Rabbit — RunRabbitRun.fyi

The ripperdoc who raised Rabbit was a man called Vulture, a Kabuki surgeon who bought and installed cyberware and expected the boy living in his clinic to earn every meal. Rabbit learned where the clean instruments belonged before he could read the labels on their drawers. There were floors to wash, deliveries to carry, patients who needed water and patients whose belongings had to be kept out of the way. When Vulture called, he came running. The doctor had little patience for calling twice, and a child could spend a long evening hungry over something an adult had already forgotten.

Before the clinic, there were fragments of another home. First-response equipment put away in familiar places; a man and a woman whose faces Rabbit could still sometimes bring to mind; visits to somewhere they worked, with the Trauma Team insignia on things he had been too small to reach. Their names had not survived in his memory. Neither had his own. Vulture told him his parents had been poor, had not wanted him, and had sold him. Rabbit was the only name he knew. He had asked about the old memories when he was little, but Vulture could always explain them more confidently than Rabbit could remember them. Eventually he stopped asking. There were questions the doctor liked better, especially once Rabbit was old enough to be useful beside the treatment chair.

Vulture knew his work. He could find a fault in a secondhand implant that another ripperdoc had missed, or explain why a patient was getting worse while Rabbit was still looking at the wound. Sometimes he made the boy talk through an answer before letting him reach for an instrument. If Rabbit got it right, the doctor might stay beside him and explain the next part, including things Rabbit would not have known to ask. Those were the days he wanted to repeat. He remembered the repairs they completed together and the patients who went home better than they had arrived. He also remembered being struck, threatened or sent away from a meal, and spent too much time trying to work out what he had done differently. If he learned faster and stopped making whatever mistake had angered Vulture last time, perhaps the doctor would be pleased with him again.

As Rabbit grew, cleaning and errands gave way to dressings, examinations and work on chrome. An injured person gave him questions he could do something with. Where did it hurt? What had happened? Had it been getting worse? He liked the moment someone stopped looking past him for Vulture and began answering him instead. A man could arrive swearing at the price, at the pain, at whichever gonk had put him in the chair, and still need Rabbit to explain what was going to happen next. Rabbit found that he could do that. He became particularly good when there was little time: sorting the urgent injury from everything else, getting help ready, keeping his attention on the person in front of him. The half-remembered equipment in his parents' home kept drawing him toward first response, though he could not yet have explained why the work felt familiar.

Outside the clinic, Kabuki taught him how to buy, carry and deliver things without assuming the person on the other end of the transaction was doing him a favor. He learned which questions got an honest answer and which only made the price go up. Vulture's recovery crew, Second Shift, brought a different education through the door. Rabbit heard the gigs retold while he cleaned up after them: who had panicked, who had fired first, what the chrome had been worth before someone damaged it. Graft, the extraction specialist, could spend longer complaining about a ruined component than about the blood on her sleeve. Rabbit knew these people as customers, coworkers and sources of stories about a life beyond the clinic. He had some self-defense training and was quick on his feet, but he had treated far more gunshot wounds than he had survived gunfights. Listening to Second Shift, he pictured himself doing better than the fools in their stories.

His left arm was replaced with a cyberarm during those years, and an implanted Medscanner became part of his medical work. By eighteen, Rabbit could see a life he wanted clearly enough to resent being kept from it. He wanted gigs of his own, chooms who would ask him along, and the chance to become one of the people others listened to. He wanted Vulture to recognize that he was ready. Even when he imagined leaving, the imagined conversation usually ended with the doctor finally being impressed.

Rabbit found the data shards while snooping through things Vulture had kept. Some files opened normally. Others were encrypted, plainly there and beyond anything he knew how to unlock. He tried the accessible material first. The field footage showed a cyberware recovery after a cyberpsychosis incident, with recorded comms running over the images. Second Shift were in it. He recognized their faces and voices, heard the same people who came through the clinic giving one another instructions while they worked. Then Trauma Team arrived, and the recovery turned into a firefight.

He watched as a medic and a woman in the response team came into view. It took him a moment to understand why he was following those two instead of the people he knew. They looked familiar in a way that belonged to the other house, before Vulture; he kept waiting for one of them to turn so he could see properly. When the woman did, he stopped the footage. He knew that face. The man beside her took longer, but once Rabbit recognized him he could not make him unfamiliar again. He went back through the images, looking from one to the other, trying to recover more than the faces. No names came. They were his parents, and on the recording they were still alive.

They survived the gunfight. Rabbit could see that much before Vulture's voice came over comms: “Zero them.” The crew obeyed. Rabbit watched it again. He knew that voice when it was explaining a repair, when it was annoyed with him, when it expected something done without another question. He kept looking for something in the exchange that would make the order mean less than it did. Each time he reached it, the words were the same. Vulture had told them to kill his parents, and the people Rabbit had spent years helping at the clinic had carried it out.

He could have spent longer with the shards. There were other files, other dates, the encrypted material he could not open. Instead, he kept returning to the recording and the one person he wanted to explain it. Vulture knew things Rabbit did not. That had been true of almost everything for as long as he could remember, and some part of him was still waiting for the doctor to supply the fact that would make this bearable. He tried to imagine what it could be. He could not. He needed to hear an answer from him anyway.

Rabbit took the recording to Vulture and asked why. He had rehearsed the question on the way, making himself angrier each time, but anger did not stop him wanting to soften his voice once the doctor was in front of him. Vulture wanted to know where he had found the shards. Rabbit answered, then asked again about the people in the footage. The doctor told him to hand the shards over. It was an instruction Rabbit had obeyed in a hundred ordinary forms: bring that here, put it down, leave it alone. He could feel the conversation trying to become another argument about something he had done wrong. “Why did you tell them to kill my parents?” he asked. He had to keep saying it because Vulture kept giving him something else to answer.

Vulture closed the distance between them, and Rabbit refused to give up the shards. The argument became a struggle. When the doctor reached for a pistol, Rabbit caught his wrist, trying to keep the weapon away while Vulture hauled him against the edge of a workbench. For a few confused seconds there were hands on the gun, the doctor's weight forcing him backward, and no room to pull free. Then the pistol went off. Vulture dropped with a round in his knee, and Rabbit found himself holding the gun while the man who had raised him bled onto the floor.

He hadn't meant to fire. His first thought was that he needed something to stop the bleeding. He looked toward the supplies before he understood that he was doing it, already slipping back into the work they both knew. Vulture reached for him again. Rabbit pulled away, knocking into the stock bench, and the instinct to help gave way to the need to get out before the doctor got hold of him. There was a loose Sandevistan among the cyberware waiting there. He took it with the shards, kept the pistol, and ran. He knew the implant was valuable. He knew another ripperdoc. Beyond that, he had very little resembling a plan.

In the street he kept expecting Vulture to call him back. He had left the doctor wounded, stolen from him and gone farther than any argument between them had ever gone. Even with the recording, even with the gun still in his hand, his thoughts kept returning to what he would say when he had to face him again. Then he remembered the order on the comms and made himself keep moving. He put the pistol away before he approached Dr. Samir Dey's door.

Dey was another Kabuki ripperdoc, someone Rabbit had known through clinic business for years. When Rabbit asked him a medical question, Dey generally answered it as though there were nothing surprising about the boy having thought to ask. He could disagree with Rabbit without making him sorry he had spoken. Rabbit remembered that now, standing at his door with stolen chrome and a story he could barely get through in order. He began with the shooting, heard how that sounded, and tried to go back to the shards. Dey let him finish. Then he brought him inside.

The doctor gave him somewhere to hide and examined the Sandevistan he had brought. Rabbit knew enough to talk about the implant and kept trying to make that the conversation. Its condition, its installation, what he could do to assist: these were things he could explain without admitting how frightened he was of being found. Dey checked it, made the arrangements to fit it, and let Rabbit ask his questions. The Sandy was installed while he stayed there. For the first time since leaving Vulture, Rabbit could think about work he might take after he had recovered, rather than only how he would survive the next encounter with the man he had shot.

He tried to make himself useful as soon as he could. One evening Dey found him sorting supplies that had not needed sorting, with a meal left untouched beside him. Rabbit started explaining how he had arranged the packets so the doctor would know where to find them. Dey listened until he finished, then moved the food within reach. “Those will still be there when you've eaten.” Rabbit said he knew that. He ate quickly anyway, but afterward Dey asked him something about a patient they had discussed, and the conversation continued without the meal becoming a favor he had to account for. Rabbit began to linger over small decisions: whether to ask another question, whether to admit he was tired, whether to say what he actually thought. Sometimes he caught himself waiting for Vulture's objection before remembering where he was.

The refuge lasted long enough for him to start imagining what might come next. Then Vulture found it. Rabbit heard Vulture's voice before he saw him, familiar enough that he turned toward it almost automatically. Dey was answering him when gunfire broke through the room and the doctor fell. Rabbit started toward him. Vulture was there with a weapon. As the gun came around toward Rabbit, the Sandy helped him react quickly enough to get behind the treatment chair. He saw a way toward the back of the premises and took it, catching his shoulder hard on a doorframe getting through. He reached the street alone.

Vulture had murdered the doctor who took him in. Rabbit had escaped again, but now he had nobody to go back to who had heard his account and believed him. He remembered trying to explain himself at Dey's door, and how readily the man had let him inside. It was easy to begin the memory a few minutes earlier and imagine himself choosing another street, another person, any door but that one. At other times he remembered Dey moving the meal closer, or waiting for him to finish an explanation that had already gone on too long. Those recollections could catch him while he was eating or talking about ordinary work, before he had time to prepare for them.

It has been a couple of months since the attack on Dey's refuge. For the last month or so, Rabbit has been turning up around Lizzie's Bar often enough to recognize faces and pick up conversations where he left them. He likes the place. The music reaches him before he is through the door, and inside, the purple and pink lighting keeps changing the color of his silver-white arm. There are people sprawled on couches around the pillars with BD wreaths fitted, groups talking in the recessed seating, and a crowded bar at the back. He comes in wearing his rust-red tech jacket and generally finds somebody to talk to before he has decided how long he can afford to stay.

The gigs have mostly been small. Someone needs a cut cleaned and closed. Someone wants an opinion on an injury they have been ignoring. A delivery needs another pair of hands, or a crew wants a medic nearby for a job that might turn ugly. Rabbit listens, asks what the work involves and offers more readily than he has learned to price. Eddies are best; he has supplies to replace and somewhere to sleep to pay for. But there have been meals, promises of introductions and jobs he has taken because being remembered seemed worth the time. He makes a point of giving people his name. He wants them to have it when a choom asks whether they know anyone who can patch them up.

One of those introductions began with a courier trying to keep blood from a split eyebrow out of her eye. Rabbit had been talking to her near the bar and stopped midway through what he was saying to ask how long it had been bleeding. She said it was nothing. Then she wiped it again. The changing lights were making it difficult to get a proper look, so he went outside with her and found steadier light near a food stall. Her account of the job got longer once he started working: a delivery, an argument over where she was supposed to leave it, somebody who had decided to settle the disagreement with the butt of a pistol. Rabbit kept her talking while he dealt with the cut. She asked whether it would leave a scar. He told her it might and asked her to hold still.

When he was done, she admitted she was waiting to get paid herself. He had suspected that when she began explaining the delivery for the second time. There was food cooking a few steps away, and he had been smelling it through most of her story. “Buy me something hot, then,” he said. “And if somebody needs a medic, give them my name.” She asked whether Rabbit was the whole name. “It'll find me.” They ate beside the stall while she complained about her client, and Rabbit listened with his jacket open and the food warming his hands. When she offered to flick him the details of another courier who sometimes needed help, he checked that the message had arrived before finishing his meal.

That has become part of the routine: turn up, hear about a problem, do what he can, hope the person remembers. Some evenings he earns enough to stop counting what dinner will cost. Others produce little beyond conversation, but he stays for those too. He likes hearing what people are working toward, what they spent their pay on, which piece of preem chrome looked better in the advertisement. He can laugh at a bad gig and immediately want to hear how the next one will be different. A familiar voice calling “Rabbit” across the room still makes him look up quickly. There are people here who know him because he introduced himself, who have never seen Vulture's clinic and have no reason to report to the man who ran it.

An experienced merc asking whether he can keep up is likely to hear yes before Rabbit has heard enough about the job. He knows how easily people misrepresent a price or leave an ugly detail out of a story, but admiration makes him generous with explanations. Maybe the run really is simpler than it sounds. Maybe the person offering it has seen something in him that he has not had the chance to prove. He wants someone experienced to take him seriously, and can mistake that attention for a reason to trust them.

The shards are still with him. He is looking for someone who can help with the encryption, and for anyone who might recognize the two Trauma Team responders in the accessible footage. He has faces to show and questions he has been carrying for most of his life. Their names would let him search for more than an image. Until he learns otherwise, he imagines them as people whose work he could be proud to continue, and hopes they would have liked the medic he is becoming. At eighteen, he is also hungry for the rest of it: a better gig, a proper introduction, an evening that ends with plans to meet again. For now he keeps returning to Lizzie's, listening over the music and making sure the next person who needs him knows to ask for Rabbit.

Rabbit was born Julian Reyes, the son of Esteban and Marisol Reyes, two successful Trauma Team first responders with a comfortable home in Little China. Esteban was a field medic. Marisol flew and drove for the company, doing the work that got a response team to its patient and brought it out again. Their colleagues had good reasons to remember them well. Esteban could make quick treatment decisions and take time to reassure somebody who was frightened; Marisol's reputation came from bringing people home from calls that had given them reason to doubt they would make it. The first-response gear in Rabbit's early memories belonged to people who knew how to use it.

Esteban also sold recovered cyberware. Emergency scenes gave him access to valuable implants and opportunities to move them into a private trade whose buyers were willing to overlook their origins. Marisol did not understand how deeply he had become involved. Her husband had dealings with Dr. Tomás Varela, the Kabuki ripperdoc known as Vulture, and a direct connection to Martin Kessler, a senior Zetatech executive who brokered illicit recoveries alongside his legitimate procurement work. Esteban was useful because he could reach places an ordinary thief could not and make knowledgeable decisions once he was there. He had been paid for those advantages often enough that the arrangement had become part of his working life.

The cyberpsychosis incident brought two of Kessler's arrangements into the same street. Kessler sent Second Shift to recover cyberware, then quietly gave Esteban the same assignment as a backup. Vulture's crew were capable of getting chrome out of dangerous places, but their violence and poor judgment made delivery uncertain. Esteban pursued Kessler's private assignment while responding with Trauma Team. When the response interrupted the recovery, the crews fought. Second Shift won. Esteban and Marisol survived the initial firefight, and Vulture recognized Esteban as the other man Kessler had trusted with his crew's job. He resented the precaution. With both parents at his mercy, he ordered them killed over comms. The responding Trauma Team crew was wiped out.

Identifying material taken from the dead led Vulture to the Reyes home. He went there for what he could take, murdered the nanny and stripped the house of valuables. Four-year-old Julian was there as well. Vulture kept him: another mouth to feed for a time, but a child could run errands, clean and eventually learn useful work. He would have nowhere else to go. Vulture took him to Kabuki and raised him as Rabbit, repeating the story that his parents had sold him until the boy had little left with which to dispute it. Among the cyberware retained from the old recovery was the Sandevistan that Rabbit would eventually steal and take to Dey.

Vulture also kept an archive of the recovery. The footage and recorded comms showed Second Shift at work, including his order to kill the surviving Reyes parents. Encrypted exchanges between Esteban and Kessler identified the executive who had arranged the job and connected him to illicit recoveries, corrupt Trauma Team personnel and other participants. Some of the people and transactions in those files were still part of Kessler's business. He knew Vulture held the evidence. Moving against the doctor could expose his own involvement, and Vulture kept the archive to protect himself from retaliation for killing Kessler's operative. For years, they continued dealing with each other under those conditions.

Rabbit did not know about Kessler or his arrangement with Vulture when he stole the shards. He had watched the recording of his parents' murder and seen the encrypted files he could not open; he did not know who was named in them or how Vulture had used them. The theft deprived Vulture of control over the evidence, and Kessler is pressing him to get it back. Rabbit is looking for his parents' names. Anyone who helps him examine the encrypted correspondence may also find the executive who paid his father, the recoveries he arranged and the people still working for him.

Dr. Tomás Varela still has patients who come to him because he can fix what is wrong with them. He listens to an account of pain, identifies a faulty implant and explains what the repair will cost. Some patients leave relieved and recommend him to others. Years of treating people have also taught him to recognize when someone has few alternatives to his clinic. He knows how much a patient needs his help and can use that need to set the terms. Rabbit grew up depending on him for food, shelter and instruction.

Vulture took pride in Rabbit's progress and claimed it as his own achievement. When Rabbit completed a repair, the doctor saw proof that he had been right to keep and train him. He reminded Rabbit that he had fed and housed him and taught him a trade, leaving out the murders and abduction that had brought the child to his clinic. In Vulture's telling, Rabbit's growing skill entitled the doctor to more of his work and obedience. He did not consider Rabbit entitled to leave. He taught the boy to explain a medical decision, then struck him for questioning an order. When Rabbit confronted him about the recording, the doctor demanded the shards back and answered his refusal with violence.

Second Shift have lived with his temper and judgment for years. Latch, the field lead, wants everyone moving once he commits them to a fight. Graft objects when the fighting damages chrome she is expected to make saleable. Haul has to get the people and the cargo away afterward, and wants to know about trouble before it blocks his route. Splice handles intrusion and information, which has given her plenty of opportunities to notice how selectively Vulture shares his own. They know one another's work well enough to complete recoveries together and argue about the cost once they are back.

Rabbit grew up seeing Second Shift return to the clinic, helping with their wounds and listening to their accounts of the work. He knew their faces and voices when he found them in the old footage. They remember him carrying supplies and staying nearby while they talked. Vulture now wants their help finding him. The crew took part in the recovery and the killings Rabbit watched, and they do not know what else Vulture recorded or how much Rabbit has managed to open.

Vulture killed Dey for sheltering Rabbit. The other doctor had listened to him, fitted the stolen Sandevistan and helped him begin a life outside the clinic; Vulture treated that help as interference with his authority over his apprentice. He still wants the implant and the archive recovered, and he wants to punish Rabbit for leaving. He also blames Rabbit for the old wound to his knee. Kessler's demand for the archive gives Vulture another urgent problem: the evidence he kept to prevent retaliation is now beyond his control. To recover it, he needs the help of crew members whose participation in his jobs is recorded on the same shards.

Martin Kessler's public title is Director of Special Procurement, Night City, at Zetatech. He knows which suppliers can deliver an urgent order, which contractors need more time than they admit, and which technical objection will become expensive if somebody ignores it. People can leave a meeting with him having obtained a better price or a workable deadline because he understands what they are trying to do. He remembers the useful details. A supplier who once solved an awkward problem may hear from him again months later, with another order and the impression that their competence has been noticed.

His private business uses the same knowledge. He can find a buyer for an implant that has come out of a violent recovery, a clinic willing to refurbish it, and a broker willing to sell it without telling the buyer where it came from. A corrupt responder supplies access or information from an emergency call. A recovery crew obtains the chrome. Transporters, technicians and brokers each take their part, leaving the buyer several transactions removed from the person who was hurt. Kessler keeps the work moving by understanding what each participant wants and how much they expect to be paid. His network has room for people who know exactly what they are doing and for people who stop asking questions once the answers might cost them a customer.

Kessler gave Esteban the backup assignment because he doubted Second Shift would deliver the recovered cyberware reliably. He underestimated how Vulture would respond to finding another operative on the same job. The doctor had Esteban and Marisol killed, then kept the recordings and correspondence linking Kessler to the operation. Kessler could afford to have Vulture attacked, but paying for an attack would not ensure that he recovered the archive before the evidence was used. For years he continued working with a man who had killed his operative, because he could judge the risks of that arrangement more readily than the risks of ending it.

Kessler's other business has continued during their standoff. Responders supply access to implants, clinics prepare recovered chrome for resale, and buyers pay for it through intermediaries. These people depend on the deliveries continuing without anyone examining how the implants were obtained. An investigation could start with a missing implant, a questionable refurbishment or a payment a witness remembers. That witness might identify only a driver or a clinic. The encrypted exchanges on Rabbit's shards could connect such a transaction to Kessler, identifying his part in a job even when a witness has never dealt with him directly.

Kessler wants the archive recovered before Rabbit or anyone helping him can read those exchanges. He knew what Vulture wanted and had spent years bargaining with him. Now he cannot assume that whoever obtains the files will accept the same arrangement or keep quiet about their contents. He is pressing Vulture to recover them, despite the doctor's anger having already disrupted the original job. He needs help from people implicated in the same business, who also have to worry about what the recordings might reveal. Expanding the search gives more people an opportunity to ask what Vulture wants from Rabbit. Kessler wants to pay for the archive's return and close the matter without explaining it to more people.