Tales from Neon Black - No Heroes in Prime City

Another bit of microfiction inspired by my cyberpunk game and the Writer Emergency Pack. Today's card was "Kill the Hero". 

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There’s a classic tale on the ‘Net, told and retold to new freelancers who talk big about the corporations and the way life outta be.

Once there was this fixer, names lost to the heap but most folks call ‘em by their handle: Juice. Juice was a mean talent with legendary hustle. They came up through the anticorp underground, setting up jobs and running cons and doing pretty well for themselves.

Time came that there wasn’t a single hacker, soldier, or suit worth their cred who didn’t know about Juice. They ran a scam with the White Rabbits to leak an unreleased television series, posed as a Ziggurat subsidiary to secure a fake trade deal with another corpo city-state, and one time stole a whole vat of Storm-Ex protein slurry and just gave it away to desert refugees outside Prime City. Right under the corpo’s noses.

Juice was a regular Robin-fucking-Hood. Even the civilians knew their name. But all that cred and good will wasn’t enough for Juice. All that time with activists and anarchists blew up their ego, and just like some hotshot with their eyes on some new chrome, Juice set their sights on an impossible job. They were going to hit the corpo upper-echelon, a full ‘Net run against their accounts and property. Wanted to decapitate a whole corporation in one night, build a better world, give all the money back to the people. Can you imagine? Billions of credits in the street, cash falling from the fucking sky like rain.

Juice got all the best hackers, splicers, and operatives the streets could choke up. Planned the job for years, built a real leet crew. Night of the quarterly Ziggurat board meeting comes up and you could swear the whole city was holding its breath.

Poor Juice. Them and their crew were dead before they hit the ground. You don’t even want to know what that Black I.C.E. did to them when they tried to fuck around in those corporate accounts. I hear they were full of all kinds of tumors, real cold alien A.I. shit. 

Next day everything was status quo. Prime City just sighed. No one noticed, no one cared. 

Morale of the story? Don’t get into this life to be some fucking hero. You ain’t gonna save the world. Best you can hope is that some asshole in some bar somewhere remembers your name after you flatline, or you live long enough to retire somewhere that ain’t here.