A Glimmer in the Circuitry
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
A Glimmer in the Circuitry
Skinline: PROJECT
Her mind cracked by a faulty conversion process, PROJECT cyborg Jinx was outcast into the wastelands with the other discarded rejects of the great neon City. Now, she joins a deadly, unprecedented suicide mission to infiltrate PROJECT Corporation Tower at the heart of the City and destroy an unfinished superweapon before it's unleashed on the wasteland communities for testingâŚ
âŚbut the higher she climbs, the deeper she plunges, pieces of fragmented memories that may or may not be her own returning, of the Tower, of a past she wants to forget, and of a girl she desperately hopes to rememberâŚ
A girl who is each and every Light.
Lightcannon Week 2026 Day 3: Cyberpunk
Pulses of bright gunfire reflected from scarred, mangled metal. Piled on a heap of shattered concrete and steel, a sleek PROJECT Corporation Command-Line Cyber-Enforcer, blasted to nothing more than a torso, stretched its hand futilely for its fallen plasma rifleâŚ
âŚand jerked as a crimson hard light harpoon projectile on a glowing, angular chain of the same speared through its chrome skull, yanking what was left of its body back into the hand of a scarred, twisted, skull-faced cyborg stepping from the smoky gloom.
Turned in its captorâs hand, its body sloughing away from the damaged neck, the cyborgâs final vis-specs scanned the halftech bodies of four eclectic, asymmetrical PROJECT outcasts. Each had been shaped in their own ways just as much by the brutal wastelands outside the walls of the City, as by the PROJECT cybernetic augments that still gleamed beneath their mismatched clothing,
A brutal, twisted cyber-corpse patched together with piecemeal castoff parts, ghastly visage lit by the glow of jagged hardlight âteethâ sprouting from his collar; a graceful scout in a practical elastomeric bodysuit and white, hooded plasfire cloak, radiant drone blades hovering behind her, synced to her every thought; a sleek, silver-armoured infiltrator unit with a young womanâs hard determined face glowing behind a crimson hardlight faceplateâŚ
âŚand a gangling punk girl, hoisting chunky custom guns in her mismatched cybernetic arms, hair a spiky plume of vivid pink streaked with blue, face drowned in a chunky, batlike visor, save for a manic, twitching grin on her thin neon pink lips.
~ Database entries confirmed. Class: decommissioned alpha prototype assassination unit, identification: PÍYK̸EâClass: decommissioned multi-weapon specialist unit, identification, IRĚľĂLIAÍ âClass: recently escaped reconnaissance and elimination unit, identification: ÄKĚśÄLIĚ´âClass: failed experimental weapons specialist unit, classification, JĚźIĚĚNĚĚnĚĚżnnͨĚÍ-ÍŹÍŽ-ĚÍÍĚĚĚĚĚĚâ ~
Pyke stared with unending hate into the triangular logo emblazoned in light on the Enforcerâs triangular forehead as he crushed its metal face like an empty can in his gripâŚ.
âŚand stared up into the same logo, burning bright across the whole tangle of the City from the enormous tower rising at its heart.
From here, the City was a phantasmagoria of neon candy glow and sleek black neo-brutalist plascarbon and titanglass. Light and darkness, decadence and minimalism, grime and sterility all perfected in the same gleaming sprawl.
Outside the walls, only shadows, dust, and hunger.
âSo this is it, huh?â Jinx sang behind him, unable to help herself when it came to, yâknow, breaking every single silence. It was just her thing! Well, one of a few thingsâŚ
She whistled as she blasted the head off another dull-ass ProCorp borg pinned under her foot, silencing its bleating cries for mercy.
Thereâd probably been a human âEchoâ in there; some dumb shmuck corpo military loyalist getting himself or herself uploaded into the factory standard frontline units and forgetting to read the fine print, last time sheâd checked they were still doing thatâŚ
Kinda funny, hearing a fulltech shell begging like it could actually still feel anything real.
Jinx shrugged and moved up behind her crew. Pyke didnât turn to look at her, just kept brooding off into the distance as Irelia and Akali joined them.
âPROJECT Corporation HQ. ProCorp Tower! Like, the actual thing!â Jinx chortled, âWeâre not just goinâ into The CityâŚweâll be the first wasteland prodgies ever to cross back over those wallsâŚâ
Jinx struck a pose on the shattered cyborg nearest her, then pulled him up into her arms and waltzed with his metallic corpse across the gulf between her alliesâŚ
ââŚand waltz right into the lionâs den of corpo land, guns blazinâ!â
She tossed her âpartnerâ over the pile and cackled at their grim, brooding faces.
âYou guys are freakinâ serious about this, ainâtcha? Like, I was along for this ride for the fun ratta-tatta-pcheww-boom-boom times chewinâ up a few corpo patrols but now weâre standinâ on this hill, posinâ all cool like weâre actually about to lock in and go in. You guys are for real, fuckinâ serious about this?â
âWe are,â said Irelia, glancing back at Akali, âThat weapon canât be allowed to be deployed. You know the score, Jinx. Youâre just like the rest of us. Weâve survived everything outside these wallsâŚeverything theyâve thrown at us.â
The wasteland breathed its bleak, rotten silence at their backs; deadly remnants of old-world tech left over from old-world wars, mad cults and bandit gangs, and an environment that was determined to die slow and ugly and take everything that still lived out there down with itâŚ
Those who lived there also faced the PROJECT Corporationâs occasional enthusiastic attempts to clean up its discarded trash by sending out cyborg extermination squads to hunt down and retrieveâor deleteâany rogue PROJECT unitsâlike each of the four Outcasts on the wall.
After all, even damaged, obsolete, discarded rogue tech like them, PROJECT technology was still proprietary.
For everyone beyond those gleaming walls around that black-and-neon paradise, the outlands behind them were an unimaginable hell. For the four standing on that wall, looking in?
ââŚbut if what Akali says is true,â Irelia continued. âThat thingâs the most advanced hunterkiller PROJECTâs produced to date. And theyâre going to train it for battlefield opsâon us.â
âSo she says!â Jinx turned to grin at Akali, âWhatcha think of the Outcast life so far, New Girl? Ainât it fun beinâ expendable cast-off trash?â
âHeh,â said Akali, âItâs sure not boring.â
Jinx pulled her gaze away from three green-glowing pinpoints in the haze and looked back at Akali. She let her blank visor scan New Girlâs stoic face.
Pyke was a mangled cast-off prototype whoâd patched himself back together from scrap parts and the Echoes of their past owners still haunting them, Irelia a failed experimental specialist unit turned reluctant rebel leader, and Jinx herself a botch-job whose noggin got scrambled in the middle of her upgradeâŚ
âŚbut Akali was fresh tech, top-of-the-line PROJECT stealth model. Showed up in the Wastelands out of the blue, ProCorp Command Line assassin borgs in hot pursuit, on the run and lips hot with her dire warning of an about-to-be-unleashed superweaponâŚ
Jinxâs smile almost flickered. She had no reason but a dim hunch to sus the New Girl, but it still itched at the back of her screwed up meatbrain. What was left of it, anyway. Those killborgs had sure been enthusiastic, but it wouldnât be the first time ProCorp had sacrificed its own for a deceptionâŚ
Nah. ProCorp wouldnât waste resources like that on some elaborate plan to catch obsolete tech little fish like them. That was crazy talk! No way to prove it, anyway! And only one way to be sureâŚ
âYâall know a raid on ProCorp Tower is total freakinâ suicide, right?â said Jinx, âLike, total give-yer-meatshell-sixty-cancers, throw-yer-techshell-into-a-trash-compactor, melt-yer-Echo-chip-in-a-furnace suicide, right?â
The other three fell silent, grim faces lifted to the tower again.
âThe only thing more suicidal than raiding that tower,â said Akali, âIs letting that thing get loose out here. Once itâs activated we donât have anything that can match its specs. Itâs still a prototype in late phase development. We get in, we take it out before itâs finished...â
âAnd we snatch the whole model data right out of the mainframe,â said Irelia, her hard light blades whirling once before they settled into floating patterns behind her back, âAnd melt the rest. If they want to build another one, theyâll have to start from scratch.â
Pyke stayed silent. Jinx flashed him a curious look from behind her visor. She knew only a bit of what drove him; he was the only other Outcast just as crazy and fragmented as Jinx. Who knew whose memories were flashing behind his eyes, screaming at him to go in, and who to kill�
Akali, Irelia, simpler. On the surface, anyway. Just two Projects-turned-outcasts, like Jinx, only canny enough to know that if ProCorp was really about to playtest their newest all-terrain super weapon on the Outcast communities picking at their profit margins from the very most marginalized spaces left on the planetâŚ
Countless scrappers would die. PROJECT didnât fuck around with its super weapons. Whatever that thing was, it had to be stopped before it got out the doorâŚ
âWeâd need an army,â said Jinx.
Pyke finally spoke up, in his dark, sepulchral growl.
Jinx giggled. âAw, Pykey, ya sure know how to sweet talk a girl.â
So. This. Insane, risky, suicidal planâŚ
âYouâre all makinâ me look like the sane one.â
Jinx grinned ear to ear. Under that visor of hers, the grin was all the world could see of her. Maybe it was all she had left of a face to give the world.
âI like it.â She hoisted her custom-rigged shoulder launcher, âIâm in!â
âWe know,â rumbled Pyke, âLetâs go.â
Jinx watched him slip ahead of them like the wraith of the wastes he was; Akali, following, her photon-blue burst of hair fading into the smoky gloom, Irelia flicking her white ghostfibre cloak behind her and tugging down her hoodâs pink vizshield.
âHeh,â Jinx muttered, watching their tiny figures slip toward the colossus of The City, ââŚwonder if anyone behind those big shiny walls know us wastelanders even existâŚwonât they be surprised?â
For just a fÍĄliÍcġeĚľrĚĄ, Jinx thought sheâd spotted someone out of the corner of her eye, just in her periphery, watching her. Nah. Just another trick of her glitched-out brain. ĹĆĄbĚĄoÍdyĚ would be out here wearing thatâŚ
âYou again,â she whispered, forced her smile back on, and trailed like a bored stray after her new companions.
Four shadows slipped into the City that night. PROJECTâs flotsam. Freaks, dregs and outcasts. Nobodyâs idea of heroes. None of them expected to come back.
But somebody had to do the job.
