Judy: Echoes of Night City Dreams by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Judy-Echoes-of-Night-City-Dreams-1234288688

Judy: Echoes of Night City Dreams ANIMATION

Judy Alvarez: The Abyss Beneath Glasswater

The moon over Night City bled its light through the smog, turning the waves along Glasswater Bay a ghostly white. Judy Alvarez crouched on the rusted catwalk of the old aquatic research dome, her wetsuit gleaming faintly under the flicker of emergency lights. The dome had been abandoned for a decade — or so she thought — until the net began whispering about strange shapes rising from the flooded sectors.

Now she was here, her neural rig linked to a battered BD recorder, pulse rifle slung low against her hip.

Her lips moved silently as she activated the recorder.
“Judy Alvarez. Investigating the Glasswater Facility. Rumor: Maelstrom gangers tried bioware splicing underwater. Result: unknown. Objective: recover test data, confirm survivor reports.”

Her voice echoed faintly in the submerged dome. Even in the dark, the place still carried the antiseptic scent of sterilizers mixed with the salty rot of decay. The walls glimmered faintly with embedded holo-panels, most flickering static.

A small drone floated beside her, its light scanning through the mist. “Area stable,” it chirped. “Radiation minimal.”

“Minimal’s good,” Judy murmured. She brushed a wet strand of teal hair away from her face. “Let’s get what we came for.”

The floor beneath her boots creaked, and water dripped in rhythmic pulses from above — tap, tap, tap — like a slow, patient heartbeat.

The main lab was half-flooded. Fish skeletons floated in glass cylinders, suspended in fluid that glowed faintly blue. Along the far wall, a tangle of biotanks rose like coffins stood upright, connected by neural cables. Most were shattered.

One wasn’t.

Inside, a shape moved — human, or what had once been.

Judy froze. “Oh no… someone’s still in there.”

The figure’s eyes opened.

They glowed red through the viscous blue.

The tank hissed open. A man stumbled forward, covered in metal scales grafted into his flesh. His mouth opened in a bubbling gasp, revealing rows of artificial gills that clicked and whirred as they filtered air.

He spoke in a voice that gurgled through a wet throat: “Not… supposed… to surface…”

Judy stepped back, gun half-raised. “Easy, choom. I’m not here to hurt you.”

He tilted his head, eyes reflecting her flashlight. “You shouldn’t have come down here… they hear you now.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

But he was already seizing, body twitching as the machinery beneath his skin spasmed. He dropped to his knees, trembling. His fingers — webbed, metal-tipped — clawed at his chest.

Then something inside him moved.

Judy stumbled backward as his ribcage cracked open like a clam. A mass of cables, scales, and silicon burst outward, reforming into a sleek, eel-like form that slithered toward the flooded floor. It vanished beneath the surface with a wet hiss.

Her heart thundered in her chest.

She turned to run.

From the corridor beyond came the sound of metal scraping on metal — slow, deliberate, dragging.

Judy ducked behind a workstation, breath ragged. Her drone flickered beside her, projecting a faint thermal map. “Multiple life signatures detected,” it whispered. “Movement below the waterline.”

“How many?”

“…Nine.”

A shadow rippled through the water. Then another.

Judy’s mind raced. The Maelstrom had always pushed cyberware limits — slicing flesh and machine until there was nothing left of humanity. But this? Biotech designed for ocean adaptation — fins replaced with servos, neural nodes tuned to sonar frequencies — it was madness.

The drone beeped sharply. “Incoming.”

The floor split open.

A creature erupted from the flooded section — its upper body humanoid, but its lower half a mass of articulated tendrils wrapped in steel. Its face was hidden behind a cracked Maelstrom mask fused with coral growth. A voice rasped from within:

“Welcome back… sister of the deep.”

Judy fired. Blue plasma seared through the creature’s chest, sending it crashing back into the water with a hiss of steam.

But more came.

From every dark pool and shattered pipe, they rose — aquatic Maelstrom mutants with luminous eyes and breathing vents that opened and shut like wounds. Their voices wove together in static-laced whispers:

“Join us… the tide remembers all.”

“Yeah?” Judy snarled.
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