PRIVATE Going Nowear Fast

[Anders Whitard]

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@Queenie

Nowear
10:30 AM​

The cab sped off with purpose, chasing after a pedestrian burdened with either a dream or just too many groceries to carry the rest of the way home.

Anders slid his cell phone back into his pocket. He had all the standard implants for hands-free communication—necessary in Night City. But every so often, he liked the feel of a physical phone, a secure alternative to his usual methods of contact and payment. It gave him a sense of anonymity.

His gaze flickered through the bustling streets, where naked neon fought to colour the world despite the morning light, bathing everything in electric hues of pink, green, and blue. The air was thick with the scent of sizzling street food, underscored by the faint ozone tang of the city's endless circuitry. His steps were steady, though the years in his bones made their presence known with every movement.

The city thrummed around him—a symphony of human and machine. Drones hummed overhead. The distant pulse of nightclub bass bled into the morning. Laughter, arguments, and the occasional siren wove through the urban din. A glint of chrome caught his eye—a cybernetic arm flashing in the light, just one of countless augmentations that defined life here, including his own.

Vendors lined the sidewalks, hawking everything from bootleg cyberware to dubious street food. Children played in the shadows of monolithic skyscrapers; their eyes wide with the wonder of it all. Anders felt the familiar pang of nostalgia for a simpler time, but he knew better. That world was long gone—buried under layers of progress and decay.

The Nowear tattoo parlour loomed ahead, its neighbouring signs flickering with stubborn defiance. The thought of the needle against his skin, the artist's steady hand, unsettled him despite his own profession. But it was ritual—one of the few moments of stillness in the relentless churn of Night City. A quiet devotion in a godless world.

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He announced himself as he entered, a deliberately casual cough signalling his arrival to the proprietress.

He respected Queenie. She was nothing like him. Where he thrived in the sterile, colourless joy of extreme order and efficiency—a hallmark of his homeland's national psyche—Queenie seemingly embraced spontaneity with an effortless, almost defiant grace. Her Italian sensibilities favoured rebellion, something he was still adjusting to.

But he enjoyed her all the same. She was like a daughter to him, though he'd never say as much. Seeing her so free, so wild, so alive brought him a quiet pleasure. At the same time, it made him feel old—like time was leaking from some unseen puncture in his soul, one breath at a time.

He spoke out in his croaky voice, not yet warmed in the morning air.

"Ciao, piccolina mia."

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[Queenie]

Amidst a thorough clean-down of one of the back client rooms, Queenie poked her head out through the door and offered the man a large smile and a chiming hello.

"Ciiiiaaaaooo Whit!" she chirped, scooching on out with rag in one hand and a bottle of disinfectant in the other, an apron crowning her usual attire. Delight flushed cheeks pressed into her eyes in the moment of a welcome hug and kiss to @Anders Whitard's own, her hands hovering just enough away from him to keep from cleaning him in the process as well.

"You are early, I should have expected. I was trying to be ready-" but as tight of a ship as she could run, clients had a way of prolonging their appointments for one reason or another. The last had been filling her in on updates of the family while she finished touching up an older tattoo.

Anders, ever an elusive man and rarely seen beyond the confines of his own surgery, could not have been more welcome. Gruff he might've been to others, Queenie saw only the warmth of a fatherly presence even if her own father was alive and well. Anders was here, her real father was half way around the world. Sometimes you needed a work-dad to turn to when things weren't quite right.

"Do you need anything?" she asked as she set aside cleaning paraphenalia and began to disrobe from the apron, "That's such a long ride for you. You should sit, and maybe something to drink?" Let no one leave Nowear saying they weren't treated humanely.

 

[Anders Whitard]

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@Queenie

Nowear
10:30 AM​

He thought she was simply brilliant. She was young, exciting, full of life, a salve to the otherwise cynical mess that Night City presented.

Anders huffed out a quiet chuckle, scratching at the stubble on his chin as she danced around him, all warmth and energy. It was a wonder how she managed to keep a place like Nowear running, considering the nature of the clientele. Still, she had her ways, and they worked.

"Early means I don't have to fight traffic later," he grumbled, voice a low rasp, but there was no real complaint in it. He leaned slightly into the welcome kiss, a rare acceptance of closeness, though his hands stayed firmly at his sides—old habits didn't break easy.

At her offer, he waved a hand dismissively. "Sit, drink—nah. Show me what's busted." His gaze flicked around the shop, the smell of disinfectant just barely cutting through the lingering ink and antiseptic. Someone had gotten a fresh piece not too long ago.

She was already shrugging off the apron, ever the busy one, but he wasn't about to let her fuss over him. "Data loss, right? System crash or someone stick their hands where they shouldn't?" He stepped forward, his coat shifting around him as he moved, the weight of his tools settling at his belt.

The world outside didn't stop being a mess just because you were inside a place like this. And if the shop's system was compromised, that was a problem. For her, which meant it was his problem too.

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[Queenie]

So feisty for such an old man. His spice was one of his endearing qualities, though, and only made the woman that much more fond of him. Though they had only known one another for a short while, a few years now by her recollection, she found Anders to have wormed his way into her confidence quite easily. Perhaps that was a mistake, but she'd yet to see any proof of it. People had told her not to trust anyone but such a tactic didn't serve her lifestyle well.

Queenie needed her connections. Human connections. Needed to know she wasn't in this alone and that there was more heart out there than circuitry and metal.

"Ohhh, oke oke. Right to work, no pleasantries," she humored him with curled lips while she stepped around behind the man to steer him into the back, "just a fritz in the security system. Anjou, we'll be in back. Watch the front, ya?"

"Got it," from one of the client rooms where one of her artists stepped out from cleaning up. A tall, skinny fellow with as much ink as he had cyberware. He nodded to Anders from behind his smock and stepped, long-leggedly, around them to take up the stool at the front desk.

To the back they went, into the security closet for an interim. It wasn't the security system that needed Anders' eyes. Queenie stepped around him, opening the door to the circuit breaker panel and then flipping a switch to the bottom that unlocked the panel itself. It swung out, permitting access to a secondary, secret panel behind where she pressed a button that opened another lock.

Clek. Clak. Panels closed. Queenie pushed against the right side of the closet's back wall and it swung out to reveal a set of stairs leading down.

Down, down into murky lights and the hidden surgical suite of the basement below.

"I have done..." her head shook in consideration of all the typical protocol things one does when they come across technical difficulties and gesticulated wildly about the surgery, "everything I know to do." And she knew a lot, considering her background and knowledge. When in doubt, ask for a second opinion.

"I was in the middle of a lung replacement, plugged in with the unit," she said to him, "and the entire system went. I blacked out, woke up on the floor with a migraine." Thankfully it had only been a few very quick minutes and she'd been able to salvage the patient and the operation without further interruption. But the entire thing had her spooked.

"I don't know what happen- it has never," now she was letting her anxiety get to her, and she clapped her knuckles over her lips to hold herself together.

 

[Anders Whitard]

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@Queenie

Nowear
10:30 AM​

"You blacked out?"

Anders' voice cut through the dim haze of the surgical suite like a scalpel, sharp and direct. He stood at the base of the stairs, arms crossed over his chest, the faint red glow of a power indicator reflecting off the worn leather of his jacket. His tinted glasses rode low on the bridge of his nose, just enough to let his narrowed eyes cut through the dark.

A glitch in a surgical unit was one thing. A full neural blackout during an operation? That was something else entirely.

He stepped forward, slow and measured, the faint whir of cybernetic servos beneath his stride. His hand brushed along the edge of the surgical table as his gaze tracked the dead display on the console.

No visible damage. No fried circuits. The system should've rebooted clean. But it hadn't.

He crouched down in front of the console, fingers ghosting over the interface. A flick of his wrist pulled his deck from beneath his jacket — old and scarred, its matte black casing worn smooth from years of fieldwork. A thin wire clicked out from the side, and he slid it into the exposed port with a quiet snap.

"Let's see what the system has to say for itself, ja?"

The hum of data streams spooled across his display, cascading down the screen like rainfall. Logs rolled by — timestamps, power fluctuations, input errors — and beneath them, static. Deep, wrong static.

Anders' brow furrowed. He adjusted his glasses.

No external access spikes. No evidence of brute-force intrusion. This wasn't an ordinary hack.

Then he saw it. A repeating data string embedded in the corrupted logs. Short. Simple.

THE FIRST SHADOW FALLS.

Anders' mouth tightened. His hands stilled on the edge of the deck.

He'd seen that fragment before. Buried deep in dark channels and black-market networks after the Blackwall had stuttered last week. Netrunners had been trading screenshots of corrupted code strings repeating the same phrase — fragments of something bleeding through the Wall.

He let the feed run deeper, peeling back the encryption layers. The static thickened. Code twisted and rewrote itself beneath his fingertips — wrong structures, alien architecture. Not corpo. Not even human.

His eyes narrowed behind the edge of his glasses. He pulled back on the feed before it reached too deep, disengaging the firewall. The code structure was recursive — intentionally so — meant to trap and loop anyone foolish enough to chase it down.

"Ja… cute."

His eyes drifted toward the surgical unit.

If it was just a random breach, the system would have dumped its memory and crashed. But this — this had piggybacked on the neural interface between the surgical unit and her implant. That's why she blacked out — the corrupted signal must have spiked through the neural link, overwhelming the biofeedback loop.

That took precision. A signal like that had to be carefully tuned to bypass security barriers and reach directly into the nervous system.

His hand brushed along the edge of the console. What kind of second-rate connection was she working with?

The surgical interface was old. Cheap. Probably modified from scavenged components. The neural feedback spike would have pushed through the weakest link — in this case, her implant ports.

"Ah." He clicked his tongue. "There is the problem."

He leaned back on his haunches, adjusting his glasses.

"You know…" His mouth curled slightly. "I could set you up with something better. A real modern interface. Clean cyberware. Surgeon's grade." He tapped the side of his head. "Would shave a few seconds off your reaction time, maybe."

He smiled faintly.

"Hell, I give you a discount. Professional courtesy, ja?"

The surgical lights buzzed as the system's logs collapsed and the console stabilized. The corrupted strings flushed out, but the fragment remained. Buried beneath the system layer.

Not a message. A signal. A test.

Anders slid the wire free from the console and stood, adjusting the cuff of his jacket. His gaze lingered on the display as it scrolled through clean output. No trace of the breach left — except for the repeating string in the root code.

"This… wasn't about you." His voice was low, mostly to himself. "Or the surgery."

If it had been an attack, the payload would have been destructive — system corruption, data siphoning, or worse. But this… this had only tested the connection. A quiet knock at the door.

"Someone was listening."

Anders' mouth pressed into a thin line. He set his deck back into his jacket and knelt by the interface. His hands moved quickly now, adjusting the cable feeds and rerouting the connection through the system's hardline instead of the shared grid. The feedback loop had slipped through an unsecured node — a corporate-grade vulnerability. Basic stuff.

"Alright." He stepped back. "That'll keep the signal clean. Hardwired. No more network interference."

He reached down and flipped a switch at the side of the console, isolating the system from the broader Net. The lights dimmed, then steadied.

"Not perfect, but better." He tapped the side of the console. "Keep it off the main grid. Direct input only. No external feeds, ja?"

His gaze sharpened behind the edge of his glasses.

"And your neural links?" His mouth curled slightly. "Trash. Old connectors. You get hit with a signal like that again…" He made a short, sharp motion with his hand. "Might not wake up next time."

A pause. His smile sharpened at the edges.

"I fix you up. Proper ports. Real modern." His cyber-optic pulsed faintly. "I'll even do you a discount."

He straightened, brushing dust off his jacket sleeve. His gaze lingered on the console for a moment longer before he turned toward the door.

"You don't owe me for this." His tone was even. "Just… maybe keep it offline until you know what you're dealing with. You think that's possible?"

The red glow of his cyber-optic pulsed faintly as he stepped back into the hall.

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