404: Doom Not Found

- 11 years before canon -

Somewhere amongst the rooms in Arasaka Tower fumed a corporate exec and his secretary. 

"It's not about the shard," Kazuo snarled, rubbing the bridge of his nose as the holo-slate hovered midair before him. "It's about incompetence. You told me it was being routed for disposal. You told me the Claws were enough straight after."

"Sir, with all due respect—"

"With all due respect, Oshima," he cut in, his tone acid, "I don't need your half-baked apologies. I need results. Your Claws had one job—retrieve a goddamn briefcase. Instead, they paint the docks with their brains and let the shard walk off in some street punk's pocket."

The other board members had already left the conference chamber. Polite bows. Shallow promises. Kazuo hadn't heard a word they said during the last half hour. The moment the emergency ping lit his retinal HUD, he tuned them out like static.

Now the chamber was silent save for the soft hum of circulating air and the distant buzz of Night City below, filtered through the tower's high-rise glass. He remained seated, back rigid, fingers clenched against the obsidian table.

"Status?" he asked flatly.

"Clean-up team's been sent. We've identified the dead. Our agents found half-melted hardware, including your missing asset. At least, the casing," Oshima replied.

"And the internals?"

"Gone."

Kazuo exhaled through his nose, slow and tight.

"There was nothing sensitive on the drive," Oshima offered, trying to salvage footing. "It was corporate noise, untraceable. Encrypted filler for the dummy batch. A glitch in the disposal request."

Kazuo's eyes narrowed.

"You're forgetting one thing, Oshima."

"Sir?"

"Noise can become a signal when the wrong eyes start listening."

Kazuo began deflecting, the true nature of the shard not truly revealed to his secretary, the knowledge compromising. 

The problem wasn't the data shard's classified info—he had taken care to bury anything overtly damaging under a sea of deflective encryptions.

No, the issue was personal. Hidden between lines of discarded logs and corrupted files were private messages—logs never meant to survive.

Romantic in nature.

Reckless.

Messages between him and Hanae Takamura.

She was young, ambitious, brilliant—and unfortunately, his colleague's daughter. A rising cyber-defence strategist whose talent drew board attention... and whose attention Kazuo had come to enjoy far too much.

The affair, while hidden, would shatter his career if exposed.

Hanae had warned him. "Delete them," she said. "Don't archive them like business memos." But his pride had flared. His words, his charm—they mattered. They meant something. And now they were floating somewhere in Night City, waiting to ruin him.

"You said this file was scheduled for destruction," he said quietly.

"Yes, sir. Standard purging. But someone at the dockyard pulled it early. The manifest lists an off-record extraction before the incineration timer ever activated. We suspect a leak in logistics. Most likely an off-hand worker seeking to earn a quick buck."

"Then find the leak. And kill it."

There was silence.

Kazuo stood.

His reflection stared back at him from the obsidian wall—immaculate suit, silver-thread tie, but eyes bloodshot with weeks of sleepless paranoia. The pressure on his shoulders had become a constant, like gravity doubled.

"If you wish to remain amongst us, then begin using that head of yours to solve it. Otherwise, you might just lose it. I can have you replaced, Oshima. Don't think for a second I won't cut you loose."

"We've begun combing the docks again. There were several combatants at the scene. One appears to have fled with the briefcase. No known affiliation. Some minor fixer named Gina J has surfaced in chatter. Nothing concrete yet."

Kazuo's lips curled into a snarl. "Fixers are leeches. If she has it, she's selling it. And if she's selling it—"

"I understand, sir."

"No," Kazuo said, stepping closer to the holo-feed. "You don't, Oshima. Be thankful for your ignorance. Your incompetence, on the other hand, will be reprimanded. Don't betray my expectations again, or else."

Oshima nodded. "What do you want done?"

Kazuo leaned forward, eyes cold as glaciers.

"I want the briefcase. I want it destroyed. I want every hand that touched it turned into ash, and I want all of this buried. Understood?"

"Yes, Mr. Kuroda."

Kazuo ended the call.

He turned toward the floor-length window, gazing out across the jagged sprawl of Night City. Neon glimmered like artificial stars, masking the rot beneath.

"I should've listened to her," he muttered.

Somewhere, down there, someone was sitting on a piece of his soul. And they didn't even know it.

Not yet.

But soon, they would.

And when they did, Kazuo would be ready to burn the city to keep his secrets cold.

---

Elsewhere, Victor adjusted the strap of his coat and stepped off the mag-rail platform, silent and unreadable.

The drop had gone smoothly—Gina J's runners hadn't dared speak more than a few clipped words when he handed off the case. No questions. No pleasantries.

Just a silent, professional transaction.

The kind he preferred.

He moved through the backstreets of Kabuki with the certainty of a man tracing geometry — each turn calculated, every step poised. His pistol remained holstered under his coat, though he was never unarmed.

The exo-suit flexed softly beneath his clothing, servos muted. It had taken hours to recalibrate the stabilisers, and longer still to solder in the kinetic amplifier without proper tools. Still — it worked.

His fingers still smelled faintly of coolant and soldered steel.

When the message came through, he checked it quickly.

:: GINA J :: She's willing to talk some deets through. You can make your way over. Brat's better than her record suggests. Doesn't know she's being vetted. Don't scare her off.

Victor didn't respond.

He didn't care for Gina's attitude, but her network was reliable. 

Victor followed the location Gina attached. His travel eventually led him to Kabuki near an abandoned arcade, the connecting alleyway barricaded and fenced off.

The gate locked within. 

With slight persuasion, he made his way through. 

The sound of city footsteps and conversation growing dimmer, and the scene slowly shifting to a darker light. Navigating to the arcade, he found the lights turned off and the window to the entry smashed in, with glass scattered around.

Where it another city, he would've deduced a break-in, but with the city being a hellhole, perhaps it was merely decoration.

Entering, his eyes seemed to dart to the abandoned arcade machines, their jolly appearance and light-hearted designs rusted with neglect. 

They hadn't been used in years, most likely, but Doom wondered if any parts could be of use. Perhaps the logic processor within could do well anointed with another. 

As he approached the designated door, he slowed.

The smell.

Burnt plastic. Something acrid.

His hand dropped toward the coat's inner holster. He flexed his palm once, discharging a whisper of static from the shock gauntlet beneath. The room was silent.

Too silent.

Victor kicked the door open.

Inside, a young woman stood over a corpse, still twitching, the deck sparking at her feet. The other girl was clearly dead, her brain cooked, jaw slack and eyes dim. Smoke curled from the neural port.

Victor didn't move.

The woman — black jacket, shortened hair, rifle slung across her back, wires half-coiled from her deck to the wall — turned.

It was V.

They stared at each other. Recognition had no time to catch up. Just wariness.

V's hand hovered near her sidearm.

Victor's gaze flicked from the body to the smouldering port in the wall. The netrunner had been killed during a sync. From the signs, it was swift, not from feedback, but an intentional surge. Possibly a second-party attack.

Possibly... the girl in front of him.

"I was told she'd be alive," Victor said, voice as flat and toneless as cold iron.

V's eyes narrowed. "Yeah? Guess someone was late."

Victor didn't rise to the bait. He walked around the body, inspecting it with clinical detachment.

Neural port destroyed. Cranial fluids still hot.

Victor straightened. "You killed her?"

V gave a shrug. "She stole my gig. She nearly fried me during a job. I tracked her."

"And executed her."

V took a step forward. "What, you her choom or something?"

"No." Victor met her gaze. "She was meant to work for me."

A pause.

"Oh," V muttered, suddenly less sure. "Well. That's awkward." 

Victor folded his arms behind his back, eyeing her. "Your work was efficient. Personal. Not without merit."

"…Thanks?"

He studied her a moment longer. There was something about her — not just recklessness, but boldness. Her technique, even standing amid a body, was fluid. She wasn't just some street punk playing edge-runner.

She was a problem solver.

And problems were the currency of this world. 

Perhaps now is the time to use her... Victor thought amused.

"She was an idiot," V said at last, toeing the corpse lightly. "Didn't even see me coming. Deck was trash. Net defences full of holes. You're better off."

Victor nodded slightly.

"I assume you have no intention of wasting my time?"

V tilted her head. "Depends. You the job type? I'm freelance. You pay, I run."

"I need someone discrete. Capable. Your methods are crude but your results…" he glanced at the corpse, "...are undeniable."

She gave a crooked smirk. "So what's the job?"

He looked around the room once more before stepping toward the door.

"We'll speak elsewhere. Somewhere clean."

"Clean's not my style, choom," she said, following him. "But lead the way."

As they stepped into the dark corridor, Victor felt the shift—something new forming.

The city had taken one piece off the board.

But now it had offered another.

A wild card.

And Doom was not one to ignore opportunity.

---

"You want me to do what?" V leaned against a rusted terminal, flicking the side of her deck like it owed her money.

Victor Von Doom didn't blink. "I need to understand the Net. Enough to trace, observe, and exploit its architecture without jacking in."

V frowned. "Wait, you don't chip?"

"No," he replied flatly. "I do not."

A low whistle escaped her lips. "You're poking at the black maze from the outside. You know that's like trying to read Braindance with a blindfold, right?"

"I manage."

Victor couldn't. 

She rolled her eyes, then pushed off the wall and strode over to a rig patched together with spare Arasaka parts and old Biotechnica heat sinks. The hum of half-broken cooling fans filled the silence.

Victor followed without urgency, datapad in hand. A diagram of Net structures flickered on his screen—likely old Bartmoss doctrine, the kind every wannabe runner parrots before getting iced their first dive in.

"You're serious about this?" she asked, tapping at a cracked console. "You trying to be a deck jockey without ever jacking in? Most people who try that end up frizzing their rig, or worse."

"I do not believe in surrendering my cognition to unvetted software. And I certainly don't trust anything mass-produced by Arasaka."

"Jesus," V muttered. "Okay, privacy nut and tinfoil hat. Got it."

"I prefer the term 'sovereign.'"

She laughed — just once. "Alright, Sovereign. Let's start with the crawl, then."

She projected a schematic of a closed-loop Netspace across the screen. A corporate sim node—basic ICE, ghost data, system logs, no active daemons.

"This is your playground," she said. "No Blackwall, no Black ICE, no brain-fry. Just old code and old teeth."

"ICE?" 

"You're kidding." V huffed her brow raised before noticing the serious look plastered on Victor's face.

"Is it meant to be?" 

"You really are a rookie... ICE stands for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. It refers to defensive security programs that protect against unauthorised access to computer systems and networks. Black ICE is meant to destroy unauthorised users." 

"I see one is a shield, the other a blade." Victor envisioned. 

"Yeah... Something like that." 

Focusing back on the simulation, Victor observed with a discerning eye. "I can trace entry vectors here. Monitor ICE behaviour. A neural port or interface is unnecessary. No need to interface directly."

"Which is exactly your problem," she snapped, slapping the side of the rig. "The Net's not a thing you look at. It's a thing you feel. You jack in, you move through it. You dance. That's how you learn."

Victor didn't respond immediately. His eyes flicked between data entries—timestamps, intrusion logs, encryption decay patterns. His mind moved like a scalpel.

V watched him for a moment, brows furrowed. "You've got the brain for it, I'll give you that. But this... you're treating the Net like it's a locked door you can just pick from the outside."

"That is precisely what it is."

"Wrong," she said. "It's a storm. You don't read a storm, you ride it."

Victor raised an eyebrow. "You mistake recklessness for control."

"And you mistake detachment for power," she shot back. "Your call, but if you ever want to do more than peek under the skirt of a network, you're gonna need to plug in."

He turned back to the terminal, tapping a few lines of code on his datapad. His eyes scanned debug logs, ghost trails, and system health indicators. There was no waste in his process.

"You ever think you're taking the long way around just because it feels smarter?" she asked, watching his hands move like a surgeon's.

"Often," he said, without sarcasm. "And I am usually right. A road paved by my own hands is better than walking on another." 

V sighed, stretching. "Alright, smarty pants. We'll start again tomorrow. I'll mock up some test scripts, maybe show you how ping-traps and honey-pots work in older architecture."

"I'll be ready."

But before he could turn to leave the room, V raised a hand, a sly grin creeping across her lips.

"Nah. See, that's the problem." She spun around on her heel and dropped onto her rig's chair with a practised slump. "You think you're ready. You think studying blueprints and sniffing packets makes you invincible."

"I've studied more than you know."

"That a challenge, Doom?" she asked, already punching in commands on her deck. "Because I'm feeling spicy today."

He narrowed his gaze. "What are you doing?"

"Teaching."

In the span of two seconds, the lights in the room flickered. His datapad buzzed angrily, the screen jittering like it had caught a virus. A warning message splashed across it in red script:

> ACCESS OVERRIDE — V: WHO'S THE SMARTASS NOW?

Victor's brow furrowed. He tapped the datapad, but the interface locked him out.

His SIN identifier—his forged digital ID—flickered to life next. A second screen, tied to a hidden terminal, flashed warnings as well. The ID had been flagged, location tracked, and briefly exposed to public bounty boards. In a real situation, that meant he'd just been soft-doxxed to every scav and fixer in the slums.

"You-" Victor stepped forward, his voice a low, contained growl.

"Relax," V said, smirking, pulling her deck cable free with a flourish. "Didn't actually let it run past mockup. But you're officially dead in the water if you think staying unplugged is safe."

He stared down at his now-unresponsive datapad. "That shouldn't be possible."

She shrugged, mock-innocent. "Oh, but it is. The Net isn't polite, Doc. It doesn't knock. It breaks the lock, eats your food, sleeps in your bed, and leaves a bomb on the couch."

Victor's jaw tensed, mind already parsing how she'd slipped through his system.

"You planted a softback exploit into my terminal earlier," he deduced.

"Yup."

"You backdated the handshake. Spoofed an idle process. A custom worm."

She raised her brows. "See? You are learning."

Victor didn't speak. He was furious—not at her, but at himself.

He'd underestimated the ecosystem of the Net. He had treated it like any other machine—predictable, mechanical, like a weapon you could disassemble and improve.

But this… this bordered on technomancy. She hadn't just manipulated signals. She had bent them, rerouted them like muscle memory.

It was a kind of sorcery he didn't yet understand.

"You needed the humbling," V said, softer now. "Not to show off. To show you that you can't just stay outside the water and expect to map the ocean."

Victor didn't answer. His eyes fell on the scrambled code crawling across his datapad—just static now.

She leaned forward. "Look, I get it. Seen your type in Saka academy, the type of dweebs who are smart in the brain but ultimately inexcperienced. If you're gonna run ops or take gigs with high-tier corps breathing down your neck, you need more than smarts. You need instincts. You need to feel what ICE is about to do, feel when a blackwall is watching you back."

Victor nodded slowly.

"You've made your point."

"Damn right I have."

He exhaled slowly through his nose, his voice measured once more.

"I will proceed with the neural port."

She blinked. "Seriously?"

"Yes. But I will build it myself. It will not be bound to Arasaka, Militech, or Zetatech standards. I will not let them touch my brain."

"Victor," she said, folding her arms. "You're weird as hell, but… fine. I'll help you source the parts. On one condition."

He raised an eyebrow.

"When it's done, first jack-in's with me. I'll keep you alive."

Victor considered it. For a moment, pride swelled in his chest. But this wasn't pride—it was pragmatism.

"Accepted."

"Good," she said, spinning her chair back toward the terminal. "Now patch up your rig. I wasn't kidding about frying your ID. And next time, lock your backdoor ports, genius."

Victor reached for his datapad, watching its systems slowly reboot. He sat in silence, filing away every line of rogue code he saw. He wouldn't be outdone again.

As he left the room, datapad in hand and mind racing with schematics, a quiet thought lingered in his head.

The Net is not just circuitry. It is will made manifest. A war of ghosts, not soldiers.

If he were to conquer this city—and eventually return to his kingdom—it would not be through brute force alone.

It would be through mastery.