We had been shooting for an hour straight until we ran out of ammunition on everything she brought. I even got to fire from her two assault rifles— a Masamune and a Copperhead according to her.

  I figured out a trick with the Sandy. While activating it, I could brace and recover from recoil much easier, limiting the spread of bullets to a far narrower range. I’d managed to get my accuracy up as well, though that was under ideal conditions, being taking five seconds to line up the shot and get rid of mental distractions.

  I’d hit a plateau when it came to the mental aspect of shooting. I could do it. I just couldn’t do it fast, and if I did it fast, I couldn’t do it accurately. It was a crippling weakness to have, and what scared me the most was that I didn’t know how to get over it.

  Was this what Nanny meant when she said that we needed to work together to fix me? I underestimated the level of effort required of me severely.

  Once we finished the ammo, we cracked open some beers and watched the sun set behind the Night City skyline, just chatting.

  “What’s the deal between you and Lucy, by the way?” Becca asked, and I sighed.

  “Ugh, don’t wanna talk about it.”

  “Never seen her get so hot and bothered whenever you’re mentioned,” she continued. “You should have seen her shitfit after Maine brought you up when we were in the Afterlife. Man, she fucking despises you.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. She sucks.”

  “Did you know that she fucked Pilar once?” she said, then made a gagging sound. “Yuck.”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s none of your business though. And we all make mistakes.”

  “Are you defending her?” Becca yelled. “Seriously, what is up with you two?”

  “Can we drop it?” I asked. “Because to be honest, I have no idea what’s up and I don’t really want to think about it. So let’s just drop it, alright?”

  “Did you guys fuck?”

  “No,” I said with a wince. If there was one thing I had learned about Becca was that she was just way too forward. I just had to get used to that.

  “Do you want to?”

  “No!”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said, having ignored my answer wholly. “You’d have better luck doing it with Kiwi, and I’m pretty sure she’s a lesbian.”

  “Lay off,” I said. “Don’t want nothing to do with her. Only got into shit with her because I chose to associate with her, but I’m done doing that now. Can’t deal with all that bullshit drama.” I gave her a smile. “This right here is nice, you know. No bullshit. Just two chooms doing stuff together. And talking.” I took a swig of my beer. “No pointless drama, insults and hurtful words. I think Lucy gets more out of our weird-as-fuck dynamic than I do. She just doesn’t tire. Damn Lunacy,” I chuckled.

  “Oh, you are fucking crushing!” Rebecca squealed.

  “Am not!” I replied hotly.

  “Wanna take her out for drinks? I’ll invite her and make it sound like you won’t be there.”

  “No!” I shouted, but it was too late. Her eyes turned golden. “Stop it!” Dammit. I prepared to send a Breach Protocol to her system so I could shut down the call. Instead, her playful grin died and transformed into outrage as her eyes stopped shining gold.

  “That bitch!” Becca hissed. “I forgot for a second that she’s as fun as wet socks. Said no without even considering it.”

  Whew. Thank God for antisocial Lucy.

  “You really shouldn’t bother her,” I said. “She went pretty hard on the drinking last night.”

  “Wait, you went out with her?!”

  “Wasn’t like that,” I groaned. “I lost a bet. Was buying her drinks all night. She was being a real bitch about it, too.” Then I remembered something. “Right! I chipped in yesterday!”

  “Really?!” Rebecca leaned closer to me to get a better look at me. “Where?”

  I pointed at my eyes. “And… check your socket,” I shot her a quickhack, and a shard ejected from her socket. She caught it just as it flew out.

  “Eeeh?!” she stared at me in disbelief. “Was that a fucking quickhack?! Did you just quickhack me? You got Netrunner chrome now?”

  “Yeah, a cyberdeck,” I said.

  “I heard that you were learning some stuff from Kiwi, but to chip in a whole deck… you’re serious as shit about this, huh?” Rebecca said. And I knew what would come next. ‘Don’t spread yourself so thin, we already have plenty of Netrunners.’ Nobody ever seemed to trust that I wasn’t just a dabbler for some reason. Was there something on my face that just screamed ‘can’t code’ or something? “Well, I for one can’t wait to see what you get up to. A Netrunner who can also kick ass? D, you’ll be a nova edgerunner, I just know it.”

  I smiled. “O-oh. Thank you. I appreciate that a ton.” The sun had almost set and the last beer was in Rebecca’s hand, rapidly emptying into her gullet before my eyes. “It’s getting late. Wanna call it a day?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Before I got on my bike, I remembered to give my system a quick rinse with the Sandevistan, sobering up instantly. I let Rebecca ride on the back as I drove us back home at a sedate one hundred kilometers an hour. I didn’t want her to barf all over my new ride, or my back for that matter, and she had plenty of fun even if we were driving so slowly.

  Meeting us outside her house was none other than Pilar, holding up a cloth bundle. Rebecca jumped off the bike and shouted “Surprise!”

  I looked at the bundle that Pilar shoved towards me with wide eyes. “You mean…?”

  “Your very own Masamune!” Pilar shouted. “This one’s got no frills, no thermal, electric or poison mods. Just the toughest metamaterial I could synthesize and a killer paintjob!”

  “Pilar, I don’t know what to say,” I said. “This is way too generous!”

  Pilar waved me off. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll ask for your scratch if there’s something crazy I found that I could add to it, but—”

  “I owe you one,” I said. “I mean it. And I ain’t gonna forget it.”

  Pilar patted me on the head. I swallowed the indignation of that and watched him grin and shoot me a thumbs-up. “Just focus on slicin’ and dicin’, samurai.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah.”

  I drove the Kusanagi home, parked it, and collapsed on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.

  Hanging out with Rebecca was nice.

  But I wasn’t exactly tuckered out to say the least. Still had a ways before I could go to sleep and skip to tomorrow.

  Maybe I should finish compiling evidence of increased neural strain from mixing chrome brands and prepare it in shard form before giving it to Kiwi?

  I hopped off the sofa and got to the terminal, typing away until a notification hit me.

  A program I had created ages ago, meant to supervise and report on any suspicious activities on the family bank account, had pinged.

  I remembered when I made it. It was after I completed a fintech course, learning about fraud and fraud investigation. Just by understanding the specific mechanics that went into the stuff, I challenged myself to create a program that could notify us if the account was ever actively monitored by an anti-fraud algorithm, which was the precursor to a full-on audit. Never expected it to ever be useful, I just made it because it seemed like a fun little IT challenge to tackle.

  I checked the notification, then double-checked the program itself and the report it provided. It timed the latency of outgoing and ingoing signals, and monitored the patterns, frequency and durations by sending pings every now and then, and using a statistical analysis model to determine if the latency was due to network connectivity or if it was because there was a monitoring application that analyzed the signals in real-time or stored them away for review.

  The analysis model wasn’t the most rigorous, having made it when I was fifteen and all, but it gave a pretty high confidence quotient.

  I shut the app down, not wanting it to suddenly trigger an audit, all the while as I sat back and took this in.

  I was fucked.

  With this thing watching my account, the city would want its pound of flesh, but taxes were the least of it. What mattered more, especially to someone on the corpo track, was the illegality of the source of my money. Mercenary work and black money was a gray area legally, but that was only if you didn’t participate in the corpo circus. Guys like Maine and them never had to worry about this stuff because even if they were audited, they would attribute the proceeds to mercenary work, probably pay a bullshit fine, or never even have to worry about that in the first place. The mercs were the only criminals that the corps actively supported. They, and the gangs, were necessary cat’s paws for their plans.

  But being labeled a cat’s paw for the corps would severely limit my future in the corporate machine. They wouldn’t want someone dirty on their team. Optics was all that mattered to them.

  In my mind’s eye, Arasaka Tower was crumbling before my eyes into ash that blew in the wind. It was all over for me.

  I slapped both my cheeks.

  Fuck.

  That.

  I was a goddamn corpo student. I knew what to do. If I didn’t, then what were all those classes even for? I had to search my mind now for a solution on what to do: I had the groundwork already: a formal education on how fraud investigations occurred, and how people traditionally avoided them.

  The answer was simple; set up a shell corporation outside of Night City jurisdiction, preferably in a place that had a worse infrastructure for financial oversight, have my income sent directly to the corp’s coffers, and then draw the money back to me from there as needed.

  The banks could investigate me, but they wouldn’t have the legal right to audit the payments made to the corp, and because the amounts transferred were practically nothing in the grand scheme of things, they wouldn’t have the motivation to break the law just to fuck me over. Easy.

  The nearest shithole to Night City with exactly the level of infrastructure that I needed to hide my slightly-illegal income was Tijuana, only twenty miles south. Using a proxy, I hit up the Net for information on setting up a company in Tijuana; it was under Militech jurisdiction, so it basically counted as a New-American territory, but the list of what was necessary to be put on the corp register differed drastically from the laundry list that you needed to become incorporated in NUSA proper, or even Night City, which was the epitome of fast-and-loose in all of North America.

  Sources widely agreed that I absolutely needed a local guide to walk me through the process and make sure I didn’t step on any toes, of which there were plenty. I needed to then set up the type of company: a limited liability company, a corporation or a partnership, which I would then need to register with the Tijuana Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the CCT, and that would usually include paying a bribe to every official in charge of processing my application, and then paying a fee on top of that.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Which I did not plan to do at all. Nevermind how much of a waste of money that was, I needed to at least make the damn corp look like it had existed for more than two seconds. Night City couldn’t audit the corp unless they really wanted to, but they would be able to look up how long it had been in existence as that was publicly available information. I had to hack into the CCT directly and get the job done that way, making sure to make it look like the corp had existed for a while now.

  Then I needed to get a tax identification number from the local government, open a local bank account, and then I needed a ton of forged documents with all sorts of approval seals. Forging the documents could easily be done using generative AI. The hard part, which wouldn’t be hard for me, was inserting the docs in a government database to make it look like the company had a history.

  The common way to set up a shell company required a lot more patience than what I was currently doing. I was able to cut corners drastically because of my hacking capabilities. All I was really worried about was setting up a bank account. I didn’t see any way around doing that legitimately since banks were a whole different ballpark from corp registers and tax offices. I could make it look like the company had to close its account before and then set up a new one, but that would still not be able to hold up if an audit demanded documents of payment history from the fictitious former bank directly.

  But it wouldn’t get that far in the first place, would it? I just needed to make sure the corp looked like it was old. Payment history wouldn’t be publicly available in the first place.

  Fuck it. Guess I would be spending my own money after all to set up this goddamn business bank account.

  Fuck.

  Couldn’t move my money out, though. My account was fucking flagged, and if I used my own money to set up a company specifically meant to wash and obscure said money, I’d be shooting myself in the head, much less the foot.

  I needed to withdraw the cash, but that was suspicious, too, especially if I took out all of it. That would probably trigger an investigation immediately, something I wasn’t ready for at all. I needed to set up the company first before even thinking about handling a formal investigation.

  Needed cash, and I needed it stat.

  And I couldn’t ask the crew. Didn’t want to be owing chooms money. Didn’t like the feeling of that at all.

  I hit up El Capitan.

  D: I need a favor.

  El Capitan: If you already broke your bike, I’m not fixing it for you for free.

  D: Not about the bike. Need to borrow cash, physical bills. Quickly, if you can.

  El Capitan: I won’t ask except: how much?

  I smiled.

  D: You’re a life-saver, Capitan. And I’ll pay you back. You know I’m good for it.

  El Capitan: That’s why I’m doing this.

  D: Fifty thousand.

  It was around how much I had in my account, therefore the amount I felt comfortable owing to him,

  El Capitan: You need it right now?

  D: Preferably.

  Without this shell corp, my income would freeze, and I’d rather not let that happen to me for an unnecessary amount of time.

  El Capitan: Meet me here at seven fifteen.

  He sent me the location, a taqueria in Rancho.

  I got suited.

  Pilar’s katana—he called it Masamune—on my left hip, a gun with the safety on in the inner pocket of mom’s jacket, my mask in the same inner pocket, and I was ready to go meet El Capitan.

  000

  I traded niceties with El Capitan, and he gave me the money without any questions or threats, which I was immensely grateful for. Couldn’t imagine anyone, especially not a fixer, being that kind to me.

  From there, I took off out of Night City for the first time since I arrived eleven years ago.

  Entering Tijuana required a visa payment, but it was more of a bribe than anything. Tijuana wasn’t big on book-keeping, every bit of bureaucracy existed to make its bureaucrats money. That’s what mom had told me. We had come from here after all.

  Once I left the vicinity of Night City, I blasted off with my bike at top speed, watching it top out at just shy of a thousand kilometres an hour. Fucking nova.

  The dark landscape rushed by me, sparsely lit by streetlights, but my Kiroshis were more than enough for the job of providing me with visibility.

  It took me three minutes to reach the first border station.

  The guy didn’t even bother to say anything but a number. “One thousand.”

  That was probably too high, but I didn’t give a shit. This was the tourist tax; I was the one riding a Kusanagi, I could afford a thousand.

  I sent him the money, plus an extra one hundred so he would leave me alone.

  “Another five to scrub you from the record,” he said, which was bullshit. He wouldn’t have recorded me in the first place, but now he would because I could pay.

  And after I paid him extra, too. Rat bastard fucking gonk.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I have no reason to need to hide my travels.”

  He grinned viciously. “Your choice.”

  I immediately sent a Breach Protocol into the system. It would delete the entire database and scrub the CCTV camera after I left, getting his dumb ass fired because fuck him.

  I rode through the opened toll gate and drove into my ancestral home. The first thing I noticed was that it was so low, like nobody even lived here. There were a couple of large buildings, some matching the size of the megabuildings back home, but the vast majority of houses were low to the ground, one and two stories.

  It was darker than Night City, too, but that was just because their lights weren’t as efficient. Almost every house was alight, however, and there was music playing. I looked around the city, driving towards the more affluent parts where I could get started on my mission. It was easier to get access to the Net there as well, and I did, searching for any law firms or business consultancy firms that could get me started. I went to one that was rated well enough for my purposes and wasn’t so expensive that it would bankrupt me.

  I needed to split my money between the cost of hiring a local guide and setting up the bank account after all.

  Thankfully, the firm I was headed to seemed to have a gated parking lot as well where I felt comfortable parking my bike. I sent the security guard there some extra cash, too. There was something about his expression and his clear interest in my bike that told me that it was better safe than sorry. Then, for better measure, I spoke to him in Spanish.

  “You don’t want to try anything, friend,” I said. I could hear that my accent wasn’t the best, but the vocabulary was there. Just… overly formal. not my style. “But I’ll make sure it’s worth your while if I find my bike in one piece. Understood?”

  “Understood,” he said with an emphatic nod. I drove in, parked my bike, and prepared to get my corpo on.

  I sat on a waiting area, some secretaries working behind bulletproof glass opposite to me. I had taken a number and was made to wait even though I was the only person inside.

  Then, after fifteen minutes, I was called to go to an adjacent room numbered 3.

  There inside was a tanned man wearing a corpo suit. “What do you want, son?”

  How did I say this…? “I want to set up a company that… doesn’t really do anything.”

  His eyes widened fractionally. “Ah, a shell corp, eh?” he switched to English. “Yes, that can be done. Twenty-five grand.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “The Net told me to come to you guys so you could basically tell me what not to do.”

  He shrugged. “The Net says a lot of shit, but that’s true. We can handle everything for you right now, no problems. You just have to bring the money and then we can fix it for you: the RFC, the registration with the CCT, bank, everything.”

  “I don’t need that,” I said.

  He frowned. “You want to do it yourself, boy? That’s not an easy road, and without contacts, some of the bureaucrats will reject you right away. I’m telling you—”

  “I’m not worried about being rejected by bureaucrats,” I said. “I have already forged the necessary documentation and I have plans for how I will get tax registration and corp registration. I just need to know if there’s anyone who would cry foul if a new shell corp popped up in the neighborhood.”

  He nodded. “Just a simple consultancy, then. You want advice and the rules of the game.”

  “Exactly.”

  “A thousand an hour,” he said. “Eurodollars, not neopesos. That damn currency should go extinct already, this isn’t the Time of the Red anymore.”

  “Chill, choom, I’m good for it,” I said. I opened up the backpack I had and pulled out a stack of notes, used the Sandevistan to count the right bills so I wouldn’t take so much of his time, and then slid the notes out from the band and gave them to him.

  He immediately started talking. “Right, so for a shell corp that exceeds a million eduardos in revenue a year, heads will start to turn. Heads meaning… the Tijuana cartel,” he conceded. “They’re the defacto government. They’ll want a cut at some point. Ten percent. Over ten million a year, Militech will start to levy a legitimate tax, but luckily that’s just five percent. You will want to pay the cartel tax because they have Netrunners monitoring and watching incoming cash flows and they will know once you start making this money and they will want their hundred thousand. Doesn’t matter if you’re from Night City—” My eyes widened at that and he just gave a knowing smile. “Calm down, it was easy to figure out. I can hear it in your accent is all. Anyway, it doesn’t matter where you live, because if they blow up that shell company, Militech will get involved and you’ll be burned anywhere that Militech exists.”

  Really? They would fucking snitch on me? Bastards.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Any way to lower that tax or something? That’s really insane.”

  “That would be far more involved,” the man said. “It would involve turning a company that does nothing into a company that does… things. Specifically, things on behalf of the cartel. That would help you eliminate the tax entirely at the cost of answering to a higher power. There are also set-ups where you can act in the capacity of a mere partner rather than an underling, and that can get your tax reduced all the way to one percent depending on the scope of your services. For specifics, I recommend you speak to the Cartel directly. They will be able to fill you in on everything you need to know.”

  I wrinkled my eyebrows. That sounded… dubious.

  “I know how it sounds, but the cartel are just another gang like the ones from your city. They can be reasoned with, as long as you approach the organ that’s in charge of money, and not, say, rape and murder. They’re quite amicable fellows actually.” I nodded. In all honestly, the cartel just sounded like another corp, just more overtly criminal. “I cannot stress this enough, get in touch with the cartel, regardless if you want to keep the company as a shell or if you have ambitions of partnering with them. And keep in mind that partnering does not entail only criminal activities.” He handed me a business card. “This is my contact.”

  I eyed it suspiciously. Lorenzo Ladron, and a number. Nothing else. No position in the hierarchy. “How much for that?”

  “Included in the consultancy fee,” he said. I took it. That was kind of him. “If you want, I can take a look at your documentation as well and check for discrepancies. I assume you have already taken care of the route to pushing the documents into the system, but I must ask how you intend to do so, just so I can help you out better.”

  “I have my contacts,” I lied. If I told him I was going to hack my way in, he could dangle that over my head and ask for more money. “Just know that getting in shouldn’t be a problem for me. It’s staying in that matters.” I gave him the documents. It was all bullshit, AI-generated, but proofread by me. That said, I was still shaky on the Legalese. I had fed the algorithm updated law books just in case, but large language models tended to get fritzy just as a matter of course. No getting around how shitty they were.

  The man booted up his laptop and read through the documents. He pressed a button, and then he just hummed. “From a legal perspective, everything seems in order. Almost. A minor issue here, but it doesn’t matter much anyway, this stuff never gets checked. I’ve corrected it so now your documentation is foolproof.”

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to start doubting him. I had already paid the man anyway.

  “Everything is in order,” the man said. “Go to the CCT and get registered. The banks are neutral zone, no special rules there, so you can go and get that sorted right away. A business account requires a fee of ten thousand eurodollars as a first deposit, plus the additional five thousand to motivate the bureaucrat in charge. Cash only. Once the account has been set up, you should be left with five thousand in the account. I recommend you don’t exceed the minimum deposit—those sticky-fingererd bastardos will take half anyway. It’s an unwritten rule: half the initial deposit gets taken, always. After that, full honesty is in effect. They will not dare to klep you on their lives.” I nodded.

  “And how do I know you’re not feeding me shit?” I asked.

  “You don’t,” he said immediately, and with a shrug. “What am I supposed to do about that, convince you? You already paid me, I have nothing else to gain from you.”

  He was right. I’d have to just take this on the chin if I got ripped off. Fuck.

  “Anything else I need to know?” I asked.

  “Keep your head low and be respectful to the people you deal with, boy, but don’t be naive, either. Maintain self-respect or you’ll lose all the money you brought here. Got it?”

  I nodded. I gave him my hand, he shook it.

  And then I was out of there.

  000

  I was at a CHOOH2 station loading up my bike as I considered how the day had gone. I had managed to hack into the CCT, getting the company, Globbal Sollutions Inc—a name riddled with typos so no one would look twice at it— registered. Getting the RFC—the tax identification number—was a little more imposing, but just as easy because taxes were pretty much a joke here. Avoiding tax was something that the consultancy guy didn’t even get into because it was such a simple process. All I had to do was to declare a low income and a high expense ratio for my company, and pay a minimal amount of tax based on the difference. This way, I could avoid paying the full 30% corporate income tax rate that applies to most businesses in Mexico. I also had to make sure that my company’s activities were not subject to any special taxes, such as the value-added tax of 16%, the excise tax on certain goods and services, or the withholding tax on dividends, interest, or royalties. I used a fake invoice generator to create some documents that supported my claims and submitted them online to the Mexican Tax Administration Service. It was a simple and common practice among many small businesses and freelancers in Mexico, and I doubted that anyone would bother to check or audit them.

  The end-result amounted to a 0.1% tax. Negligible, basically. And I could set up a program to pay that amount for me as well.

  The bankers were scummier and more challenging to deal with, but they shut up very quickly once they saw my money. I paid an extra five thousand to speed the process up and getting the company up and running.

  It had been three hours by the end of it, most of that time being spent on the bank, but I was now the proud owner of a shell corp.

  I finished loading up on the gas and watched as three skimpily clad ladies walked up to me, one of them clearly drunk. They spoke Spanish to me and were clearly interested in the bike. I had to gently turn down their offers to take me to a party, and once I was done fueling my bike, I paid and took off, intent on going back to Night City.

  Then I remembered: I have family here, don’t I? I couldn’t remember their faces, but I knew their names from what mom had told me. She had still been in contact with her mom, calling home weekly.

  She had missed the last two weeks now. Might as well not keep the old lady waiting with the bad news.

  I recalled that she was based in San Antonio de los Buenos, but that wasn’t much to go by. I wracked my brain for more clues—I didn’t wanna drive all the way back to Night City and then back here to get to the bottom of this little mystery. What I remembered plus what I could glean from the Net should be enough.

  She worked as an occultist, didn’t she? Didn’t she have this shop, too? Something about rubies, and spirits…

  I searched the Net for a variety of different wordings until I arrived at one:

  La Rubí Casa de los Espíritus. A picture popped up on the net, of a smiling old lady with two ruby red implants on her cheekbone, like mom’s.

  Abuela Donna Martinez.