The IFV-24 passed down over a dark street. Its repulsers slung remnants of acrid gunk around in a thin spatter. This part of the city had seen the worst of the acid rain from the previous night.

Coming to a stop, CURL, Leary, and Tinker stepped out. A pale woman with glowing acrylic liberty spikes and purple leathers approached Leary and began to deal.

From around a corner, Darius watched, absorbing every detail of his new world, and all the people in it. He pulled the scrap cloth further over his head like a hood and slipped deeper behind the corner.

CURL’s eyes fluttered into focus behind her visor again. She checked the dealer, the sleeping figure across the street… but what is that? She saw a cybernetics signature that was altogether new to her. She infiltrated it easily. Decades old factory level encryption is all of the protection that it had. “Must have been a really shitty RipperDoc to do that installation,” she thought to herself. She scanned the tech. Chips, eyes, brain, spine, arms, adrenals, something called a purifier, and none of it was working beyond base operational protocols.

She jacked out, and looked around, trying to see who it was. Darius noticed her starting to look in his direction, and he moved down the alle, but it was a very close call.

His bagged feet squished into the malodorous browning sludge as he made his way to the end of the alley. He was feeling tired again. The constant ache of his body had been sapping him of energy all day, but it was still the best he had felt in a long time.

He reached the end of the alley as it tapered off to another street. An eerie sensation washed over him. He suddenly felt an instinctual discomfort. Something was wrong. He ducked behind a pile of trash at the foot of a fire escape.

Hoots and hollers echoed down the empty street. A gang dressed in black and green clown suits. He’d seen something like them before on TV. They had murdered a holo reporter that was in their territory, but this couldn’t be their territory. There were too many people here, and these guys were sadistic. Nobody would willingly stay in one of their neighborhoods.

Suddenly a shot rang out. A spray of red mist erupted from the back of one of the clown’s heads. The others pointed and laughed hysterically as the body fell limp. Cybernetic blades burst menacingly from the arms of one of the clowns and he ran toward an alley parallel to the one Darius had just left. This clown leaped into the air with blades at the ready, and was shot through three times before landing face-first in the muck.

A woman stepped forward, purple and teal hair cascading down one side of her head. The other clowns licked their lips and drew firearms and blades to join the fray. A huge dark figure stepped up next to the woman and raised heavy pistols, gunning down more of the gang. Finally rapid staccato gunfire ripped the air and a grizzled P-Sec stepped in to mow the rest down easily.

Darius held his breath, and ducked lower behind the trash. He heard their voices.

“It’s a signature I’ve never seen before,” the woman’s voice reverberated loosely down the empty street.

“Hmm,” a voice rumbled.

“But you said the cybernetics wasn’t any good. Just running safe mode protocols,” another voice said, raspy and tinged with age.

“It’s still salvageable,” a younger male voice spoke. “I could do it. Not a lot of people could, but I could.”

He peeked around the trash and saw the woman in the middle of the street. She stood dead still.

“Be silent,” Darius thought to himself. “Don’t move.” His body ache intensified in this hunched position. His head began to feel light, faint, his left eye shuddered and rolled back into his head. “Not now!” His left arm locked into place, then his right, then his spine. He felt a tingling in his brain and his vision went to grayscale. Words appeared, barely legible on the edge of his vision.

“[INFILTRATION DETECTED] Deploying defensive measures...”

The woman in the street, still in his vision, began moving again. “They’ve got ICE installed?” she exclaimed in surprise. “The security is aggressive. It caught on to me pretty quickly once I’d started shutting things down.”

With his spine down, he was paralysed. His right eye was locked on the street. All he could see was her, around the edge of the box. His legs were crumbling beneath him as his muscles lost control. He fell against the wall, cracking his head against it. He felt the hot flow of blood down his cheek.

Now his locked eye could only see the corner where the grimey asphalt beneath the fire escape met the concrete of the wall, but he could hear them. They were getting closer.

“[SYSTEM RECOVERY] CHK_SYS… 100%”

“[SYSTEM RECOVERY] Booting with safe mode protocols… 100%”

His spine was back. One by one, his parts came back online. He got up painfully, and ran for the alley. A cylinder clinked and rolled across the ground beside him. It clicked as static charges suddenly pulsed across his metal. He tumbled, rolling across the mucky ground. His body ceased motion as every piece of his cybernetics shut off completely. The words in his vision disappeared, and as everything faded to black, he saw the giant dark figure holding the pin of an EMP grenade.

His vision now gone, he heard the group approaching him, feet squelching in the foul red. He felt two firm and gigantic hands reach under his body and lift him up.

“Tinker, get a sedative, we’ve got 49 seconds left on the EMP before he boots back up,” a voice rumbled.

He felt a pinch in his neck, and then… nothing.