Friday Night Firefight: A Cyberpunk Isekai

I had no clue what a shoemaker was.

From context clues I was guessing it was someone who could provide me with an NCPD file so I wouldn’t stand out compared to the average Night City citizen. But I had no real experience with the criminal life before I came to Night City and I had no idea what to expect.

Yoko – the owner of the netrunner café – and I quickly came to an agreement regarding the arcade cabinet. In exchange for directions to where it was languishing in the old, abandoned church, she gave me 5,000 eddies, a used Cyberdeck OS, and an introduction to her shoemaker. The introduction would also include a basic ID that the guy would give me so I wouldn’t get arrested by the NCPD for just walking down the street.

After reaching the agreement, Yoko suggested I might not want to wander around Watson with 5,000 eddies and a cyberdeck on my person. I figured she was right and, after a quick chat with Frank who assured me that Yoko was trustworthy and not out to cheat me, I left my stuff with her before heading over to Forbes Street to meet up with the shoemaker.

Forbes Street seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it. Walking up and down the street and taking in all the various shops, I soon saw a familiar figure and realized where I was. There was a Tyger Claw seated in a wheelchair next to about three racks of clothes. Every time I started up a new game, this guy was always one of my first stops so I could change out of the ridiculous looking starter clothes V wears in the beginning.

I stood on the overpass by Forbes Street, giving the shop I had been guided to a quick once over. At the top of a set of stairs was a simple door situated under a neon blue sign that read ‘toys.’ A picture of handcuffs was graffitied next to the sign, letting me know what kind of shop it was. Two things about the store stood out and let me know it wasn’t like any of the hundreds of other businesses I passed in this part of Watson.

The first was a guard milling around outside the door. Any other time I would have dismissed him as just another Night City rando doing whatever people did in this city. But something twigged in the back of my mind and made me take a closer look at him. The way he stood by the door, his nonchalance and ease of movement, reminded me a little of how Deng carried himself. This guy was definitely more dangerous than I had given him credit for the first time my eyes passed over him.

The second thing that stood out was the turret sunk into a nearby wall. It was covered in graffiti that matched the rest of the wall and the only sign it was there was the dark plastic covering the top. I knew that if I tried to muscle my way into the store then one or both obstructions would quickly stop me.

I walked up to the guard and pushed down my embarrassment as I muttered the code phrase Yoko gave me.

“I’ve been a very bad boy and I need to be punished. Is there someone inside who can help me?”

The guard gave me a look over and then pursed his lips in annoyance before jerking his head towards the door. I guessed that was the sign to go ahead, so I opened the door and stepped into the shop.

It was like nothing I had expected. Even though I knew the outside of the shop was only a cover, I was still expecting the inside to try and conform a little with the sex toy store motif. Instead, I stepped into what looked like someone’s living room. A wide, long bookcase separated the entryway from the rest of the shop, forcing me around it to get to the main area.

Once past the bookshelf, I noticed a rich leather couch in the middle of the room, facing a flatscreen tv that was sunk into the wall. A table and two chairs sat behind the couch, and a small doorway in the corner led to what I guessed was a storeroom. At the sound of my entrance the owner, who had been lounging on the couch watching TV, stood and met my eyes. He glanced at me and then over to the door, then gave me a cheshire grin. I had the sneaking suspicion that he had created the door phrase that I had just used, and that he’d done it just to embarrass the people who came to him. He hadn’t even been there to hear me say it. He probably just enjoyed the knowledge that I was forced to say something that would make both me and his guard slightly uncomfortable.

The shoemaker looked like every other rich guy I had ever seen. He was younger than I expected, probably in his mid-twenties, and wore black slacks with a white dress shirt he kept half unbuttoned. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, showing off his gold cyberarms. They looked more stylish than functional; less able to rip me apart than the gorilla arms I had seen a few other people sporting. The ease with which he wore clothes that I couldn’t have afforded even in my previous life spoke of a massive wealth gap between the two of us.

“You must be the kid that Yoko called about. My name is Indrajit Sarna, shoemaker, bon vivant, and most handsome man in Watson.” He walked over to me and grasped my hand. I saw his eyes flash blue as he came closer. “Hmm, new shoes and a skeleton. Interesting.”

“A skeleton? Uh, what’s a…Yoko told me you can help me get an NCPD file so I wouldn’t stand out.” I had just met the man and he’d already put me on the backfoot. Much like his shop interior, he was nothing like what I had been expecting.

“Oh, I’m going to do much more than that my good man,” he said as he guided me to his table and chairs. “You need a lot of help.”

I didn’t know how much all this was going to cost me and from looking around the place, the bookshelves and the rugs and the couch and tv, I expected he charged a lot of money for his services. Yoko said that her introduction would include a basic ID, and that was all I really wanted from this guy.

“I just need the file,” I explained as I sat down.

“I could whip up an NCPD file for you in about five minutes. And it would last about that long under scrutiny.” He reached into his pockets and pulled out a silver cigarette case and lighter, offered me a cigarette, and then grabbed one of his own and lit it. “I owe Yoko several skeletons and she’s extended one of them to you. So, don’t you worry about the price.”

For a brief moment I wondered if this guy was reading my mind, but then I quickly realized that was absurd. There wasn’t any cyberware in the world that could do that. At least, I was pretty sure there wasn’t. I glanced down at the clothes I wore. They were obviously second hand. My Wraith boots were worn and filled with holes. The shirt I had on was clean and that was the best thing that could be said about it. All my clothes pointed to my current lack of funds. Just by looking at me it would be obvious that I’d be concerned about the price.

“What’s a skeleton?”

“Yoko said your name was Noah?” When I nodded, he took a drag of his cigarette and continued. “I make you a CIN – city identification number – and upload you to the city database and, boom, you exist. Those are your shoes, something you wear outside and walk around in. But if anyone looks deeper, they find that you are only a couple days old. You just popped into being fully formed, like Athena from the mind of Zeus. No, we need to sell the lie. And that’s where the skeleton comes in.

“We show you took drivers ed classes a few years ago, you paid rent in Arroyo for two years, you’re a loyal customer of a BD Shack in Westbrook. Slowly but surely, we pile on more and more paperwork. Each of those things – your drivers ed diploma, the electrical bills and rent you paid in Arroyo, your loyalty card from the BD Shack – is a bone. And when you add enough bones together you form a skeleton.”

Indrajit stood from the table and motioned for me to follow him as he crossed the room to the door that I thought led to a storeroom. But when I walked through the door I found it was so much more than that. It was a second, smaller room set off to the side, stretching the length of the wall of the store that we had just left. On one side of the room was a workbench filled with computers and equipment. The wall opposite the workbench was covered in guns. I saw Unitys and D5-Novas and Lexingtons. None of the guns were high end but they all looked well cared for. Indrajit caught my glance over at the guns and smiled.

“I help people appear and disappear in Night City. I deal with safehouses, skeletons, and smuggling routes that can get someone anywhere in the NUSA within 48 hours. Some of my clients need a little extra protection but can’t carry a gun that is easily identifiable. All my stuff is clean and untraceable.”

Indrajit pulled up a rolling chair by his workbench and motioned me towards a smaller one in the corner. “So, what would you like your name to be?”

“How about Noah Body?” I asked with a smile.

“No. I’m not going to create an identity so stupid,” he scoffed. “If you want to be an idiot I won’t stop you, but flaunting an ID that says you are nobody will collapse the skeleton I give you. And then everyone would think that my work was shoddy.”

I lowered my eyes to my hands in my lap as I thought about what he said. He was right of course. I had imagined conversations where I had just done something amazing, and people would be like ‘who are you?’ And I’d answer with a shrug of my shoulders ‘me? I’m nobody.’ But actually having that name on my ID was probably taking the bit a little too far.

“We can do Noah Batty,” he said as he smiled at me. When he saw the surprise on my face he shrugged his shoulders. “I like the flair and the thought of tweaking everyone’s nose and having a secret. But you must be a little more subtle about it.”

Indrajit quizzed me over the next hour or so, trying to gather as much information about me as possible. Then, after he explained it would take him a day to finish building out my skeleton, he quickly ushered me out of his store. He said he’d message me when he finished and would be able to ‘fit me for my shoes’ some time tomorrow. Having nowhere else to go and having accomplished a lot today – had it really started with me waking up at Fred’s place? – I wandered back to the No-Tell to sleep in an actual bed.

I woke up the next morning, having slept on top of the covers of the bed to limit the amount of space I touched in the room, and left the No-Tell. Somehow, I felt dirtier than when I lived out on the streets. I wandered around Forbes Street for a while, window shopping and breathing in the city, until Indrajit called me. I headed over to his shop and a few minutes and one palm scan later, I left as Noah Batty, the newest legal resident of Night City.

I stopped off at Yoko’s café to grab a chip with my money stashed on it and the cyberdeck she had traded me, before making my way over to Bradbury and Buran in southern Watson. Twenty minutes later and I was standing in front of a metal gate at the bottom of a set of stairs, excitement barely held in check as I knocked on the gate and peered into the basement room. Right where I expected him to be, watching old boxing clips at his workbench, was one of the best rippers in Night City.

“Yea?” asked Vik, not looking up from the screen on his workbench.

I opened the gate and slipped inside. Sure, I had met Dakota and saw Rita outside Lizzie’s but Vik was the first major character from the game that I was going to interact with, and my excitement showed. I was more nervous now than during the gig I pulled with Deng.

“You’re Vik Vektor,” I said with a touch of reverence in my voice.

Vik glanced up from his screen with a wry smile and cocked an eyebrow at me. “That’s not normally how people greet each other. I already know who I am.” The fact that he said it with a crooked grin helped lessen some of the embarrassment I felt.

“Yea. Sorry about that. It’s just that I heard you’re one of the best rippers in the city and I got excited. I’m Noah. Noah Batty.”

Vik turned his chair fully towards me so he could take me in, and I felt his eyes slide over me with practiced ease. “First time at a ripper? It’s rare to find someone who isn’t at least a little chipped in this city.”

“Yea,” I said, thinking about telling him the story I had concocted for when Dakota was curious about why I didn’t have cyberware – that I was from a family that looked down on modern technology. But I thought better of it and snapped my mouth shut. I didn’t want to start our friendship by lying to Vik. “I’m hoping you can change that.”

I reached into my bag and brought out the cyberdeck that Yoko had given me: a Fuyutsuki Electronics Mk. 1. It was a subpar deck that had probably been gathering dust in the back of Yoko’s store. But it was good enough to get me started on the netrunner path.

Vik took it and looked it over before turning back to me. “If you want to use this, you’ll need to install more than just the deck.”

“I’m thinking of getting everything that I need done here. That would include a personal link and whatever else you suggest.”

“You’ll need optics for the cyberdeck.” Vik motioned me over to one of the surgery chairs in his clinic and tapped a couple buttons on a nearby screen. “Normally I don’t take walk-ins but it’s been dead today so I can do this for you. A standard first-time implant package includes a neuroport, internal agent, cyberaudio suite, chipware sockets, and a personal link. We can also do some optics that can interface with a cyberdeck OS.”

He looked me over, taking special note of my shabby appearance. “Kid, I hate to ask this, but do you have the money for all this?”

I smiled and pulled out the eddie chip that Yoko had given me. “I think this should cover it. How much is it all?”

“The implant package is 500 eddies, then 1,000 eddies for the optics so you can actually use your cyberdeck, and 500 eddies to install everything.”

2,000 eddies. It was less than half of what Yoko had paid me, but it was still a massive chunk of my money. I sighed and then nodded at Vik. “Let’s do it.”

Since it was such an involved procedure, Vik kept me in his clinic overnight. When I woke in the morning, he ran through some tests to make sure that my body had healed from the surgery and that everything was working as expected.

I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the personal link peeking out of my left wrist and was also freaking out over the fact that my vision could zoom in and out now. The first few times I tried to zoom into an object in the room, I became slightly nauseous, and Vik laughed when I mentioned my concerns.

“Happens to everyone when they get new optics. Your brain needs time to adjust to the new normal. Pretty soon you’re not going to think twice about zooming in and out and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without your new eyes. Just don’t try and zoom in while you’re walking, or you’ll trip over your own feet and probably get sick all over the place.”

After going through a few more tests Vik cleared me and said I was good to go. I thanked him, grabbed my bag, and left his clinic with an excited bounce in my steps. I quickly turned the corner and found a quiet place on the street where I wouldn’t be overheard.

When I had first got to this world, I realized that my lack of optics was the limiting factor in not being able to access the system that every isekai protagonists gets. Now, thanks to Vik and the Arasaka Tower Arcade Cabinet, I had solved that problem and could soon supercharge my growth as a Night City legend.

“System,” I spoke into the air and scanned my vision. Nothing. “Status. Body. Reflex. Cool.”

Still nothing.

“Uh, tutorial. System. Tutorial. Help. Menu.” No words popped in my vision. No help boxes showed up with useful hints. My shoulders dropped and I hung my head. “Sonuvabitch.”