Chapter Text
In all of his years as a ripperdoc, and especially since he'd moved his practice from Tokyo up to the Moon, Dr. Kipling Nakashima had never been this nervous. Typically, he'd associated his under-the-table Arasaka contract with easy jobs: some spy's implants go gonked, the tram runs over a corpo's arm, that sort of thing. The kinds of jobs where the patient was just in and out within a few minutes, and he could go back to giving Tycho's corpos whatever random aesthetic chrome they want to pay for. Cat ears or technicolor skin or what have you. The corpos kept the clinic open; the Arasaka contract kept himrich.
This, however, was something different. Adam Smasher himself was leaned back in the chair, seemingly asleep (not that it was easy to tell with FBCs). He'd come in damned near torn to pieces; whatever synthskin layer was over this body had been utterly annihilated, there were large dents and scuffs all over the titanium endoskeleton, each and every limb joint was damaged beyond what simple lubrication could help with.
"Mr. Smasher?" Dr. Nakashima asked, unsure if he'd get a response.
"Just Smasher, like I told you," Smasher said.
"Oh. You're up. What the hell happened to you?" Dr. Nakashima asked, in audible bafflement.
"Got in a big clusterf*ck trying to protect Michiko Arasaka at the Modern," Smasher said, curtly. "Two different groups hit the place. I took one out, the other flatlined her." The best kinds of lies, Smasher thought, were the ones that weren't reallylies- he just chose to leave out information and then make it clear he was done talking. Dr. Nakashima paused, taking this in.
"Michiko? Saburo's granddaughter?" Dr. Nakashima asked. "She's gone?" Smasher sighed in annoyance.
"Well, I wasn't f*ckin' talking about the old one," he grumbled. "Yeah, she's zeroed." He was being oddly casual about this, Dr. Nakashima thought.
"Does... Saburo know yet?" the doctor asked.
"f*cked if I know," Smasher snapped. "What, you think I'm the f*ckin' news? Do your job." A chill ran down Dr. Nakashima's spine, and the hair on his forearms stood on end.
"Smasher, that's... not gonna be quick," Dr. Nakashima said. "Your synthskin isn't really a patch-together job, you need a whole new layer grafted on. And this body's... I don't know, techies on Earth could probably repair it, but it's damn well beyondmy skill set. Some of this, you're gonna have to wait on, and some of it, I just flat-out can't help you with."
"How long's the skin gonna take?" Smasher asked, almost growling at the ripperdoc. His eyes darted to meet Dr. Nakashima's, and the ripperdoc could tell that if the full-borg didn't like his answer, he was going to have avery bad next few moments.
"Tuning a full sheet of ExoDerm to you, large size, is gonna take about four-five hours," Dr. Nakashima said. He prayed silently that this would be an acceptable answer and that he wasn't about to be torn in half by a very angry merc. Smasher sighed.
"That's fine," he said. "Long as I'm outta here today. You got TV in here?" His eyes darted around, looking to see if there was one he hadn't noticed. The ripperdoc spun the chair around, pointing him at a rather large flat-panel, and turned it on.
"Any particular channel you want it on?" Dr. Nakashima asked. It was currently showing a news broadcast about the events that had taken place at the Moonscape Modern. Smasher studied it briefly; Michiko was still noted as unaccounted for and missing, which meant they hadn't found her body yet. All the better for him. The longer it took, the easier it'd be to bullsh*t his way out of it.
He was starting to think hereally hadn't thought this through very well, but that wasn't an uncommon experience for Adam Smasher. If anything, it was his default mode. He wasn't someone who generallythought before committing violence, and generally, it tended to work out for him pretty well. Such were the benefits of metal over meat: it means you don't have to deal with such things asconsequences andremorse andhaving to properly plan sh*t before you do it.All the things his patsies had to worry about.
"You got the channel that shows old football games?" Smasher asked.
"Euro or American?" Dr. Nakashima asked, flipping through channels.
"I sound f*ckin' British to you, gonk-brain?" Smasher grunted, as the TV eventually settled on the 1990 season game between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The two were tied; Albert Bentley had gone for a short run for Indianapolis, putting them up seven, but Hart Lee Dykes, Jr. had thrown an impressive long pass to make up the points for the Patriots. The game was in deadlock, in the third quarter, and New England was setting up for a field goal. Something about the situation seemed vaguely appropriate to him.
2004
I shouldn't still be alive, Adam Lichtenberg thought to himself. He was pretty sure he was in a hospital bed of some kind- he couldn't see, the heat of the explosion had burned out his eyes, but it felt soft under him, and he could faintly hear beeping through his shattered eardrums. The bed was the only thing he could feel that wasn't simply agony. He couldn't move- he wasn't sure if he still had anythingto move.
The bed rocked slightly under him- someone pressing a button for him- and the agony dulled with it. Painkillers. He knew howthis felt, though he'd never needed them quite this badly before. Usually, he did this for fun.
"Need you somewhat lucid," a man's voice said. Every word, every vibration of sound, made the pain throb in his ears, but the drugs dulled it as they took effect.
Adam could hear the man rummaging through papers. Some sort of file.
"You've made quite a little name for yourself, Adam," the man said. He sounded corpo. Rich. All the things that usually meant "stupid target" in Adam's mind. "Dishonorably discharged from the Army, spent two years in Leavenworth for unauthorized sale of military weapons. Soon as you got out, you came back to NYC and started ripping sh*t all over the city, robbing people,raping people, killing anyone who looks at you funny. And here you are, a pile of ground sausage on a hospital bed. Bet your parents are proud," the man said.
This motherf*cker just here to lecture me?Adam thought to himself. He wanted to strangle the man for mentioning his parents, but the lack of functional arms made that a challenge. He settled for grunting; his vocal cords had been seriously burned, so he couldn't form proper words, but he could at least get a caveman-like grunt out.
"It speaks," the man said. "Good. I'm a ripper, and I've been sent here to help you reach your full potential. You can either have steady work, of the kind I know you like, and a shiny new full-body conversion that gets you back up and running, better than ever... or I can just turn your life support off right now, and your story ends here. Grunt at me again if you want to live, buddy."
Adam grunted again.
2005
Servos whirred in Adam's body as he walked, his feet leaving indentations in the concrete of the testing facility and destroying a three-pronged logo he didn't recognize. It wasn't pretty, or elegant, but it worked. The corporate ripperdoc let out a cheer of excitement; it was the first time he'd ever done work quite this extensive on someone, and he had reason to be proud of himself.
"Basic mobility seems all good," the ripperdoc said. "You're definitely not bedridden anymore. Now, run the obstacle course and let's see how you're doing on fine motor and advanced mobility." Adam broke into a run, much faster than it looked like he should reasonably be, cracking the concrete with a loud thud every time his feet hit it. He climbed up a titanium ladder deftly, then across a set of monkey bars, then down a faux rock wall, before doing a mid-air backflip off a ramp over a chest-high wall.
"That good?" Adam asked, in the voice of Elvis Presley. The ripperdoc hadn't understoodwhy Adam had wanted the voice of Elvis Presley over his original one, exactly, but he was willing to oblige.
"f*cking fantastic," the ripperdoc said, with a grin on his face. "You ready for armament testing?"
Adam grunted affirmatively, and the ripperdoc led him to a makeshift shooting range: one section was taken up by man-shaped paper targets, another by metal discs, and a third and final one contained a decommissioned, beaten-up Militech MT-4.
"Anti-personnel, precision targeting, and anti-materiel," the ripperdoc explained. Before the ripperdoc could go any further, Adam pointed his fist at the paper targets, and a chaingun emerged from his forearm, a small support Y-beam unfolding to hold it in place; his arm rattled as the chaingun spun up and sprayed 25mm rounds at the paper targets, turning them into empty, bent metal frames surrounded by shreds of paper. He looked at the metal targets, turning his arm towards them, and briefly paused, letting his auto-targeting software lock onto the discs; servos in the chaingun's support arm adjusted its aim, and without even moving his arm, he put a single round through each one, creating massive clean holes in them. Finally, for the tank, the travel-on-wire rocket pod on his shoulder flipped up, letting loose a salvo of three as the ripperdoc ducked for cover; when the dust cleared, the decommissioned materiel was no longer recognizable as anything but a husk of charred metal.
"f*ckin' nova," Adam said.
"You said it," the doc said, picking himself up and patting the dust off his legs. "Labcoats really outdid themselves on your kit. Wanna see how your new body does withbeer?"
Adam smiled. He was starting to like this ripper.
"Adam Smasher," the ripper said, a proud look on his face as he slammed his mug of Genesee Cream Ale down on the bar. Adam looked at him blankly.
"Huh?" Adam grunted, not following.
"Way f*ckin' better name for you," the ripper said. "C'mon, AdamLichtenberg?No offense, that sounds like a lawyer, not a one-point-one-two ton walking tank. You need a better merc name. Adam Smasher. Like 'atom smasher,' you know?"
"People usually just call me Adam," the man said, bemused by the idea as he sipped his own beer. "Not in the habit of telling people my full name." Drinking was proving to be one of the benefits of his new body; Adam had always loved cheap booze, but when he'd been all meat, he was somewhat of a lightweight. A forty-ounce was all it really took to put him under. In this new body, he was four down, and more lucid than his ripperdoc could have ever hoped to be.
"Hey, even better," the doc said, pointing at Adam as he tilted slightly on the barstool. "Every merc needs a good alias, right? I mean, c'mon, look at that Blackhand sum-bitch the other side has. You really think he came out his momma with the last name Blackhand?"
Adam thought about it, scratching his chin with a massive metallic finger reflexively. He was starting to feel comfortable in this.Secure. Something told him that, if he took a rocket propelled grenade likethis, it wouldn't even scratch him. For all intents and purposes, he was immortal; invincible; consequence-free. Something about this troubled him, though.
"You said something about theother side?" Adam asked. "f*ck's that all about?" The ripperdoc looked at him quizzically.
"Yeah, Militech," he said. "What, you thought I was just a charity ripperdoc? All your sh*t's Arasaka tech, bud. Courtesy of the Emperor himself." Adam thought about this for a moment. He wasn't a fan of the corporations, exactly. Adam Lichtenberg was a born gangoon, a self-interested cyberpunk; his only real interests were cash, violence and partying, and the more he could mix the three together, the better. Corporations meantstructure, meantorder. Structure and order meant Adam didn't get to have his fun, and thus were his natural enemies.
The merc decided he could use a change. Treating order and structure as his enemy had caused him to end up on a hospital bed, nothing but an upper torso and mostly-destroyed head kept alive by life support machines. Giving order and structure a chance, so far, had gotten himout of that. Adam Lichtenberg was dead, blown to pieces by a rocket-propelled grenade, and Adam Smasher,the thing they'd made out of what was left over, was willing to bend the knee so long as he got something good out of it.He took a large gulp of his beer and slammed the mug down on the bar, spiderwebbing the bottom of the glass and denting the bar.
"Think I kinda like that name," he said. "Adam Smasher. Got a badass ring to it." The ripperdoc laughed.
2021
Adam Smasher rarely got a chance to rest, ever since he'd taken Arasaka's offer, and so, this was immediately odd. Usually, his assignments were "go to a location and kill everything that isn't ours." This was an outlier.
His briefing this time had been relatively simple and quiet. Go to Michiko's eighteenth birthday party (the young one, not the old one, he'd confirmed), keep it safe, keepher safe. She had her own bodyguard, Kenichi Zaburo (they'd met before, to mixed results), but this was too high-profile for just him to handle, and so Smasher stood there, in his Gemini body sculpted to look like a muscular Elvis Presley, appearing absolutely ridiculous next to a three-tier cake with eighteen candles in the top and two of the many lavish ice sculptures the Emperor had ordered for his granddaughter. He felt somewhat like a polar bear in the Texas hill country, and the lack of any actual action only served to make things worse.
"Hey, you doing okay?" a young girl's voice rang out behind him.
"Could use a beer," Smasher said, without turning around. "Or a joint." The girl laughed warmly- agenuine laugh. Smasher turned around and nearly jumped out of his synthetic skin in shock, realizing that he had just made this quip to Michiko Arasaka herself.
"Honestly, choom? Same," she said. "I hate it whenojiisan does all this over-the-top sh*t for me. Don't get me wrong, it all looks preem, but... I kinda feel like a zoo animal, you know? Feels like this is all more for him than me."
Adam had been somewhat afraid of "the princess," as she'd been jokingly referred to by the lower-level employees. Every indication he had gotten was that he had to beextraordinarilydelicate around her- not by his standards, but bynormal standards, and that this sort of comment could have gotten him in several hundred worlds of sh*t. The reality, however, was that this wasn't an attempt to protect her fromexternal threats- it was Saburo being deeply paranoid about his rebellious granddaughter. His rebellious granddaughter who, right now, was opening up to Adam and had just very strongly hinted to him that she wanted to get the hell out and go get intoxicated.
Gears turned in his brain briefly, and he concocted a plan, to the extent he was capable of much of one. He was going to take Michiko Arasaka out for a night on the town here in Night City, and if any corpo rats had anything to say about it, he'd just tell them he accompanied her for her safety. He'd get to have some proper fun tonight- maybe even some violent fun, given she'd be a moth lamp for muggers and boostergangs-and look good to the Emperor, and on top of that, something told him that giving her a decent birthday instead ofthis clusterf*ck qualified as a good deed. Maybe he'd even get laid. The way you'resupposed to, even.
"You know a back way out of this place?" Adam asked, and Michiko grinned in response, grabbing his hand and leading him, gently but quickly, away from the commotion.
2023
"Going somewhere?" Smasher yelled out, around the corner from the intruders. Something about it didn't sound quite as cool coming out of his mouth as it did in his head; he resolved to work on his one-liners when he was out of this. Another Arasaka trooper called out for cover, and covering fire from assault rifles and light machine guns sprayed the hallway, pinning the opposing party down and taking out three of their SpecOps. All that was left was the edgerunners of note. The fun part of the fight.
Rogue Amendiares popped off a burst from an assault rifle, followed by two grenades; Smasher simply ignored them as he rounded the corner and lumbered forwards. His Samson body could take it. Their full-borg, sleeker and thinner than Smasher, almost ninja-like- Smasher had seen him before, but didn't know his name offhand- fired off a shotgun, taking out two of the Arasaka security, in turn. Smasher switched his vision to thermal and scanned the area- one more figure, crouching behind a desk, reloading his Malorian Arms revolver. Silverhand. He finished the motion and jumped out, brandishing his puny weapon directly at Smasher. Against meat, it was a formidable little gun; against Smasher's metal, he may as well have been shooting spitballs.
"Hey, steelhead! Let's rock and roll!" the rockerboy shouted, unloading a burst at Smasher that bounced off him harmlessly. Smasher hesitated slightly.
Steelhead?he thought to himself.Christ, he's not any better than I am at it. He lifted his arm, unfolded the auto-shotgun he'd gotten to replace one of the chainguns, and let out a burst from it, tearing Johnny Silverhand in half as he spun and fell. He paused for a moment; it was too easy. It should not have been this easy. A legendary mercenary, and all it had taken to put him down was one halfway-decent shot to center mass. The rockerboy's upper half twitched slightly, and the Malorian was still smoking; Smasher made a mental note to take the gun as a memento, at least, before the cleaners could get to it and incinerate it. Even if it wasn't much good against him, Eran Malour's craftsmanship was worth preserving.
Smasher's moment of reflection was all it took for the other full borg- Shaitan, Smasher remembered his name finally- to latch onto his back, in what Smasher could only think of as a combat piggy-back ride. The larger borg backed into the wall, hoping to slam Shaitan into it and throw him off, but the smaller borg held on in a desperate grip even as his right arm splintered into metal and wire on impact.
"Offa me, you... f*ck! f*ck are you even...!?" Smasher grunted.
"Get out of here! I've got him!" Shaitan called out to his comrades, his voice hollow and modulated. Smasher cursed his luck that they weren't all meat, as the others ran away in fear. He gripped for Shaitan's arm, leveraged his weight, and slammed the smaller borg down on the floor of the lab, cracking the tile. No one-liner this time; Smasher was too annoyed for that. He pressed his foot down into the borg's torso, grabbed both the intact left arm and the shattered right, and wrenched upwards as hard as he could, tearing them out of the sockets and throwing them to the side.
An idea occurred to him, and he took his foot off, rolling the smaller borg over.
"What are you-" Shaitan asked, fear in his voice, as Smasher reached down and grabbed the biopod visible in the back of Shaitan's neck. The thing that contained everything stillhuman about him.
"Got a little plan for you," Smasher said, as he ripped the biopod out, shutting down the mangled FBC fully, and scanned the area with thermal vision. Another, potentially more interesting, team was moving to the roof, with the last notable figure still unaccounted for among their ranks. Morgan Blackhand. They were already about to reach their AV and escape. He quickly donned a DaiOni exoskeleton, made his way for the stairs, and began ascending, holding the biopod in his hand.
"Oh, Morgan!" Smasher called out, mockingly as he reached the top.
"What the-?" Morgan called out from the open door of the AV, before doing a combat roll out, heavy assault rifle at hand. Adam waved a jaunty, happy hello, with the hand that was gripping Shaitan's biopod, shaking it around like a dog's rag-toy.
"Oh, I'm sorry! You probably don't recognize him from this angle, but this is your friend Shaitan... or, you know, what'sleftof him," Adam said. "I'm afraid Silverhand is in even worse shape. At least the borg's still alive in here; I'd say he's got about ten minutes before the battery dies. You wanna get him?" Adam paused. "Then you're gonna have to stop ducking me, you son of a bitch, and fight."
Morgan turned to the AV. For a moment, Smasher almost thought he was going to run, yet again. Smasher had been trying to test Morgan Blackhand in combat for, at this point, several years; each and every time, the mercenary had run like Hell the moment he'd seen hide or hair of Smasher.
"Get the hell out of here! Now!" the mercenary barked.
"Chief, we ain't leaving ya here!" the pilot yelled back, over the roar of the engines.
"You sure as hell are! Spider and the others are the priority! Go!" Morgan called out. The AV took off, and Morgan turned to face his opponent. "All right, pipsqueak. Time to see if metal really is better than meat." He co*cked his heavy assault rifle- a weapon that could actually dent Smasher slightly. He'd actuallyprepared.
"Let's dance," Smasher said, and the bullets rang out. The fight began in a stalemate, and stayed there for what felt like eternity, as the two dodged around each other's fire, Smasher's speedware and Blackhand's raw skill competing to see who would win out. Shaitan's biopod fell over the edge of the roof as Smasher dodged a shot meant for his right shoulder; no matter. The two remained locked in equal combat.
Then, the bomb went off, thundering through the concrete and metal of the tower. The roof shuddered, providing its only warning of impending collapse, and Smasher threw himself at Morgan full-force, grabbing him and wrapping his arms around the solo legend.
"What the hell are you doing!?" Morgan asked, alarmed, as Smasher kept him in a bear hug.
"Keeping you alive so we can finish thisproper sometime, you gonk," Smasher said, as flames ripped through the roof that would have incinerated Morgan instantly, but bounced harmlessly off the full-borg's DaiOni exoskeleton. "Not letting you go out like a bitch to a f*ckin' nuke in the middle of the fight."
The roof collapsed, and Smasher and Blackhand fell, the former shifting his weight so that he'd take the brunt of the fall. Metal could be repaired; Smasher would survive this easily. Meat could not. The impact from hundreds of feet up knocked his systems offline, severing the connection between his own biopod and the body he occupied.
When he came to, in an Arasaka ripperdoc's chair, he learned that Blackhand was the one person of note unaccounted for- neither confirmed dead nor seen alive since. It was one of the very few times in Adam Smasher's life that he genuinely smiled.
2026
Adam sat on the couch in Michiko Arasaka's luxury apartment, wearing his Gemini body. The muscular Elvis one, which had initially been for stealth operations, but had, in the years since, become mostly used for her. The one thing about his life that felt warm, pleasant,human.The one thing in his life that didn't involve mutilation or murder or destruction. The outlier.
They'd chosen to get takeout tonight. Usually, Adam cooked for Michiko when they'd have date nights at her place. He wasn't a great cook, he couldn't exactly open up a restaurant or anything (and the war had only made things worse on that front with the prices of anything fresh), but it always made her happy when he'd try to make something for her, even if it came out imperfect. This time, however, it was somewhat sad-looking styrofoam boxes from a street jambalaya vendor.
The television was talking about him.Again. Yet another random day of the week for him during the war that they'd decided was some sort ofuncovered war crime that neededjustice andreconciliation.This time, a village five clicks west of Kosovo where Militech had set up a forward operating base. Smasher had been tasked with dealing with it, and so he'd just rained travel-on-wire missiles on everything that walked until the area went quiet. At least it was better than the news footage of him clearing out refugee tunnels out of Tegucigalpa with a flamethrower, or the Militech-run orphanage in Nha Trang he'd been tasked with making an example of; Michiko had really particularly disliked seeing those.
It confused him that she was havingissues with this. She was an edgerunner. She was an Arasaka. She knew what she was born into, and not only that, she'd chosen the actively more violent expression of it instead of just putting on a suit and resting on her corpo laurels, like everyone else with the last name. And yet, she was looking at him with fear in her eyes, without even touching her food. Like he was a monster, not a man. Like he was pure evil, created in a lab and sitting next to her in her apartment.
"Adam, I can't do this," she finally said. "I'm sorry. I don't think we should see each other anymore." The words stabbed him in the heart. He looked at the television, at the footage of what he had done for Arasaka. What he had enjoyed doing for Arasaka. He looked at the new nickname they were using for him on the chyron- the Devil of Arasaka. He stood up, metal joints creaking slightly.
"I understand," he said, and walked out the door, into the plush hallway, feet thudding on the carpeted floor with every step. The remaining humanity in him hurt, worse than it ever had, worse than the rocket propelled grenade even had. The words out of his mouth were truthful, though; he understood perfectly. His duty, his fundamental nature, conflicted with any love he felt for Michiko or vice-versa. He could not be both Arasaka's Adam Smasher and Michiko's Adam Lichtenberg, and he had no choice in which one to give preference to.
Adam awoke to Dr. Nakashima nudging him slightly. The football game on the television had changed to the 1984 Cleveland Browns losing to the New Orleans Saints; Hokie Gajan had just taken a 2-yard pass from Richard Todd for the latter team's first touchdown. He groaned.
"Your skin's ready," the ripperdoc said. "You sleep alright?"
"Yeah," Adam grunted. "Get that sh*t on me already so I blend in again. Still got work to do up here."
"Aye-aye, captain," Dr. Nakashima said, with a mock salute, as he prepared his tools to apply the new layer of synthskin to Smasher and set the Devil of Arasaka loose once again. The ripperdoc had eased up; it's somewhat difficult to be intimidated by someone who's snoring in a chair watching ancient football games, and Smasher took note of this.
The full-borg briefly debated in his head. On the one hand, Dr. Nakashima was doing his job as well as he could reasonably be expected to, and he had football on. On theother hand, it was starting to become clear to him that he needed to actively keep his edge up, and the ripperdoc hadn't beenthat useful. He'd just been able to give Smashernew skin.That wasn't enough to mean Smasher could slip in front of him and leave him around to talk about it. He wasn't in, say, Grayson's league.
When Smasher left the clinic an hour and a half later, clad in a fresh new layer of synthskin, its interior looked as if a tornado had ripped through it, and Dr. Nakashima was dead. The ripperdoc had been gutted roughly, as if using a blunt instrument or someone's bare hands, and pinned to the wall with the scalpels from his kit. Smasher decided that, when he got back to the hotel, he'd take a nice, hot shower to clean the blood off.
