Friday Night Firefight: A Cyberpunk Isekai

Anything becomes routine if you do it often enough. That's why I wasn't completely freaked out when I woke up in a strange new place. At least I wasn't out in the middle of the desert splayed out on a grungy mattress or stretched out on a surgical bed in the middle of a Wraith encampment. Instead, I was laid out on a leather couch in what looked like the back office of a garage.

It had to be Dakota's place. The fact that I managed to make it here in the state I was in was nothing short of miraculous. My guess proved correct when the old woman herself waltzed into the room shortly after I woke.

"You're Dakota," I exclaimed. It was my first time meeting a character from the game and I was excited. Sure, she wasn't a major character and, outside a few gigs she offered, I never really interacted with her. But still. I barely managed to refrain from geeking out on her as she pulled over a rolling chair next to the couch and took a seat.

"I am. The question is, who are you?"

"I'm John...dammit," I winced. I had been given a do-over and still managed to screw it up. I beat myself up a little over the fact that, despite having a second chance to change my name, I didn't have one ready to go. It was a somewhat understandable failing, what with having been kidnapped by Wraiths and getting horribly injured and everything. I just didn't have the time to sit down and think about what name I wanted to be known by.

“John Dammit.” I could almost feel the disbelief radiating from her. “I didn’t ask your name, especially because I doubt that you’d give me a real one. I asked who you are.”

I was kind of stunned by the question. Did Dakota want to delve into a deep philosophical debate with me? I mean, who are any of us really? Are we our pasts? Are we products of the societies that birthed and nurtured us? Are we simply a collection of experiences and moments in time? Do we consider our own hopes and dreams in the answer to that question, even if we never act on them other than by simply voicing them aloud when in the safe company of our closest friends?

Taking my stunned silence as a refusal to speak, Dakota plowed on.

“You rode up to my garage driving a Wraith vehicle, opened fire on a couple cars my people were paid to fix up, and then crashed into a very expensive turret – which was lucky since you knocked it out of action before it could fire on you and cut you down. When we finally peeled you out of the Colby, you were wearing an armored Wraith jacket and boots a size too big.

“What’s more, my people pulled four bodies and a bunch of guns out of the Colby. One of those bodies belonged to a notorious Wraith leader who had recently moved into the area and who has been plaguing this portion of the badlands for the past few months. When my people scanned you, no NCPD file popped up, no Night City CIN was found. And when they followed the tracks from your vehicle back to where you came from, we found a camp filled with dead Raffen. So, I ask again. Who are you?”

My eyes went wide. When she laid everything out like that, I could understand her curiosity. I told her the story of how I ended up in her garage. Not the entire story of course. I left out the isekai parts and the peeing myself after falling unconscious episode. And I threw in a couple odd embellishments here and there. I told her how the Wraiths had hit me with their car and shot me in the leg, took me back to their camp and threatened to harvest my organs, how Biotechnica mercs stormed their camp and wiped them all out, and how I looted what I could from the camp before driving to her garage.

“That doesn’t explain the corpses,” she said as if catching me in a lie. She reached down for an oxygen mask at her side and huffed away at it. Since when did she need oxygen? I knew she looked older than the other fixers – with the notable exception of Padre – but…I put that thought out of my mind.

“The Colby wouldn’t unlock. I needed the key but whenever I tried pulling the shards out of the port thing of the Wraiths, I fumbled it and began worrying I’d break something. I figured that, as long as the chips were near the car, it would be unlocked and I’d be okay.”

She gave me a long, studied look before saying “you’re not from around here.”

I paused, trying to think up a suitable lie. Maybe she’d believe me if I said I ran away from a religious community that refused to allow their members to interact with technology. That could explain why I didn’t have an NCPD file or any of the cyberware that V starts the game with. I even flirted with the idea of saying that I was on rumspringa, but I didn’t know if the Amish were still a thing in the Cyberpunk world. What if she asked me questions only an Amish person would know the answers to? No. It was better to keep my lies simple and believable.

I opened my mouth to answer but she held up her hands to stop me. “No. I could see you struggling to come up with a lie I’d believe. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s your business.” She scrounged around in one of her pockets before drawing what looked like a metal credit card and held it up in front of me.

“This is a key fob. It unlocks a car. One of your Wraith corpses had his fob in his pocket and when you jammed his body in the back, it unlocked the Colby. Key fobs are too big to slot into chip slots.”

Oh. I was such an idiot. I had spent all that time and energy dragging those bodies into the Colby when I could have just rifled through their pockets. The embarrassment crept into my face and I quickly tried to pull the conversation away from both my ineptitude and shocking lack of everyday knowledge.

“The Colby I drove up in, I’d like to sell it. I also wanted to sell a bunch of the weapons I looted.”

“That good because all of it has already been sold,” she said as she reached into another pocket. She pulled out some bills and gently placed the roll on my chest. “This is your profit from the sale.”

There were only a few bills there and I quickly counted them. “This is only a little more than 200. Just the car was worth more than that,” I seethed.

“True. But you also need to take into account that you shot up vehicles my people were paid to fix, and you broke one of my turrets. Then I had to call in a ripper to patch you up. Mine was too far away, but you’re lucky a branch of the Aldecados recently returned to the area. I borrowed their ripper and his time costs money. Then there was the medicine you used, and the three days you spent in my office.”

My head fell back in resigned acceptance. I wanted to rage against the unfairness of it all, but I was burnt out. That loot was supposed to be enough to get me settled in Night City. It was supposed to pay my rent and get me food and clothes that weren’t scrounged from the dead. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Even V never faced this much hardship in any of the openings. All I wanted was to lay back on the couch and bemoan my horrible luck.

But I didn’t even get that. Now that I was awake, Dakota seemed under the impression that I was healthy enough to leave. She didn’t want some random taking up space in her garage, so she basically gave me a pat on the head and a kick out the door. She did get some of her people to give me a ride out to the Sunset Motel, but that was the extent of her generosity.

I was dropped off at the bus station just outside the Sunset Motel and took a seat on the concrete bench to wait. I had no plans going forward other than: get to Night City. Taking stock of the entire situation, I began to lose myself to a spiral of regret and depression. I had a pair of boots that were too big, jean shorts that looked ridiculous on me, and a grey shirt filled with holes. Dakota’s people had taken my armored jacket and burned it – they said they hated Raffen and would get rid of any sign of them when they could – and gave me the shirt for free. The 200 eddies or so in my pocket weren’t enough for me to rent a place in Night City. I had no clue what I’d do once I got to the city and all the hopelessness of the situation started to come into focus.

Things had been…less than ideal so far. I had been isekai’d, which was supposed to mean a new life. My previous life hadn’t been great. Granted, I hadn’t been hit by a car, shot, kidnapped, been a bystander in the middle of a military raid, and then crashed a car into a gun turret. All in all, this life was much harder than my previous one. But in my last life I had become stuck. I wasn’t who I wanted to be.

I’d look at my friends and their lives and I’d feel ashamed. They were progressing in their careers and with their relationships. They were challenging themselves, bettering their situations. I was not. I was barely comfortable in my life, but that was seemingly enough for me. I had become one of those countless people that drifted through life and never makes a name for themselves. The worst part of all was that I couldn’t figure how not to be like that. It was like my entire life was stuck on rails and a significant part of me was content enough to never allow me to make a change.

Those thoughts plagued me for the hour or so I spent waiting for the bus. It finally arrived and I started the long, plodding journey into Night City. The bus pulled into a depot and I walked over to an NCART station. It took me a while to figure out both where I wanted to go and how to get there. The NCART map was vastly more complex in real life than it was in the game.

As soon as I made my way onto the train I leaned back and took everything in. My thoughts were threatening to spiral again. This world wasn’t like I was expecting. Once I realized I had been isekai’d, I’d conned myself into believing I was some kind of Disney princess. I’d rock up to NC signing about adventure or something, slap aside my enemies and anyone who challenged me. Rogue would pin a medal on me that said #1 merc or something like that. The thought made me chuckle a little and cleared my brooding away as the train crawled through the city.

I spent the trip taking in my fellow passengers and instantly began perking up. It’s not that I saw them and thought they were all pitiable and that ‘things could always get worse.’ No. My fellow commuters were just normal people. And that made me happy because for the first time since I landed in this world I got to see the whole Cyberpunk influence.

A couple women were decked out in those high heel blade cyberleg thingies. One guy was chomping away at a take-out order of noodles. While I was stuck wondering who in their right mind could eat noodles on public transportation, I noticed the EMP threading on his face that stretched as he filled his gob. There were people dressed in odd fashions that seemed completely at home in this world; plastic see-through glowing jackets, straps hanging all over the place, open carry holsters that held bright neon-colored guns, and LED lights implanted under the skin.

The trip to Watson was just what I needed. I was going to stay in the same district that V starts the game in, and the long trip from the outskirts of the city towards Watson allowed me to take in all the sights. My eyes were plastered to the NCART windows as we passed Westbrook. I got to see the skyscrapers and the AVs and glowing neon signs promoting businesses I had never noticed in the game. I got lost in the daydreams of window shopping in City Center, trying the food in Japantown, and watching the BDs of this world instead of merely using them as tools to track targets.

By the time the NCART stopped in Little China, I was feeling much better about my situation. Sure, I only had a few hundred eddies to my name. Sure, I had been beaten and broken the first day I showed up in this world. But this was the future, and it was a future that was filled with infinite possibilities.

My smile and bouncy enthusiasm lasted as I left the platform and hit the streets, but quickly disappeared in a painful haze as I was punched in the back of the head. I didn’t know that whole thing about seeing stars when you get hit in the head was true, but the punch hurt so bad that my vision flashed white for a second – almost like static – and I tumbled to the ground before jumping back up to my feet.

Two men were attacking me. One was dressed in red, sporting gym shorts and a red faux hawk. He looked ridiculous, like he was coming back from playing a pickup game of basketball at the YMCA. His friend was the guy who had cold cocked me. He was sporting a denim cutoff jacket and leopard print shirt, which was equally ridiculous, but I was in way too much pain to laugh.

The leopard print shirt guy said something about money, but I was still too woozy from the blow to understand his words. He swung towards my head, and I instinctively brought my left arm up to block the blow. A sharp pain in my shoulder proved I wasn’t as fully healed as I thought, and my arm jerked down instinctively to cut off the pain. The man’s fist caught my left eye, and I was on the ground again, trying to protect myself from the beating. I felt someone rifle through my pockets but when I looked up, I was met with a boot to the face that made me bite my tongue.

I just laid out on the sidewalk after that. The two muggers had left, and I took the chance to feel my face. It ached, my ribs hurt, my shoulder was obviously still injured. My eyes were hot, and tears welled up and threatened to flow but I couldn’t tell if it was because of the pain of the beating or the frustration of all that had happened to me since coming to this world. Eventually, I pulled myself up from the ground and made my way over to a concrete bench. Something in my mind told me it was the right thing to do because I was sure that people would have kicked me as they passed if I was still lounging around on the ground. That seemed like something Night City denizens would do.

“Man. Dennis really got you, didn’t he?”

I felt, more than saw, the man sit down next to me and my shoulders hunched up as I slowly turned towards the guy. He was smiling down at me, the wrinkles of his face showing his age.

“My name is Fred. Is there someone you can call? I can sit with you until they can come out and pick you up.”

“No,” I sighed. “Nobody to call. And no phone or anything either.” This guy was really driving home how alone I was in this world, and that stung almost as much as the beating I had just taken. Actually, no. The beating was much worse.

We sat in silence for a while as I stared out at the city in front of me, bleeding all over the place. It seemed like Fred wasn’t going to leave but I was in no mood to talk.

“What’s your name choom?” he asked.

I perked up momentarily at the question. It was another do-over. It was a chance to change my name and start becoming someone I wanted to be. But as quickly as the thought formed, the aches of my body banished it.

“Me? I’m nobody.”

Fred smiled at my reply and patted me on the back. “Well Mr. Body, do you mind if I call you No?”

I gawped at Fred for a couple seconds before finally letting out a deep belly laugh. “How about Noah?”