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Writer's pictureLavender Milk & Honey

Maximum Mike - The Voice of Night City (2/6)



Transcripts


Each post will contain 3 stories from Maximum Mike (voiced by Mike Pondsmith)

Is there some hidden truth into them? Some subtle metaphors? It’s your call.


 

The truth behind the Arasaka’s relic


- Newsflash, people!

- You’ve heard about this ‘Relic’ that Arasaka teasing to the rich and famous?

- It’s all over the screamsheets.

- Copy your personality engram into a chip and your loved ones don’t have to say « goodbye » when you finally die.

- Carry your dear sweet grandma around on a chip, ask her for advice or a pick-me-up whenever you need it.

- Eternal life of a sort.

- Of course, this is only on offer to the richest and most powerful people.

- Immortality isn’t for squeebs like you and I, the common man.

- But is there more to it than that?

- We know that Arasaka’s been working on mind emulation technology for half a century now.

- Most notably with the infamous Soulkiller.

- You’ve probably heard of it.

- It’s a Net-Weapon capable of copying your mind to a secure server and leaving your body an empty vessel.

- And what do they do to the copies?

- Interrogate them, do some experimentation, a little torture…

- You know, the good stuff.

- So you, a billionaire executive, decide to get yourself copied…

- …so your precious offspring never have to be without your sage wisdom.

- Or so you can give your annuel speech at the company Christmas party.

- I mean, what would the world do without you?

- And Arasaka gladly makes a copy of your brain, puts it on a chip and hands it over.

- But not before making a copy for themselves.

- And that copy goes straight to digital interrogations…

- …where they pull your psyche apart, bit by bit, until they’ve squeezed every last memory out of you.

- Every compromising situation, every crime, every heartache.

- Your secret fears and desires.

- And now you belong to them, literally.

- Yeah, someone in Arasaka’s marketing division should get a raise for this one.

- They’ve taken the most feared weapon in Arasaka’s arsenal and turned it into a luxury item!

- That’s pretty impressive when you think about it.

- And remember, operators are standing by.


 

« Dead city » of Busan, Korea


- Hey, people!

- Got something to kick around here.

- You remember Busan, Korea?

- Maybe you do, it was in the news, because in 2022 it was a city of four million people…

- …and the site of one of the nastiest fights of the 4th Corporate War.

- Now, just a year later it was a city of four million ghosts, entire population having been exposed and killed off…

- …by some unknown disease, which was incredibly rapid and lethal.

- Whatever it was, the Koreans did contain it, and even today the blockade’s maintained on that dead city.

- Or is it?

- I don’t mean the quarantine, that’s real enough, ask anyone who’s tried to sneak in.

- No, I mean the city.

- Is it really dead?

- It’s hard to get satellite footage of the place, but a friend of mine in a interesting place dropped me some images, and…

- …let me tell you, folks, something is going on.

- In December last year, fire broke out in Dongnae District.

- Now, that’s not unusual.

- Maybe a lightening strike, old gas line.

- What’s strange is that in those satellite images from February this year, that damage appears to be repaired.

- Now, the Koreans who maintain the blockade of the city have responded to rumors in the past.

- They said the city was already one of the most automated in the world before the war turned it into collateral damage.

- After all the people died, the machines just kept working.

- That even made sense at the time.

- Come on, it’s been 50 years.

- Do any of you know of any machine that keeps running for 50 years without proper maintenance?

- I mean, sure the machines keep the lights on, but who’s keeping the machines running?

- And there’s something I left out earlier when we were talking about this.

- Those buildings that burned down in December were old apartement complexes.

- So, what’s there now?

- Well, according to sat photos, it looks like warehouses, at least to me.

- Listeners, these aren’t repairs.

- It’s new construction.

- Sounds to me like the official line on this one is an official lie.

- As usual.


 

Why the ESA officials were assassinated?


- So hey, people.

- Max Mike here.

- Now, I know you follow the news in the screamsheets, so by now I know you’ve heard about the assassination…

- …of those ESA officials during their big conference in Zurich, right?

- Yeah, the news says it’s Highrider extremist, Lunar Separatist pushing back on ESA expansion on the Moon.

- But, of course, that’s not really what’s going on here.

- Never is.

- Now, I’ve got friends in, let’s say, high places, and they’ve told me the truth of the matter.

- See, a few weeks ago, a Militech espionage team infiltrated on Arasaka base in the Mare Nubium.

- That’s the Sea of Clouds.

- They were there because of unusual seismic activity at the base.

- It’s an indicator that Arasaka was moving around a lot of regolith for construction.

- For you, dirt boys and dirt girls in the audience, let me clarity.

- Regolith’s just a fancy name for moon rocks.

- So, what did they find, you ask?

- Only a partially completed and totally unauthorized mass driver.

- That’s a big rock thrower.

- It’s really good for getting cargo materials back down to Earth from the Moon.

- And also, as we learned in the last war, it’s a great way to drop rocks on cities.

- So, you might not know this, but new mass drivers are strictkly regulated by international treaty and they’re prohibited under ESA Lunas-Use contracts.

- The ESA has the ultimate high-ground advantage in any Earth conflict with their own Tycho and Copernicus mass drivers.

- And they really don’t want anyone else having that advantage.

- Especially Arasaka.

- So, my friends in the know tell me that Militech seems to have fed that information about Arasaka’s secret mass driver to the ESA committee…

- …in advance of Arasaka’s upcoming lunar contract renegotiations.

- And to keep their contracts, Arasaka’s taken a drastic action to eliminate anyone…

- …in the ESA who might have seen this data on their mass driver.

- But hey, this was sloppy by Arasaka’s standards.

- In fact, so sloppy I’d be really surprised if this had come from the top.

- I’m guessing some middle manager somewhere was just trying to cover their ass.



 


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