As I quickly left Rebecca and Pilar's place, Keanu Reeves stared down at me from the side of a building and for half a second my brain remembered he is a semi-dead rock star here. Jump-scare, but then again it's just graffiti. If this fucker moves I'm killing myself.
I found myself flat broke yet again. Drinks and tips and wasted eddies, all gone. The bounty payout wasn't incoming for another few days, if it was coming at all.
I could feel the stress of extreme budgeting come again, and this time I will get ahead of it. Soylent bars are an abomination but it's all I can afford and even those will only last a week. Time to tap in strategic reserves.
After a long bus ride where I took a nap to rest my head, I arrived back at Sprocket & Wires. A construction crew was doing something with the front wall, scaffold, paint, more patchwork over the old pieces of concrete.
Sprocket sat on the hood of her car near the entrance, watching over the crew fixing up her shopfront.
"No work for a while, huh?" I said, like it didn't mean zero stable income for me.
"And you were out celebrating," she said, flat. She could most likely smell everything.
"Work related. Middle-aged women wouldn't get it," I said. Explaining shit to her won't make a difference anyway.
"Why are you just watching over? Don't they have a guy to do that?" I nodded toward the crew, toward the one holding the ladder steady, the one up high adjusting something, and the three nagging what should be done, using mostly curse words.
Sprocket began tapping with her fingers on the hood of her Quadra. "This shop's the only thing I have. So I watch it."
I didn't answer. I went past the scaffolding into the back where my room was. The five guys didn't notice. I shut the door behind me and tried filtering out the outside noise. I went over to my little hiding spot and took out the cred chips looted from Nick, the bastard who died like a dog in here before the mercs.
Even with the internal security of my software it clearly is not enough for comfort, and Spiker I spent a grand on is also gone, so improvisation it is. While I sat down on my mattress I remembered the softness of the actual bed I woke up in today. This is not it.
When I opened my door a construction crew was right outside talking about the cracked concrete nearby.
I step out, nod. One looks at me and says, "Who the fuck are you?"
I say, "I work here. I just came in a few minutes ago."
Another one squints in suspicion. "Man, I don't know. My brother-in-law got tricked on a construction site recently, fuckin' fired him on the spot."
"Yeah, no, you can ask Sprocket just outside."
"Sure we can. But isn't the business closed while we are here? Man—"
"Listen, you should really go and ask her."
"I get it, but it's really just so that we don't get fired."
"Is it on us? Our contract is pretty good?" asks one of the workers.
"More of an expectation of a good worker, isn't it?" answers the other.
"Oh, I totally get that, but you are really just kinda in my face."
Man backs off.
"Oh sorry, just, uh—I really need this job."
"Yeah, no worries," I say. "SPROCKET, DO I WORK HERE?"
"NO SHIT!" she screams from outside.
Other construction workers nod.
"At this point, yeah, if something does go missing—"
"Yeah, I mean, it's on her."
"Totally on her."
"Don't mind me then," I said and went over to the pile of car electronics that were stored for future replacements. I took one of the better consoles and took it with me back to the room and some wires.
The thing was, every decent car had a shard slot in them, and with enough finesse I could probably make one into a buffer that would increase the odds of me not getting cyber-AIDS.
I clip a bridge connector to the functioning console and insert my personal port. Everything's offline except me and the RAVEN. The chips slot in. Sixteen locks each. Bulky encryption. Slow readouts, all things considered. The console didn't get much of a throughput.
If I want cash now I need more juice. I think about Sasha's notes. Reboot, factory reset, push RAM, push CPU. I set the RAVEN to a modest overclock. That makes the process about forty percent faster without the temperature going up more than a few degrees, but going above forty degrees Celsius would cause permanent damage to my already fucked up cells. The whole process took some time, but documentation cut down the guessing about what to adjust.
In a few minutes of trying I finally got the rhythm of cracking a lock on the cred chip and a small amount of money came into my account after claiming the unique encoder. Twelve bucks per lock on this one it is.
After getting the first one done I took a break, splitting headache, and decided to get myself something to drink. But the cred sticks are really easy to crack once I got the hang of it.
Cracking open a drink, I gulped it down. Because it got warm it felt awful going in. A fridge is a must.
I took the first one out of the console and inserted the second one; they had the same pattern, but this one had only ten bucks per segment.
After getting all of them I became the proud owner of 528 eurodollars. At the end there I managed to crack a segment in only six seconds. Adaptive AI does wonders.
After looking at the structure of the chips I notice that they barely have the space for the encryption, much less malicious hacks, but maybe it varies model to model. Next time, if the same model has the same number of bits, I could probably skip the buffer device.
I then got out of my shabby room and found that the workers had gone out to lunch, it seems. Sprocket and her car are also gone. I decided to make a quick run for food myself, even if my appetite was shit for now.
After I got back from a local convenience store I plopped my haul on the counter and grabbed a chair for myself. While I eat I check the news as always.
Among the usual mass killings there are The Night City Journal names Somalia the #1 tourism destination of 2075, and the emergence of some local freak who dresses in a somewhat colorful skintight suit in Little Japan, "saving people." In reality he is just going on a killing spree against gangs. Someone has gone cyberpsycho, I see.
I then logged into the BBS to browse for the things I pinned down, and most of them were already off the market. But the overall saturation of things to buy and sell increased yet again. Filtering them out was a chore, and I wonder if it's possible to inject yourself with the condensed information of it all and not sift through it like a monkey.
Hmm. There are training chips that hijack your neural pathways to make you proficient in things, but they are usually fine-tuned for that. If it's not possible in 2075 then it's probably not possible at all.
After a while of pinning down the offers for living spaces and data packs I switch to the less popular category for a quick glance: bounty board.
In the netrunner space it's rarely about the pure killing of the target; most are focused on offering money for the location of the target or targets. It's a big city.
I checked out for myself for good measure, found nothing thankfully, and stumbled across a bounty to locate a freak and his family, the one who kills gangs in Little Japan. A thousand just for a location?
Too bad I'm not going back to Little Japan for that. I'd rather not interact with a cult. Speaking of that, their website did get actual secure protocols, which meant I could not snoop around in the private rooms. But the general activity was on the rise again; this time they were collecting money for a new Tech Orthodoxy church in Watson.
Then suddenly I received a message from Sasha: "u up? :3"
"It's 2 pm. ???"
"Still cranky? I hashed things out with Becca, btw. Buy some undies. And maybe cut down on your drinking."
"I will be fine. Didn't you order alcohol when we first met?"
"Just one drink. Totally different. Let's meet at Yoko's, I have news."
"Already ahead of you."
I browsed for longer waiting for her to log on. At that time I finished all my food and went back to my room to lie down. But first, I should probably change clothes. Totally forgot.
Then I got transported to her location by her powers of an admin. This time it was a virtual garden of sorts. Very rough looking, but certainly a Japanese-style garden, even a zen garden with stones. Didn't know this place had something like that.
As I walked a little, looking around, I received a neural input that someone was poking me in the back in a way. I turned around and saw Sasha in her pink-cat form.
"Change your avatar, it's ugly."
"Yeah, no, it costs money. What is this place?"
"Oh, Yoko tried making it a few years back. School project if you will, but never really caught on. It's really tough to portray nature in this space. BDs just work better."
I looked over the bonsai tree behind her. It looked good as light played with it. Sasha turned to look at it too.
"Imported model, not hers."
"Anyways, what's the news?"
Sasha immediately put up two fingers of her cartoony cat. "Good news and bad news. Which one do you want?"
"Let's start with the bad."
"Okay, so not providing you info for a while; maybe ask Yoko, but she will probably charge you for the trouble."
"Ok, I can manage. Why is that?"
"Good news: our big job is a go. I'm going to be busy as all hell preparing for it because this time the whole operation relies on me."
"Big leagues, huh?" I ask.
Every potential thing that is going to come up is potentially the thing that makes her not appear in the story as I know it anymore.
"Sure are. While you and Becca were drinking we actually met up with our fixer and we got the final deets. That creepy guy sure has his ways to get what he needs."
Maine's gang main fixer was Faraday, a corp asset, traitorous fucker with four eyes. Literally. He poses as an independent fixer.
"Mind sharing, what's the gig?"
"Not going into details but we are infiltrating a corp building for data. Been preparing for this for a while."
"And… Sasha, what's your part in it?"
"Oh, I'm the one infiltrating. Our fixer got us a way to get a jammer that will shut down every outgoing security signal. I go in, decrypt the data, and leave."
I have a feeling that that is one hundred percent super-fucking-dangerous.
"And you are sure it's going to work out? Against a corp?"
"We got this Caelen. We are mercs; it's our specialty to get dangerous gigs done."
"Not what I meant."
"Then what does it mean?"
I took my time to think how to phrase this. Thinking about my first meeting with her in the BBS, I'm reminded that Biotechnica was the name that popped up on some file names. And they are by no means weak.
"I just think sending a netrunner off the team headfirst can be avoided. Does the jammer block everything?"
"No? It's going to be tuned specifically for the outgoing security alarms."
"Then send a big sturdy guy like Maine to get inside and just get the data with your help."
"We obviously considered that, but even someone like him will have trouble with the passive security in that building. Disabling it as you go is far faster than bulldozing it with guns. Jammer will not work for long."
"Okay, two big guys in. Others guard the jammer. How does that sound?"
"What are you doing? Do you think I'm not capable?" she said in both an amused and angry tone.
"I just think… there are smarter ways to go about this."
"Okay mister-gets-shot-every-week. We already planned this gig out and this is the optimal solution."
"Hey! All of those are actually because I got involved with you."
"Well... it's somewhat true."
"I'm trying to help you out here since we have a deal and I want to see it through."
"I'm not going to die, you don't even know how much chrome I'm packin'," Sasha says confidently.
"'I'm not going to die'—every person that says that dies."
"Clearly projecting," she said.
"You know what, I said what I said, but know what, catch this."
I threw her a file which I created the other day for fun, a zip bomb of exabytes of junk data, a clear upgrade of the college pranks in terms of effect.
Sasha holds the data package in her hand. "Secret_data.zip, what's this?" and opens it, making her avatar freeze for a second and her glitch out and log out of the BBS.
That moment I got transported back; I found myself in the market area. I looked over my pinned listings and decided to spend almost all of my remaining money on a data wall, commonly referred to as a brick, for 500 eddies. I logged out for the day.
Updating data walls was a constant chore for netrunners and most preferred to buy in bulk from trusted sources. I bought a decent one to break, study, and flood the market with my own. If I bought too good of a data wall I doubt I could extract anything useful from it.
Breaking a data wall is hard because of the amount of false backdoors, changing structures, and overall massive amount of information. But it's just a matter of time in a way; no defence is ever perfect. I fired up the overclock and started hacking away at it carefully enough not to corrupt the data.
That moment I got a message from Sasha: "You won't get me like that again. You started a war you cannot win."
Seems like she rebooted her system, and considering current specs of hardware it's highly unlikely her system would be damaged from that.
"get gud."
Sasha's answer was a single angry-cat emoji. Seems like she is not that angry.
I spent the whole evening holed up, sifting through every bit of information, but I couldn't figure out what half of the functions did. Every few milliseconds a small cluster of data was counting up, and I did not find a link to what it affected.
But overall the data wall tried acting as other processes to mask its purpose from autonomous tools like AI, which seemed useful, but who is going to think that the constant process that sat on top of the firewall was a hologram controller.
Two days passed as I studied the data walls for nearly sixteen hours a day. It was tiring, and the days of construction noises outside did not make the process easier.
Sprocket came to watch a few hours a day before driving away. And the construction guys actually shared the food that they brought whenever it was lunchtime.
I had considered going around and looting the vending machines for food, but it really boosted my mood to eat something better. Great guys. I talked with them from time to time, and it turns out they were paid a shit-ton for this job, and got paid fifty percent advance to do a real quality job. Two of them were sending their kids to college with this money.
After the first day they all had guns on them after I told them what happened here briefly.
By the second day I did make considerable progress on the data walls and their make. I even began trying to do my own versions.
I set up two new data walls and did them right, not some lazy copy-paste junk, actual unique structures, oddball entropy patterns, timing gaps in the handshake with the custom number generator that works off like cloudfire but with absolutely chaotic neural impulses instead of lava lamps.
Took longer than I thought. Took a lot more to actually make them into a proper structure. But with the help of Yoko, we pushed them into the right channels and found two buyers who actually wanted something cheap that would hold for a minute or two from passersby.
Five hundred eurodollars hit my account. It felt like winning the lottery for five minutes. Bought another data wall straight away to learn further.
Yoko did tell me that with time, once he gets good traction, they can raise the prices. And she tested my data walls; sure it took her a few seconds to get each one, but the base was there. You could not sell the same data wall multiple times over, very against the rules and a bad practice, but I sure kept the copies to myself.
The work was tedious in the best way. You build something and then you test it until you can't stand looking at it anymore. Then you tweak the entropy, move a pointer, change a garbage callback. A proper data wall is a tiny, ugly cluster of data you keep bashing against until it gives up.
I later received a message from Sasha: "Good brick :3."
Fuck. She bought one to hack me faster.
When Monday came, I received 710 eurodollars from the bounty. Came from a short message: "Claim processed."
It was enough for me to finally move from this garage, since construction was not the best ambient noise for work.
But first I decided to stop by Vik and get another boxing session going, but this time Vik did bring along Jackie. That man beat the shit out of me. He actually got me on the ropes in a training session. We are in different weight categories, how is that fair?
Jackie was a good guy, but he really was into beating me up. I left that basement gym like a torture chamber.
Afterwards I asked Vik for basic supplies: bouncebacks, a pair of meddocs, a topical synth-bandage satchel. Sure it was a little pricey and had not nearly the effect like that in the game, but the package of drugs in a bounceback made sure to keep you going even if your legs get chopped off. That's what Vik told me at least.
The week turned into a grind. Data walls sold here and there, trimmed-down a quickhack every so often. Made enough space to fit another one. I found an overheat quickhack, cheap knockoff but Yoko said that it works almost always, just really bad against robots.
Bought it. That thing would surely be useful. Fire is more scary than effective against people here anyways.
I had gone to actually making three or four data walls per day, but eventually Yoko told me to tone it down since it brings the price down too much and suggested I price them higher but limit it to two a day.
I spent a lot, but I also earned a lot. So it evened out to a point where I had around a thousand on me.
During this week I went to train with Vik twice; this time Jackie had other plans. After the last session I decided to get to his clinic for a quick checkup.
Something weird was showing up. Neural tissue had grown over several other implants. Not full encapsulation, not yet, but enough that future upgrades could fight with what my body had already staked claim to. Vik didn't sugarcoat it.
"You feel anything off?" he asked, fingers moving on the pad.
"No. Maybe a little tingle once in a while, but only during high load."
"Good. But this," he tapped an image on the pad, "means we can't just shove chrome in and hope it stays. Less intrusive is better. Or you'll have rejection issues down the line. This kind of reaction is fairly common, but not with this speed."
I asked about options for protection. He pushed a list across the screen: subdermal plates. Bone mesh. Expensive. All of it required a lot of intrusion.
Then he said it plainly: "Bioware is the only thing I'm fairly confident in that won't cause a major issue."
Skin weave. Vik explained it in plain speech, threaded fibers carried by nanites through the superficial layers of skin, strengthening tissue without making you look like a walking lizard. Not perfect. Barely visible. But it gives you light armor without a visible vest. The best version available could even heal itself over time. I decided to get myself the top of the line on most of my body.
The procedure was slow as nanites integrated themselves into my skin. The first day my entire body felt as if I was covered in a film or a shell. Two days in, I felt tightness across my back as my skin tightened slowly.
I learned to run my fingers along my forearm and not freak out when the texture had a hint of wrongness. Vik said the whole process will take weeks to fully complete.
Two more walls were sold, this time 430 per brick. And I managed to tweak overheat just a little. I had a few grand sitting in small transfers.
That's when I bought information about a secure hideout on a maintenance floor in a skeleton building near the old business strip. It was empty, bare fluorescent lights and dust. A place where nobody cared if someone went up and down stairs at night.
I moved some of my belongings there, rigged the same old shotgun shells above the entrance, and left the ladder in place. Fire stairs, top floor access, HVAC ducts that fed into a rooftop that had lines of sight but also places to hide. Yoko promised that the seller is trustworthy, and she is telling that — it better be so.
The garage changed. The place looked stripped-down and organized. I have a feeling Sprocket is going to sell. She would not care otherwise.
I bought myself a fairly cheap assault rifle, a D5 Copperhead. It set me back around half a thousand with the strap so I could hide it on my back. Also installed a false floor panel in my locker in my new place. Paranoid? Rational.
Then I also found an old rusty bathtub in the lower floors, but I had no ice and hauling the ice bags up here is a chore. God, I want a fridge.
Sasha popped in periodically on the BBS. She wasn't there for fun; she was there for work. But she did try to prank me when we were on at the same time. Once she uploaded a daemon as a joke; it wiped a test wall I'd been proud of, then laughed and told me to "get gud."
She had a monowire upgrade, crystalline edging. She sent me a short clip, all clean light of a clinic, and the wire cut down a stack of paper just by grazing it. "New toy," she said. "Exclusive augment."
Tonight was the job. Sasha told me they were locked and ready.
When she disconnected I did as well and sat in my new place on the bare floor, thinking.
The truth is? I didn't want to watch her go into something like this and not be able to do anything about it. Not because I'm noble, but because I'm able to prevent the most obvious death in history for my benefit. She said "I'm not going to die" line for fuck's sake.
Fuck you, twisted world. I know what you are doing. And I got my own plans.
Saving Sasha once got me this far, two times and I got myself an ally for life, however short it may be.
The best outcome? I stand there like an idiot waiting to rush in to help. She is confident. But confidence means nothing against someone like Adam Smasher.
I get up, gather my things, close the door behind me, and climb down the fire escape stairs to the street with everything ready.