Captain 68

As a former New America captain and now a Barghest member, twenty-six-year-old Carl had never worried about her name—until around the end of 2075, when the mercenary named Carl, who shared her name, burst onto the scene.

Carl, a name meaning "an ordinary person" in English, was an extremely common name in North America.

It was so common that if you casually shouted it on the street, a whole crowd might turn around. But after that other Carl made a name for herself, whenever people mentioned Carl, they thought only of that young woman.

That already world-famous Carl.

Just as when people said "Bonaparte," they first thought of Napoleon I;

Just as when people mentioned "Churchill," Winston Churchill was impossible to avoid.

Sharing a name with a celebrity always gave people the subtle illusion of having "lost" their own name, and Carl of Barghest had also experienced this rare "blessing" of sharing one.

At the end of '75, she was still Carl. In '76, everyone still called her by her full name, because they all knew that the Carl in Night City had Carl as both surname and given name, while her given name was Carl and her surname was Taylor. By the end of '76, people had begun habitually calling her by her former New America rank—Captain—and gradually stopped using her name. Even her surname was rarely mentioned.

Carl Taylor knew she could not blame her familiar friends and colleagues. After all, in Night City nowadays, anyone who suddenly heard "Carl," or that nickname "KK," would get a fright.

No one wanted to suddenly run into KK. It was no different from encountering a ghost while walking alone at night. If someone shouted that name in the middle of the night and, after the initial fright, people found out