A yellow-painted G240 cruised down the streets of Arroyo.
Inside the car, Gloria drove while asking Lin Ke, who was sitting in the passenger seat.
“Is there anywhere you want to go?
Or should I show you around Night City first?”
Lin Ke wore a disposable face mask, leaning lazily back in the passenger seat, which was peeling its rubber coating.
“I need to sort out my identity first.
Did Mann send a message?”
As he spoke, Lin Ke looked over at Gloria.
Even though she didn’t have to work today, she was still wearing that yellow EMT utility jacket, hiding her shapely figure beneath the oversized coat.
Not very pleasing to the eye—her figure had looked so good when she was in her pajamas.
*Smack!* Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Gloria slapped her smooth forehead with the other and replied sheepishly, “I forgot.
I haven’t checked my messages or mail since I woke up.”
With that, the red, diamond-shaped implants below Gloria’s eyes began to glow faintly.
Then, an orange-yellow data ring lit up in her pupils as she began reading the mail in her neural link.
[Megabuilding Property Management: Dear Ms.
Gloria, records show that we have not yet received your rent for Megabuilding H4 this month.
According to lease agreement VD-23301524/2075, if payment is delayed further, you will be forcibly evicted from the property.]
Gloria ignored the eviction warning.
When had she ever *not* waited until the very last day to pay?
She scrolled down.
[Mann: Gloria.
Mr.
Lin’s ID chip is done.
Ask the client how he wants it delivered.]
Well, it was now 8:28 AM, and Mann’s message had come in at 6:00 AM.
She was over two hours late.
Giving the man beside her a guilty glance, and seeing that Lin Ke was looking out the window, Gloria said in a casual tone, “Mann says your ID chip is ready.
He wants to know where to hand it over.”
“Hmm, tell Mann to send the chip to Watson’s Little China.
You decide on the exact spot.
But before that, I need a neural port implant.
Take me to get one.”
“Sure,” Gloria replied.
She quickly messaged Mann back, then habitually steered the car toward Rancho Coronado.
There was a private clinic there that sold cheap secondhand cyberware and even offered free installation.
A few minutes later, noticing the buildings outside the window suddenly getting shorter, Lin Ke realized what she was doing.
Surely this woman wasn’t taking him to buy secondhand cyberware?
He warned her, uneasy:
“Where are you going?
Take me to a proper cyberware clinic!
I don’t want to install some secondhand junk freshly ripped out of some poor bastard!”
“I—I get it.” Gloria snapped out of it.
She was so used to scraping by that whenever shopping was mentioned, her first thought was where to get the cheapest deal, completely forgetting that Lin Ke was paying with his own money.
At the next intersection, the yellow G240 pulled a U-turn and headed up the overpass directly to the City Center.
An hour later.
In a parking lot in the City Center.
Gloria opened the car door, slid into the driver’s seat, and handed a shopping bag to Lin Ke.
“Here’s the neural link you wanted.
A new model released by Zetatech in 2072, with three chip slots…”
Ignoring Gloria’s rundown on the cyberware, Lin Ke pulled a palm-sized square box from the bag.
He tore open the red-and-blue packaging and took out the implant, which was sealed in a dust-free bag.
[Neural Data Reader and Interface Device – Neural Port] Implant (Equippable)
Quality: Common
Description: Manufactured by Zetatech.
Comes with three neural slots, high-speed data reading, and millisecond-level neural response.
Compatible with various cyberware.
PS: Ready for a craniotomy?
*The first step toward mechanical ascension, huh?
A neural port, the foundation of digital immortality.*
Seeing this implant, Lin Ke thought of Arasaka’s Relic 2.0 from the game.
Setting aside its numerous requirements and restrictions, the Relic could copy a human’s mind onto a shard.
Plugging it into someone else’s neural slot could transfer their personality and consciousness.
Wasn’t that digital immortality?
“…This cost 4,200 eddies.
The receipt is in the bag.
Out of the 40,000 eddies you gave me, excluding my 10,000 eddies fee, there are 25,800 left.”
Lin Ke snapped back to reality.
Gloria’s mouth was still running.
“Right.
Got it,” Lin Ke answered half-heartedly.
Stuffing the packaging back into the shopping bag, Lin Ke didn’t even look at the receipt.
He tossed the bag out of the car window toward a nearby dumpster, where it landed on a pile of overflowing trash.
Seeing Lin Ke throw it away without even looking at the receipt, Gloria felt a strange sensation.
Whether Lin Ke genuinely didn’t care or was just putting on a show, in a place like Night City, where everything revolved around money and profit, people like him were affectionately known by the locals as “easy marks.”
*What an idiot.*
“Alright, let’s head to Little China to pick up my ID chip.”
“Yes, Master Lin,” she teased.
Back in the forties—specifically 2040—the Watson district had been on track to become the next City Center.
Thirty years ago, megacorporations had poured massive funds into the district, building numerous commercial centers, skyscrapers, and public facilities, like the Night City Medical Center.
Suffice it to say, if you didn’t have a trustworthy ripperdoc and were afraid of having your organs harvested while unconscious, you brought your eddies here.
It was a bit pricey, but it guaranteed your basic personal safety.
As the district developed, a massive influx of immigrants arrived, mostly of Asian descent.
Their tendency to stick together in a foreign land, combined with a strong sense of ethnic identity, changed Watson.
This was evident in some of Watson’s place names, such as Little China, Kabuki, and Sakura Street—streets and areas steeped in cultural heritage.
But over the next thirty years, more and more people poured into the district.
Plans failed to keep up with reality, and Watson gradually drifted off the track the megacorps had originally laid out for it.
Now, it was 2075.
In the eyes of Watson residents, Little China was still a relatively poor neighborhood, but even so, it was better than the slums of Santo Domingo.
Little China boasted a wide variety of entertainment.
Restaurants and gambling dens were everywhere, catering specifically to patrons who couldn’t afford to spend their money in the City Center or Japantown.
The food, shops, neon lights, slang, and overall flavor here were distinctly Chinese, drawing residents from other districts of Night City to experience it on their days off.
Gloria drove the car to Ellison Plaza in Little China, which had an NCART elevated rail station.
Because it was easily accessible and highly recognizable, Gloria had chosen this spot for Lin Ke’s exchange.
Lin Ke was now alone in the car.
He didn’t get out to retrieve the chip, instead sending Gloria to get it on his behalf, just as she had for the neural port.
After all, he was unregistered, and getting spotted by an NCPD patrol would only bring unwanted trouble.
With no one else in the car, Lin Ke took out his newly purchased neural port and tried to equip it to his inventory.
[Equip this implant to your gear slot?]
Staring at the text appearing on his retina, Lin Ke confirmed with a thought.
*Yes.*
The implant in his hand dissolved into a streak of white light and merged into his body, leaving only the empty dust-free bag in his palm.
Looking in the car’s rearview mirror, Lin Ke stared at the neural port that had appeared on the right side of his neck, then reached back to touch the hard lump that had formed at the base of his skull.
With another thought, he unequipped the neural port.
The port on his neck vanished instantly, returning to normal flesh.
*I can’t keep it equipped for now, or I won’t be able to explain it to Gloria.*
*Still, this is a fascinating experience.*
*Right now, I only have three gear slots on my character panel.
Looks like I’ll need to plan carefully how to use them.*
*Click.* The driver’s side door swung open, and Gloria climbed in with a furious expression, muttering under her breath, “Infuriating, absolutely infuriating…”
“What’s wrong?
Why so angry?” Lin Ke asked, amused.
“It’s all because of you.” Gloria rolled her eyes at Lin Ke and handed him the datashard in her hand.
“The runner Mann sent to deliver this was a green-haired kid.
Looking at her height and face, she couldn’t be more than thirteen or fourteen.
Tattoos at that age!
I only said a couple of words to her, and she started cussing me out.
The things she said…”
“That brat.
She ticked me off so much.”
*A green-haired kid?
Thirteen or fourteen?
Sounds like Rebecca, alright.*
She was Rebecca.
She tattooed herself, drank, swore, and killed.
But she was a good girl, the kind of good girl everyone loved.