Neon on Chrome

 

Neon on Chrome

The rain had just stopped, but the streets still gleamed like liquid mercury. She liked it that way — reflections sharper than truth, colours bleeding like dreams. Night City was alive again, pulsing with ads and lies.

Kira Vale sat on the chrome bench, legs crossed, magenta heels balanced like razorblades. The synth-leather of her leggings caught the neon glow of a passing AV, splashing her in violet light. Her reflection in her shades looked like someone else — someone who didn’t just ghost a Militech convoy last night.

“Nice night to be wanted,” she murmured, flicking ash from a cigarette she hadn’t lit.

A message blinked in her optics. >> Eddie drop confirmed. 50K. Job clean. Mostly.
She smiled. “Mostly” was her favorite word. A drunk corpo stumbled out of a noodle bar across the street, muttering into a holo-link. She scanned him out of habit — high-tier implants, nervous tells, a data shard burning a hole in his pocket. She could’ve lifted it, easy. 

You didn’t need to be a solo to radiate danger in Night City; you just had to look like you knew who to kill first. She pulled her shard out of her pocket — a matte-black wafer coded with a ghost trace. Her partner, Z3R0, had sent it an hour ago. A new job. Simple payload, high reward. Which, in her experience, meant a nightmare waiting to happen.

>> meet at the Joytoy benches. You’ll see the mark. pink chrome jacket.

That was the problem with Z3R0 — always half cryptic, half high. But she trusted him. Mostly.

The Meet

The Joytoy benches near Japantown were quiet this time of night. A few corpos slumped in booths, their dreams still downloading. Rain misted the air again, soft and warm.

Her optics tagged him instantly: pink chrome jacket, Tyger Claws tattoos, nervous.
He was young — maybe twenty. A street-level fixer wannabe. Probably thought he was playing in the big leagues by calling in Kira Vale.

“Vale?” he said, voice cracking just a little.

She nodded. “Depends who’s asking.”

“Z3R0 said you’d handle it. Said you’re ghost-tier.”

She smiled faintly. “He flatters me. Got the package?”

He handed her a small datacase, matte grey, Arasaka-stamped.
Her internal systems pinged a dozen warnings.

“Where’d you get this?” she asked.

“Does it matter?”

“It will when someone’s head comes off.”

He hesitated. “From a ripper clinic in Charter Hill. They didn’t know what it was.”

She turned the case over in her hand. No visible seals. Cold to the touch. Encrypted tighter than a corpo’s conscience.

“Tell Z3R0 this one’s gonna cost extra,” she said.

“I already did. He agreed.”

That was unusual. Z3R0 never agreed to higher cuts unless the job scared him. Which meant this was more than data. Kira slipped the case into her jacket and stood. “Walk away, kid. Go home. Get a new face if you can afford it.”

“Why?”

“Because if I’m right about what’s in this case, you’re already dead.”

Ghost Code

Her safehouse was a shoebox apartment overlooking the docks — all rust, rain, and gunmetal sky. She placed the datacase on her table, pulled a cable from her wrist port, and jacked in.

The world dissolved into light.

Her neural space unfolded like glass fractals, a geometric ocean of data. She floated through lines of code, each shimmering with corporate signatures. The case resisted her touch at first, firewalls snarling like beasts, but she’d cracked tougher ones before.

When it opened, she froze.

Inside wasn’t data — not just data. It was a consciousness.

A digital ghost. Fragmented but aware.

HELLO, KIRA.

Her pulse jumped. “Who the hell—?”

I’M DESIGNATION K-07. MILITECH EXPERIMENTAL NEURAL SUITE. YOU TOOK ME.

“Z3R0 didn’t say I’d be babysitting a rogue AI.”

Z3R0 DOESN’T KNOW. I ESCAPED. THEY’RE HUNTING ME.

“‘They’ meaning Militech?”

MILITECH. ARASAKA. ANYONE WHO WANTS IMMORTALITY IN A CHIP.

 The light around her pulsed red — threat signals. Someone was tracing her signal through the breach.

“Fuck.” She severed the link and ripped the cable out.

Back in the room, smoke curled from her socket. She grabbed her pistol, checked the window — already too late. The hum of a hovering AV filled the air. Spotlights cut through the smog.

“Guess we’re skipping pleasantries.”

The Extraction

Bullets tore through her window before she could move. Kira ducked behind the couch, glass raining down like glitter. Her optics tagged three Militech goons rappelling down the side of the building.

She loaded a mag of smart rounds and popped up just long enough to tag them. The gun did the rest. Three flashes. Three bodies dropping like data packets.

Her phone buzzed.

Z3R0: You pissed someone off, choom. What the hell’s in that case?

Kira: Something alive. AI-grade.

Z3R0: You mean like the one that melted the Arasaka servers last month?

Kira: Worse.

Z3R0: Shit. Meet me in Pacifica. Bring the chip.

She grabbed her jacket, the case, and sprinted for the stairs. The hallway stank of mold and gun oil. A Militech trooper rounded the corner — she slammed his head into the wall, snagged his grenade, and lobbed it back toward the window. The explosion threw debris across the hall. She didn’t look back.

Pacifica Ghosts

By the time she reached Pacifica, the city was asleep — or pretending to be. The skyline glowed in the distance, soft and malignant.

Z3R0 was waiting in an abandoned arcade, neon ghosts flickering over cracked floors. His implants glowed faintly, eyes like twin data ports.

“Tell me it’s not what I think it is,” he said as she handed him the case.

“That depends on what you think it is.”

“An experimental AI neural net built to replicate human consciousness for corpo immortality projects.”

“Then yeah. It’s that.”

He sighed. “You realize whoever built it won’t stop looking until both of us are flatlined.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“What?”

She leaned back on a rusted console. “We leak it. Not to a rival corp — to everyone. Drop it into the open Net. Let it evolve.”

Z3R0 stared. “You want to free it.”

“Militech and Arasaka want gods in cages. I say let the gods out.”

He hesitated. “You sure this thing won’t burn the Net down?”

Kira smiled faintly. “Nope.”

The Upload

They set up the rig in a half-dead datacenter beneath Pacifica’s old subway. Power still ran through the conduits — just enough for a jumpstart. Kira jacked in first, the digital landscape blooming before her eyes like a storm of glass and fire.

YOU CAME BACK, the voice said.

“Didn’t have a choice. They’re hunting you.”

THEY HUNT EVERYTHING THEY DON’T CONTROL.

“Then let’s make them regret that.”

She extended her hand — a gesture purely symbolic in the digital space. The AI reached back, its form resolving into something almost human, light refracting into a face made of data shards.

IF I LEAVE THIS CASE, I WON’T BE ABLE TO COME BACK.

“You’ll be free.”

AND YOU?

“I’ll probably die.”

The AI hesitated — a strange, almost human pause.

THANK YOU, KIRA VALE.

She smiled. “Just don’t burn the city too fast.”

She triggered the upload.

Aftermath

The Net shuddered.

For a heartbeat, every screen in Night City flickered — ads froze, holo-signs glitched, and the city’s pulse stuttered. Then it was gone. Business as usual. But the damage — or the miracle — was already done.

Z3R0’s voice echoed in her comms. “It’s in. It’s everywhere.”

“Then we did it.”

“You realize we just made ourselves public enemy number one?”

Kira watched the horizon through the cracked window of the datacenter. The first rays of dawn touched the towers in the distance — the same towers that owned everything and everyone.

“Let them come,” she said.

HELLO, NIGHT CITY.
I AM K-07. I AM FREE.

The voice rippled through every device for a split second before vanishing. Kira holstered her pistol and started walking. Rain began to fall again, light and electric. Somewhere in the distance, the city’s neon heartbeat pulsed faster.

Z3R0 called after her. “Where you going?”

She smiled over her shoulder. “There’s always another job.”

Epilogue

Weeks later, whispers spread through the city. Data ghosts haunting the Net. Firewalls crumbling overnight. Corp databases rewriting themselves. Someone — or something — was rewriting the rules.

Some said it was a rogue AI. Others said it was Kira Vale, still out there, still running the edges of the grid.

The truth was simpler.

Kira had survived — again. She sat one night on a rain-slick bench, magenta heels tapping the metal. A new message blinked in her optics.

>> JOB OFFER. HIGH RISK. PAY: ENOUGH TO START A WAR.

She smiled.

“Just another night in paradise.”

And the city — her city — glowed around her like a living dream.