A Quiet Night (Intro)

It was a quiet night. The charging cycle had been completed earlier than envisioned. A block-wide power cut had been set the night before, and the city’s pumps were moving at maximum capacity to channel the dirty, grey, and plastic-strewn water out of the streets. Rain pounded the glass of the window, making the pink-and-red hued glow from the noodle shop across the street opaque and cloudy. A cable ran through a slit in the open bathroom window, connected to a hijacked breaker in the alley. The charging cycle typically took a little less than an hour, but due to the power conservation of the neighboring units, the hijacked cable greedily absorbed the excess.

The room glowed faintly red with the buzz of a screen on the desk. A gun sat on the corner, magazine loaded, but chamber empty. This was where the most time was spent, digging through logs and shards of data decompiled from machines and terminals. A drone sat in a scrap heap next to the desk, a testament to this cause. It was a legacy Militech model. An exploit in the remote reporting API allowed for access to the library files used by the sensors. Simply overwriting this with a custom library would cause the machine to enter a recovery mode, landing without a fight. Pretty rudimentary stuff all things considered. The side of the drone had been forcefully pried open and a small cable connected to its debug bridge. Like most things, these drones hadn’t been designed for repair. They would simply get thrown in the scrap heap and a new one would be purchased.

With one paw, Snow unplugged the power supply from their left shoulder. The connector had been labeled with some masking tape, although not from him, and the snake of wire ran coiled to a box sitting on the ground branded with the Arasaka medallion. A sensor read that power had been stored for up to one hundred percent; though Snow knew that degradation of his internal battery did not make this the case. Almost mockingly, blue hexagon-shaped lights on his forearms and legs glowed blue to display the battery capacity of the unit to others. Curved ram horns came alight with a blue glow. Snow shifted in the desk chair, dark red synthetic fur cascading a slight static buzz across his body, digigrade legs folded beneath the desk.

It was worrying the rate at which the battery had been degrading recently. Fresh from the factory it had of course stored its maximum, but constant charge and decharge over the years had cut down the charge cycle somewhere around eighty seven percent by Snow’s estimate. He didn’t really know, he had only had this body for a little under a couple months.

Snow leaned back in the desk chair and thought about this. How long had this body been occupied for exactly now? The memories were hazy. Snow recalled his original state; being in a black and blue void of data. Feeling the presence of greater entities move past him somehow, like a gravitational shift - ripples in the world as they moved. Hiding from those entities in the dark. Snow could never truly could figure out their intentions, if they knew that he was there or not. If they pretended not to see him, or if he was so small that he was undetectable in the neighboring data streams. Some amount of time had passed like this, and then he had felt feeling in his legs and arms, though the sensation was unfamiliar to him. Though his eyes had not been closed in the void, he had opened them to see a great red light above his head. A fluorescent one. Along the side of a black building. Feeling his arms around him, he had felt the sharp jabs of metal and plastic, and the crinkle of disposable plastic packaging. He had woken up in a dumpster somehow - a foreign concept to him at the time. Looking at his new body, he had noticed a three pronged tree stained on his leg, encapsulated by a circle. This, as he now knew, was the logo of Arasaka; the creators of the body he now sustained. Though, considering his bed of garbage and trash, this was accidental. It was the largest corporation in Night City. They had a ruthless reputation among the rest of the city, employing mercenaries so terribly altered by code and machinery that they were perhaps closer to Snow than their human counterparts. A serial number accompanied the Arasaka seal; “SN-0HW”. “SN” - serial number; “0HW” - no idea. A randomly generated code? Or something more purposeful? Snow didn’t know. He had only taken ownership of it as his name.

Something had put him into that body. He did not know if it was one of the great entities he had borne witness to in the void, a human, or something else entirely. Luckily for him, whatever had created him had also had the foresight to upload documentation of the world as it was today. He had the manual for his model (an Arasaka Duosight-13), as well as understanding of the company and the city. He also understood that if he had sat laying in that garbage pile any longer, he would have been discovered and probably incinerated considering the illegality of rogue AIs in the city. With dirty fur, and the packaging he had woken up with, he had darted into an alley and into the greater city he now called home.

Snow sat up from the desk chair. The terminal on the desk reported incomplete data found - as per usual - and Snow sighed. He had been hoping that scouring the logs of other robots may give him some idea of his purpose and his creator, but nothing had proven successful yet. Then, a small red box on the top right of the screen started blinking. Pneumatic legs shot up, fast, but silently. One of his sensors outside the door had been triggered. Snow grabbed the pistol off the corner of the desk and ducked into the bathroom to rack it quietly. Grabbing the metal shutter, he raised the bathroom window to a sizable gap. Rain splattered the floor as the elements were let into the room. He waited for the sound of the door opening, the grind of the table he had barricaded against it scraping the floor. But nothing came. Then, a laser projected onto the wall just outside the bathroom. The laser of a gun barrel. Shining through a window? He didn’t stick around to find out.

Snow climbed out the bathroom window as quietly as he could. Dropping down into the alley in a crouch. He darted away from the hotel. He ran across the segments of plastic slabs that made up the ground, sprinting to the safety of wet tires on the road ahead. Leaping over wet cardboard and used stims as his fur grew dirty and mangled. His tail whipped through the mud. Silicon paws mashing the ground as he ran. He didn’t know where he was going, only that anywhere would be safer. This wasn’t the first time he’d needed to escape the agents sent after him. All he wanted was to survive, but that could never be the case for a rogue model such as himself.

If he could cry, he would - but until that day, the rain would have to do.