Links: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/a-man-with-a-heart-what-a-damn-gonk-a-cyberpunk-2077-oc.533086/
Chapter 1: Opportunity
"It is with some displeasure that I must tell you to cease and desist...."
The rest of the words on the email seemed a blur. Cease and Desist?! I checked the header of the email, and sure enough, there it was, the Biotechnica logo, shown proud and true at the top. I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose once again, taking a moment to rest my eyes away from the harsh glow of a screen. Like all the others, I filed it in the 'potential trouble' file of my inbox and attempted to move on with my life. Like all the others, it seemed more oriented at nuisance value than anything else. I had them stymied, and they knew it. My tech wasn't exactly innovative, rather an application of an already accepted but long ignored concept, and best of all, it was public. Bad for Biotechnica, and for all the corpos in general. Because you can copy my tech, but now that the cat's out of the proverbial bag, you can't supress it, no matter how hard you try to.
And wasn't that just a bitch? All that profit, all those eddies, just down the drain. And best of all, I wasn't one of them, a corpo, a man of wealth. Oh no, I was a street urchin with some common sense and a basic knowledge of economics, a shockingly rare thing in the future, I had found. And what a disappointing future it was. Oh sure, it looked the part, with the mega-towers, and the neon-drenched streets, and all the fancy tech, but that's all it was, looks. Everything else seemed worse, the people dumber, shorter lived, more prone to violence, less ambitious. Hell, illiteracy, of all things, was now becoming a common thing again. After all, who needs to read when you can just use a braindance to learn things? Not like schools are important, huh?
Fucking morons.
And that wasn't the only thing either. Social mobility, in spite of all the new tech, seemed to be more depressingly stagnant than ever. Corporate consolidation, a government withdrawal from providing even necessary services and a general attitude of corruption seemed to be holding people down. Even worse, the lower classes, of which I am a former member in this world, are complicit in their own depression. Parents who refuse their children to go to school, adults preferring quick and easy gang money over honest work and building wealth. I mean, it's not like the tools have disappeared, the stock market is still here, and seemingly more accessible than ever. Businesses are stupidly easy to open, even if they are insanely hard to get off the ground, and opportunity seems abound, although unlike most, I actually bothered to look for it. Honestly, sometimes, the sedentary laziness of people in this world shocks me. I mean people always talk about how they want to 'make it', but will anyone get off of their ass and try? No, that would be too obvious, let's sell drugs and shoot each other instead!
And so, what does a man from an entirely different timeline and from fifty years in the past try to do? Fix it, of course.
Turns out, they're not the only morons in town. I've been here for more than five years at this point, and by all accounts, my rise has been meteoric. And so, why am I spending my Saturday night staring at this fucking screen in this dingy fucking office rather than getting wasted at Afterlife like seemingly my entire staff has chosen to do?
Because in spite of all my financial success, when I look out the window, nothing seems to have changed. The streets are still grimy, dirty and dangerous, and the people walking them, even more so. Shootings are a common sight, as are Cyberpsychos, gangs, rapists, murderers and paedophiles. Oh sure, here, high above it all, more than thirty floors up, everything is clean and the people are nice, minding their manners, well dressed, punctual and motivated. But I still remember those days from five years ago, of sleeping on the streets, of running from fight to fight, barely scratching out a sense of stability only to have it promptly snatched away by some up-jumped Maelstrom, Animal or 6th Street thug with a nine millimetre and far too many substances in his system.
So, in such dire straits, how did I manage to rise so high? Like I said, its economics. Like most people, one of the first things I noticed was the insane food prices in comparison to the average wage. Food, alone, would east up something like 30% of my earnings every month. 30 fucking percent! It took a larger share of my income then the fucking rent! And that was also obscene! It seemed the same for everything I looked at, healthcare, cars, computers, toys, everything. Prices were high, higher and becoming even more so by the day.
Now, for a normal person, this would be crippling. The only thing you would see would be the bills, and that's where your dreams would go to die. But those high prices signalled something else as well: opportunity.
You see, to be able to understand the cause behind these depressingly exploitative prices, you have to understand something about this world. Mega-corps don't just happen, it requires a government to turn a blind eye for decades, to ignore blatantly predatory behaviour for decades. What's more, it requires a government to not only neglect it, but to actively incentivise that sort of behaviour from those corporations. The result is that they can try and force each other out of business in unscrupulous ways, gain market share, and then fix prices for themselves. What's more, when governments stop giving a shit, like they seem to have in this world, then that forceful expulsion becomes outright espionage. People killing each other over a new type of chip, or over a clause in a contract. And once the cat got out of the bag, the violence escalated, quickly. Infiltration soon morphed into a cold war between rival corporations, and soon enough, outright war. The politicians, under the influence of the CIA, FBI and DEA and their batshit plans were more than happy to ignore the problem whilst lining their pockets from the numerous 'donations' going their way.
So much for a free market. So much for democracy.
Of course, all of this is merely window dressing for the real story. You see, once corporate consolidation and espionage really began heating up, it quickly spilled out into all of the sectors. Including the food sector....
The big ag companies at the time, their battle for dominance got really heated. To the point where they began to infect each others harvests with biological weapons to kill their crops and reduce their competitors profits, making them softer targets for a potential acquisition. The government, being in their pockets, naturally opted to give the companies subsidies to help them 'increase production' instead of cracking down and actually fixing the problem. Incidentally, the politicians who passed that particular law all retired to generous fortunes and executive positions at these firms.
Never mind the effect this had on the food supply. Never mind the famines, nor the dead, emaciated corpses strewn about the globe. The boardroom is all that matters.
I swear, sometimes I feel like punching myself to check if I'm not in a nightmare. The stupidity of these people.
Anyway, once all the mess had died down, only a handful of corps were left, and they realised that the high prices their war created had enabled them to acquire frankly insane profits. So instead of stopping the war like sensible, normal people, they came to an agreement to keep the pretence of war going, as a justification for retaining those high prices. In Night City, there is only one of those corporations in operation: Biotechnica.
And that's where I come in.
You see, Biotechnica has enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the provision of food in the city. All ingredients used in all meals enjoyed by anyone other than the ultra-wealthy come from one of their facilities. Kibble, All-foods, they own the lot. Hell, the only reason they aren't the virtual Kings of the city is because both Arasaka and Militech have interests here, and nobody, not even me, is stupid enough to butt heads with those heavily armed juggernauts.
Well, they held a virtual monopoly, until recently, that is. You see, nobody bothered to compete with them, fearing Biotechnica's particularly brutal brand of espionage would be turned on them instead. Any new agricultural tech they made would be stolen, any new crops poisoned and the owners of those crops quickly experiencing unfortunate 'accidents'.
And yet, once again, the past came to be my saviour in this endeavour. Open-Sourcing, a term near and dear to my heart in my old world in my old-life as a programmer, enabled me to bypass any attempts at IP theft. No point trying to steal something that's publicly available, is there? My own lack of implants helped me bypass many of the attempts on my life, after all, you can't hack good old skin and bones, now can you?
Speaking of which, how stupid are implants anyway? I mean, shoving a piece of hackable, unreliable tech in your body for a minor upgrade?
Anyway, by a combination of strangeness on my part making me unpredictable and sheer luck, I survived long enough to get my business off the ground. Best of all, there's not much they can do about it, at least for now. Because even though my innovations are simple, they would be too costly for Biotechnica to implement at scale, whereas I have built my company around them, putting me at a sizeable advantage. What's more, my innovation shields me from the worst of the biological attacks on my crops as well.
So, what is this mythical innovation, you ask? It's indoor farming.
More specifically, it's climate controlled, sealed indoor farms in large, formerly abandoned, warehouses outside the city. Dirt cheap to acquire and retrofit, cause its in the middle of the desert and nobody lives there, and though farm labour, machinery and seeds were harder to acquire for security reasons, they were worth it in the end. Now, this is not in any way unique. In my old world, they were relatively common, and widely thought to be the next major evolution the green revolution. In this new world, its primarily used to grow crops on spacecraft or specifically to grow drug crops by gangs. Seemingly, nobody thought to grow vegetables and fruits with it instead.
Like I said, fucking morons.
The genius of this, is that no matter what happens now, the damage can't be undone. My tech is public, so even if they kill me, a thousand new upstarts with a bank loan and some dreams will come in to take my place with their own companies. They can't compete with me properly, because it means slashing their prices to a fifth of their current levels, and losing a huge chunk of their profits. And whilst they are trying, they seem to be struggling to poison my crops.
Thank you, mechanical locks, air filtering and solar panels!
All of this means that for the first time in more than thirty years, the residents of Night City have access to fresh, clean, cheap and unprocessed food.
And they fucking love it.
In the time I have been in business, I have not once failed to completely sell the entirety of a harvest before the next one is ready. When I set up the company, I don't think I imagined the sheer extent of the problem. I mean, before I came along, foods that you or I might consider pedestrian, like real lettuce, were considered a luxury. Because of me, families could now afford to feed themselves properly for the first time without having to choose between what else to sacrifice to pay for it, like fuel or shelter. One warehouse rapidly became two, and then three, and then thirty as the teeming masses got their first taste of properly cheap and most importantly good food in decades. The start-up loan I took out, usually meant to be paid back over twenty years, was paid back in two, and gradually, as I expanded, my prices fell further and further. To many, I am their saviour, because this small improvement in their lives has changed everything. I'm not exaggerating either, though I desperately wish I were. It is estimated that the lower prices and additional employment generated by my company have helped lift more than a hundred-thousand people in the city above the poverty line. Needless to say, I have become ridiculously popular as a result.
There's just one problem. The government. You see, the city authority, under the direction of the esteemed Mayor Lucius Rhyne, has decided to fine me for a string of nuisance violations, never mind the nuisance posed by more aggressive rivals. This pressure is combined with an increasingly aggressive attitude taken by a corrupt NCPD towards my company and its operations, such that raids and searches have almost become commonplace in our offices. They haven't killed anyone, yet, but it's only a matter of time. All of this is compounded by Biotechnica's attempts to patent the idea of indoor farming, which if they did would enable them to legally supress their burgeoning competition, and with the amount of money flowing the way of the courts, it's even possible they may win. Hence, the cease and desist letter.
But none of that matters right now, because I just spotted my next big opportunity scrolling on the bottom of the silent TV in the corner of my office.
Mayor Lucius Rhyne was just killed. An election will be held to determine who will replace him.
Looks like that popularity will be coming in handy.
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So, the first chapter is complete, and the scene for conflict is set. Will our protagonist thrive, or will he succumb to the cesspit of the city?
I do not in anyway own Cyberpunk or any related properties, only my own character.
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Hope you enjoyed it!