The House of the Reaper welcomes Novice Min.
We also welcome Operators Auralie Altham, Nicthered, and Aydehan to our ranks. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
By the time the sun had begun to rise, we had cracked the server. The data held dense and complex biological telemetry and hardware logs, and a handful of files that proved my initial theory regarding the intentional friction between cyberware brands.
Over the next few weeks, my interactions with Kotka evolved into a daily routine. I spent my time in the Net with her whenever I didn't have any physical gigs, testing our code against each other in friendly cyber-skirmishes. And together, we moved from cracking encrypted files to exploring abandoned sectors of the Old Net, which, thinking about it now, was a stupid idea. We ran a great risk just to hunt for pre-Krash artifacts that we never found.
Her brilliance shone through her work. Her coding style clashed entirely with mine, since I relied on overwhelming processing speed and flawless architectural integration. Meanwhile, she relied on chaotic, unpredictable, out-of-the-box logic bombs functioning like digital graffiti. For the first time in my life, I had met my match.
Professional paranoia slowly faded into genuine friendship. We existed as prodigies isolated by our own terrifying potential, finding solace in the only other person speaking our specific language. So, of course, the term "choom" naturally entered our vocabulary.
However, living entirely in the Net held no real appeal to me, and I ached to test my physical capabilities to see how my rewritten firmware functioned in the meatspace under actual duress. I reached out to one of my local fixer contacts, and I picked up a mid-tier retrieval gig in Japantown.
Some Tyger Claw data-broker was operating out of a guarded pachinko parlor. Unfortunately for him, he held my target: a specific shard containing local extortion routes.
I asked mom if she had any plans to go out today, and after getting a no, I took the G240 and drove into Westbrook and parked three blocks away in a dimly lit alley. The rusted exterior of the car drew some attention since the cars were a bit nicer here, however, it wasn't much, and it kind of blended in.
Before stepping out into the neon-lit drizzle, I reached into the glovebox and pulled out a piece of gear I'd recently acquired from a vintage tech vendor. It was a tactical balaclava painted with the stark, grinning visage of a human skull. It originated as a replica piece from an ancient, pre-Krash video game series called Call of Duty. The character who wore it shared my street name, Ghost, and the irony felt too perfect to pass up.
Plus, he was a total badass, and the shit he said was just preem. Shit, I still remember when he got asked if he was ugly under the mask, and the man just responded with "Quite the opposite." And well, I don't know if I'd call myself eye candy, but I was already 6 feet and two inches tall, and Ma called me a handsome young man. And we all know our mothers never lie.
I pulled the balaclava over my face, the synthetic fabric clinging tight to my skin, and flipped the hood of my dark grey jacket up to completely obscure my white hair.
Two chrome gangers guarded the front entrance, maintaining my stride as I approached them. I compiled a Reboot Optics daemon in a fraction of a millisecond and forced it through their localized subnet. The two guards instantly grabbed their faces as their cybernetic eyes plunged into absolute darkness, the daemon crashing their visual drivers.
As they shouted in panic, blindly grasping at the air, I slipped between them and stepped into the loud, flashing chaos of the pachinko parlor.
My HUD highlighted the data-broker in a back room surrounded by three more guards. I moved through the crowd, pretending to join in on the dance and slowly making my way his way. Once I reached the back hallway, I bypassed the biometric lock on the wooden door by short-circuiting the magnetic seal with a localized burst from my deck.
The door slid open, startling the broker and his guards. One guard, wired with a basic reflex booster, reached for his smart-pistol, but the Kerenzikov Boost System engaged before conscious thought could even form.
The world ground to a sudden, viscous halt, freezing the flashing neon lights of the parlor outside the room mid-strobe. The guard's hand moved toward his holster at a slow pace, tracking frame by frame. Individual beads of sweat formed on the broker's forehead. I wished I could have chipped in a Sandevistan. That shit would have accelerated my physical body, turning me into a blur of motion, but I get it, I'm too young for it.
However, being nicknamed the poor man's Sandy wasn't too far off for the Kerenzikov. It flooded my central nervous system with synthetic adrenaline, drastically altering my perception of time rather than my physical speed, and though my body remained bound by human limits, my mind suddenly possessed a vast expanse of time to calculate and act across the Net.
I locked onto the guard drawing the pistol, capitalizing on the time dilation, and compiled a Weapon Glitch and a Short Circuit, targeting his personal link and queueing the commands in my active memory. Shifting my gaze to the second guard, I compiled a Synapse Burnout and routed it directly toward his optics, holding the execution command on a hair-trigger.
I noticed that the third guard, wired with heavier combat chrome, had stepped forward to lunge at me. I analyzed his movement and released the Kerenzikov pulse.
Reality snapped back to its normal speed, and the uploaded daemons executed simultaneously, sending sparks erupting from the first guard's smart-gun grip as his neural processor fried, his eyes rolling back in his head. The second guard dropped his weapon, his hands flying to his temples as the burnout scrambled his visual cortex.
As for the third guard, he was the closest, and I didn't need to hack him. Using the situational awareness the time-dilation had just provided, I had read his telegraphed punch perfectly. I sidestepped his fist, striking him precisely in the carotid artery before twisting his wrist and driving a knee into his solar plexus. He crumpled to the floor silently, his lungs emptied of air.
The data-broker witnessed a skull-faced 6'2 man stroll into the room as his three armed guards collapsed to the floor in the blink of an eye. Scrambling backward in his chair, his face drained of color as he held his hands up in surrender.
"Hand over the fucking shard," I demanded, the thick fabric of the balaclava muffling my voice as I attempted to make it sound deeper than it was.
Fumbling with his pocket, he pulled out the encrypted shard and tossed it onto the desk. I grabbed it, slotted it into my neck port, and verified the data.
"Wise choice. Pleasure doing biz," I muttered, backed out of the door without breaking eye contact with the man, and once I was through, I turned on my heel and slipped back out of the parlor, leaving the blinded guards at the front door still rubbing their eyes. Once I got back into the G240, I pulled down the mask and sent the ignition command through my Neural Link, driving away without raising much of an alarm. Seems like rewriting the code with my own custom firmware didn't have any drawbacks, as it performed flawlessly. The Paraline, the Zetatech Kerenzikov, and the Militech Boost System had worked in seamless harmony.
Once night fell, I returned to the Net and lounged in the shared digital workspace Kotka and I had customized into a virtual replica of a pre-war arcade, complete with glowing neon cabinets and the synthesized sound of 8-bit chiptunes.
"Hey Ghost, I've noticed that you never talk about the meatspace," Kotka said.
Her neon-pink cat avatar draped lazily over the top of a virtual fighting game cabinet. My silhouette leaned against the wall, tossing a digitally rendered coin in the air.
"Nothing much to talk about," I told her. "I live in Rancho. I run gigs. I take care of my mom. That's the whole file."
"Boooooriiiiinnnnng," she teased. "There has to be more to the great and terrifying Ghost than that."
"I pulled a retrieval gig in Japantown today," I offered. "I was testing out the firmware I had written. Shit was preem."
"Okay, that's slightly less boring," she said. "But you're dodging the question."
The coin in my hand vanished, and I looked up at her avatar.
"What about you, Kotka?" I asked. "You poke at my real life, but you keep yours locked behind military-grade ICE. What's your story?"
The feline avatar remained motionless for a long time. The 8-bit music of the arcade seemed to grow louder in the silence, and I assumed I had pushed too far and expected her to sever the connection. Finally, her voice came through the comms, her voice having lost its usual bright, synthesized tone, growing quieter and revealing the very real, very young tone of a teenage girl.
"I live in Heywood," Kotka said quietly. "Not the nice part. The part where the Valentinos and the 6th Street gangers shoot each other over garbage piles."
"I know it well," I nodded.
"I'm fifteen now. But a year ago... when I was fourteen... my mom died," she stated in a downcast tone.
I felt a knot tighten in my actual stomach. I knew that specific, hollow pain intimately since I knew the exact cost of losing a parent to the oh so great City of Dreams.
"I'm sorry, choom," I said.
"Don't be. Pity has never brought anyone back, and it's not going to start now that you've shown it," she replied, her digital tail flicking aggressively. "She worked as a baseline civilian processing data and had received some minor neural implants to help with her job. She went to a budget ripperdoc, mixed some cheap brands, and her body started rejecting them. The neural pain grew excruciating."
Listening intently, the pieces of the puzzle slowly began aligning in my mind.
"So she went to a clinic," Kotka continued, her voice trembling with tightly controlled anger. "They prescribed her a painkiller, some Biotechnica drug called Securicine. Standard issue to stop the rejection and manage the stress."
"I've seen some ads on them," I murmured. "They push them hard for anyone with entry-level chrome."
"Yeah, well, the drug didn't fix the problem, Ghost," Kotka snapped. "The mixed chrome caused something in her head, and the Securicine just numbed her brain's ability to cope with it. And I think it did more than that... I think it actively ate away at her slowly. Her memory started going. Then her motor functions. And she just... withered away..."
The pink cat avatar hopped down from the arcade cabinet and paced slowly across the virtual floor.
"She died right there in our tiny apartment," Kotka said bitterly. "She just wasted away in her own bed, and the city's automated med-techs wrote it off as a tragic biological rejection. A statistical anomaly. But I knew my mom. Her brain didn't naturally reject the chrome. I swear to you, the Securicine killed her, and I just know it... I just know it in my heart that Biotechnica knew the drug caused the neurodegradation that killed her... I don't have any proof right now, but I know it. The real data is probably locked behind thick corpo ICE. Behind some servers which we'd have to physically interact with to get the pharmaceutical R&D files."
She had no proof. It was just the dark, gnawing suspicion of a grieving daughter. But as I stood there in the virtual arcade, I realized we didn't need the pharmaceutical files to understand the first half of the trap.
"Kotka," I said quietly. "The neural pain your mother felt... the friction that made her need the pills in the first place. It wasn't an accident, and I doubt it was a biological rejection."
The neon cat stopped pacing and looked up at my shadowy silhouette. "What are you talking about?"
"I told you I was looking into inefficiencies in my own hardware," I explained, the weight of the last two weeks of coding settling heavily over me. "When I dug into the firmware of my deck and my reflex tuner, I found background subroutines with behavioral modifiers. My chrome was actively fighting itself for bandwidth."
"Deliberate incompatibility," she whispered, catching on instantly.
"Exactly," I confirmed. "From what I saw, it's pretty clear that the megacorps intentionally design their ecosystems to reject each other so that when a civilian mixes chrome from different budget brands, the firmware generates digital friction. The brain naturally tries to bridge the gap to make the hardware function, which would probably cause constant neural pain and spikes cortisol levels."
"Which drives them straight to the clinics," Kotka said, her digital voice dropping to a horrified hush. "And the clinics prescribe the Securicine."
"Send me everything you have on the gray-market clinic logs we just cracked," I instructed. "We're going to map it out."
Kotka and I operated in a state of obsession for the rest of the night. We utilized my massive processing power and her chaotic investigative algorithms to run cross-references, tracking the data patterns of patients who entered clinics with mixed-brand hardware.
The conspiracy we uncovered ran so deep into the fabric of Night City's economy that it was unbelievable.
Sitting together in the virtual arcade, we stared at a colossal holographic corkboard covered in red digital string. It connected thousands of documents, clinic intake forms, and firmware updates. Kotka brought up a secondary file, projecting a glowing graph derived from the clinic data showing the staggering prescription volume of Securicine across the lower-income sectors of the city.
"Since the painkillers just numb the brain's ability to feel the friction," Kotka said, staring at the numbers. "It creates a physical dependency. The corps intentionally sell incompatible hardware that causes excruciating pain, and then the pharmaceutical divisions drain bank accounts selling the drugs needed to endure it. And if my theory about Securicine is right, the 'cure' is pushing the lower classes straight into early graves. No surviving victims to prove their wrongdoing, no problem for them."
A cold fury crystallized in my chest as I stared at the data.
"And I'm guessing the corporate elites don't have to worry about this, right?" I asked, letting her come to the conclusion I had already come to.
"I ran a diagnostic simulation on a unified corporate package," she replied, bringing up a set of code modeling an executive suite. "Buying an entire ecosystem from a single corporation and using only their hardware keeps the behavioral modifier dormant. The system runs perfectly with no friction or neural pain... Which means no need for Securicine."
"The rich stay healthy because they can afford the unified ecosystem," I murmured, the injustice burning like acid. "And the poor, forced to mix budget chrome, get pushed into a meat-grinder."
"It's an economy of suffering," Kotka concluded.
Taking the Galena down to an open-air market in Santo Domingo the next day to grab some specific soldering wire, I found myself analyzing the crowds rather than just observing them.
I noticed a dock worker haggling with a vendor over the price of synthetic noodles. The man possessed a cheap, Dynalar-brand cyberarm and a basic Kiroshi optic implant. His organic eye twitched wildly as he argued, and his breathing remained shallow, all the while he kept rubbing his temples as if fighting off a migraine. I quickly ran a passive scan on his bio-monitors.
He had spiked cortisol levels, an erratic heart rate, and he suffered from severe digital friction between his incompatible implants. My scanner also picked up a half-empty bottle of corporate-mandated painkillers in his jacket pocket. He was degrading and only existed as a ticking time bomb, completely unaware of the countdown.
The reality of my own anomaly hit me. Yeah, I wasn't naturally immune to the friction since I had felt it myself as that microscopic stutter. But my Neural Link and unique neuroplasticity had allowed me to detect the deliberate sabotage before it could cause any real neural damage or pain. Because my brain operated at zero latency, I possessed the raw processing power to perceive the malicious code, tear it apart, and rewrite the subroutines to establish perfect harmony between my mixed chrome. But I was an anomaly.
Walking back to my car, the weight of the truth I knew pressed down on my shoulders. Armed with so much processing power at just fourteen years old, I found myself staring at a systemic machine designed to feed on human suffering for profit, fully aware that the millions of people around me lacked the knowledge or the eddies to fight back.
Meeting Kotka back in our virtual arcade later that night required a specific resolve.
"What can we do with the data we have, Kotka?" I asked.
"Nothing. Having it isn't enough," she replied. "Dumping it on the Net just means the corporate media will spin it as a conspiracy theory and it'll be buried under braindance celebrity gossip within an hour."
"Yeah, fair enough," I said. "Dumping the files won't change the firmware, and it might actually just paint a target on us."
"One day, we'll be sharp enough to drag this out of the dark," Kotka said with a resolve in her voice. "We're going to find the proof about the Securicine, and we're going to burn them with their own data."
"Count on it," I agreed. "For now, I think it'd be best to stay under the radar, keep earning scratch, and upping our skills."
Severing the connection, I opened my eyes in the meatspace. I allowed my senses to acclimate to the sounds around me until I could hear the hum of the solar panels vibrating gently through the walls of my home. My mother slept safely down the hall, unburdened by the crushing debt that had once defined her life.
I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling. I knew that exposing the truth wouldn't stop anything. A screamsheet headline wouldn't save the dock worker at the market, and it wouldn't bring Kotka's mother back. The megacorps held all the power, enforcing a rigid line between total dependence and absolute suffering.
The only way to stop the meat-grinder involved fixing the machine itself. But the thought of becoming a Corpo-rat repulsed me. This whole ordeal reminded me of Laguna Bend, but a billion times worse.
I made a silent, unshakeable vow right then and there. If I really wanted to help people, I know not everyone would be able to afford to take the steps I took. But maybe if I wrote a universal bridge, some sort of open-source firmware update functioning like a patch that would lessen the impact on users.
Maybe I'd build a cure to force conflicting corporate hardware into seamless communication, bypassing their malicious behavioral modifiers entirely. Once complete, I would embed it deep into the independent ripperdoc networks, purifying the system from the inside out.
But to do such a thing would require years of intense study, reverse-engineering proprietary software, and dangerous real-world testing that wouldn't need me to personally spend weeks rewriting firmware for each and every victim. The complexity of this ambitious goal of mine bordered on the impossible, but shit, I've already made the impossible a reality by making my mother work and stress-free at just fourteen.
I chose to keep this decision entirely to myself, sparing Kotka the burden of what amounted to an impossible crusade. I would walk the razor's edge alone. I would carry the weight of this knowledge into every gig, calculating the cost of power, building myself up step by step to one day make a real change. After all, this is the fucking City of Dreams, isn't it?
---
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