404: Doom Not Found

- 10 years before canon -

"I didn't die," V announced, kicking the door open with her boot and tossing her jacket onto the counter. "Again. That's twice this week."

Victor didn't look up from his bench. "The statistical odds of your survival are beginning to skew probability. I'll adjust the model."

"Uh-huh. You could also say, 'Nice job, V. Good work not bleeding out in a parking lot.' That's what normal people say."

Victor snorted mid-solder. "Do not equate me with medocracy."

V dropped into the chair opposite him, leaning back, arms sprawled like she owned the place. "I don't need to Phd to see you're crazy. A chrome-head with more intellect than heart. I've met more bums with better sense than you."

"Your point?"

"That I'm starving and you still haven't restocked the fridge."

Victor tapped a sigil-etched interface on the bench, watching the glyphs flash green. "Food procurement is your domain. I subsidise the apartment. The division of labour is equitable."

"Only because you cook like a depressed AI."

"I find sustenance distasteful. Its necessity irritates me."

"Well, I like food, and I just cleaned your rust-bucket shower drain again, so you owe me noodles."

Victor stood, gauntlet fingers flexing as he powered down the bench. "You survived a low-tier fixer's fetch job. Your reward is continued residence."

"Wow. Heartfelt. You ever think of doing pep talks for orphans?"

Victor mused at the words...

Was he not already doing so? 

He walked past her toward the kitchenette, his boots making minimal sound on the steel floor. "Only if they're worth the investment."

V laughed, pushing herself upright. "Anyway, Padre said you greenlit me for that job. Figured I'd get screwed over without Doom looking over my shoulder?"

"I merely told Padre you weren't likely to die. Immediately."

"That your way of saying you believe in me?"

"No. That's my way of saying I believe you're marginally more competent than the gangers you seem to attract."

V smiled anyway, taking the win even if it came in barbed wire. "Still. I owe you one."

Victor opened a drawer, removed a data shard, and flicked it across the table. It landed with a soft clack. "Then repay the debt by staying alive."

V caught it, blinking. "What's this?"

"A job. Eventually. When I deem you ready."

She stared at him, trying to tell if he was serious. Of course, he was. Doom didn't joke. Not intentionally, anyway.

"Cryptic as always," she muttered.

"You're dull. Pay attention."

V rolled her eyes and stood. "Whatever Chrome face. I'll go hunt down noodles. You want anything?"

"No."

"Didn't think so."

She slung her jacket over her shoulder and moved toward the door, pausing before she left. "You know, for a guy who barely talks, you say a hell of a lot."

Victor didn't look up. "Then perhaps you should listen more carefully."

He returned to his work, the minutes turning to hours soon after, before being interrupted by the light sound of a buzz alerting him. 

His focus snapped to the blinking icon on his data pad.

Incoming Call — PADRE

He answered.

"Doctor," came the familiar, gravel-edged voice of the Heywood fixer. "I have a job that needs your touch. A data extraction from a corporate node. Clean, quiet, and most importantly—smart."

Victor didn't look up from the interface he was welding. "Why come to me? I'm no netrunner."

Padre chuckled lightly. "Precisely. This isn't a brute-force breach. It requires finesse. You'll be acquiring intel from an off-grid Militech server. Air-gapped. No standard access. I need someone who can think… creatively."

Victor's hands paused, the micro-solder in his grip steaming for a moment too long. "And the payout?"

"No eddies," Padre replied. "Not yet. Pull the data, and I give you information—on something bigger. Something moving through Santo Domingo in a few days. An experimental Militech convoy. Prototype-tier."

Victor leaned back, expression unreadable beneath the dim shop lighting. "A job… for a favour? You dare ask Doom to trade in whispers like some market snake?"

"You asked what the reward was. I told you. Besides, this gear—it's not standard issue. Think: bleeding-edge. I don't know what exactly is in the transport, but the corporations are nervous. That should tell you enough."

Victor's interest sharpened. In this world, whispers of experimental tech weren't casual. They were often sealed behind NDA bullets and buried corpses.

"Very well," Victor said at last. "But this is not a street brawl. I'll need schematics. Security protocols. Every byte your little birds can sing."

A soft tone indicated Padre uploading the files. "You've got twenty-four hours. After that, the node relocates."

Victor ended the call with a finger.

He sat for a moment, eyes tracing the encrypted blueprints on-screen: a decommissioned data vault housed beneath a Militech logistics outpost in Rancho Coronado. Light personnel presence, mostly off-site security. The real defense was digital: encrypted triple-lock BIOS, quantum-signature keys, a server that didn't just hide — it rejected intrusion on a molecular level.

No wonder Padre hadn't called a netrunner. This job didn't want code. It needed architecture.

No netrunner of any level was going through this... 

Perhaps legendary figures such as Rache Bartmoss or Alt Cunningham but any other high-profile netrunner? 

Perhaps not. 

Victor pulled out a drawer of micro-sigils — hand-etched chrome shards, slotted into a makeshift cyberdeck he'd been slowly building over the last month. It wasn't netrunning in the traditional sense. This wasn't ICEbreaking. This was insertion — his tech layered with arcane insulation, able to mask presence not through stealth, but by distorting the data itself.

"Let fools punch walls," he muttered. "Doom simply walks through."

Three hours later, his board was covered in sketches. Subsurface tunnel routes. Thermal sensor fields. Firewall diagrams wrapped in mystic runes. He plotted three points of failure, two backup exits, and one remote signal to shut the entire node down should it be traced.

V entered the apartment carrying a burger that smelled like despair. She paused as she saw the mess.

"Damn. What are you doing, building a nuke?"

Victor didn't look up. "If you saw a nuke, you'd be dead."

V blinked. "Okay. Not ominous at all."

She dropped onto the couch, already distracted. "Hey, Jackie says hi. Wants to know if you're still mad he scratched your car."

Victor didn't reply. His mind had already moved on — not to Jackie, or V, but to the convoy. What kind of tech would require corporate shell routes and black-site encryption? What were they afraid of losing—or afraid of others finding?

Doom would find out.

He stood, crossing to his gear locker. Time to prepare.

———

When Victor struck, the Night was thick with static. 

Rain had begun to drum on the concrete like a metronome counting down the inevitable.

Santo Domingo's outer sectors were dim, industrial, and silent except for the low thrum of power lines and the groan of heavy freight lifters somewhere in the distance.

Victor knelt by a service access port buried under rusted scaffolding.

His coat, soaked through at the shoulders, clung to him as if protesting his stillness. He didn't mind the wet—there was clarity in the cold.

He'd scouted the facility for two days. Militech had a mobile data vault running low-profile inside a converted water treatment plant, masked beneath layers of local zoning permits and shell companies.

Padre hadn't known much—only the time, location, and that the shard inside contained prototype development records for next-gen warfare systems. But Doom didn't need context.

Only opportunity.

He pulled out a flat disc no larger than a coin and pressed it against the access panel. The interface pulsed once—sigils carved into its underside flaring momentarily. It wasn't just code.

His tablet's operating system, self-inscribed with archaic glyphs, bent reality around his intrusion, scrambling trace signals. The feed began to loop, cycling through fifteen seconds of stale input.

Then he was inside.

No alarms. No alerts.

The corridor was narrow, concrete and sterile. Pipes hissed overhead; floor sensors lit with infrared—Victor kept to the edges, mapping the grid with practiced ease. There were five guards inside the plant, all rotating every seventeen minutes.

He timed their movement cycles down to the breath.

Two were in the canteen. One smoked outside. One in the server corridor, head bent over a combat comic, oblivious. The last was stationed near the secure server, pacing lazily with his rifle slung over one shoulder.

Victor didn't kill.

Not here.

Noise was exposure. Blood, evidence.

He approached the first guard silently—an older man, bored and already nodding off. A sharp pressure behind the neck with two gloved fingers sent a mild shock, dropping him instantly into unconsciousness. No twitching. No pulse change. Just stillness.

One by one, he made his way through. The smoking guard was easier—gas inhalation as he leaned against the wall, a rebreather jammed over his mouth for five seconds. Slumped down, out cold.

Each movement was deliberate. Elegant.

While blind stealth would've been preferred, there was simply too many bodies and surveillance around to observe.

No eyes were better than blind. 

Inside the maintenance corridor, Victor passed a thermal camera and ducked into a blind spot he'd memorised during recon. He slid a mirror around the corner—saw the guard in front of the server vault. Still pacing.

Victor pulled a coin-sized emitter from his coat, whispered a command into it, and flicked it toward the hallway wall. It landed silently, blinking once. A low chirp like a broken ventilation unit echoed.

The guard turned, distracted. That was enough.

Victor struck like a ghost.

A twist of the arm, a jab to the diaphragm, and a final nerve pinch. The man dropped in place, unconscious but unharmed.

Victor dragged him into a storage closet, wedging the door closed with a metal bar.

Silence returned.

He stood now before the vault's door. Triple-sealed, with both passcode and biometric encryption. He pulled out a shard inscribed with glowing, hand-etched patterns. The moment it touched the lock's surface, the runes interfaced—arcane overlays disrupting standard ICE protocols. The glyphs shimmered, then synced.

Green light.

The vault door slid open.

Inside, a single netrunner sat jacked in—thin, augmented, young. His rig blinked red in warning, his feed showing tracer ghosts. Victor had looped the system feeds, but the runner had noticed anomalies—too late.

Victor crept in behind him, watching the youth frown and mutter curses to himself. He raised a hand to strike—

But paused.

This one was close to the shard. Too close to risk accidental corruption.

Instead, Victor whispered a word—something old. The light around him dimmed briefly.

The netrunner's screen glitched. He blinked, confused, turned, and Victor hit him with a single nerve tap that overloaded his visual feed.

Out cold.

But before he could steal the data, he needed to blur his tracks. The possibility of an off-site netrunner could exist. 

Blurring the SIN signature and scrambling data feeds, Victor ensured that to any outside influence, the area appeared to operate at a steady flow. At least for another twenty minutes, but by then it would be too late.

Victor turned to the server. Sleek. Encased in black carbon-steel housing. He slid the extraction shard into the data slot, muttered a second phrase—his custom encryption sigil glowing on the pad.

Download: 34%.

He waited, unmoving.

The data shard clicked softly—an almost imperceptible sound, drowned in the electrical hum of the vault.

Download: 89%.

Victor stood still, barely breathing.

Every step leading here had been measured, calculated. Even the layout of his own body posture was deliberate: back to the wall, dominant foot ready to pivot, eyes flicking between the door and the data feed.

The netrunner still slumped unconscious in his chair, head tilted awkwardly, a fine line of synthetic sweat trailing down his chrome jaw.

Victor glanced at the unconscious boy again, a flicker of something passing behind his eyes—judgment, perhaps. Or disdain.

He muttered beneath his breath, "You're fortunate. Had I not required silence, you'd be ash."

Download: 100%.

A dull tone confirmed extraction. Victor slid the shard free, slipping it into a lead-lined pouch inside his coat. He didn't smile, didn't allow even the smallest flare of satisfaction. The job wasn't done until he walked out alive.

He left the vault door ajar behind him, part of the illusion. A clumsy thief, perhaps. Or an inside job.

Regardless, their conclusions would be limited. Clumsy in certain areas, too thorough in others. 

His steps were silent as he retraced his path back through the corridors. The bodies of the five guards lay exactly where they'd been left—undisturbed, none the wiser. They would wake with mild headaches and no memory of their presence.

The coin-sized cameras he'd thrown earlier blinked their final loop before shutting down. Tiny, temporary surveillance ghosts—recorded nothing, sent nothing. Perfect for feeding false timelines to cleanup teams.

By the time he reached the outer service access, the air had grown heavy with mist. Dawn threatened on the edges of the skyline—thin grey bleeding through the neon haze.

Victor crouched near a maintenance panel, opened a casing, and retrieved a tiny bug no larger than a splinter.

One last safeguard—installed hours before the operation began. It had been monitoring for third-party interference.

Militech was cautious, but Victor had calculated something more likely: rogue elements, other corpos, netrunners hungry to sniff out black data before it could leave the city grid.

Nothing had come.

Victor's fingers closed around the bug, crushing it.

Then, he stood, straightened his coat, and walked down the alley.

No alarms.

No pursuit.

He moved through the industrial zone like a ghost, shadowed and unseen.

As he reached the edge of the perimeter—just shy of the urban grid's active scanner zones—his internal ping chimed. A coded message, low-bandwidth, encrypted in Padre's signature.

"Received. Transfer confirmed. Your favour is earned."

Victor didn't respond immediately. He stood at the curb of an empty stretchway, staring at a fractured holo-billboard sputtering half-lit ads for combat stims and memory wipes.

He could still feel the weight of the shard in his coat. Whatever Militech had been developing, it was important. Possibly even revolutionary.

He activated a small relay device embedded in his glove, linking the shard to a secure storage vault buried inside an anonymous proxy server. The kind of dead-drop no one could ever trace—archaic and paranoid, exactly the way he preferred.

Then he replied:

"Hold your end, Padre. I want convoy schedules. I want a composition. Nothing less."

Another delay—then a short ping of acknowledgment.

Victor turned his collar up against the cold. He didn't need warmth. He needed time.

Back in the apartment, his hands moved instinctively over the tools scattered across his workbench. The noise of Night City barely bled through the thick insulation of his walls, but it was there—always present, like a dying animal growling in the dark.

He placed the shard down, now clean, dormant. He would review it later. First, it had to rest. Tech—like magic was temperamental when exhausted.

His eye caught V's jacket thrown lazily over the sofa.

She'd returned from her food hunt earlier than expected, dropped her boots and passed out in the side room. A half-eaten burrito sat abandoned on the counter.

Victor shook his head, muttering, "At least she didn't bleed on anything this time."

The apartment lights dimmed. Victor sat down slowly, gazing at the blackened skyline.

The job was clean. Too clean.

And that meant the next one wouldn't be.

Because Night City always knew when something had been taken from it. And now… it would start to bite back.

___

[AN: My laptop has been spazzing out, havn't been able to write this week :P. I'm going to be really busy next week but I'll still try and upload some chapters.]