where you are now,” he said, gesturing all grandiose and openly, “What an improvement.”

  “It’s a second chance, right?” I replied, glancing up at the building I used to work at, “That’s a start.”

  “Funny,” Johnny mused, “Doesn’t look much different to how it used to be. Different logo and everything, sure.”

  “You know, it’s funny you should mention that,” I said annoyedly, crossing my arms and stopping at a railing, “We’re here.”

  “What, the Tower? You wanna do this now?” he laughed, “And here I thought you weren’t suicidal anymore.”

  “Look over my left shoulder, Johnny,” I commanded, guiding his gaze to the monument behind me, “That’s the 2023 Monument. We’re going to pay it a visit. See those pillars there? Those hold the ashes of the fallen,” I muttered, looking back at it, “All half a million of them. Every now and then we see the team go out with the drills, carving a new section out of the marble for another container. Each one has about a hundred remains in it for the commoners, but if you were particularly well-off, your next of kin could purchase an individual one for a sizable fee.”

  “Classic Arasaka,” he frowned, “Makin’ money off people’s grief. Why’m I not surprised.”

  “And they say that lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice…” I riffed off him, “But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Follow me.”

  Walking down this pathway with no uniform on felt somehow wrong. I used to eat here, sampling many different kinds of bento and sushi from the market tucked away in the park’s underground. Not much about the park has really changed, apart from a new glass canopy. I heard there was a huge battle here about a year ago, some sort of affair involving Adam Smasher. But we all dismissed that as an urban legend – I wonder what actually happened? Be funny if it was a different disgruntled ex-employee.But I guess it goes to show that it doesn’t take a whole lot to actually get inside Arasaka Tower, just balls and persistence. Luckily I think we have those both covered. But this wasn’t intended to be a trip down memory lane.

  “Welcome to the 2023 Memorial, Johnny,” I told him as I walked towards the entrance, hands behind me and head bowed in respect, “I believe you should be familiar with this place.”

  “Very.”

  “Good,” I smiled, “Then you should be able to show me around.”

  “What’s your point of us comin’ here, anyway?”

  “Johnny, if you had the chance, would you do it all again?” I asked him, “Think hard as we walk through here.”

  A female voice told us in several languages to maintain a respectful silence as we walked through the halls. Simulated fire crackled along the walls, painting the whole office floor in an eerie deep red. “Everything here was preserved exactly as it was. Recognize anything, Johnny?”

  “No… yeah… a little bit…” he muttered to himself, “What is it?”

  “Johnny, are you fucking kidding me?!” I lashed out, “‘What is it’… Fuck. Don’t you dare pretend like your fucking Alzheimer’s is acting up again.”

  “No, I mean… Fuck it… I don’t know…” he pondered, lighting up a cigarette, “Wonder if my ashes’re in here somewhere.”

  “I doubt they’d give you the honor,” I told him plainly, “Nice try though.”

  “So why is it that we’re here? What, to reminisce about the good ol’ days?”

  “Not exactly…” I muttered in return, “What is it that you remember about this place? I want you to really think.”

  “Why? You already know what the memory is.”

  “No, Johnny. I want you to say it,” I demanded.

  “Fuck, see, I told you that you were just as bad as Alt,” he sneered, “Look, we’re standin’ in a pile of rubble. Would I do it again? Fuck no, cause it didn’t accomplish anything. Tower’s still here, Mikoshi’s still here, people’re still here, life goes on, next act up to stage.” I struggled with every fiber of my being not to raise my voice in this place. But he was making it exceedingly difficult.

  “Come here,” I told him, walking into the main hall – a glass chamber suspended over the original site, forever frozen in time. “Welcome, Captain Tokai,” the automated announcer said as I walked in, “Thank you for your service.”

  “Guess they forgot to scan my tags, huh?” Johnny joked.

  I could feel my blood starting to boil, but this was important, more for him than for me. I hope this works…

  “Now I’m gonna close my eyes and kneel down so you can’t see. Alright? I want you to picture in your mind exactly what happened that day.”

  “Man, what–”

  “Johnny!” I snapped at him, “Please… What do you see?”

  “Fine…” he grumbled, “I see Rogue, Shaitan, and Murph with me on a chopper. We flew in to the top of the Tower.”

  “Alright, what’d it look like? The Tower.”

  “No windows. Tall, black. Sorta trapezoidal-lookin’ rooftop.”

  “And I remember you coming out of the bottom. What happened then?”

  “I was wheeled out the front door on a gurney. Loaded into the back of a black van and driven off to the heights, in Saburo’s estate. Watched the explosion from there. Then the man himself came in to personally deliver the finishin’ blow.”

  “Alright, now I’m opening my eyes.” Before me were the remains of the two main towers below me, along with the old logo. “Do you see any access for a van? Because I don’t. In fact, I see staircases leading up to one of the towers.”

  “Hmph,” he grunted, pondering what I was saying.

  “Johnny, I’m not sure whether your memories were altered by the corruption on the Relic, Soulkiller’s process, Arasaka modifying it, whatever it was – you have got to face reality.”

  “It’s not like I don’t know that, V,” he sighed, “Why, what’d you think was gonna happen if you brought me here? That I’d have some sort of divine revelation? C’mon, you can’t be that fuckin’ naive.”

  “Fine, then tell me, why’d you do it?”

  “Seriously? We’ve been over this a million fuckin’ times, it’s gettin’ old,” he complained.

  “Yeah, and we’ll keep going over it until I get a satisfactory answer. Now you can launch yourself into one of your anti-corpo spats all you want, but take a good look at that and tell me if it was justified.”

  “I dunno, you tell me, you’re apparently the expert on all things Johnny fuckin’ Silverhand.”

  “It’s called looking shit up, asshole,” I said with a furious undertone, “Several members of the original teams have given interviews. If you know where to look.”

  “Teams?”

  “Yeah, Johnny. Teams. Plural. Morgan Blackhand led the offensive. You were nothing more than a diversion.”

  “No, no, that’s not right,” he stopped me, “We were out to get Mikoshi and Soulkiller. Period. End of fuckin’ story. Rode the chopper to the top of the Tower, got in, installed a virus onto the localnet courtesy of Murph’s netrunnin’ wizardry. Were supposed to get out, ‘cept Adam Smasher had a score to settle.”

  “What score?” I asked him, “You bang his girlfriend or something?”

  “Oh, now who’s jokin’ at a serious time,” Johnny replied, tapping his foot on the glass, “Told you you’re becomin’ more like me.”

  “As are you, Mr. Avoidant.”

  “Nah, man,” he said quietly, “I’d die ‘fore I became a corpo-cog in the machine.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” I confessed, “Back before I joined up.”

  “I remember back when I first joined,” Johnny reminisced, “Thought the world was in the palm of my hand. They really hammed it up back then. Promises of travelin’ the world, bein’ all badass an’ shit. Ended up signin’ up when I was 17, one year ‘fore the age limit.”

  “So you were underage?” I asked, “Did they find out?”

  “Eh, probably,” he thought, “Honestly I don’t think anyone gave enough of a fuck. They were just happy to have another body to throw in the meat grinder.”

  “Yeah… I know the feeling,” I sighed, looking down at the rubble, “My culture has a habit of treating life… cheaply. I come from a country so overpopulated that we just blindly accepted a thirty percent casualty rate in basic training. Not injuries – deaths. To us, it was a part of training. Our instructors told us it was to prepare us for the horrors of war.”

  “Sounds more like cullin’ the herd if you ask me,” Johnny stared pensively, “A convenient excuse to keep the numbers from overwhelming the economy.”

  “Indeed,” I nodded in agreement, taking a longer walk back and forth between the different exhibits. I couldn’t even imagine what it must’ve been like, to stand in the rubble the day after. What was once not just your home, but your entire city, reduced to smoldering ruins. “Let me tell you a story, Johnny,” I breathed out and bit my lip, “At the end of World War II, my great-great-grandfather was a farmer, and a bit of an entrepreneur. He’d built a little water purifier, operating six distilleries that made potable water for his crops. By 1945, the Tokyo firebombings had gotten so bad that bodies had started infesting the water. They say the bays turned a sickly yellow-brown color, that people would wash up on shore all the way down to our peninsula. People who were burning alive to escape the fires. They all desperately ran for the water…” I walked outside to get some fresh air, “And suddenly his business was booming. Everyone else’s crops were dying out, or being stolen by the refugees fleeing south. Our city’s population went from 100,000 to over 210,000 in just a few years. And you know what he did? He turned his farm into an enterprise. Set up five times the distilleries, sold his crops, and built a full-on desalination plant. Soon, he sold the water to hundreds of thousands of wartime orphans, lost souls, and aliens.

  “Tch,” I winced, finally leaving the exhibit entirely and heading to the park, “My family has profited off war for generations. After the Second World War ended, my family ended up primarily as businessmen and politicians under Shōwa’s reign. They grew to have the largest water desalination plant in all of Japan.” I looked over at Johnny as he took a seat next to me. “I was supposed to be a politician, you know. With my mother’s ties, I was a shoo-in for the National Diet. But I saw the hypocrisy in the family business and wanted to carve my own path. So I ended up joining Arasaka instead.”

  “Crawl outta one hole and into another,” he mused.

  “I thought that, because Arasaka was so deeply affected by the bombing that they’d somehow… embodied the spirit of Japan. It was all about honor, sacrifice, duty to yourself and your family. I was never much for collectivism, but boy, was I a sucker for a good motivational speech at the time.”

  “Mm, think we all were, once upon a time…”

  “Why did you sign up?” I asked Johnny, joining him on a nearby bench, “Just straight.”

  “Easy enough,” he said, leaning forward and lighting up a cigarette, “Guy comes through town makin’ all sorts of promises about hope and grandeur. I grew up in a city called College Station. Wasn’t too big, built around the university. And I wasn’t exactly cut from the right cloth for that. Mostly just hung out at dives and played in garage bands, shit like that. Couple years on into the Second Central American War, and there he is. Recruiter lookin’ to meet his quota. I ended up joinin’ on the spot… Couldn’t really tell ya why. Just felt like the right thing to do at the time.”

  “I know what you mean,” I nodded.

  “We fought against drug cartels, barons, shit like that, all throughout Central America. Place was a fucking mess by the time we were done with it. But to answer your question, V… Nah. I don’t know why I signed up. Least I don’t think so.”

  “Does it… bother you? Not really knowing who you are?”

  “Course it does, V. Thanks to you and Alt – or whatever the hell that thing was, anyway. To be honest, I’m kinda scared what Rogue might say.”

  “Do you think you’d want the answers?”

  “I dunno… would you?”

  “I’m not sure…” I glanced down at the concrete sidewalk, “Part of me thinks it might be nice to just live in blissful ignorance. No burdens, nothing to live up to, to live for… But then, what would I have if I never had any principles, any soul…”

  “What do you think it means, to not have a soul?” he asked me.

  “To not have a soul…” I cupped my fingers together and twiddled my thumbs, “I think… it’d be living in the absence of pain.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, think about it – so much of our collective experiences come from pain. We share our pains with others and it brings us together. We experience empathy, love, generosity, because we know suffering. Remember what I said about the kami, the aratama? There’s another side of it, the nikitama, nigi-mitama. A kind, gentle spirit. Both are two separate entities coexisting inside one body. Both overlap, intermingle with one another, each fulfilling their own portion of one complete soul. This world is shades of gray, and to truly live in it, we need that complete picture. We need the pain to experience the pleasure. Living without pain, then, isn’t really living at all. Surviving, sure, but not living.”

  “So what, am I your aratama all of a sudden?” he asked me, “You know I don’t believe in any of that religion crap, right?”

  “I dunno, Johnny, do you think you have a soul?”

  “You ever been to the Middle East?”

  “I have,” I nodded, “Couple of times.”

  “I remember the day they shared pictures of Dubai after the bombs dropped there. People’s shadows etched into the pavement and walls. Like a city of ghosts. They say that you can still see their faces frozen in time, embedded in the glass. I think, in a way, their souls are preserved, too…” he muttered quietly, “Soulkiller is like the inverse of a nuke. It destroys that shadow, but everything else around it just keeps on walkin’.”

  “And that’s what you believe happened to you?”

  “Yeah…” he kicked a loose pebble, “Thanks for hearin’ me out, though, V.”

  “Thanks for actually taking the time to sit down with me, Johnny,” I smiled, “You should try this whole ‘being nice’ thing more often.”

  “Hey now, don’t push it too far,” he joked, “Liable to get on my bad side again.”

  “Right, let’s get to work,” I told him, standing up and checking the time, “Gotta get back, get the car, and go meet up with Takemura soon.”

  “Let’s do.”

  ---

  Militech and Arasaka's rivalry was legendary, only compounded by the Fourth Corporate War. In 2022, two aquacorps, CINO (Corporation Internationale Nauticale et Oceanique) and OTEC (Ocean Technology & Energy Corporation) went to war over a third defuct company (IHAG)'s assets. CINO hired Arasaka and OTEC hired Militech, and what began as a proxy cold war turned into bloody conflict. Night City served as the primary battleground on American shores, being where Arasaka was headquartered on the continent at the time and their last bastion.