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The death of an empire is so much quieter than she thought it would be.
Its last gasps are the free-fall plunge of a stock chart and Network 54’s news ticker streaming across her optical field: EBM shareholders incur losses of €$400 billion, lawsuit imminent; EBM prepares to declare bankruptcy after data leak; EBM’s interim COO and CTO resign, to be hired by Arasaka.
Yelena blinks it all away, letting the ocean take its place. The water is calm today, gentle waves cresting white before sliding into the sand, barely shifting the grains around the shells strewn over the beach. She’s always liked watching the tides. There’s something comforting in their infinitude; they’ll outlive the collapse of every megacorp and every new crack in her heart.
She looks away from the ocean as her assigned attendant glides over. He’s been terribly attentive since she got here, nearly to the point of irritation, but she can’t bring herself to shoo him away.
“Can I get you a drink? Or perhaps a massage?” he asks. His smile is radiant, full of the best teeth eurodollars can buy.
“Just a martini, please,” Yelena replies, then tells him to make it with gin instead of vodka, even though she hates gin. The sun reflecting off the doll cyberware on his neck is blinding.
He brushes a hand over her shoulder before leaving for the bar, glowing like a bronze trophy, sand kicking up around his feet.
She lights a cigarette and considers fucking him later. Even a murderer deserves some basic pleasures.
Settling back in her chair, she pulls up the news feed again, superimposed over her smoke and the cloudless Belizean sky. No suspects in EBM data breach, authorities say. A quick, quiet demise, just as she wanted.
In contrast, the death of her marriage was one long scream, culminating in the roar of a gunshot.
It started the same way it ended: with a woman. A woman with many names, but when Yelena met her, she called herself Andrea Powell.
Andrea was everything, and nothing. A lover, a confidant, a stranger, a whore. Young—too young—yet world-weary. Erudite, yet uncultured. Desperate, yet composed. Caught in a binge and purge cycle with life itself, craving more than she could ever hope to consume. But she wasn’t to blame for what happened. If Andrea was a stick of dynamite, Yelena was the one lighting the fuse.
The attendant returns with her martini. He lingers by her chair longer than necessary, and his perfect face twitches close to a pout when she waves him away. She trades the cigarette for a drink, taking a cautious sip. Swallowing, she runs her tongue over her lip. Not bad.
It was her husband, Dimitri, who brought the dynamite to their home. After almost twenty years of marriage, the luster was starting to dim, and the distance between them—romantically, sexually—was widening by the day. Andrea was meant to shake things up, splash some color onto the desaturated ennui of their relationship.
And oh, did she ever.
Maybe it’s only the certainty of hindsight speaking, but the affair seemed inevitable. The sheer disruption Andrea brought to Yelena’s life was more irresistible than the piles of synthcoke and bottles of champagne they drowned themselves in every time she visited the penthouse.
During her appointments, Andrea was like a marble sculpture—beautiful and static, her being decided wholly by another’s hands. She would have laughed at the worst joke ever told, would have comforted a serial killer had he started to cry. She was pleasant, professional, even with her face between Yelena’s thighs, but that was all she was. Yelena wanted more.
Did she plan to fall in love, when she tossed their contractual boundaries aside like fluttering ribbons of cut red tape? She’s asked herself that many times, and the answer is always no. For once in her life, Yelena hadn’t planned anything at all.
She looks up at the sky. So blue. The architects did a phenomenal job; you can’t see the edges of the dome at all.
From their first meeting outside Yelena and Dimitri’s home in Century Tower, Andrea had a way of getting Yelena to reconsider the path she was on, the one everyone else in her life insisted she take. Going to the aquarium together—a place Dimitri could never bother indulging Yelena enough to visit—was the kind of revelation typically reserved for religious experiences or hallucinogenic drugs.
Their time together was as magical as it was doomed. Andrea wanted her to leave Dimitri. Of course she did. Yelena wanted to leave Dimitri… eventually. But Andrea was young, and youth brings impatience and capriciousness; they infected Yelena like a virus. Their meetings grew longer, riskier.
Exactly when Dimitri discovered her infidelity remains a mystery. He never once confronted her about it. Even when he came home after a two-week trip to Europe and saw the way Yelena was all but floating around the penthouse—god, he could probably smell Andrea’s perfume on her—he said nothing, giving her a chaste kiss on the cheek before retiring to their bedroom to change.
“Oh, Dimitri,” Yelena says to the ocean, and sighs.
Even after everything, it’s hard to comprehend the totality of her husband—the man and the monster. It shames her to admit it now, but when Andrea first confessed the hell he was putting her through, Yelena didn’t believe her. She’d love to say it was because she simply couldn’t fathom Dimitri possessing such a capacity for cruelty, but that would require a level of delusion bordering on cyberpsychosis.
No, Dimitri certainly had the capacity. You don’t get to his position in the corpo world without it. The man who masked his predecessor’s murder as a suicide had all the abilities necessary to stalk, extort, isolate, and threaten an escort into erasing her identity and fleeing for her life.
But he had never turned that cruelty on Yelena. Not at the time, not yet. And that self-centeredness blinded her.
It was only when Andrea called her that last time, when she told Yelena that Dimitri had sent an armed thug into her home while she was asleep, had him stick a gun in her face and promise things would only get worse, that Yelena understood. This was her husband, and this was the ugly reality of her whirlwind fantasy romance.
She begged Yelena to delete everything EBM had on Andrea Madeline Powell. And then she asked her to do the same for someone named Juliette Helena Vuillermoz—the woman she used to be, before she came to San Francisco.
Yelena did as she was asked. But before she pressed delete, she made backup copies of both women’s data and saved them to her cyberdeck.
She just couldn’t let her go.
How can one possess such power and not use it? It was a sublime challenge, piecing Juliette and Andrea together from all those discrete data points, painting a picture of a woman Yelena could barely trace the outline of during their time together. Juliette was born in Mayville, Washington to a civil engineer and a high school biology teacher. Her parents provided her with an upbringing that was comfortable, if rather modest. She received her first credchip for her thirteenth birthday and spent most of it at the local movie theater, a trend that continued throughout her adolescence. Her grades in school were underwhelming at best, moreso after her parents’ divorce when she was sixteen. But she was a good child overall. No run-ins with the law, not even a speeding ticket.
In 2060, Juliette Vuillermoz disappeared. Her last entry in EBM’s database is at a CHOOH2 station in Medford, Oregon. Her parents made many attempts over the next several years to find her, involving police forces across the western free states, but without appropriate compensation, the trail grew cold. Juliette was presumed dead, a victim like countless other fame-hungry young women on one-way sojourns to California.
In a way, Juliette was dead. But, at the bottom of a contract in a no-name San Francisco casting agency, she resurrected herself into Andrea Powell, the woman Yelena destroyed.
The last time they spoke, Andrea’s voice was brittle on the other end of the holo, cracking on her promise that she’d been happy with Yelena, despite it all.
In the end, it was that voice that allowed Yelena to find her again. In the months after Andrea left, Yelena soothed her heartache by building an algorithm. It was an extravagant waste of resources, funneling every new piece of data EBM mined into an encrypted server containing Andrea and Juliette’s files, running a constant stream of comparisons. Andrea was thorough: there were no hits for retinal scans or fingerprints, no facial recognition matches from any of EBM’s drones or streetcams. She’d even apparently sprung for genome-cloaking. And she’d paid for everything with hard, untraceable cash.
For all her prudence, though, she neglected to get herself chipped with a vocal modulator. The match pinged Yelena’s cyberdeck one morning while she was in a meeting. She excused herself to the bathrooms, locked herself in a stall, and listened.
From the lobby of Konpeki Plaza in Night City, May 18th, 2071: It’s nothing personal. Just the way I’m wired.
I guess it’s just the way I’m wired. A diner in San Francisco, November 22nd, 2065.
It didn’t take much from there. Yelena worked backwards, pulling the security footage and lining up the timestamps. She didn’t recognize the woman who spoke with Andrea’s voice, but one look at Konpeki’s bookings told her everything about the man she was with. A quick parse of his holo record, and Yelena had a name before she returned to her meeting.
Evelyn Parker.
It was strange at first—as strange as it was to learn about Juliette. But as Yelena began tracking the data, Evelyn became a natural extension of Andrea, of Juliette. She still liked classic jazz, according to her music subscriptions. Still ordered gin martinis when she went to the bar. The face was new, and so were the clothes and the hair and the brand of cigarettes she smoked, but the woman underneath couldn’t be hidden. When Yelena watched her in snatches of camera feeds, she saw Andrea in the way Evelyn walked, wearing Andrea’s confident, casual posture like a glove.
A few seagulls—some of the last on Earth, specially bred by the resort—land nearby, pecking at something in the sand. Yelena lights another cigarette.
She could have easily reached out to Andrea—to Evelyn, she corrects herself. But somehow doing that felt more wrong than seeing her through EBM’s prying eyes, in isolated, disembodied data. Yelena wasn’t supposed to know Evelyn Parker.
Neither was Dimitri.
When she woke up one morning to find a security alert from her cyberdeck’s monitoring software, she thought it was a glitch. Unauthorized local access, it said. 3:58 am.
She expanded the readout, saw which files in her deck were covered in another’s cyberprints. Saw which ones were copied, every line of them highlighted in red, transferred from the interface port in her neck and into the personal link snaking out of Dimitri’s wrist.
Yelena’s deck is a NetWatch prototype, a gift from a friend. Of all the things she owns, it’s her most prized possession. Its storage capacity alone outstrips other corps’ entire dataservers. But Dimitri only took three datasets: Juliette Vuillermoz, Andrea Powell, and Evelyn Parker.
The gulls have found a crab. Not a real crab, but of course they don’t know that. They tear it apart, screaming and flapping at each other, fighting over the kill.
She still remembers it so clearly: walking out of their bedroom to see Dimitri in the living room, sitting on the couch, coffee in hand. Like nothing was wrong. Like he hadn’t committed digital rape.
I’ll be taking a business trip to Night City, he said.
So brazen it made her feel insane, sent cold, wet doubt squirming through her head. She had to pull up the security alert again just to be sure, just to ground herself.
He knew she knew. It was a dare. Try and stop me.
She ignored everything inside her breaking, smiled at him, and said, Have a nice time.
There was a moment, sometime after he’d left, when she considered doing nothing. She was so very good at doing nothing when it came to Dimitri. He would come home in a few days, or a week, or a month, and they could continue their farce for another twenty years. It would only cost a single life.
Initially, she merely observed. She was there, perched in the corner of Bleu’s luxurious dining room, when Evelyn saw Dimitri. Yelena zoomed in, watched Evelyn’s eyes track over her client’s shoulder to stare at Yelena’s husband on the other side of the restaurant. She watched Evelyn return to her dinner for a few more minutes, smiling and laughing, and then she stood up, gesturing like she was just going to use the restroom or perhaps go outside for a smoke. Yelena switched feeds; Evelyn left the building, walking fast, arms wrapped tight around herself, glancing periodically over her shoulder until she left the camera’s field of view.
It was then that Yelena decided she could no longer abide her own passivity.
When Evelyn turned to a local street gang for help, it was Yelena whispering hints in their ears. When they found the hotel Dimitri was staying in, it was Yelena disabling the security systems. And when Dimitri was on the ground, face pressed into the plush carpet, it was Yelena jacked into the room’s camera, watching Evelyn sob as she fired a round into his head.
The gulls seem to realize the crab is mechanical—one pecks a few more times at its metal guts, scattering springs and alloy scraps everywhere, then hops away in disgust and takes flight once more, circling the ocean with its brethren.
The news of Dimitri’s death quickly reached EBM; an interim COO was immediately assigned, and Yelena was allowed time off to grieve. The funeral was lovely, attended by most of the corp’s SF branch, and Yelena cried so much she couldn't tell where the fake tears ended and the real ones began.
No one was surprised when she resigned. The CEO hugged her like a sister, said he understood completely and would support her wherever she decided to go.
Where she decided to go was back to her office, to her desk to write one last tiny bit of code for the company she had poured her entire life into. She anonymized the program and used the final few minutes of her security clearance to set it to deploy in 168 hours across all of EBM’s systems.
By the time the code activated, making every single proprietary EBM data-mining process open-source, she was on a plane to her private resort in Belize.
Her glass is empty, and the attendant swoops over to refill it. Yelena lets their fingers touch when he takes the glass from her hand. Then she laughs, but not at his suggestive joke.
EBM and Dimitri—she is a widow twice over.
The beach is empty, and it’s not like anyone could see the alphanumerics scrolling across her optics anyway, but Yelena still looks to her left and right like an amateur criminal before she pulls up Evelyn’s file.
The last entry is from this morning: 4:56 am, Sky High Smoke Shop, Senate Ave., Night City. Evelyn bought a packet of Hollywood Strawberry Lights and some spearmint gum. Sky High doesn’t have cameras, so Yelena has to go back a little further, to Tuesday at 6:13 pm, to a five second clip of Evelyn crossing Kennedy Avenue on her way to Lizzie’s Bar. Her hands are in the pockets of her jacket and her head is held high. She walks like she owns the entire fucking city.
Yelena selects Juliette, Andrea, and Evelyn’s files. Thirty years of data.
She deletes it all.
When the attendant returns with her second martini, she tells him to stay. His mouth on her neck is warmer than the sun as she watches the tides wash into the sand.