Chapter Text
“I should be in there with him.”
Lucy rolled her eyes in cyberspace, hands pressed up against the processing unit of a camera, looping the feed. She sighed as the security camera began to replay the previous night's footage just before David entered its view.
“I’m being serious, Luce!” Becca repeated, her voice crackling through the netrunner's holo. “He might need a couple of extra hands in there!”
“I’d be on your side if you weren’t the polar opposite of stealthy,” Lucy grumbled, rushing through the net, trying to get to the next camera. “In position, David.”
[Gotcha. Tell me when it's good to go,] his holo sent back. He was still worried that there might’ve been sound-activated alarms.
His worry might have been justified if they were anywhere other than the NightCorp manufactory in the middle of the Badlands. No one would willingly go out of their way to drive out to a quarry in the middle of nowhere just to steal construction materials. It was part of the reason why there wasn’t a security detail to begin with, and subpar ICE on what security measures did exist.
"Camera looped, go ahead David."
Honestly, NightCorp could’ve done without those, as well. The only ones that tended to hang around the area were the Nomad tribes, and every gonk in Night City knew they wouldn’t go for construction materials. Tents didn’t need concrete, after all.
“How’s the view in there, Cowboy?” Falco drawled through her receiver. Lucy was glad that Maine got them into contact with their wheelman, considering he was one of the few Nomads that had moved into Night City completely. It was unlikely they would ever find a native that knew how to traverse the massive dustbowl that was the Badlands, so his help was a godsend.
That he already knew the factory's location ahead of time was just a bonus.
[Pretty skeletal,] David chirped, moving past another camera as he got closer to the center of the complex. [I can see moving gantries, and spinning kilns. Guess they don’t need solid walls when the entire thing is automated.]
“Heard nothin’ but spook stuff ‘bout that place.” Falco grumbled into the call. “Most of us wouldn’t even drive close to it; elders called it alive and evil.”
“You’re making that up,” Becca teased. “Or are Nomads scared of the big bad infrastructure factory?”
“Laugh it up, lass,” Falco snarked, a grin in his voice. “I reckoned it was bullshit, too. Why else would I be willing to idle the car next to it?”
“‘Cause, the desert gets cold at night?” Becca snarked back. “How's it going in there, you two?”
Lucy smiled in Cyberspace, reaching closer to the next camera. “Almost to the core. From there, David can just take a left a—”
A tremor stopped her, just as her hand was about to reach out to the camera’s representation in the net. She paused, looking around, trying to figure out what could have shaken the digital field this far out.
A daemon was out of the question. This place should’ve been even more secure than Night City itself, if only due to its sheer seclusion. This net was basically in the void; nothing beyond the Blackwall had the reach to even find it, let alone infect it.
Another tremor.
“David. Hold up,” she whispered into the call, eyes darting around, preparing her ejection subroutine. “There's something in here with me. Another Netrunner, maybe.”
[Gotcha. Should I go radio silent?] David whispered back, his nervousness apparent.
“Not sure yet,” Lucy muttered, and pulled up a ping protocol, considering using it. It’d give away her presence, but the returning signal frequency could potentially lead her back to what was causing those tremors. As long as they knew the cause, they could deal with it.
Just as she was about to unleash the protocol, cyberspace moved , and Lucy was sent tumbling to the ground.
“What in tarnation…” Falco mumbled. “Shorty, you seeing this?”
“Don’t call me tha—what in the goddamn…?”
Lucy shook her head, ignoring whatever the other two were talking about as she tried to figure out what had just thrown her to the ground.
The answer was rather obvious, in retrospect.
Cyberspace itself bent outward, lines of code and circuitry shifting and warping like a topographical timelapse until a massive head had grown out. Tentacles of data connected haphazardly to a central eye that glowed with an angry red light, bathing the area in red. Her body froze at the sight, and the chilling realization started to flood in; It wasn’t a netrunner. It wasn’t a demon.
It was the subnet itself.
The entire factory was intelligent, and it had just noticed her messing with its eyes.
“Oh shi—”
She was violently thrown out of Cyberspace, her connection snapping suddenly as the Chevillion Emperor shot out of the range of the factory’s net. Her eyes jerked open, coming back to reality, catching the odd rock formations shoot by in the windows of the armored SUV. “Falco, what are you—!?”
Her question was cut off by a giant metallic crash. She swung her head around seeing a shockwave of dust billowing out behind them. As the dust settled, there was suddenly a wall that definitely was not there when she first dove into the net.
“Did the fucking factory move!?” Rebecca screeched out, her torso halfway out the passenger-side window.
“Whaddaya know. Elders were bein’ literal, that time,” Falco breathed, voice shaky. “Goddamn living factory.”
Lucy couldn’t find the words to respond, looking back at the labyrinth of industrial might. Only one thing echoed in her mind.
“What about David?”
He stood there, calling out through his holo, but there was no response.
What the hell… he grumbled internally, trying one last time to reach out before he finally gave up for a moment. He leaned against a wall of pipes, trying to figure out what could've happened.
Did the netrunner cut our comms? It was possible, but Lucy should’ve been able to wrestle control back from any opposing runner by now. Did the netrunner get to Luce? Also unlikely. Even if there was a netrunner in NightCorp skilled enough to do that, they wouldn’t be wasting their time in the boonies guarding a quarry factory.
He waited for a bit, pinging for anyone through the holo one more time. Again, no answer.
His worries started to get to him, and he turned back the way he came. If he used Sandy, he could probably shoot past the cameras without setting anything off. Just have to…
The thoughts died in his head as the entire structure shuddered. The walls screeched as metal ground against metal.
“What the—”
Suddenly a mechanical limb burst out from one of the walls, carrying a massive camera pointed his way, an array of red LEDs glowing menacingly around the black aperture that dilated and contracted in a manner close to a predator focusing on its prey.
“Intruder…detected.”
David was frozen in his place, gazing back at the camera staring him down.“...Excuse me?”
“Applying countermeasures.”
Time dilated around him as the distinctive whirring of various power tools above him caused the reflex to kick in. His gaze slowly shifted up to see what was happening. His eyes widened, watching in a sick sense of awe as a set of mechanical arms disassembled the pipes above him. He couldn’t help but watch, almost hypnotized by the hundreds of claws working in tandem. A single unified effort as they deconstructed the ceiling above him, revealing another group of arms rapidly building a track above the newly made hole.
He could’ve moved, but his brain was stuck trying to comprehend what was happening in front of him.
His fight-or-flight instinct kicked him out of his trance, noticing a red canister sliding down the newly made track. His body started to move finally as he realized that the canister wasn’t colored red, but actually glowing red. He turned to run away, only to see that the pipes that had been pulled out of the roof were in the process of being rebuilt into a new wall behind him, intent on boxing him in.
Thankfully, he had noticed in time. He jumped through the gap in the incomplete barricade, managing to duck and weave between the mechanical arms, running as far as he could before Sandevistan timed out.
He panted, looking back at where he’d come from, unsure if it was a good idea to rush deeper into the facility “...Is this fuckin’ building trying to kill me?”
“Affirmative.”
His eyes widened, looking behind him to see another large camera glaring back at him, sweat accumulating down his neck at the sight. Sandy activated again and he ran away, quickly becoming lost in the maze of pipes and skeletal walls.
David panted heavily, hoping that he’d lost whatever was chasing him, and tried to figure out just where the hell he was. He knew that eye-thing couldn’t have caught up to him after his first use of Sandy, meaning that there were several of those things and the ease that they could command other arms…
His brain finally caught up to what the factory had said to him.
He would’ve laughed at the absurdity if he wasn’t still worried about staying quiet. Considering the building had mechanical arms ferrying giant cameras around that responded to his question, sensitive microphones were a definite possibility.
Okay, Martinez. How the hell are you gonna get out of this one?
Falco finally let off the throttle when the Emperor was far enough from the sprawling factory. The man let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and relaxed his grip on the wheel. “An entire goddamn building…” he sighed, repeating himself. He stared at the imposing structure in the rearview feed, still in disbelief.
Framed by the setting sun, the massive structure cast ominous shadows across the desert, looking ever more malicious by the second.
"So!?” Rebecca growled, digging through her dufflebag and pulling out one of her guns. “It’s just a bigger bitch to kill, nothing changed!" She paused to check if the weapon was loaded, her hands shaking slightly and making it hard to accomplish.
"Goddammit." She hissed, almost dropping her gun and huffing to herself, trying to calm her nerves. Finally she leaned out the window and glared back at the building in the distance. As she looked back at the imposing structure; her bravado died in her chest, and the weapon in her hands felt woefully impotent. “...fuck!”
Lucy glared at the console of the Emperor, making the SUV beep and open the back door with her unspoken command. She took a deep breath and faced back fully, eyes locked onto the building in the horizon.
It was a sprawling mess of steel pipes and chimneys, guarded by a segmented perimeter wall that had looked imposing even before the building had attempted to attack them. The angular panels and slides resembled the legs of a millipede, its clawed tips digging into the earth. The smog it spewed out looked eerily similar to the dark clouds that daemons tended to give off in the net.
“What the hell is that thing?” Becca grumbled, her shotgun hanging loosely on her hands as she walked back and sat down next to Lucy. “And how do we get David out of it?”
“...No clue,” Lucy breathed. She wracked her brain, trying to figure out how the hell they could possibly beat an entire building. She felt helpless, remembering how the net was dwarfed by whatever was operating the structure. She’d never encountered anything like it, and she had no idea how she would even begin to battle something of that magnitude.
The daemon inside Tanaka was the size of a flea compared to the beast that had stared her down.
“Somethin’ like a Delamain?” Falco offered, looking back from the driver's seat, arm hooked behind the passenger seat. “Y’all reckon it’s an AI core that went rogue?”
Lucy shook her head, looking back at the driver. “It couldn’t have been. AI just…don’t get that big. This thing was bigger than the net it was housed in.”
“Maybe that’s ‘cause it kept, like, adding into itself, somehow?” Rebecca offered, scratching her head. “It’s a factory that creates shit for making more buildings, and it can move.” She gulped as the pieces started to fall into place. “What are the odds that it can use the stuff it creates to add more to itself? Not just physically, but also inside the net?”
Lucy shuddered at the concept, looking out at the sprawling mess of a building in front of them. The architecture of factories was never the most visually appealing, but on a second look, she could see some repeated patterns and sub-assemblies that looked distinctly newer than others, almost as if they were built far after initial construction.
“Who in the hell would make somethin’ like that?” Falco asked, face growing paler by the second, realizing the same fact. “That’s just asking for it to go rogue.”
“Someone that doesn’t know what grey goo is?” Rebecca huffed, looking down at her shotgun one last time before fully letting it go. Drapping it back in her dufflebag.
“Grey-what now?” Falco grumbled, facing the road again, avoiding looking through his rearview mirrors and doing his best to avoid slamming his foot down omto the gas pedal and taking them away.
“The idea of miniature machines that could use raw materials to make more of themselves, effectively consuming everything, ‘til there was nothing left…” Lucy recalled, her heart climbing up into her throat. Some gonk corpo in Night Corp had apparently built it and set it loose out in the Badlands.
Rebecca pointed back at the factory. “You think that’s a bigger version of it?”
The thought terrified Lucy.
“We need to destroy it,” the netrunner mumbled, still staring at the building. In the distance, it almost looked like it was breathing, heaving up and down rhythmically. “We need to get David out of there and obliterate it.”
“Where’s Silverhand when you need him?” Falco joked.
“Dead, just like David if we don’t find a way to delta him outta there! ” Becca exclaimed, pointing back at the building. “C'mon, Falco, turn this rustbucket around! He’s not gonna make it outta there on his own!”
The driver laughed, looking back at the passengers. “What, you expect me to ram this baby into the fuckin’ wall?” he asked, keeping the steering wheel completely straight. “We’re stuck out here, and he’s in there,” he explained, pointing back to the monstrous factory. “The way I see it, the only one that can do anything about his situation is him.”
Sitting around wasn’t going to help him. He had to move.
He knew the factory had already built walls between him and the exit, so there was no point in expecting to be rescued from the outside. For all he knew, Lucy and the others were dealing with something even worse out there.
He was in a living factory that could rebuild pieces of itself. What was stopping it from manufacturing weapons to take care of intruders? It had weaponized burning sand or some such just a few moments ago.
He clenched his fist. Right now, there were only two options: either he found a way out of the factory on his own and faced whatever was outside,or he went even deeper and found the off switch for this monstrosity.
He honestly wasn’t sure which would be easier.
“Hey, asshole!” he called out to the building, the Sandevistan on his back humming as it prepared to activate. “Come and get me!”
He started moving as soon as he heard the walls start to pull apart, separating segment by segment. He could see the moving mass of mechanical arms wielding an entire construction site’s worth of power tools as they rushed toward him.
The factory was fast, he had to admit. But he was faster.
Activating the Sandevistan, he didn’t stop to watch, like last time. He rushed off the moment he saw the moving mass of construction equipment, heading his way. His plan was simple, run around the approaching mass of arms, and run down the track it was building, straight back to its source.
Then, he could pull the plug. Or something.
He could figure it out when he got there.
He ran as fast as his legs could carry him keeping an eye out for the mass of arms that were still attempting to catch up to him. He continued through the maze of pipes and girders, looking back and catching glimpses of the trolley through the gaps in the walls, ensuring that he wasn't straying too far.
He jumped over steel pipes, hopped onto conveyor belts carrying stone and gravel, and rushed between moving gantries.
Finally, he managed to navigate behind the moving mass of arms, and started rushing back through the trench they’d dug out in their path toward him.
“So, what? We just sit on our asses and do nothing while David’s still stuck in there?” Rebeca yelled, turning to face Falco with a snarl, “You don’t deserve your cowboy stache, you fuckin’ coward!”
“Hey, now, don’t get hasty!” Falco shot back, sounding genuinely offended about the ex-Mox’s comment about his facial hair. “Do you have a better idea?”
“Yeah! That place should have an open door for deliveries!” Rebecca argued, pointing her finger toward the factory. “We ram the car through that, find David, and delta out!”
“And what if that perimeter closes around us?”
Rebecca didn’t have an answer for that. She growled in frustration and threw her arms down. “Dammit! This was supposed to be an easy job.”
Lucy stared back at the factory. It glowed slightly under the moonlight, standing out against the starry sky behind it. She stared up at the moon, feeling useless. She couldn’t fight against the giant in the net, and David was completely on his own.
She absentmindedly realized this was probably how he felt when she’d deep-dived into Tanaka’s system. The only thing she could do was continue to believe in him.
Please be safe, David. I can’t lose you, either.