"Morning, Night City! Death toll across all sectors yesterday? Four! That's it. Four. Shocking, really. I almost started believing in miracles—until I saw the footage. You folks gotta stop dying in such boring ways. Make it art next time, huh? Anyway, if you're still wearing pants, that's already a win. Thank your donut-scarfing NCPD officers—because without their itchy trigger fingers, we'd be knee-deep in cadavers right now..."
"Watson's Vortex psychos were painting Kabuki red again. Literal red. Body parts on rooftops, chrome hands still twitching. Valentino boys? Skipping Day of the Dead. Even ghosts said, 'nah, too messy.' But hey, Pacifica's still a steaming hole of nothing—so we're technically fine!"
"And you're fine too, baby. With me. Stan the Man. Let's chase some dreams... or run from nightmares. Either way, it's Night City, and I'm in your head."
---
Carl's eyelids peeled open like they'd been glued shut. Streaks of crimson lights swept into his bleary, blood-crusted eyes. He squirmed. His face hurt. All the muscles from forehead to jaw stiff and knotted, he felt like someone had sewn it on his body like Frankenstein.
Fuck, his brain too.
His first breath hit like licking a battery. Something sour. Something dead. It smelled like the septic tank after a Thanksgiving Day Feast. He grimaced and gagged, sucking the vile air through clenched teeth as he pushed against the ground, raising his aching shoulders off the steel floor.
The lights grew brighter as the pain bled away. The overhead fluorescent strips glinted, and everything seemed too bright for Carl's aching brain, pulsing like an old film noir nightmare.
"F-fuck..."
His voice was cracked, like sandpaper dragged across rusted metal. The back of his head pulsed with dull agony. His skull felt split while his ears were filled with the distorted echo of Stanley's voice.
This wasn't a hangover. He got used to hangovers. This was fucking bad.
His hand sank into something soft. Wet. Squishy.
A banana peel. No, two. A wad of used tissues. A bloodied high-heel—stained at the tip. The stink of it, the putrid trash bin smell... the acidic bite of rotten food—was it real? It had to be.
He blinked against the neon stabbing his retinas. Too much light. Too many colors. Everything was moving, even the air. Ads blinked and mutated above him like digital demons: girls with snake-tongues offering "Love in Five Seconds," robotic wolves howling about brain-boosting implants, a politician with his genitals blurred but still gyrating.
"Where the hell am I...?", Carl murmured to himself as he winced, wiping the grogginess and crust out of his eyes. His cheeks came back stained in a grimy, silty charcoal.
A rusted guardrail loomed beside him, and he clung to it, pulling himself out of the steaming trash heap. His body ached. His hoodie clung to his damp body like cling wrap, the fibers tickling him.
And when he looked over the edge—into the chasm of the apartment block's open center—his gut dropped.
High above the lower city, between towers of steel and glass and filth, floated cars. Not tires-on-pavement cars. No. These machines soared, hummed, shimmered. Like starships drunk on sex and arrogance.
One buzzed past, leaving a trail of synth perfume and blue fire. And as he watched it glide through the skylines, a needle-thin tower sliced by the night sky, he got the feeling it wasn't a hallucination. Or a joke. Or drugs.
Carl's eyes widened at the sight and couldn't help but mutter, "No... no, no, this is not real."
The city was too much. Music pounded through walls. Somewhere below, a woman moaned—slow, drawn-out, almost operatic. Nearby, a scream. Laughter. A gunshot. His heart quickened; he tasted bile as sweat dribbled down his face and slicked the side of his nose.
It looked like Night City—only brighter. Shapeless figures shimmered through the rain, swaddled in neons, speeding across the city skyline like hungry phantoms.
He glanced down the corridor of the megablock.
Rats with glowing spines darted between the feet of gangsters loitering like wolves. Men and women—or things that used to be—leaned against graffitied walls, talking in languages Carl didn't recognize but somehow understood. A girl with a mechanical tail and translucent skin was tonguing something sharp from a guy's neck. He moaned, spine arching like a bow. His pants were already down.
Carl turned away, his heart pounding, breath shallow.
'What the fuck is this?'
His head throbbed harder now, the confusion turning to nausea. He clenched the guardrail, teeth gritted. "Okay... think."
His memories were hazy. Fragmented. The last thing he remembered—he'd been in his dark room, hunched in front of his desk. Watching a gameplay video.
Cyberpunk 2077.
A sinking feeling twisted in his gut.
He turned to face the apartment wall. The neon-scabbed tiles. The rusty elevators. The shitty graffiti that looked too intentional.
"...no way."
He stumbled toward a broken mirror wedged between two doors, shoved it aside, and stared out at the balcony again.
"This... is.. V's building.", Carl muttered in disbelief and looked around him at the people in the hallway, "T-This is N-Night City!"
A man stood nearby, muscles grafted with carbon-fiber, his jaw replaced by sharp metal plating. Glowing eyes tracked something in the distance. A woman leaned against him, laughing, her mouth sliding open too far—revealing a flickering tongue with data-jacks.
These weren't costumes.
They were prosthetics. Full cybernetic mods. No seams. No uncanny valley.
They were real.
Carl's gaze dropped—and froze.
One man walked past, dressed in tight chrome pants. No underwear. His crotch was glowing. Pulsing. Pink to purple to blue. The pants displayed moving holograms—some suggestive, some explicit. And beneath the shimmer, the bulge moved unnaturally, as if something inside was automated.
Carl's jaw dropped.
"The fuck... it's changing colors—?"
The man twitched, arms jerking to a beat only he could hear. Shoulder spasms. Head bobbing. Full epileptic-sex-dance. Carl stepped back as the guy walked past him, body buzzing with mod-enhanced pleasure.
He turned to watch him go, frozen in disbelief.
"This isn't cosplay... This is fucking real. I've been dropped into a wet dream made by a psychotic AI."
Behind him, another man groaned and dropped his pants against the wall. Without warning, he started pissing right there—golden stream splashing onto the grating.
Carl recoiled, disgusted. But in the puddle, he saw his reflection and froze again.
The face looking back was his—but not. The lines were gone. The stubble. The hollowed-out eyes of a twenty-four-year-old on too many all-nighters. The reflection was eighteen, maybe nineteen.
"What... did I get rebooted?"
He stepped closer to the puddle, squinting. It was him. Same eyes. Same scar on his brow. But younger. Clean skin. Less damage.
"Alright, who the fuck gave me a youth DLC?" he muttered.
Above him, speakers clicked, and Stanley's voice returned.
"Day of the Dead, people. The spirits are watching. And they're laughing. So light a candle, fuck a stranger, and remember—nothing in Night City is sacred but chrome and credits."
Carl's breath hitched.
'Day of the Dead. That's November 1st... or 2nd.'
He walked further, down a dim corridor stinking of synth drugs and burnt oil. A flickering ad board shimmered nearby.
Dead Man's Lottery – Enter Now! Draw Date: 2075 / 11 / 03
His jaw slackened.
2075.
He leaned against the wall. Everything inside him tried to scream, but only a moan escaped his throat as panic overwhelmed him. He took a ragged breath and pushed himself away, clutching the guardrail, the pain of his fractured nails almost welcome.
Suddenly, a thought crossed his mind.
He hadn't recognized the language on the screen. Didn't need to.
He just understood it.
The symbols, the glyphs, the tech-slanged jargon, it all made perfect sense. Like his brain had been patched with the future's code.
Carl laughed and thought, 'I've got a cheat code... a fucking universal translator.'
No system. No UI. No tutorial. Just this.
Language comprehension.
And probably... that was just the beginning.