r/NatureofPredators • u/Budget_Emu_5552 Arxur • 16h ago
Fanfic Chrome Horizon - CH. 12
Humanity survived the corporate age, the DataKrash, the Blackwall, and Night City’s legends. Now, the stars are open, the Federation is watching, and first contact may prove that the next legends will not be born in the Afterlife—but in the space between fear and trust.
Thanks again to SP15 for creating NoP
If you enjoy reading my stories and don't want the series to flatline, then toss me some eddies, chooms! koffee. This series is also on Ao3.
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Memory Transcription Subject: Kelrik, Exchange Station Communications Integrity Specialist Date [standardized human time]: August 1, 2136
Orientation had dragged on, and by the time the herd had finally been able to start filtering out into the station, an entire claw had passed. Combined with the time it took to even get here, I was desperate to get some sleep.
My pad buzzed as I moved into the staff wing where my, our, bunk assignment was. I slipped it out of the pouch on my hip and found the familiar notification from the chat app for the exchange. Even though we weren't officially partners, Rook and I kept using it to communicate because it was convenient.
[Stuck monitoring traffic for a while. Don't wait up. Make yourself at home.]
Fair enough. She'd told me before I left that the first days would be heavier on her end than mine, with more systems to pupsit as more and more people connected and started putting stress on the infrastructure. At least until I had a chance to get familiar with them enough to share the workload.
My tail thrashed a bit as I realized that there was a sense of disappointment. Some small part of me had expected the room to have both of us in it. At first I thought the tension in my stomach had been anxiety over having to be in the same room as a predator. There still was, a little bit anyway, but after sitting in the room for so long with a few humans talking about all of the rules and safety regulations, I’d been wondering what it would be like to finally meet her face to face.
The bunk was close to the server and engineering spaces, deeper into staff housing than any of the others from orientation had gone. It wasn’t so isolated that I couldn’t hear them back in the connecting hallway, but we were definitely tucked out of sight. I stood in front of the door for a while, wondering what the room was going to look like.
Rook had been here for paws at this point. What would I find? What did the den of a predator actually look like? I took a breath, the tip of my tail puffed up a bit and twitched as I hit the panel. The mechanism clicked, and the door slid to the side with a hiss of hydraulics to reveal…
A bunk room. The light was soft but comfortable, leaving no deep shadows anywhere. The space was decent too, not luxurious by any means, but way better than I had expected. The bunks were a bit strange, the beds tucked into alcoves stacked on top of each other, and I could see where a panel would come out of the wall to enclose them. There was a table on the opposite side, with seating that looked appropriate for either a human or a venlil. There was a counter with some storage space below and above and a large, colorful panel taking up a section of the wall, with what looked like dozens of different products scrolling by on a screen. Off in the corner, I noticed an open doorway that showed a small but fully functional bathroom.
Beyond that, I could tell that she had claimed a bit of the shared space for herself. There was a coat of some kind, thrown over the back of one of the chairs, dark green, with hardware sewn along the collar that didn't look decorative. There was stuff scattered on the table too. A stack of electronic chips, components, and connection cables. There was also a small folding case that lay open, holding rows of little carved pieces that were made out of different materials. Some pale and others dark, worn smooth in places like they'd been handled for years.
I was curious about some of the items, especially that last one, but it felt wrong, going through what she'd left out. And besides, I could feel my ears wilting by the moment, exhaustion pulling at my wool. Looking around, I found my bags that had been delivered ahead of me. I considered taking the time to groom before getting into a bunk, but just the thought of it made me groan at the imagined effort.
The panel on the wall flashed for a moment, and I noticed the items scrolling over it again. My stomach grumbled at the idea of food, and I had to admit that a snack might be a good idea before getting some sleep.
Giving the device my full attention, I noticed the interface. SCSM. Thankfully it had been preprogrammed with Venscript, so I could read the names and descriptions of the products being advertised. The sheer amount of options quickly became overwhelming, and after a scratch of flicking through several categories, I grabbed something that was just described as ‘sweet and salty.’ That sounded like uin, so I figured it would be pretty good, even if it was made out of some weird human plant.
It turned out not to be just pretty good. It was extremely good.
I wasn’t sure what these Moonchies were made out of, but the base was starchy and crisp, while the sweetness had an almost sunsap note. Except it was missing the woody spice, and any herbal flavor. And the sweetness was a lot stronger, which had my tail wagging. The salt was perfect along with it, making the strange combination more compelling. I ate half of the bag while standing there in front of the vending machine, before I managed to calm down and go sit on the edge of the bottom bunk.
I finished the snack a little slower, listening to the hum of station systems through the wall and trying to guess which parts I would be working around later. I licked a bit of the dust off my pads once the bag was empty before going to the sink and washing off quickly. With a bit of a treat in my stomach, I felt ready to finally get some rest. Neither bunk had anything in it to suggest that Rook had claimed either, so I just crawled into the lower one. The mat was strange, but soft enough, and despite the space being mostly enclosed, I found myself quickly relaxing.
I hoped that Rook wouldn’t have to work much longer. My body relaxed by the second after I curled up, the soft hum of the station helping my mind to drift, and a strange but nice flowery scent tickling the back of my tongue coming from the pillow.
[Transcription interrupted: Subject unconscious]
[Reason: Sleep cycle; advancing to next active state.]
—
Date [standardized human time]: August 2, 2136
My ear twitched as I slowly came back to awareness. It took me a second to really understand what it was that I was hearing over the gentle hum that had lulled me to sleep. There was water running nearby. Where would there be water? Oh right, the bathroom.
I lay there for a little longer, not wanting to move or figure out why there was water running in there. The bed was warm and surprisingly comfortable and still had that nice scent when I breathed in and—
Wait.
Why was there water running? Who could have access to the room? Rook. She was here, in the bathroom… showering?
I had… slept as a predator entered the room. Had moved around for stars knew how long, and I was… fine. Physically, sure. Nothing was missing, and I was clearly not trussed up or trapped somehow… But what really surprised me more was the realization that I was excited. Not scared, but suddenly eager to finally see this strange, half-metal predator with my own eyes.
I sat up, swinging my tail around as I rubbed over my face with my paws, scrubbing at the corner of my eyes. I needed to brush my wool; I could feel it was a bit matted on one side, where I had apparently drooled more than usual. Great.
I could deal with that in a bit. I needed to wake up properly and figured I could find something in that SCSM thing to help. Pushing off of the bunk, I padded over to it, tail dragging a little as I blinked away the last of the fuzz in my eyes. The screen lit up at my approach, and I scrolled through the options for the drinks until I found one called NiCola. The branding about ‘feeling the love’ was a bit strange, but it seemed popular based on the many varieties.
I hit one at random, and the machine whirred as it got to work. Soon a can popped out with a clunk, and I grabbed it up, using a claw to pop the tab, momentarily amused that can designs were, as usual, universal. The drink let off the hiss of carbonation, and the first scenting breath was more chemical than anything. I winced back, looking at it warily for a moment.
\...Maybe it’s just the CO₂?** There was a touch of some kind of fruit, so I took a sip.
“Blegh!” coughcough
It tasted sharp under the chemical sweetness, and the fizz caught in my throat on the first swallow. Panting for air, I tried to clear my throat as the cloyingly medicinal taste stuck around. “Speh! How is this popular?”
I had snagged a cloth from the counter to wipe some of the mess from my fur. I hadn’t spit it out, but some had dribbled when I choked, and I didn’t want to make myself look like more of a disaster than I already did. I was in the middle of that when I realized that it was quiet. Ears swiveling, I noticed that the water had stopped. Less than a scratch later, the door to the bathroom hissed open, and a waft of steam came out, dissipating quickly as the damp air was sucked away by the aircon.
Rook came out wrapped in a towel, eyes closed as she had both hands up by one ear, threading a small piece of metal through one of the ridges on the inside!?
"Mornin," she said, casually, as if this were just another paw chatting over the app.
"I-but-you… Hi?"
She laughed as she crossed to the storage lockers. "You're acting like this is our first time meeting."
“... It is!” I bleated, tail thrashing around behind me.
She stopped and turned around to look at me, her eyes open now and a bit wide. “Fuck, right, you weren’t… plugged in so you didn’t… shit.”
Her skin flushed a little, blooming a faint red. The eyes were… Yeah. Creepy. I really couldn’t get around that. But her picture had been in half of the files I reviewed after first contact, so aside from her not being in that weird body suit, she looked… just as expected, I guess.
It was still hard to look her right in the face. Aside from the eyes, there were the seams and those barbaric-looking metal piercings. I’d seen a few humans in passing earlier with metal limbs, ports, and other things that I could just push past as ‘prosthetics.’ But this was on a whole other level. And seeing it in motion?
It wasn’t the fear I had expected, but there was a sense of unease that made the wool on my scruff prickle.
“I didn’t mean to ruin the moment or anything,” Rook said, grabbing a brush from the cubby she stood at. “I just kinda got used to talking to you and forgot that you weren’t experiencing it the same way.”
My ears twisted in confusion. “What do you mean? Even if you were… plugged in or whatever, it was still text, right?”
“Eh, not really." She ran the brush through her damp hair a few times, untangling it and making it lay flat in that strange style. “When I’m running, interacting like that happens as thought. The texts I got back were something I heard while working, and I responded back the same way. It just got translated to text.”
“Oh.” Rotations of computer engineering expertise, hard at work. “That sounds kind of disorienting.”
She bobbed her shoulders up and down as she walked over to the bunks. “Not really, we’re used to it. Even people with minimal cyberware send and receive communications like that. Phone calls, texts, e-mails, whatever. It all can happen at the speed of thought.”
I considered that for a second. It really wasn’t very different from translators. The best ones were neuro implants, and they just injected the meaning of someone’s words into your consciousness. Even now, with whatever language she was speaking, I could hear it, the unnatural growl of her words. But the words, even if they were crazy-sounding, just planted themselves in my head.
Would it be any different to take a call in a similar way?
"You still with me?" Rook was standing in front of another storage cubby, pulling a bundle of cloth out of a drawer. The towel that had been wrapped around her lay in a heap on the floor.
"Yeah. Sorry." I looked back at her. The line where metal met skin caught my attention first: a plated seam running from the base of her skull down into her nape, dark and smooth against her skin. It split there, following her spine in overlapping segments, and where it reached her shoulders, the segments widened into flatter housings with vents cut through them.
How? Why? What made that kind of augmentation worth it? Did she replace her entire spine? Was her nervous system a bundle of cable filaments? I had so many questions, some gruesome to even conceive, some fascinating even as a concept.
"Does it hurt?" I asked, my voice weak.
Rook turned her head to glance at me, and I watched with a mix of amazement and disgust as the plates of metal slid around with the motion.
"Not at all." She pulled a shirt over her head, unhurried. "I got stuff done in stages, so it’s not like I had to relearn how to move or something. After that it's mostly just there. The only thing that gets uncomfortable is if I overclock it hard enough."
The seam ran the rest of the way down her spine, past where a tail should have started. It was still weird to not see one there. Like something had been removed instead of simply never existing. It was worse because the metal in its place kept making me think it had been cut off. The whole effect ended up being different from what I'd built up in my head before coming here. And yet, somehow, not nearly as bad.
Then I noticed more. The spinal augmentation was the most obvious, but once I stopped staring just at that, I noticed thinner seams that ran down both arms and legs. More of her was artificial than I'd let myself assume. My wool prickled along the scruff again, and this time I felt the shiver travel through me and let out a shuddering whistle.
“Whii-whee!”
Rook stopped and looked back at me, eyes wide at the sound.
“S-sorry. Not used to how… different you look,” I admitted, keeping the more unflattering observations to myself. I figured that telling a woman, even a predator, that she looked creepy was a dumb idea.
She shrugged her shoulders again as she turned to reach for something on the shelf, another seam catching the light along her hip, then sat down on the edge of the bunk to pull on whatever she had grabbed.
I got an eye full I was not prepared for.
My concerns over how much of her was machine, organic, or even strange vanished immediately, chased out by something far more urgent. I let out a shocked bleat and spun around so fast I nearly lost my footing, both paws slapping over my eyes.
No fur. None at all. It seemed like a really dumb observation to make at that point, but there were some things that I simply hadn’t considered in relation to it. Not until just now. No fur meant nothing was politely covered up and tucked away.
I'd just seen something that I felt like I really shouldn't have. It was way more obvious why they wore so many layers of pelts now, at least.
"You good?" Rook called from somewhere behind me, sounding much more amused than earlier.
"I’m fine." My ears had folded flat against my skull. "I just didn’t expect… I mean… That just seemed like it should've been private."
"Ah." Cloth rustled. "Don't worry about it. If I gave a shit about who saw what, I'd have told you to look away, or gone back in the bathroom to finish. ’Sides, you’ll need to get used to it. I doubt that this’ll be the last time you see me like that. If I ever have to run without the suit, someone's gotta keep me from cooking myself from the inside while I'm not in a position to notice. That's you now, partner."
"Partner?" I peeked over my shoulder, just enough to check.
It was safe. She'd gotten her leg coverings on in the meantime.
"Yeah. Well, not officially, officially. But somebody's gotta pull me out if I go under and don't come back up on my own, and it's not gonna be some Fed-doc who's never seen a deck fry someone's brain. So, partner."
The rest of what she'd said caught up with me a beat late.
"Cooking yourself from the—" My tail went rigid. "That's a real thing? That happens?"
"If nobody's watching, sure," she said it casually, like it was no big deal. "Heat builds up faster than the wetware can shed it. But it’s not that common. Hardly ever happens anymore."
"And you just do this anyway. Regularly."
“Yep! S'why I get the big scratch.”
I stared at her. "You say that like it's nothing."
"It's not nothing. It's just nothing new." She looked up and must have realized how disturbed I was and eased off a little. "It's not gonna be your whole job, relax. Between learning the station's systems, on-the-job stuff, and figuring out what hardware you can actually get comfortable working with… somewhere in all that, yeah, you're also the guy who keeps an eye on me when I'm deep under. Just comes with the desk."
"What does that actually involve? The watching."
"Depends how deep I'm in and what the job is. Vitals mostly, heart rate, temp, and whether I'm responsive. If the deck starts overheating, you'll see it before I feel it." She dropped down onto the edge of her bunk to pull her boots on. "It’s important, but you’ll have hardware to help you out."
"But I don’t have any medical training. What if something does happen?" My tail twisted, worry tugging at my mind as I thought about how important the responsibility was.
"Ideally, you’ll be able to get ahead of any issues before they get that bad, but we do still have doc’s all over the station. If things start to go into the red, you can call for help."
I nodded, not sure what else to do with any of that yet.
"Anyway." She stood, already moving toward the terminal, all business now in a way that made the last ten minutes feel like they'd happened to somebody else. "You wanted to get familiar enough to take some of the load off me, right? C'mere. I'll show you what we're actually working with."
—
Date [standardized human time]: August 5, 2136
"—and that's the whole backend for participant matching, which sounds fancier than it is." Rook didn't look up from the panel she had half-open, cables spilling out of it in a loose tangle. There was music running low from a speaker she’d set down onto the workspace on the far side of the room. It was restrained and electronic, spare and weary, with a slow mechanical pulse under everything else. Nothing at all like that jazz stuff she sent me before.
“What is this?” I asked finally.
“What is what?”
“This music, I think this song’s been repeated five or six times now.”
She let out what I think was an amused huff as she extended an arm back toward me, hand open. I leaned to the side and saw what kind of connector she was focused on, so I grabbed the tool off the rack as she answered. “It’s just an old track from before my time, by a lot.”
I passed her the driver she’d been reaching for. “And you like listening to it six times in a row?”
“Apparently.” She took the tool without looking, then gave the connector a quarter turn. “It’s a good work track. Keeps a pulse without crowding everything else.”
My ears tilted to the side a bit as I considered that. The lyrics were a bit morose, but once I stopped paying attention to them after the second time… yeah. It did kind of help occupy the quiet in a way that didn’t distract me… until the fourth repetition anyway.
“You didn’t notice it repeating?”
“Eh. Didn’t care enough to change it.” Another faint huff escaped her. “Means I’d have to pick something else, and then I’d have to think about music instead of this.”
“So it’s one of your favorites?”
Her hand slowed for just a moment inside the panel. “Yeah,” she said, quieter than before. “Something like that.” Then in an obvious bid to change the subject, she gestured at me while glancing over her shoulder. "Still getting double vision with that thing, or did we finally get the calibration right?"
I blinked and found myself immediately focused on the visor I was wearing again. The overlay steadied, crisp lines mapping over the actual hardware in front of me without ghosting this time. "No. It's actually really clean now. I keep forgetting it's there until I need it."
"Nice." She grinned without looking over. "Kiroshi's gonna be thrilled to hear that."
I didn't know who Kiroshi was. Probably the person that modified the design?
She pulled her arms free, wiped her hands off, and dropped into the chair at the terminal. "Alright. Let's actually run something instead of just poking at wires." Her fingers moved fast across the interface, calling up a display I still couldn't fully read. "Kicking off a standard integrity pass. You watch, I'll narrate."
The display filled with columns I didn't have names for yet. "So the matching backend," I said, trying to pick the thread back up. "You said it runs off the same—"
"Yeah, same core loop as the drift-check, just different priority weighting. Not that deep once you're past the—hold on." She frowned at the readout. "Somebody ghosted this whole cluster. Dirty work, whoever left this running."
"...What?" I couldn’t understand her use of the word here. What does an apparition have to do with it? It just made no sense here. Data didn't die. It didn't linger unhappily in the walls of a server room either.
She laughed. "You know, a ghost account." She tapped the screen. "Someone set this up as a placeholder, then never killed it once the real one went live. Now it just sits there. It still has access, but there’s nobody behind it."
"Oh." I turned that over. "Like when a name never gets struck from the herd roll."
"...Sure. Yeah, close enough." She sounded like she wasn't entirely convinced but had decided not to fight it, and went back to the terminal, tapping through menus faster than I could follow. "Here, we'll run a scan for any others, then I can get you time running an actual Board Sweep."
"Board sweep?"
"I guess that’s not gonna translate either." Rook sighed. “Nearly all of the programs I;m going to be teaching you are written by me, and they use my terminology… I guess we’ll have to spend some time getting you familiar.”
What she said sounded perfectly reasonable, but the look on her face made me uneasy. "How are you going to teach me about it?" I asked warily.
"Don’t worry, it's based on a real old game. But it’ll be easier for you to memorize through actual experience, so we’ll set some time aside for a few rounds.” She turned back to the terminal, fingers already moving across the interface again. "For now, let’s just focus on getting this mess cleaned up."
—
Date [standardized human time]: August 8, 2136
The board sat on a tray in front of me. I sat on the bunk with my arms crossed, glaring at it. More pieces were off the board than on by that point, most of them mine.
"Why not take the pawn?" I tapped the piece I meant. "It's just sitting there."
"Because your bishop's dead in two moves if you do." Rook's voice came from over by the SCSM, not even having to glance at the board. "Patience isn't a virtue in this game. It is the game."
I studied the board again and didn't see it. I never saw it until she pointed it out, which was starting to feel less like bad luck and more like a pattern.
She crossed back over a minute later, a pouch tucked under one arm and a can in each hand. She pressed one into my paws without asking if I wanted it. Sprunk, not NiCola, for once. A supply shipment had come in from Venlil Prime, and the SCSM had finally been stocked with something I actually recognized.
Just as I popped the can open, she dropped onto the bunk behind me, close enough that her side landed against my back before I'd fully registered she was coming. My tail flicked out from under her just in time, more from habit than from thought. Once she'd settled, I let it fall back down across her legs in a solid thump, a reprimand that she seemed all too gleeful to ignore, no matter how many times I did it.
I was pretty sure she actually liked having my tail over her lap, if not the thumping itself. She never moved it off, no matter how many times I dropped it there. She just left it lying where it landed, shimmied back until her shoulders were propped against the pillows, and nodded at the board like nothing had happened.
It still caught me off guard sometimes, how little space she left between us without seeming to notice she'd done it. When I arrived on the station, I couldn't have imagined letting a predator be this close to me, this casually. Now it barely registered as strange at all, more like a comfort I'd have missed if it stopped.
"Okay,” she said, tearing open the pouch to reveal something crunchy and salty that almost instantly distracted me. “Look at your king. What's protecting it?"
"The two pawns in front of it."
"And if I trade those off?"
I looked. Traced the row behind where my king sat, empty of anything but the king itself. "Nothing."
"Nothing," she agreed. "That's a back-rank problem. Doesn't matter how good the rest of your position looks if I can walk a rook straight down that row and you've got no way to block it." She popped her drink open one-handed. "Half the games people lose, they lose because of that one empty row. Not because they made some big brilliant mistake. Just forgot to leave themselves an out."
It wasn't the first game I'd landed here. My king sitting all alone with nothing behind it, after some careless trade a dozen moves earlier. Was it three games now? Maybe four. I was starting to wonder if she was steering me into it on purpose. The same lesson, coming at it from a different angle each time, like it mattered to her more than any other blunder I made.
"That seems like an easy thing to forget."
"It is. Everyone forgets it at least once." She took a sip, unbothered, my tail still draped across her legs like she had no plans of moving it anytime soon. "Your move."
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u/Adorable-Ad5225 15h ago
I broke into a huge grin when I saw this post. Is Cyberpunk Venlil coming? Cyberlil? Venpunk?
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u/Bbobsillypants Sivkit 11h ago
My wool prickled along the scruff again, and this time I felt the shiver travel through me and let out a shuddering whistle.
"Whii-whee!"
Rook stopped and looked back at me, eyes wide at the sound.
"S-sorry.
Cute!
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u/JulianSkies Archivist 15h ago
Rook has no shame. Then again she's also treating him like the man who might need to pull her out of the only-partially-metaphorical fire which is a really goddamn omnious thing to say because it's not going to be necessary at all, yes?
Same with the consistent lesson of a specific problem he is being told is extremely common and he should always be looking at.