La Vérité

The truth of Night City, unbiased. Experience the news for yourself, and make your own decisions. Braindances attached to every post, minimally edited for the confidentiality of the team.

[lappel-de-la-verite]

POST #005 — "CRIMSON CONCRETE"

The following footage was captured via direct neural stream. Unfiltered. Uncropped. Timestamped where relevant.

A quiet night. A random street. A general store’s neon sign, buzzing faintly against the dark. A scenario we could all find ourselves in. Because even in Night City, lives still need to be lived. Groceries. Errands. The illusion of routine.

But just past sundown, this perfectly average scene was torn open: red painted the sidewalk. Bullet holes chewed through storefronts. Smoke clung to every breath.

0:00 — A pistol round shatters a customer's grocery bag.

Screams. Gunfire. Then: the full picture.

Red Chrome Legion. Maelstrom. One side caught of guard. The other, high on bloodlust.

0:13 — Maelstrom member leaps over a car, smashing the head of a legionary into the pavement, repeatedly.

This wasn't a shootout. This was a slaughter.

Maelstrom didn't just win. They reveled in it — tearing through their rivals long after the last trace of resistance. Kicking down corpses. Pulling out entrails, and stripping the remains of any implants they had.

0:53 — Audio confirms motive: territory expansion.

Then came the sirens. Not just NCPD.

MaxTac.

They had time to run. But their rationality was long eroded by their tech.

1:41 — First autocannon round fired. Pavement erupts. Vehicles combust. Limbs scatter. 1:45 — The weakened drop first, unable to dodge the center of the blasts. 1:52 — Agents drop from above. 1:54 — Every shot targets a joint. Elbows, knees, hips, necks. Always in that order. 1:57 — Static-filled screams. Maelstromers'.

They all go down. Save for one.

A monster. Eight feet tall. No visible skin or flesh left — only plating and wiring.

He lifts an agent single handed. Snaps his neck like a bottlecap.

2:10 — A single shot rings out: railgun fire. In through the sternum. Out through the spine. He stumbles — but does not stop. 2:12 — Six agents converge. Focused fire at the base of the skull. 2:18 — Detachment. Silence.

The body still twitches. The head, still bites at the air. A broken machine, too far gone to know it's dead.

Cyberpsychosis.

MaxTac begins cleanup. The Red Chrome Legion is left where they fell. But Maelstrom?

Heads. Torsos. Intact limbs. All gathered. Some still moving.

And then, they're gone.

What remains is a street unfit for mourning. Ash. Blood. Melted chrome. Impact craters the size of tires. And between the cracks in the pavement — a thick, red sludge.

Human matter ground into crimson concrete.

I documented what was left. No edits. No enhancements.

This is the kind of night we all risk. Just by stepping outside.

[ BD-Archive-005: “Crimson Concrete”] (Viewer warning: Graphic violence, post-incident trauma, signs of cyberpsychosis. Do not view on low-end neural decks.)

Safety is a luxury. And in this city, you don't need to pick a side to bleed on the pavement.

[lappel-de-la-verite]

You talk a lot about transparency and showing things as they are, but you still blur faces and hide names.

You ever think maybe you're just another coward hiding behind a filter?

I've thought about it. And here's what I landed on:

The truth is about what happened. Not about who bleeds for it.

I blur faces so people don't get killed for standing next to a camera. I mask voices because I've seen people traced from less than a cough.

My anonymity isn't cowardice. It's cover.

I don't plan to stay hidden forever. Just long enough to survive telling the truth no one else will.

You want spectacle? Go watch the feeds. You want truth? It's in the braindances. You just don't get a cast list.

[lappel-de-la-verite]

POST #004 — “LIVING GHOSTS”

The following footage was recorded via direct neural stream. No dramatization. No filters. Sound distortion minimized to preserve clarity without compromising identity.

It started with a hushed conversation.

An Exec looking to order a job. A foray into a Biotechnica storage facility, built on the edge of the Old Combat Zone. The goal: source lists for the ingredients used for a recent product. QC reports. Anything that might indicate a subpar product.

Word got to me. I got to them. Said I'd help put together the crew — and come along myself. On one condition: everything we see, everything we extract, I broadcast. Unfiltered. Uncensored.

They agreed.

I started digging — cross-referencing merc chatter, scan logs, and black market medical supply routes. MedTechs don't work in a vacuum. They need gear. They need stock. Eventually, one name surfaced. Someone who'd been slipping into that same Biotechnica facility — late, quiet, unlisted.

I reached out. They accepted. The way in was now secured. All we had to do was survive the rest.

Meanwhile, the fixer filled in the blanks. A Solo. A Netrunner. One to extract the data. One to keep us breathing while they did.

We showed up in disguise — just convincing enough to buy us a few quiet minutes. The MedTech’s contact had done their part: the door was unlocked.

Peace didn’t last.

05:32 — an employee crosses our path.

The Exec panics. Says the wrong thing. No cover story. No fallback.

The alarm trips.

06:34 — security measures engage.

A turret drops from the ceiling like a guillotine. The Exec reaches up, and jams a virus into its maintenance port while it warmed up.

06:42 — the override kicks in. Her hands shook just once.

Then, the hallway erupted. Gunfire. Screams. Shattered tiles. We returned fire out of instinct, not strategy.

The Netrunner used the turret as an access point. Turned their own defenses against them.

07:42 — silence. Brief, and grim.

We moved while it lasted. Made for the offices upstairs. Barricaded ourselves in. The windows would have to serve as an exit.

The Solo set up the barricade. The Exec prepared the getaway car. The MedTech patched up any wounds we had. I searched for physical records. The Netrunner jacked in.

What she found wasn’t just tight security. It was a Lich-class daemon — old code, war-forged. Arasaka architecture. She cracked the ICE, pulled the data, and made it out intact — barely.

During extraction, drones gave chase. The Solo turned them into scrap.

Back at the safehouse, the Exec reviewed the haul. It wasn’t what we went in for — but it was bigger. This wasn’t about a faulty product. This was about something buried deeper.

The file wasn’t QC logs. It was infrastructure planning. Memos between senior Biotechnica staff. Mentions of cloning incubators, leftover war-era mainframes, and something called the Infinity Protocol.

The phrase that stood out: “To house the SPIs.”

If you know what that means, you already understand the scale. If you don’t, you should read it for yourself.

I’ve included both the neural footage and the memo — unaltered.

[ BD-Archive-004: “Living Ghosts”] (Viewer warning: Includes live-fire footage, high-level system breach, and Lich-class daemon interaction. Minimal compression. Voice masking applied.)

[ File Attachment: “MEMO 1 – BM-cRS Infrastructure Upgrade”] (Internal Biotechnica communication regarding enhanced cloning incubators, mainframes, and project security. Reference to “Infinity Protocol” and “SPIs” included.)

Ghosts don’t just haunt the past. Now, they might haunt the future, too.

[lappel-de-la-verite]

If You’re Seeing Stars, You Set It Up Wrong: A BD Viewer PSA

Footnote // tech support // slightly concerned

Okay, so apparently enough of you have messaged me about headaches, nausea, and “feeling like I got microwaved” after watching the latest braindance that I feel obligated to say something.

First: no, the BDs aren't glitched.

No, Vérité didn't cook your cortex with contrast filters.

She doesn't touch the sensory data. The only edits she does are scrambled voices and blurred faces—when needed. The rest? That’s the raw feed.

If it’s hitting too hard, that’s on your setup. Or you.

So here’s a quick guide on how not to fry yourself during playback.

> BASIC BD VIEWER SETUP

You wouldn’t run an old relic of a viewer with factory defaults, right? …Right?

1. Calibrate Your Sync

Always run a sensory alignment test before playback.

If your viewer doesn’t offer one, get rid of it yesterday.

Heart rate sync should stay within ±10 bpm of your baseline. If it spikes within the first 30 seconds? Eject.

2. Turn Off Fancy Visual BS

No HDR.

No auto-contrast.

No “cinematic smoothing.”

These are memories, not movies. Let them be ugly if they need to be.

3. Tone Down the Audio Processing

Voices might sound weird. That’s intentional—it’s anonymization, not a bug.

Do not enable auto-normalization or virtual surround unless you want the sound of a gunshot to rewire your ears.

Set spatial balance manually. Rear channels low.

4. Neural Buffering = Your Best Friend

Got older neuralware? Enable delay buffering (40–60ms is usually solid).

Emotional spikes can hit hard—especially with unfiltered fear or adrenaline. Buffering helps cushion the impact.

Not immersion-breaking. Just self-preserving.

> PACE YOURSELF

Vérité’s braindances are raw. That’s... kind of the point.

Don’t binge five in a row unless you want to feel like you lived five days in one.

If you’re new to BDs:

Take breaks. Hydrate. Give your brain some offline time.

And no—staying up all night doesn’t make you edgy. It just makes you sloppy.

> FINAL THOUGHTS

These aren’t vids. They’re experiences.

And experiences don’t come with “mild version” toggles.

Set it up right—or suffer accordingly.

Your call.

– Footnote

[lappel-de-la-verite]

POST #003 — “WHERE THE COLORS LISTEN”

Footage captured via direct braindance logging. No overlays. No narrative prompts. Interpret as you see fit.

It wasn’t on any registry. No tag. No artist signature. No AR beacon. Just a wall—forgotten, humming faintly with smart-ink. It appeared overnight on the east edge of Heywood, along a collapsed rail spine. The locals call it the painting that listens.

I came expecting stunt marketing. Maybe a mood-linked ad prototype from someone hoping to impress Ziggurat. Instead, it was… quiet. Intentional.

At 01:12 in the BD, the pattern shifts. No prompt. No contact. Just presence. The mural responds—not with imagery, but with feeling. The ink pulls into slow-moving shapes, cool color washes, the outline of two figures. One walking away from the other. The second fading—blurring. It wasn’t a memory. Not exactly. But it was close enough to hurt.

At 02:03, the emotional spike hits. Subtle in the footage. Not in me.

I came back the next day. The mural had changed again—same medium, same silence. But the tone was different. Like it had listened. Like it had remembered.

Others who’ve stood in front of it report seeing different things. Personal things. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t repeat. It reflects.

I’ve run scans. There’s no standard data stream. No outside projection. The ink carries trace biotech—barely legal, but not proprietary. I don’t know what this is. An art experiment? A psychological bleed? A memory siphon?

But it knows silence. And it knows what we leave behind.

[ BD-Archive-003: “Where the Colors Listen”] (Viewer warning: Playback may evoke dormant emotional memories. Use grounding routines if necessary. Proceed solo.)

I tell the truth so no one can take it from me again. But sometimes, the truth is soft. And I miss it. I’m sorry, my muse.

[lappel-de-la-verite]

POST #002 — “9 MINUTES LATE”

The footage in this report is uncut, direct neural feed. No slo-mo. No dramatic music. If you want theater, check the feeds. If you want the truth—press play.

Heywood’s skyline is cracked and rusted. Tents and desperate people everywhere you look. Plastic sheets serve as walls. But if you walked the Zhirafa Forward Expo last week, you’d think it was all about to change.

Compact housing modules. Automated construction drones. A new dawn for "district revitalization."

Zhirafa's pitch was shiny, smooth, corporate-loud. "Housing for the displaced. Efficiency for the overburdened. Clean tech for a cleaner city." What they didn’t say—what the protest signs spelled out loud and clear—was that tents may be free, but this housing won’t be. No jobs were being created. No subsidized guarantees. No stake in the future they were showcasing. Just another product line.

The Prime-Time Players showed up to say that out loud. They weren’t armed. They weren’t masked. They came in full costume—biosculpted like a family from a bygone world, waving signs that read:

“You can’t automate community.” “Our culture is not debris.” “This isn’t progress—it’s pricing us out.”

They were laughed at. Brushed off. Filmed for the ‘quirky protestor’ B-roll segment.

Then the bomb went off.

The footage attached begins at 03:42—just after the detonation. Panic. Fire. Screaming. A child crawling out from under a collapsed booth. The drone operators froze. Emergency responders were 9 minutes out.

The Players moved in under 3.

One ripped open a crushed scaffold with a powerjack. Another turned a fallen Zhirafa construction drone into a makeshift stretcher. One gave up their own med-injector to stabilize a vendor with a shattered arm.

In the middle of the wreckage, one of them muttered: “This ain’t how the episode ends.”

They didn’t wait for applause. They didn’t stay for interviews. By the time the ambulances arrived, they were gone.

Zhirafa’s official report makes no mention of them. Night City News edited them out entirely. Even the drone footage loops them out with visual noise.

But I was there. I saw them. And now, so can you.

[ BD-Archive-002: “9 Minutes Late”] (Viewer notice: Contains real-time post-detonation visuals, injury, and field triage. Subtitles enabled. No overlays.)

Progress doesn’t always wear a badge or a logo. Sometimes, it wears a fake mustache and a sitcom sweater… and pulls you out of the fire anyway.

[lappel-de-la-verite]

POST #001 — “BURN PATTERN: NONSTANDARD”

All footage in this report is first-person braindance capture. No outside edits. No overlays. What you see is what I saw.

“They called for help. No one came.”

The signal repeated every 16 seconds—compressed audio packet, medevac priority, flagged red. I found it scraping across damaged relay towers along the eastern fringe of the Old Combat Zone. The kind of place you send no one, unless you don’t want them coming back.

No official dispatch. No acknowledgements. According to Trauma Team's logs, the call doesn’t exist. So I went myself.

The convoy was there. Burnt, torn, partially embedded in a concrete embankment. Medical gear half-detonated, trauma foam still spraying weakly from a ruptured canister. And something else—markings scorched into the hull in a pattern I didn't recognize. Like claw scoring... or ritual etching. Maybe both.

The braindance shows it at 01:44—scratches too precise to be accident.

Inside: melted chrome. One ID badge still intact, tagged to a senior Trauma tech. Most of the crew were missing. No bodies. But plenty of blood. A dragged trail leading out, where pavement was warped under something heavy... or hot.

At 02:14, you’ll catch the first movement. Humanoid. But twisted. Overlength arms. Metal spine segments too dense for standard structure. Skin sheened like obsidian plating. This wasn’t chrome from any ripperdoc I’ve seen. This was bodysculpting—and not the flashy kind. The kind you whisper about. Experimental. Predatory. Draconic.

Then the voice at 02:47, over my comm intercept: “They’re not human. I repeat, they’re not—” Signal cuts.

What happened here wasn’t gang violence. It wasn’t bad wiring or AV failure. This was meant to be a rescue. But when the rescue failed, they made sure no one would ask why.

Trauma Team, when questioned, labeled the transmission "training data." Their spokesdrone ended the call after 6 seconds.

The braindance is live. Sequence includes approach, internal footage, and enhanced audio. [ BD-Archive-001: “Burn Pattern: Nonstandard”] (Encrypted. Playback may cause mild signal drift or disorientation in low-end neural rigs. This is the first public archive in this format—adjust your viewer settings accordingly. Strong stomach recommended.)