Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.4 (Patreon)

1.4

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Chozo.

A simple word. It wouldn’t mean anything to the people of this world, other than a pair of syllables strung together.

If I went around announcing myself as that, I’d get a few weird looks, and then complete dismissal as someone who was utterly lost in whatever obscure cosplay it was meant to be, just like the posergangs of old... If, admittedly, to a greater extent than normal since Exotics weren’t nearly so common than the mere bodysculpts that were necessary to be a normal poser.

To be honest? I was fine with that. Let them look at me and see an Exotic. Let them look at me and see something I’m not.

Because I wasn’t an Exotic, I was an actual fucking alien, and my current species had been a precursor race which made the absolute best technology of this setting look like childrens’ toys.

The Chozo came from Metroid. The short version of what they were, what I now was, is that they’re an avian species blessed with extreme longevity, incredible intelligence, physical abilities that were nearly supernatural, psychic abilities that were outright supernatural, and a somewhat concerning habit for disregarding the structural integrity of planets.

The somewhat longer version is that the Chozo are bipedal avians, wth heights that vary between more than two meters at the smallest and more than five metres at the largest. They had once been a warrior species, but they eventually changed their ways once their technology reached a point that they could no longer develop it any further. At some point, they also split apart into multiple different tribes with a lot of them fucking off to different parts of the galaxy to do their own thing.

One group, for example, straight up Ascended into a higher dimension Stargate-style, though that particular group also got yanked back down by what was basically Space Cancer if the Space Cancer was also both sentient and mutagenic.

The only two of tribes that had actually been named were the Thoha tribe, the pacifistic and benevolent good guys, and the Mawkin, their near-complete opposite.

Why point that out?

Well, it was actually important.

The Thoha tribe kept an aesthetic of gold and blue, with long robes and cloth being predominant among them. It was quite similar to what I was wearing, but one of the other details about the Thoha was that their pacifism was enforced.

They’d given themselves a mental block on engaging in violence, such was their commitment to peace. I had already killed three people in as many hours. If I was subject to the same rules, I’d have collapsed to the ground in agony around about the same time I snapped the neck of that guard.

Considering that I was currently sitting in a chair browsing what passed for the local news sources, that was obviously not the case for me.

The silver accents of my clothing might have been another clue, as silvery, high-tech armour was common for the Mawkin, but the accents were precisely that. Accents. Not the fully covering armour that the Mawkin favoured.

They weren’t the only options, but they were the most known ones. Every other group of Chozo went completely unnamed, with little known about them at all. It remained unclear how many existed, how many had survived, and what most of them had been up to.

Of the rest?

None of them really narrowed things down.

Where did that leave me?

In an odd position.

Without the confidence to go ahead and say that this body belonged to any given tribe, I was left to take things as they were.

My height was closer to the larger end of the scale. Judging by a little tape measure that I’d found laying around in a cupboard, my full height was just slightly under four metres tall. A somewhat comfortable slouching pose took that down a decent bit, but I was still fucking huge.

According to a public statistics dataset I found, the average adult male height in this city hovered around the vicinity of one hundred and eighty six centimetres. Tall, very tall, but also quite unnatural. It was a product of all the bodysculpting, genemods, and cyberware enhancements that the population went through. Height was a symbol of power, and everybody wanted to be just a bit taller than everybody else.

And so it had crept up over the years.

Naturally, this left me dramatically taller than everyone else, and I knew for a fact that I was going to be ducking through doorways a lot.

Height was one thing, but it didn’t stop there. I had the physical abilities of the Chozo. Strength, speed, durability... I was stupid strong, stupid fast, and stupid tough. I had the kind of physicality that Fullborgs wished they could achieve.

The only thing the Chozo could do that I hadn’t yet tested out was the Morph Ball, and the only reason I hadn’t yet tried was because this absolutely wasn’t the place for it.

By physical abilities alone, I was quite possibly the most dangerous thing in the city. Yet, even that paled in comparison to the much more important detail that I also possessed the Chozo’s talent for technology and spirituality.

The latter had always been indistinct and never really elaborated upon, but oh, it was useful. The Chozo had left behind prophecy in their workings, but being on the inside of it?

Right on the edge of my mind were the eddies of reality, and knowledge that what could be seen in physicality wasn’t the end of it. Yes, souls were very real, and I could feel them. The layers beyond the physical were peeled back, and I could glimpse the truth of things.

In this world? In the world of Cyberpunk, where trust was hard to come by, where you survived by your ability to judge people, judge situations? It was impossible to state how useful it was. To be able to look at a person and have a reasonable judge of their character before they ever even spoke?

It wasn’t even fair.

Combined with the former?

In a world where damned near everything was defined by technological might, the potency of the ability to look at a circuit board for a few seconds, and then discern both its entire method of operation, the flaws of its construction, and the improvements that could be made was beyond description. It was the kind of thing that megacorporations would kill for, both to acquire and to deny. Entire fucking nations had risen and fallen due to the actions of singular people who knew the right kinds of things or the wrong kinds of things.

One man had broken the world’s networks, shattering society for decades to come. Progress had halted in its tracks, and people were still clawing things back.

I’d looked at a Cybermodem that had been in storage. Cleaning it up had taken an annoying amount of time, but once I’d opened it up?

It was...

I’d looked at what had probably been cutting edge tech a few years ago, was still decent now, and all I saw was vulnerability. An endless series of poor choices and compromises- or, worse, deliberate flaws. I saw rare earth metals mixed with toxic compounds held together by a few thin layers of polymer, and it may as well have been garbage to me.

One minute, and my brain had already figured out how to turn it into a machine that would have laughed at supercomputers. Two, and the design in my head was already mostly biological, and the genetic sequences necessary to make it grow itself were assembling rapidly.

All of this gave me something that most people in this world didn’t get.

Options. Choices.

This would have been spectacularly useful if I’d had an actual plan before coming here, but I hadn’t.

It had been a surprise, after all.

What does one even do, in this position? In another reality as an alien with the very real possibility of being capable of turning the world on its head with the right kind of effort?

Well, step one for any plan was simple. Get your basics out of the way.

Food. Shelter. Drink. All three had been solved by now, as subpar as this building was, but the immediate issue was out of the way.

The second step was equally simple. Gather information.

Fortunately, in the process of solving step one, I’d also gained a computer and effectively free access.

It surprised me how difficult it was to find the date. Clocks, and timekeeping in general, simply wasn’t immediately displayed. I suspected that it was because a very large amount of people were probably running around with at least basic Neuralware, and why would anybody need an external clock when they could just check their own system?

The date is currently the first of January, 2050.

This meant... very little to me, actually.

So far as things went, I wouldn’t say that I considered myself a particularly big Cyberpunk fan. I’d played a few sessions of the tabletop game, had two completed runs of 2077, watched Edgerunners, read some fanfics, and... yeah, that was pretty much it. A superfan, I was not.

The last time I’d gone into the background lore had been when Phantom Liberty had come out, and frankly, I hadn’t really gone into the old lore, I’d gone through the new stuff. By this point, the 2050s were a blur, and even my new Chozo brain hadn’t fixed the old, blurry memories.

I probably could fix it if I really tried, but...

Did it matter?

No, not really.

Perhaps things would have been different if I’d appeared further in the future than here and now. Edgerunners had been a sad enough story that I was motivated to see it end better, but most of those people hadn’t even been born yet. V had also been a sad story, but there was no guarantee as to their appearance, gender, or even backstory, so good luck finding them when they also probably hadn’t been born yet.

If they ever were.

Chaos theory is a bitch, and while time did have a path that it would like to take, it was surprisingly easy to sever fate. When life and death were both tosses of a coin, who’s to say that any of the people whose stories I knew or cared about would even be born? What I knew now might never become the truth.

It was, therefore, pointless to try and plan something out twenty five years in the future. And, if I wasn’t going to bother with thinking that far ahead, why bother trying to remember the immediate?

In the end, the only thing I could do was plan for myself.

What did I want? What did I need? It’s only after you figure those things out that you can keep going.

Start with needs. I had food, water, and shelter, but all three were in poor form, and would need upgrading as soon as was reasonable. I suppose I could find more Scavs and kill them, too, but frankly, that wasn’t a long-term solution.

For a truly long-term solution, I had to get myself established within this city.

Problem: I had no forms of identification. I had no account in Night City’s banks. No number I could be contacted by, no systems that could let me be contacted.

Cyberware was so common that external agents were a rarity. Maybe one in seventy five people wasn’t walking around with a permanent phone in their head.

I would need to acquire all of those things.

And what did I need in order to get all of those things?

Why, money, of course. According to the publicly accessible government Net addresses, I would need to go visit an office for identification (which costs money), go visit the bank for an account (which costs money), acquire either an Agent (money) or a postal address (much more money).

Being that I currently have a big, round zero for my supply, that’s bad. I did, however, have three corpses on hand, and I was reasonably certain that I would be able to get something from them. If all else fails, there’s always the rather macabre option of further reducing the supply of Scavs in the city.

Still, there was a lot of immigration to this city, so it couldn’t be that difficult.

I hoped.