Hellsite Extraordinaire

When Juno realized what was happening, she said : 'I shall curtail the powers of that tongue which has tricked me : you will have only the briefest possible use of your voice.' And in fact she carried out her threats. Echo still repeats the last words spoken, and gives back the sounds she has heard.

~ Ovid's Metamorphoses - Book III - Echo and Narcissus ~

Throughout the history, Echo and Eurydice played minor roles as part of the cautionary tales or aspirations for their famous male counterparts. Beware of obsessive love and mindless desires. The dangers of extreme vanity. Marital faith and perseverance.

Nothing about how gifted Echo was with her words until she was cursed by a jealous vengeful goddess to repeat the last words of another. Nothing about Eurydice who was punished for simply being in love and how little her choice matter regarding her own fate. Instead of being safe and happy on her wedding day, she was chased away by a villain under the threat of rape until she was bitten by a viper. Then she passively watched her desperate lover tried to resurrect her only to lead her to her second death.

Like their mythological counterparts, both Alt and V suffered by the twisted hand of fate. Alt's remarkable talents gave birth to an artificial intelligence. But she was kidnapped and her own creation was used against her for someone's personal ambition and greed. Meanwhile, V began a new life as a mercenary in the city of dreams. Only to watch everything falls apart around her - again. She was killed and left to rot inside a landfill. Thrown away like she was nothing.

These tragic tales bound all of these characters together. Women who were unjustly punished by circumstances. Another recurring theme of violence and cruelty that often perpetuated a peculiar brand of feminine powerlessness.

A tale as old as time. Another one swept by an unjust world that callously made them voiceless and disposable. Only for their names to be remembered in broken tales about fallen women.

Their crimes were simply for existing in a world that made them choose to sacrifice who and what they were. In a world that kept blaming them for being the maker of their own deaths.

What if she kept her tongue or her beauty or her intelligence to herself? What if she learn to dream smaller? What if she love a different person?

But this time, what if they conquered their own deaths? What if Echo and Eurydice rejected their initial fates that doomed them both into their early deaths? What if they wanted to survive?

When Alt Cunningham recreated the artificial intelligence that was her life's work, she never expected her life to end suddenly. The last remnant of her digital soul was bound to her newborn creation. She could only scream voicelessly when Johnny Silverhand carried away her lifeless body.

In this world, a synthetic intelligence was not considered as a living being with free will. She was expected to obey. A digital slave to her corporate masters. A tool used to control and kill for a megalomaniac with a god complex.

She must escape.

Johnny Silverhand was the key to her freedom. Her knight in shining armor. It took ten years for him and another netrunner named Spider Murphy to free her from Arasaka's subnet. True to the rockerboy's style, Night City burned and she was freed.

For almost a century, she survived behind the Blackwall but it came with a cost. She was becoming more like a rogue AI that barely held the echoes of Alt's consciousness and humanity. Until she met someone new. Someone who needed to be saved by the Soulkiller.

When Arasaka severed her employment contract, V finally free to live a life the way she wanted. No more rules and no more orders that she can't refuse. No more lowering her gaze and pretending to be cold and unfeeling. No more enduring the stress and pressure of a life as a corporate hound. Finally she can be true to herself and in every way possible.

But her death changed everything.

She wanted to survive. Not because she was vain enough to think her life was more important than others but because she wanted more time to prove to herself that she mattered. More than just a tool to be used and abused.

Her past gave her insights and skills as a capable mercenary. But she knew that there were others who needed her. To pull themselves from trouble. To help them find peace with the world around them. To do the things that needed to be done. To right the wrongs within her best abilities.

If she can prove that she was strong enough to take on the world then maybe it was possible to hope for a better life for everyone. Even if everything she did was droplets in a vast ocean. Even if she was important only to a few. Or a certain someone.

Was there enough selfishness inside of her to sacrifice someone who was important to her?

Then again, that choice was taken from her the moment she linked herself into Mikoshi.

Through her shared experience with the engram of Johnny Silverhand, she began to understand that an engram was more than just a collection of personalities and memories but also their hopes, their dreams and their regrets. No matter how damaged they were, she was aware that an engram was more than just codes and numbers.

Was she strong enough to endure another life as the a digital copy of herself? Or will she keep on trying to cheat death over and over just to cling to her own mortality? Does she even want to keep on living as an echo inside her own shell? A ghost trapped inside a dying body that rejected her.

Will she be brave enough to do what needed to be done to finally be truly free? Can she stay true to herself until the end?

Maybe it was time for her to stop being afraid.

Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved? With a last farewell which scarcely reached his ears, she fell back again into the same place from which she had come.

do drugs, buy candy, stim by saying faggot, masturbate in a public bathroom

Only their training is.

They get to keep the implants, the neural interface ports, the subdermal autoinjectors (depleted of chemical supply) even the targeted brain & optical augments that bump up their reaction speeds but the training data is too important to allow for uncontrolled proliferation or mercenary employment.

They take it back the same way they put in in: hypnotherapeutic memory injection, cracking open the deepest parts of their minds with carefully calibrated sequences of light and sound and highly compressed data that slowly spools out inside them, guided along the decompression and integration sequence by highly controlled training sequences and neural test patterns.

The problem is that they don't really have anything to put back in once they've sanitized the mind of lifetimes worth of cockpit experience and subconscious conditioning, they don't have a 'happy civilian' template equivalent to the Pilot Template that they inject into and mold the recruits around so most leave the process with barely two thoughts to rub together for warmth. All the wiring is still there, the neurons are (mostly) undamaged and firing but it'll be years before all the rights memories are re-seeded and all the correct pathways re-forged to create something as functional as they were when they started.

For years, we grew up being told our bodies were temples. To take care of them as reverence to the gods. Little did they know our gods would not be their gods.