#hoowee

vance is a gay transgender man who grew up in a corporate family. his mother n father had met while working for arasaka counterintel during the 4th corpo war and had vance and his sister maya shortly after the war ended. they owe arasaka their comfortable, safe lives; if it weren't for their loyalty to the megacorp, they'd have been crammed into some rundown megabuilding alongside a thousand other poor, working class night citizens.

a lot of things started to change for vance when he turned 15. he realized he was transgender and confided this in maya, who had suggested his first chosen name: he started going by penn when he started his education at arasaka academy.

this was also the year he received an official, albeit beginner-level, cyberdeck. it's a hard implant for someone so young, but he had expressed an interest in tech and the NET years beforehand; why not let him hold the beauty of it in the palm of his hand?

he had jumped at the opportunity. he had always wanted it; why not accept it, now that he's been told he could have it?

he began to see his small world for its interlocking machinations. began to understand the little bits of code fluttering inside every piece of tech in the city. with the cyberdeck linked up to his neural systems, night city's buzzing got louder and louder, until the ever-present drone started keeping him up at night.

it would follow him throughout all his years in the academy—right until he graduated and arrived on arasaka's doorstep at the age of 19, newly transitioned and unaware of the other, freer paths the world might've had for him.

they took the beginner deck they had given him four years prior and began building him a new one.

a new deck required new implants. some of these were necessary, at first: a black steel spine to shoulder the weight of the deck, for example.

but over time, as vance excelled at every task they had given him, and then some—arasaka began to wonder: could they make him into something beautiful, in its intricacy, something impossible?

the average netrunner looks like their profession; technosights; jumpsuits; the seams for their cyberware running through their skin.

arasaka wanted to create something different—something covert. the most innocous of people; a tech weapon the nusa government themselves would kill to have (but how little they really knew).

vance's handlers proposed this plan to vance himself, there seated in arasaka's basement; they were, in some aspects, honest about what they wanted for him. they wanted him to be dangerous. they wanted him to be good. they vowed that they would be by his side throughout the whole process, the promise as loyal as vance had decided to be the first time he put on his uniform.

so he agreed—to all of it.

they started slow.

the steel spine traded for titanium; an expansive cyberdeck with more ram capacity; pulmonary implants to keep up the processing power; other organs traded for their mechanical counterparts, to ensure their safety when vance overclocks his systems.

vance became eerily familiar with arasaka's in-house chop shop. the ripperdoc there, boone vasco, put him under the knife time and time again—each major procedure had been carefully scheduled a few years apart. but vance wasn't just arasaka's pet project; on the side, he was their assassin. their ghost, trickling through the neon-drenched gutter that is night city, slaughtering anyone that needed zeroing.

a little hack there, an iron pressed up against someone ribs here.

he flatlined some disgruntled, middle-class corpo rat, some pencil pusher, who thought all it took to delta out of the corp had been booking the fuck out of the city with little else but both his family and several canisters of CHOOH2 in tow.

as far as anyone is concerned, maybe they did make it across the border.

or maybe they could've just made it, had they been faster; smarter; had they stayed to begin with.

maybe.

vance ran ops in and out of the nusa; his file will never see the light of day, not for all the eddies in the world. there's shit on there that'd start coups; destroy what little they've all built to keep. there are just some things that will always stay between him and the corp. they owe him that much.

when he wasn't out on the field, he was chasing novice netrunners out of arasaka's intranets.

eventually he had gained enough implants that the skin on his torso and back began to run warm—too warm. these were the days where he'd run ops feverish and slow. these were the days his own systems would fail him.

letting the machines breathe out in the open would've defeated vance's entire purpose; they had to get creative.

enough of these slip ups led to an entire torso's worth of a realskinn graft. arasaka had taken the market variant and specifically modified it so that it would allow vance (and his systems) to cool down faster. it's like a mesh rather than skin, soft enough to pass as the latter, but with pores big enough to remind one of the former.

they peeled the organic skin off his back and chest and replaced them—slowly, carefully—with this unique version of realskinn.

it took vance a long time to recover; for his body to accept this skin-like facade as its own.

--

because of the nature of his work, arasaka had thought it best to keep his existence a secret from the people beneath him in the pecking order. as far as they were concerned, vance was in a class of his own—just as adam smasher is his own unit, in a sense. still arasaka's; still a product of their patronage; just with a false sense of independence and superiority above everyone else, as if they're not all wearing the same tags.

vance had found a friend in someone like him; her name was veronica. she was a weapon, too—more blatantly, however, and certainly more of a physical, immediate threat that secrecy would've been a waste of more realskinn.

they often snuck out of work when they could—they took any and all measures to ensure that they didn't look anything like what arasaka had made them into. they went to bars. concerts. they breathed with the rest of night city—for the first time in a very long time.

--

the year is 2076. vance has been in arasaka's ranks for 12 years. he is 80% realskinn and the only truly organic parts left are on his arms, legs, and face. he is still arasaka's top dog; he is still their hound, loyal on a short leash. he still hears the world as loudly as they want him to.

but one, slow night in the basement, his handlers begun to talk—not to him, but amongst themselves. they didn't know he had left a little virtual watchtower for himself in the mikoshi chamber; the one place where he wasn't allowed to be.

he had spent 12 years as their model of what the perfect netrunner should and could be: covert, dangerous, and a powerful piece of tech.

he had spent 12 years as the first in a potentially long line of others.

they could've started sooner, more efficiently; they could've rolled out 3 generations in 12 years, not just the one.

one of the techies claims trial-and-error; there had been many times where certain implants had made vance violently ill. they had had to roll back. his recovery had been a necessary delay time and time again.

another agrees: one generation for twelve, another 2 in half that time. why not stop complaining and start now, with all the information gathered thus far?

and what'll we do with him?

the techies gathered around the room didn't have to answer for vance to understand his own obsolescence.

he had given them 12 years of his life; he had given them the skin off his back; he had told himself that every time he chose arasaka, he was choosing out of his own desire to be good.

what good comes of something past its expiration date?

--

he hadn't been the only arasaka pet project to be thrown out. veronica, too, was going to have her implants traded out so that they may go to the faster, newer generation of her kind.

together, they worked fast; they pulled every string that they had had the foresight to weave around night city; they created a small team of mercs to ferry them out of arasaka HQ; among them was vance's contact, jackie welles.

not many mercs were open to going toe-to-toe with a megacorp like arasaka—but if vance scrambled all the data concerning himself and veronica from their escape, then no one would ever be the wiser. to anyone on the outside looking in, it'd just look like they were stealing equipment from a shipyard.

--

i won't go into too much detail about the escape; only that it was long, tedious, and had left its marks on the both of them—physically and mentally.

in 2076, veronica and vance disappeared from arasaka's ranks, carrying within themselves the unique, stolen implants that made them who they are.

in 2077, they were beginning to live their own lives again.

vance changed his appearance; scrubbed all traces of himself from the NET, if any at all; tried to find his footing in the city that had heard of him only in the bodies he had left behind.

he looked over his shoulder a lot, those first few weeks he had spent lying low in mama welles'. he had been averse to any and all touch; he still craved it, however. that soft affection that demanded of him nothing but to let himself have it.

the hand brushes from jackie; the way mama welles would pat his cheek or fix his hair (even if it didn't need fixing) now and again; how viktor had put his hand on vances knee after the latter had confided in him everything arasaka had done to him.

he had left his family behind. his sister.

but he had friends at the end of his corpo world, too.

moving among them, he had found something in himself that he had had never realized was there: that he has a lot of love to give, and no idea how to give it.

but he tries, anyway; that is the one act of free will arasaka can't take from him.

--