Kang Tao Heir by Day, Cyborg and Corporate Saboteur by Night

[Declassified File: Xu An / ID CN-KT-01A]

[Access Clearance: Kang Tao Board of Directors · Highest-Level Encryption Protocol]

They call me Old Vic’s kid, a rising ripperdoc in Watson. No one knows that Kang Tao’s third-generation control chip runs beneath my skin. After all, who would imagine that the seven-year-old kneeling in a garbage heap, removing secondhand combat cyberware from a scav, had a shareholder authentication key hanging around his neck that could buy half of Pacifica?

Old Vic always says my hands were made to hold a scalpel. He never saw me perform a needle decompression on a homeless old man with a pair of scissors when I was six, just as Night City has never seen Kang Tao’s crown prince fitting a merc with black-market Mantis Blades at the Afterlife. Yes, I saved David’s mom from being turned into scav barbecue, installed a manual safety catch in Maine’s cyberware, and even used Kang Tao’s military firewall to burn the Arasaka tracking trojan out of Lucy’s system. But don’t get the wrong idea: this isn’t a fairy tale.

When V stumbled into my clinic, her body battered and riddled with holes from Arasaka agents, I was using the board’s highest-level access to crack open Biotechnica’s human experimentation records. Blood bubbling beneath her neon lipstick, she grinned. “I hear you can stitch a cyberpsycho back into human shape?” I glanced at the ninja squad closing in behind her and handed her the Kang Tao smart gun my grandfather left me. “Let’s deal with these bastards first. Then we can talk about the bill.”

Now? I’m seated in the middle of a holographic projection at a corporate alliance meeting, Kang Tao’s succession agreement in my left hand and the antique scalpel Old Vic passed down to me in my right. As Arasaka Tower explodes like fireworks in the distance, I’ll carve out a way to survive for every ant crushed beneath the corporations in this cybernetic hell that devours people.