CyberChuck2077

Chapter 3 — Secret girlfriend

The flat, synthesized chime of the automated announcement still echoed through the condo as Chuck slowly set his pizza down on the cardboard box.

For a long, agonizing moment, nobody moved. The only sounds in the apartment were the quiet, steady hum of the air-conditioning unit and the soft tapping of rain against the windowpane.

Then Chuck gave a single, quiet nod. "Okay."

Sarah’s eyes locked onto him, sharp as cold steel. "Okay?"

Chuck swallowed, his throat clicking dryly. "Okay."

The Rhino enforcement unit was moving through the Liandri & McKay Tower with methodical, ruthless efficiency. Floor by floor. Apartment by apartment. Door by door.

Sarah’s gaze snapped back to the entrance, her mind running fast, clinical calculations. "How long until they reach this floor?"

Chuck didn't answer right away. Instead, he pushed himself up from the table, crossed the room with quiet, deliberate steps, and dropped onto one knee beside the dark fake wood kitchen island. His fingers brushed along a microscopic, almost invisible seam in the floorboards.

Sarah watched his hands move with practiced ease.

A tiny mechanical latch clicked beneath his pressure. Chuck pulled a rectangular section of the flooring upward, revealing a dark, recessed service compartment lined with anti-static foam. He reached inside and hoisted a heavy, matte-black case roughly the size of a tactical duffle bag.

Sarah’s expression hardened instantly. The blood drained slightly from her face as her eyes registered the sleek, reinforced carbon-fiber casing.

She knew precisely what rested inside that container.

"Where the hell did you get that?" Sarah whispered, her voice dropping to a lethal urgency. She stepped toward him, her blue eyes narrowing. "And why does a middle-tier systems analyst have a class-five Lurker combat-drone?"

Chuck glanced up at her, his face completely unreadable as he rested the case on the rug. "Insurance."

Sarah stared down at him. "You keep black-budget military reconnaissance gear as insurance?"

"I’ve got a somewhat complicated life," Chuck muttered smoothly, unlatching the primary security clasps.

The matte-black casing opened with a soft, pneumatic hiss of depressurization. Inside, the sleek, insectoid machine unfolded with a series of sharp, precise mechanical clicks. Six articulated, hydraulic limbs extended outward from its central chassis, followed by a secondary pair of stabilization appendages. The limbs spread wide against the carpet. At the end of each leg, a narrow, monomolecular metallic blade slid forward and locked into place with a subtle clack.

Sarah’s hand instinctively snapped behind her back, her fingers brushing the hilt of her weapon before she remembered the holster wasn’t there, and the memory of fighting these nightmares left again.

The Lurker’s central optical array flared to life with a quiet, high-pitched electronic chirp.

Chuck tapped a sequence into his handheld interface module. The machine didn't hover—it moved with sickening, spider-like agility, scuttling across the rug and vaulting onto the living room wall. Its jointed limbs folded and unfolded with terrifying, silent precision as it ascended toward the ceiling.

Once it reached the room's highest corner, the machine's outer chassis shimmered violently. Light bent around its carbon frame as its active optical camouflage engaged, dissolving the black shape seamlessly into the shadows overhead.

Sarah watched the drone vanish into thin air; her heart started pounding a frantic rhythm. Wasting no time, she lunged toward the workbench, retrieved her Harbinger, slammed the high-capacity magazine home, and sent home the slide with a heavy metallic clack.

She turned, grabbing Lisa’s small hand to pull the child behind her.

Chuck reached out, his hand gently catching her wrist. "Don't."

Sarah froze, her eyes flashing dangerously as she glared down at his grip. "What?"

"You won't need it," Chuck said softly, releasing her wrist.

Sarah’s posture remained rigid, her fingers white-knuckled around the grip of the heavy pistol. "What is your plan, Bartowski? We have armed purge teams descending on this corridor."

Chuck looked up at the empty ceiling corner where the cloaked Lurker rested, then turned back to her. "We're on floor thirteen."

Sarah frowned. "That’s no insurance."

"There are roughly one hundred residential units per floor," Chuck said, pacing slowly back and forth across the rug, his mind clearly running complex, analytical algorithms. "To conduct a proper, thorough door-to-door sweep, a standard Rhino squad needs at least twenty to thirty operatives—more if they're actually cross-referencing resident biometrics instead of just knocking, grunting, and pretending it's an investigation."

Another heavy metallic thud echoed from the floor above, vibrating subtly through the ceiling beams.

Chuck pointed upward toward the noise. "Minimum twenty minutes. Probably closer to thirty."

He turned back to face her. "That gives us half an hour more or less before they knock on that door."

Sarah stared at him, her tactical mind weighing his estimates. "Unless they bring breach charges or sweep three apartments at a time."

"Then we adapt," Chuck replied calmly.

"Run?" Sarah suggested, her eyes flicking toward the window.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because the tower's primary perimeter is sealed," Chuck explained, giving her a tired, slightly helpless smile. "Running down the service stairs right now would be like trying to escape a swimming pool by swimming harder. They control the ground levels."

Sarah’s eyes narrowed into slits. "So what are we doing?"

Chuck looked her dead in the eye, his demeanor shifting into something sharp, composed, and undeniably confident. "I have an idea. But to make it work, I need you to do something for me."

"What?"

He took a slow, deep breath. "Tell me your name."

Sarah stood frozen, staring at him as if he had just spoken in a long dead, ancient language. "Have you lost your mind, Bartowski?"

"No," Chuck said, offering a small, casual shrug. "I really haven't. But you're going to have to trust me on this one."

Sarah didn't look remotely convinced. Her hand remained firm on her weapon.

"Look," Chuck continued, gesturing vaguely toward the ceiling. "You could literally report me to CyberForce right now for possessing an illegal, unregistered class-five military drone and have me thrown into a federal black site for twenty years. So… please. Tell me your name."

Sarah’s expression stayed stone-hard, her sharp blue eyes taking in every millimeter of his face.

Then, her shoulders dropped half an inch. "Sarah," she said quietly.

Chuck waited, his head tilted.

"Sarah Walker."

A heavy beat of silence passed between them.

"I'm going to go ahead and assume that's not your real birth name," Chuck noted dryly.

Sarah’s head snapped toward him, her glare lethal enough to melt lead. "What?"

Chuck raised his hands defensively. "Nothing! Just an observation. Sarah Walker is fine. Great, in fact."

He turned away, walking back toward the microfiber couch, and sat down. Sarah watched him with deep suspicion as Chuck leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, staring intently at the terminal screen resting on the coffee table.

For a fraction of a second, something extraordinary happened.

Behind the dark, hazel pupils of Chuck’s eyes, a microscopic, golden flicker of light flared to life. It was a fleeting, terrifying burst of raw data processing—a rapid neural sequence that illuminated his irises with tiny, golden specks before vanishing just as quickly as it had appeared.k

Sarah caught the phenomenon instantly. Her breath hitched in her throat. What the hell was that?

Chuck didn't look up at her. His fingers began moving across the terminal's touch interface with blinding, supernatural speed, executing complex keyboard commands without looking at the keys.

"So, here's our official narrative," Chuck announced smoothly, his tone remarkably composed. "Sarah Walker, my smoking-hot girlfriend…"

Sarah blinked, her jaw tightening. "Excuse me?"

"And her little sister," Chuck continued, gesturing toward Lisa, "Lisa Walker, came over to visit for the weekend."

He paused, his brow furrowing as his fingers hovered over the screen. "No, wait. That sounds slightly suspicious given the current regional travel restrictions."

He tapped a sequence on his knee, some sort of melody or just moves for concentration; Sarah couldn’t decipher it. "California Republic,” he said.

Sarah stared at him in utter disbelief. "What about it?"

"She came here from the California Republic because she's planning to move back in with me," Chuck explained, nodding to himself as if assembling a completely logical jigsaw puzzle. "Yes. That's good. That explains the lack of local residential history for the last year."

Then, his face brightened with an awkward, genuine grin. "Because she couldn't find a decent job in Hollywood."

Sarah’s left eyebrow rose to an impossible height. "Hollywood?"

"Yeah, good thing that you don’t have some visible and ugly chrome on you. Hollywood could have been nice. But to land a job there, except for a brief, incredibly dark stint at an Orange-Orange frozen yogurt stand," Chuck added, nodding vigorously. "There we go. Flawless backstory."

He stood up and walked back to the dining table with a triumphant air. "It's perfectly believable."

Sarah simply stared at him, her mind struggling to bridge the gap between his absurd cover story and the terrifying speed at which he was operating.

Chuck pulled out a wooden chair and gestured toward the four open pizza boxes. "Come on. Eat while it's hot. Panic on an empty stomach gives you terrible heartburn."

Sarah didn't move an inch. She pointed a rigid finger at the glowing terminal on the coffee table. "What the hell did you just do, Bartowski?"

Chuck offered a sheepish smile. "A little magic." He reached down, picking up a slice of vegetarian pizza. "Go look."

Sarah approached the table cautiously, keeping her distance from Chuck as she leaned over the display.

The terminal screen was displaying an official, high-resolution digital file from the Miami-Dade Municipal Registry.

Sarah stopped dead in her tracks.

The primary image field showed a photograph of her. Or rather, a photograph that looked undeniably, terrifyingly real. She stood on a sun-drenched beach, her arm linked through Chuck's, both laughing into the camera as the ocean crashed behind them.

Before she could process the image, another photo auto-scrolled past: Chuck and Sarah sitting at a dimly lit, high-end Italian restaurant, clinking wine glasses together.

Another: Chuck, Sarah, and little Lisa sitting together on a park bench, holding ice cream cones.

Another: A group family photo at a holiday dinner. Birthday parties. Vacations. Different outfits, different lighting conditions, different years, completely seamless depth-of-field rendering, and perfect shadows.

The photographic footprint was utterly staggering. It wasn't just raw image manipulation—there were digital video loops, geotagged metadata, timestamped receipts, and archived social media pings spanning three full years.

Sarah’s eyes narrowed into dark slits.

"Malibu," Chuck noted casually, taking a bite of his pizza. "The lighting algorithms in the California database are surprisingly easy to match."

Sarah raised her head, locking her icy gaze onto him. "How?"

Chuck gave a mild shrug. "I altered the deep registries. Municipal archives, birth cross-references, regional tax nodes, government health databases. Everything."

He picked up a napkin, wiping his thumb. "Your driver's license is in the system now, too. Fully verified."

Sarah stared at the screen as a digital rendering of a Miami Driver's License popped up. She leaned closer to inspect her face on the ID card, and her expression instantly hardened into stone.

"You gave me braces?" she demanded, her voice dropping into a deadly whisper.

Chuck winced and stepped back. "Well… not currently! It's an archived driver's license photo from when you were younger!"

"You gave me metal braces."

"It's a driver's license photo!" Chuck defended frantically, holding up his hands. "Everyone looks slightly awkward in their teenage driver's license photo! It adds an undeniable layer of bureaucratic authenticity! Those are very convincing braces!"

Sarah stared at him in absolute, speechless astonishment. For five full seconds, the deadly corporate operative was rendered completely speechless by a civilian who had just rewritten national databases to give her a fake past with orthodontic history.

Slowly, deliberately, Sarah lowered her Smith & Wesson Harbinger. She slid the weapon behind a cardboard box near the table, keeping it within easy, split-second reach.

She walked over to the table and sat down.

The vegetarian pizza box was closest to her. She reached out, pulled a slice toward her plate, and then paused. With clinical, meticulous precision, she began picking off the sliced black olives one by one, setting them neatly on the edge of the cardboard.

Chuck watched her, leaning against the counter. "You don't like olives?"

Sarah didn't look up, continuing her task. "No."

Chuck nodded thoughtfully. "Okay. Good to know. So… if anyone asks how long we've been together…"

Sarah looked up at him, her face unreadable.

"Three years," Chuck said, nodding.

"That is completely insane," Sarah stated flatly.

Chuck shrugged smoothly. "That's precisely why the algorithm will accept it. Bureaucracy never questions long-term mundane details."

Sarah looked back down at the terminal screen, watching the forged life history scroll by. The photographs, short video clips, fabricated medical records, and tax filings—an entire, living, breathing identity generated out of thin air and woven into hundreds of secure government databases in less than ninety seconds.

She took a slow bite of her pizza.

Above them, perfectly concealed against the dark ceiling, the Lurker drone remained motionless, its optical sensors silently scanning the perimeter.

Sarah looked across the small table at Chuck Bartowski.

He was casually chewing his pizza, brushing crumbs off his shirt, looking for all the world as if fabricating an entire digital existence for two hunted fugitives was just a mundane, everyday part of a Saturday morning.

For the first time since she had crashed through the window of Nakamichi Plaza, Sarah Walker found herself wondering with absolute, terrifying certainty… who the hell Chuck Bartowski really was.

XXXXXXXXXXX

They continued eating in relative silence, the heavy tension in the condo slowly giving way to the mundane, savory reality of hot food. Lisa happily worked her way through her very first slice of pepperoni pizza.

Chuck lifted another slice of Hawaiian, took a thoughtful bite, chewed slowly, and then froze mid-swallow. His eyes widened as a horrifying realization hit him like a freight train.

"There is one problem, my sister," Chuck announced, lowering his food like a man holding a live grenade. "A massive, glaring, catastrophic problem."

Sarah tilted her head, her blue eyes tracking his sudden shift in posture. She took a neat, measured bite of her pizza before answering. "Why is that a problem?"

"Why is that a problem?" Chuck echoed, his hands gesturing wildly with the slice. "That isn't just a problem, Sarah. That is THE problem."

He lowered his hands to the table and leaned forward urgently. "Look, fabricating digital records? That's child's play. Photos, municipal registries, driver's licenses, birth certificates… That's just raw data. Data can be manipulated. Data doesn't ask awkward questions at Thanksgiving."

Sarah waited quietly, her expression unreadable, though a spark of genuine curiosity flickered in her eyes.

"But Ellie?" Chuck shook his head, a genuine shudder running through his shoulders. "She can't be fooled. You can't rewrite her hard drive."

Sarah raised a single eyebrow. "What?"

"Because she's my sister," Chuck said, as if that were a universal law of physics explaining the entire cosmos. "She knows me. She really knows me. She knows my facial twitches, my nervous habits, and every lie I've tried to tell since third grade. And, more importantly, she has never heard a single syllable about you."

Sarah leaned back slightly against her chair, studying the sheer panic radiating off the man who had just effortlessly rewritten national databases sixty seconds prior. "So?"

"So I can't exactly waltz up to her and casually explain that I've been dating a woman like you for three whole years!"

He gestured vaguely toward Sarah—taking in her sharp, lethal grace, her stunning features, and the faint, lingering shadow of high-level military training.

"Because the second I mention your name," Chuck continued, his voice rising an octave, "Ellie's big-sister radar is going to detonate. She is immediately going to ask where you've been hiding for thirty-six months. Then she's going to ask why I've never mentioned you at family dinners."

He paused, dramatically pointing at Lisa, who was blissfully chewing her crust.

"And then she is going to ask why my apparently drop-dead-gorgeous, secret girlfriend suddenly has a four-year-old little sister who lives with us now."

Sarah looked down at Lisa, then back at Chuck's wide, terrified eyes.

Chuck let out a heavy, weary sigh, resting his forehead in his hand. "See? That's already three life-threatening questions before we even get to the dessert."

The ghost of a smirk twitched at the corner of Sarah's mouth. "Your sister sounds difficult."

"You have no idea," Chuck groaned, sitting back up. "She's an MD. She diagnoses complex internal pathologies for a living. Spotting my terrible cover stories is practically a hobby for her."

He picked his pizza back up, taking a small bite to calm his nerves before his face darkened further. "And then… There's her boyfriend Captain Awesome."

Sarah blinked, pausing mid-reach for her water glass. "Why do you call him that?"

Chuck stared at her as if she had just asked why the sky was blue. "Why wouldn't I call him that?"

Sarah waited, her jaw set in quiet amusement.

"Everything he does is awesome," Chuck explained, counting on his fingers with deep, lingering resentment. "One: LifeLine Medical Team leader in the worst parts of town. Two: Professional-level extreme sports enthusiast. Three: He cooks gourmet meals out of leftover vegetables."

He held up a fourth finger, leaning in close. "Four: Flossing."

Sarah stared at him, genuinely lost. "Flossing?"

"Super flossing," Chuck insisted solemnly, nodding. "It's a thing apparently."

Sarah shook her head, a soft, silent breath escaping her nose as she tried to reconcile this terrified, neurotic civilian with the man who had dragged her through a hail of heavy machine-gun fire twelve hours ago.

Chuck leaned back in his chair and rubbed his aching temples. "Between Ellie's interrogations and Devon's absurdly healthy optimism, they are going to be an absolutely tough nut to crack."

Sarah took another calm bite of her pizza. She watched Chuck for a quiet moment. He looked utterly exhausted—dark smudges lingering beneath his eyes, his hair a messy mop, his shoulders weighed down by the absurd reality they were trapped in. Yet, despite the exhaustion, his analytical mind was still spinning at a hundred miles an hour, desperately trying to map out and solve the next threat before it landed on his doorstep.

It was a strange, dangerous kind of bravery.

Sarah lowered her slice to her plate, her blue eyes softening just a fraction. "One mission at a time, Chuck."

Chuck looked up and met her gaze across the table. The frantic, nervous energy in his face slowly ebbed away, replaced by a quiet, sheepish smile. "Right. Yeah. One mission at a time."

For a long, peaceful moment, neither of them said anything. The condo's quiet warmth settled over them, a tiny sanctuary floating thirteen floors above a city crawling with corporate purgers.

Then Lisa held up her empty paper plate, pointing her tiny finger at the pepperoni box. "Can I have another one?"

Chuck’s face brightened instantly, and a genuine, booming laugh escaped his chest. "See? Finally, someone in this apartment who actually understands proper tactical priorities! Here you go, sweetie, but you should try the one with the ham and mushrooms too."

Sarah shook her head, turning her face slightly toward the rain-slicked window to hide the small, rare smile breaking across her lips.

XXXXXXXXXXX

The sound arrived long before the knock.

It wasn't a gentle sound—it was the heavy, rhythmic thud of pressurized hydraulic joint-actuators and steel-toed combat boots vibrating directly through the floorboards. It was a slow, mechanical cadence that signaled the approach of heavy tactical armor.

Then came the impact.

Three measured, iron-heavy strikes against the reinforced metal face of the front door.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

Inside the apartment, the quiet atmosphere shattered instantly. Lisa’s hand hovered an inch above her paper plate, her childish enthusiasm freezing in a heartbeat.

Chuck swallowed hard, his throat dry as bone. His pulse hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird, but he forced his facial muscles into a mask of mild, civilian annoyance. Deep breaths, Bartowski, he screamed at himself internally. You are just a normal guy. With a normal, yet too-gorgeous girlfriend. And a completely normal, legitimate digital footprint that definitely wasn't forged twenty minutes ago. Boy, hope the biometrics will hold. Please…

Chuck looked across the table at Sarah.

Sarah gave him the smallest, almost imperceptible nod of her chin—an unspoken command to execute the play.

Chuck stood up, his legs feeling a bit like lead, and walked to the door. He unlatched the heavy deadbolt with a deliberate, metallic click and pulled the panel sideways.

Five Rhino enforcement operators filled the narrow corridor.

They didn't look like municipal police officers; they looked like walking war machines, matte black and grey. Sealed ballistic suits, reinforced chest plates, and heavy tactical helmets with dark, polarized visors obscured any trace of human features. They held their weapons in a practiced low-ready, their gear built less like body armor and more like someone had taken a bomb-disposal rig, reinforced it for urban warfare, and handed it to a squad of black-ops purgers.

The operator leading the stack took half a step forward.

"Identification," the lead operator grunted, his voice carrying the synthetic rasp of a vocal modulator.

Chuck straightened, trying to project slightly startled, law-abiding compliance. "Chuck Bartowski. Resident." He pointed an awkward, stiff thumb over his shoulder into the warm light of his living room. "And my girlfriend, Sarah Walker, and her little sister, Lisa Walker."

Behind him, a shadow shifted. Sarah moved.

Chuck’s soul practically left his body. Please don't, he prayed desperately in his head. Please do not try to snap the neck of a guy wearing class-four tactical plating!

Sarah completely ignored the wave of sheer panic radiating off him. She glided past Chuck, stepping into the doorway. She positioned herself directly beneath the hallway's overhead halogen light, allowing the harsh glow to illuminate her features.

She stopped inches from the lead operator's chest plate, looking up at him. "Officer, can I ask you a question?"

The operator tilted his helmet down, his optical sensors and helmet-mounted camera array sweeping her from head to toe.

His visor lingered on the dark, blooming violet-and-green bruises on her. Her posture was rigid, favoring her left flank as she subtly protected it, where fresh, hand-sewn sutures pulled beneath her athletic shirt.

At the same time, a tiny heads-up display inside the operator's helmet processed the automated query pinged to the building's central server. On his screen, Chuck's deep-level hack executed perfectly, flashing a green verification node: VALIDATED: WALKER, SARAH. RESIDENTIAL GUEST. CLEAN RECORD. WALKER, LISA. RESIDENTIAL GUEST. CLEAN RECORD.The connection to the NeoTech subservers was established, but the biometrics file came back corrupted. The Rhino leader took in her battered physical condition, then shifted his gaze to Chuck—who was standing beside her, sweating profusely, eyes wide with manic terror, looking guilty as sin and entirely out of his depth.

"We don't deal with domestic disputes," the operator stated, his voice flat, deadpan, and utterly devoid of empathy.

He didn't wait for an answer. "Unit Four to Control. Apartment 1304 is clear. Moving to 1305."

Without another word, the leader turned his armored back on them. He raised two fingers to signal his squad. The five living tanks turned in crisp, synchronized formation, their heavy boots clanking rhythmically down the carpeted hallway toward the next door.

Silence returned to the threshold of Apartment 1304.

Chuck stood frozen, staring out into the corridor as the heavy thuds moved along.

Inside the quiet apartment, Lisa set her pizza crust back down on her plate and raised a tiny, polite hand in the air. "Can I have more pizza now?"

Chuck slowly closed his eyes, resting his forehead flat against the edge of the open doorframe with a long, wheezing exhale. "Sure, honey…" he whimpered softly into the steel.

Beside him, Sarah remained standing in the doorway, staring down the corridor. For the first time since she had crashed into his life, the lethal, hardened operative looked genuinely, utterly speechless. She—a top-tier corporate black-ops agent recovering from high-explosive shrapnel wounds—had just been completely dismissed by an elite corporate purge squad as the victim of an ugly domestic argument with Chuck Bartowski.

Beside her, Chuck had to bite the inside of his cheek until it nearly bled to keep from bursting into a wild, hysterical fit of terrified laughter and closed the door.