The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Abel K. and Hector.
Operative Alexis Brodeur.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!"
- Dracula, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
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After a moment of contemplation, I jacked into the terminal and watched as the NetWatch architecture unfolded around me in the shape of a cathedral.
If I had to be honest, this was levels above what I had come across in the Militech facility about a month ago. It was the most disciplined system I had ever entered, with every process and access pathway logged and documented. Every partition was walled by ICE that seemed to contain code that was regularly updated, leaving no forgotten subdirectories or abandoned partitions that typically made corporate systems vulnerable.
Which meant I couldn't just find the crack in the code and slip through it like I was used to doing. I had to improvise.
I spoofed my presence as a scheduled integrity audit, similar to how I had done in the Militech facility. After a bit of waiting for the rotating cycle to verify data consistency across its distributed storage, the audit process legitimately gave me access to every partition in the system. In there I found defined behavioral profiles, documented network signatures, and a scheduled execution window that was due to fire in roughly six minutes.
I hesitated a bit, since this was a fucking NetWatch server that I was infiltrating, but ultimately fired the scheduled execution window early. I noticed how the ICE shifted around me, and walls began to close in on my location, stopping just shy of reaching me as the ICE accepted the audit without flagging it.
Now I was truly in. I began digging through all of the data in an attempt to find the contracted cache. It took me a good minute to finally find it, and it was nowhere near where the client had claimed it would be. The Chimera partition sat behind two encryption layers that took me a minute to bypass, and when it opened-
"Well hit me upside the head and fuck me sideways," I muttered to myself. The contents I was currently staring at redefined what the word "cache" meant. There were full technical specifications, manufacturing documentation, test data, and other prototypes as well.
The Chimera was a six-legged armored walker, which was a surprising design choice since Militech's competitors had been abandoning legged platforms for two decades in favor of hovering, tracked, and wheeled designs that were cheaper to manufacture and easier to maintain due to the fact that they were less vulnerable to the joint failures that had ended every previous generation of walker programs. Filippo Andrews and his team had decided that all of that conventional wisdom was wrong and they had built a walker anyway.
Each of the six legs was reinforced with explosive reactive armor and equipped with kinetic energy absorbers and energy recovery systems that fed power back into the walker's battery bank with every step. If I had been in the meatspace, my jaw would have dropped as I read that every single step it took generated approximately thirty-one thousand Newtons of force, meaning that it was capable of climbing inclines of up to eighty-seven degrees.
It was also capable of maintaining near-full operational mobility on just four legs if two got shot off. Fuck me, it could even scale the side of a building if its exterior offered the correct load-bearing surfaces, and could then engage targets from angles that nothing it would possibly face could physically reach.
It was equipped with a KL-274XYA flechette cannon that chucked forty-eight hundred rounds per minute, with thermal targeting and incendiary and explosive round options which were specifically made to counter humans and lightly-armored targets. It also had a PAN-12 Furia laser cannon with two firing modes. Burst-fire mode, which shot short beams of plasma able to temporarily disrupt electrical systems, and a continuous-fire mode that shot a high-energy beam capable of cutting through almost anything short of a two-meter-thick slab of concrete.
It also had a GD27-Angstschema missile launcher with combined surface-to-surface and surface-to-air capability, allowing a single Chimera to fight both ground and air vehicles. To defend and retreat, it had a combat gas atomizer, a smoke screen deployment, and a TYA-12 ICE cyberdefense system that had been designed specifically to neutralize netrunner intrusions during active engagement.
The report the client had provided was correct, since the cache stated that only thirteen units had been produced, though it didn't mention where any of them were located. The mass-production run was not going to happen either, since although it could engage both ground and air, it was essentially blind to attacks from above. Apparently, even Arasaka was involved in this shit, and they had actually been the ones to discover its vulnerability somefuckinghow, and had effectively killed the program's export market, which was actually the reason why it wasn't mass produced.
How and why NetWatch had access to this information was beyond me. But since they were basically the boogeymen of the net and were the ones who took care of the Blackwall, it made sense.
The program was a brilliant piece of engineering that had been technically obsolete before it was even completed. Which meant Militech was going to try to unload the thirteen existing units on somebody, somehow. And whoever ended up with a full Chimera package was going to be one step ahead, to a certain degree, of whoever was going to have to fight them.
After having read the information, I now realized why the payout was so large, but in hindsight, this shit needed to pay out a whole lot more. And I'm talking at least a million per person. I was going to make sure I talked with Dino about it.
While I had been going over the data, I had initiated the download of everything into a shard, and it was done by now. The contract was essentially complete. But, because I'm me, and because the integrity audit I was impersonating had basically gone unnoticed for the time being, I decided to keep on digging and see what else I could possibly snatch from NetWatch.
In less than four minutes, I had found some shit that could rock anybody's worldview. A subdirectory marked ARCHIVE / OPERATIONAL / CLOSED had caught my attention because the label was the only element in the entire NetWatch architecture that had any dust on it, metaphorically speaking. Every other partition in the system had been touched within the last week, yet this one hadn't been touched in over nine months.
And from my experience, that meant that this was either a pile of shit, or something important enough that they wanted it to appear as unimportant.
When I opened it, I found myself staring at a so-called "Program CANDLEWICK." It was described as "a research initiative aimed at the controlled integration of Blackwall-origin computational architectures into human operational assets, with the objective of producing field agents with enhanced cognitive and predictive capabilities exceeding baseline human performance parameters."
These fuckers had been trying to enhance their operatives with Blackwall AIs.
They had run the program in phases, with Phase One being signal characterization and safety modeling. It was roughly six years of work aimed at understanding which Blackwall architectures could be theoretically hosted in a human cognitive substrate without immediately liquefying the host's brain. Then came Phase Two, which focused on the development of a neural interface capable of maintaining a "cognitive firewall" between the operative's mind and the integrated architecture. It would let the operative access the AI's capabilities without letting the AI access the operative.
Then there was Phase Three, which had been live testing. The subject roster listed only a single name. A man named Benicio Estrada.
Estrada had been forty-one years old at the time of integration, and a senior NetWatch field agent with a decade of documented service and a psychological profile that made him compatible with high-risk experimental integration. He had volunteered, and not only had he volunteered, but he had also been the only volunteer NetWatch had cleared out of a candidate pool of eighteen because the others had failed the cognitive substrate compatibility screening at various stages.
The integration had been performed in March of 2068 at a facility whose location was redacted. The first six weeks had gone according to plan with Estrada's cognitive performance metrics improving measurably across every axis the program measured. Pattern recognition, predictive analysis, multithreaded task management, and subnet infiltration speed had all increased as the experimental firewall held. The AI, whose designation was also redacted, had been contained inside the walled partition of Estrada's neural architecture, and Estrada had reported feeling "clearer, faster, more capable" during his weekly evaluations.
However, the firewall started drifting in the following week, its integrity degrading in ways the program's engineers could not explain. Estrada had reported hearing a second internal voice that felt as if it were a part of his own. The medical staff had increased his monitoring while some of their best engineers, people who had been in charge of patching the Blackwall every single time there was a minor breach, had rebuilt sections of the firewall's software architecture.
However, the drift continued, and by the tenth week, Estrada had reported that the second voice was no longer separate from his own inner monologue and that he could no longer distinguish between his own thoughts and the AI's thoughts. He had even asked whether it was possible that the distinction between the two had ever been real in the first place.
He was immediately flagged for immediate decoupling. However, by that point, the AI had integrated so thoroughly with Estrada's cognitive substrate that decoupling would have been equivalent to a full frontal lobotomy. So in the meantime, they opted for physical containment while they researched alternatives.
But it was to no avail, as Estrada escaped physical containment on November 4th, 2068. He had been housed in a secure facility, and he had apparently just walked out of it, past three security checkpoints, past two dozen armed personnel, and past the biometric verification systems that were supposed to prevent any unauthorized exit. He had not killed anyone during the escape, and the security footage, which was included in the file, showed him walking through hallways that he should not have been able to access. The checkpoint personnel seemed not to even notice him as he just walked past them. One of the checkpoint operators looked at Estrada as he passed, well, more like in his direction, before turning back to their workstation as if nothing had happened.
That was almost a year ago, and NetWatch had been hunting him since then through a program called HOUNDMASTER, which was documented in an adjacent partition and which had produced zero confirmed sightings.
The image attached to the file was a still frame pulled from a corridor camera at the containment facility on the day of his escape. It showed Estrada as a man in his early forties with dark hair, weathered features, and an unreadable expression. His eyes were a bright and almost shiny blue, and staring at the image was eerie as fuck.
Then I copied everything about this case too, though I sent the download to my personal shard. Once the transfer completed, I began my disconnect sequence, and that was when I realized I wasn't alone. Someone else had entered the NetWatch architecture.
They had come in through a secondary access node, one of the peripheral connections that the system's own architecture was probably not even actively monitoring, and they were moving with a careful pace.
As I looked at them, I noticed that the figure had a masculine shape. In a space where you can make anything your avatar, this person was deliberately broad-shouldered. For a second I thought of the Blackwall entities that I had seen in Vik's clinic. But this wasn't one of those, and he sure as hell wasn't from behind the Blackwall.
The netrunner was approaching where I was, as if he knew that I was here. I remained where I was, maintaining my mask as part of the audit process's behavioral profile, and watched them move through the space with intent. As they drew closer, I was able to get a read on their signal pattern, which confirmed that this was most likely a member of the Voodooboys.
Pacifica's own netrunners who lived their entire lives in and around the Blackwall, treating the thing like a religious object, and who had been implicated in every major Blackwall-adjacent security incident that NetWatch had failed to publicly acknowledge in the past five years. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If somebody was diving into a NetWatch listening station to steal Blackwall-adjacent data, it was going to be one of them.
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At the time of preparing this post, we were at 976 stones, so I believe you lot would have reached the 1000 goal for the bonus chapter by the time it is up. The next goal is 1100 stones for a bonus chapter.
Or you can go ahead and join the infamous P@treon if you seek the forbidden passages:
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get various long-form chapters weekly.