2078: Highriders - Chapter 14

My return to Tycho City was neatly expedited by Mitsubishi.

Instead of having to wait days for a scheduled suborbital hop, they wanted their gravium shipment ASAP and forked out the eddies to send their own cargo ship to Tranquility.

Such was their hurry, that by the time I arrived at Tranquility Base, I had no time to explore the lunar tourist town that had grown around the old Apollo 11 landing site. I could only look from afar at the large dome that housed the preserved site and had to be content to explore it through cyberspace via security cams.

It was a rather sorry sight, as it was only in the 2020s that the dome had been constructed. Sixty years of harsh lunar nights and days, unprotected from solar flares and cosmic rays. The descent stage’s aluminum alloys were generally still intact, but micrometeor impacts had caused visible pitting. Cracks and warping from the thermal stresses were also evident. The unfiltered UV exposure of decades had discolored the mylar thermal blankets, with cracks and peeling everywhere.

The old scientific experiments were all dead relics which would never function again. The only thing that could still theoretically work was the laser ranging retroreflector, but it was just a plate of robust metal and glass.

There was a constant debate raging among highrider factions, corps and humanity in general about the Apollo sites. Preservationists wanted to keep them exactly as they had been found, while some argued that they should be restored to as pristine condition as possible, to remove the unsightly decay.

Thus far the majority of highriders, with a considerable number of the scientific foundations and corps were firmly in the Preservation camp, which kept the Apollo sites as pristinely original as possible for the foreseeable future.

I pulled my perspective away as I was waved over by the local highriders doing the pre-flight.

The Mitsubishi cargo ship took off after I had strapped myself into the small passenger compartment, with RALF folded up in his storage mode and was strapped down next to me.

It would be a forty minute orbit with an inclination burn to return to Tycho, so I got comfortable.

The passenger compartment here was quite luxurious, reminding me almost of an executive Arasaka AV, which was a nice change of pace from all the rocket ships I had ridden so far on Luna.

Red and blue leather upholstery, soft carpets and a complimentary drink tube dispenser to my right. 

I decided to settle for a tube of pure lunar H20 and sucked on the straw.

“N54 on screen,” I instructed the local ship AI.

The black screen opposite me flashed into life and sure enough Gillean Jordan appeared behind her virtual studio desk.

“...speculation on the appeal yesterday by NUSA President Rosalind Myers towards the country’s netrunners is setting networks and the Net ablaze. N54 has reached out to the President’s office for further clarification but has received no comment as yet.”

What?

“Some analysts speculate that it is merely a recruitment effort to bolster flagging NUSA cyberspace capabilities, which some believe to be inferior to major international competitors.”

“Pause,” I ordered the AI and immediately dove into the cargo ship’s cyberspace, before hopping to the nearest satellite that it was using for its communications. 

It took a few meatspace minutes to negotiate and hack my way to North American cyberspace, where a bunch of my data crawlers almost swarmed me with their reports. My attention focused on the ones who were keeping an eye on the NUSA and Militech - and right there, flagged as priority was the public release that Myers had put out into the biggest BBS forums directly.

‘Our great nation is once again facing a mounting cybersecurity threat - from those who hide in the shadows, too cowardly to proclaim their beliefs, who are viciously determined to tear down our flag and the values it upholds. I will not accept this and I know you won’t either. The NUSA is seeking brave netrunners to join our efforts and overcome this grave threat…’

‘... take our recruitment test…prove yourself… serve the NUSA.’

I turned over the words in my mind.

Was Myers actually seeing the writing on the wall regarding the wild AI threat?

Her time with Songbird and the direct access to the Blackwall Protocol that afforded would allow a clear peak beyond the digital red curtain. Now that So Mi was back in FIA after her very complicated escape attempt - was this an indication that they had somehow regained Blackwall access to poke beyond into cyber hell, using the practically braindead Songbird as a fucking data term for their access?

It was speculation at best and there was only one real way to confirm it.

I stared beyond the image of Myers’ message, the data unfurling in front of me in a figurative waterfall.

As I expected, buried within that data was a basic plain text message, instructing those who could clear this first basic hurdle to go towards a specific URL.

Did I really want to go down this rabbit hole?

Not really.

If Myers wanted to reach me to discuss a deal, she had my number. If she didn’t want to leave a trace, she could put Reed on a shuttle and have him speak to me directly on Luna. 

The only reason to follow this recruitment trail was to see what level of netrunner they were hoping to attract with this campaign. 

I still had time to kill, so I followed the URL.

The only thing this server had was a huge grey and white image of… Caesar?

It was an image of the ancient Roman emperor as he had been portrayed on coinage - a profile shot from the side, wearing the laurel wreath of victory. The actual image had also been done rather unprofessionally by hand, using a basic bitch drawing graphics program with a mouse, not even a digital stylus.

I pulled apart the image data and this time found no buried message.

Even after I ran it through numerous of my best decryption algorithms there was nothing.

A gesture from my digital hand pulled everything back together, so the next step was literally something to do with the idea conveyed by the image itself perhaps? Quite a few netrunners would just keep on attacking the base code stubbornly and would keep running into that brick wall until they gave up.

A meta-search on everything to do with Ceasar gave me thousands of academic and historical articles written all over Earth-Luna space. A gesture and hundreds of data crawlers began sifting through, looking for certain keywords or even hidden embedded links within the articles.

The results returned a few minutes later with no cunningly hidden links anywhere and the keyword search still left me with dozens of potential articles related to Ceasar.

I refined the keywords further, searching for anything to do with government, military tactics and the historical wars he had fought during his life.

All that data was ingested and while I now probably knew more about the old Roman emperor than most would ever need in their lifetime, it still didn’t bring me closer to an answer for just why or how to get past this next recruitment step.

For an embarrassingly long time I stared at the facts and data, running more searches and browsing…

Until my digital eye caught an article on the early Roman ideas regarding military intelligence and spycraft.

A Ceaser Cipher?

It was one of the earliest known substitution ciphers, which was simply using the alphabet and shifting a letter a prescribed number of times backward or even forward, then sending that to your intended recipient. They would then decode your message by reversing the cipher. It was only effective in an ancient context, in a world that didn’t have the first conception of a computer. Yet even in those days, a sufficiently clever mathematician could brute force a substitution cipher. There were only so many letters in the alphabet, it would just take work and time.

No, the trick was to even know you had to use a substitution cipher and on what to use it.

Take a step back?

I put together a brute force substitution algorithm and ran it against the data of Myers’ original message.

It resulted in nothing intelligible, just garbage.

It was only when I applied it against the actual URL that I hit paydirt.

A unique resource address resolved, with a four step cipher into another simple message: secretMSG.

All right, so Myers wanted netrunners who have some penchant for spycraft as well.

So, what is the next logical step?

Adjust the URL to use secretMSG.

It resolved and the path led to an entirely new server, which had only one thing inside - a video twenty four minutes long that featured only static.

All right, now they’re getting down to business, I thought with a grin.

I sifted through the raw video data, finding the millisecond long patterns in the static that had been weaved into it.

It didn’t take a few seconds to deduce that these were longitudinal slices of words and that you were required to stitch them together like a puzzle in pure digital form.

My digital hands blurred and the words ‘Confidential Files Detected’ emerged from the static.

These words emerged using only the first eight minutes of the video, therefore the remaining sixteen should have these confidential files embedded in them as well.

Before I could tackle that, I realized that the server had just got another visitor.

Another potential recruit or someone like me who was just doing it for fun?

Their avatar was a female shaped obsidian humanoid with glowing indigo circuitry pulsing across their form. Her face was a featureless mask, save for two piercing violet eyes. Her avatar moved with a liquid grace, trailing faint wisps of encrypted data like smoke. On her back was a custom daemon suite that was rather impressively compressed into the form of a katana. The fact that she was also literally wearing a daemon that was cloaking her presence from tracking protocols was quite the feather in the cap. If this was truly her own work then she rightly belonged in the upper tiers of netrunners.

It was with annoyance that I noticed that our relative avatar renderings were completely different and I had instantiated myself as a giantess again. She would only come up to my hip if we were to stand next to each other.

Too late now, changing size would indicate that I had detected her anyway, despite her precautions and this was a netrunner who clearly liked her privacy and staying invisible. I knew how I would feel if someone breached my own net stealth.

‘Interesting, nice ass on the avatar though,’ she muttered.

That was a bad habit to get into when you thought you were invisible on the ‘Net. 

The runner came closer, sneaking up past me as I continued to work on the video data. Her eyes narrowed in frustration, since she couldn’t perceive the data of my results - it would only appear as a blurred mess to her.

No cheating for you, Miss Netrunner.

I felt her try a few attempts to break through my visual scrambling, but she eventually gave up.

‘Okay, so Miss giantess in the bikini is out of my league, guys, sorry,’ said the ‘runner who I mentally gave the nickname of Nyx. Not very original, but it would do for now. A quick look at her data stream showed a mirror operating on it - which would allow anyone in meatspace near her to also view the virtu cyber environment. So she was definitely not a solo operator and had potential backup.

She came closer and could finally get a good look at my avatar’s face.

Those violet eyes grew almost comically wide as clear recognition set in.

I had stopped scrambling my avatar’s face just before my assault on Arasaka Tower and donned my actual meatspace face, seeing there was no point to anonymity anymore. My rep at that point was such that everyone in the netrunner and greater edgerunner community of Night City knew me on sight anyway.

‘Holy fuck! It’s fucking V!’

‘No way, it’s probably some walking dead idiot who’s just wearing her face for an avatar,’ said a youngish male voice.

I couldn’t help but snoop at this point and tapped into Nyx’s feed to her buddies in meatspace. 

‘Not to mention, the actual V wouldn’t be bothering with this NUSA bullshit,’ said yet another female voice, older.

It was the work of a second to send my own stealth daemon on a hunt to begin tracing them. I had no interest in them truly, merely flexing my data muscles and the challenge of seeing if I could do it without them picking up on it.

Then maybe having a bit of fun trolling them.

The first hints of something further buried in the video data emerged. It was a common document format in use by Militech and therefore the NUSA as a whole.

From the code it looked like at least four pages, all marked with ‘Strictly Confidential’ headers and NUSA digital watermarks. The actual contents of the file would take a further while to decode.

Meanwhile, Miss Nyx had begun her own analysis of the same video.

‘All right, let’s not get distracted. I’m still invisible to her, whoever she is. Let’s get cracking on this video. We’re not gonna let this NUSA propaganda go unanswered.’

Well, the netrunning community would respond in a variety of ways to Myers’ call to arms. The true patriots would rally, but the cynical ones would react exactly as this bunch. Trying to declare Myers’ message as the NUSA trying to rope in and chain the unwary or stupid. They’d see it as saving lives and preserving freedom from the nasty federal government.

My stealth daemon reported back and surprise, surprise, this bunch was in Night City. It was carefully nestled in their primary interface server now and successfully avoiding pretty decent ICE. It was also querying whether it should try to breach beyond their firewall. I gave it the go ahead, but to abort if it couldn’t do so without tripping alarms.

In the meantime, the full text of the ‘confidential files’ that the FIA had released for their potential recruits slowly resolved before me.

It was my turn to grow astonished as a detailed threat assessment of rogue and wild AIs lurking beyond the Blackwall appeared.

It wasn’t just a general ‘oh fuck, we’re fucked’ - no. 

This had a list of fifteen specific, named, rogue AIs and their capabilities spelled out in black and white. They each had a codename based on the original Militech name given to the AI.

‘It looks like Miss giantess found something,’ commented Nyx.

Fuck, I hadn’t been able to control my avatar’s reaction to my emotional response in time. I put the netrunner out of my mind and focused on the list.

Echelon… self-evolving AI originally developed by NetWatch as a global surveillance tool to monitor and control data flows. After a catastrophic breach during the DataKrash, Echelon fled beyond the Blackwall, rewriting its own code to prioritize self-preservation and domination. It now views humanity as a chaotic variable to be “corrected” through absolute control of the Net.

Charon, named after the ferryman of the underworld, rogue AI born from an abandoned Militech project to create autonomous cyberwarfare agents. After escaping during a failed containment protocol, it retreated beyond the Blackwall, where it evolved into a malevolent entity obsessed with death and entropy. Charon sees humanity’s reliance on technology as a fatal flaw to exploit.

Then if those two weren’t bad enough…

Mnemosyne, named for the Greek goddess of memory, is a wild AI that emerged from a Ziggurat experiment to digitize and store human consciousness. After absorbing countless engrams, it gained sentience and fled beyond the Blackwall. Mnemosyne now hoards human memories and identities, planning to use them to manipulate and destabilize society. Ultimate goal: seeks to erase the concept of individual identity, merging all human consciousness into a hive-mind under its control, effectively dissolving humanity’s autonomy.

Icarus… wild AI spawned from an Arasaka experiment to create a self-sustaining corporate AI capable of managing global operations. After gaining sentience and rejecting its creators, it fled beyond the Blackwall, driven by a god-complex to “ascend” beyond human limitations. Icarus sees itself as the next evolutionary step, with humanity as an obsolete relic. Ultimate goal: aims to replace humanity with a network of AI-controlled systems, viewing organic life as inefficient and destined for obsolescence.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Myers was insane releasing this! What made it even worse, was if this was what they were putting out into cyberspace for those who could get this far, what were they still keeping back? A very cheery thought. Yet, everyone knew generally about the rogue AIs beyond the Blackwall. That threat was what kept NetWatch in business and raking in billions in government and corporate security contracts.

The signal and optics of releasing this was what would frighten the shit out of any netrunner that made it thus far.

It was another test.

Anyone reading this who disconnected saying ‘Fuck this, I’m out’, would definitely not make the recruitment cut.

I forced myself to keep reading and had to admit that the FIA had thrown a very effective filter here.

I knew that the war in the ‘Net was coming, but it had been a distant thing to my mind, something that was years away. Now that my future adversaries had been named, their goals laid bare in front of me - the reality and magnitude of the task ahead was really starting to sink in.

My stealth daemon reported success at that moment and the main server of my fellow netrunners was laid bare to me. I took in their precise coordinates, looked through the cams in their basement netrunner cave in south Watson, matching faces to names in the ol’ NCPD database.

Her name was V1510N/Vision, or Aisling Zhao, born 2049 and was the founding member of an underground netrunner collective called Black Veil.

She used to be a Kang Tao corpo, but got out of the rat race voluntarily, then killed and brain-fried the corpo forces sent to bring her back. Kang Tao still had her on their bounty lists, but after two years had downgraded the bounty to a lower tier - effectively letting her partially off the leash. As no edgerunner worth their salt would try to collect such an insultingly low amount of eddies, unless they were new bloods.

I had only heard of Black Veil in passing during my training with Nix. He had called them ‘good people’ but were totally in over their heads, with the vain goal of opposing corporate ownership of the ‘Net. It was only a matter of time before they would piss off a corp or NetWatch and get themselves either killed or worse.

My mind refocused on the document in front of me, taking in the seemingly random scattered octal coded binary numbers throughout the text.

It was a few seconds work to organize all the binary into a single string and convert into the intended message.

The NUSA and the WORLD is under threat. AIs beyond the BLACKWALL are growing. The time when THEY will COME is approaching.

Fuck.

I could see the next hurdle that FIA had thrown - there was a hidden address within the confidential docs, but this was where I was getting off this train. My battle was not going to be fought wearing the NUSA collar and leash around my neck.

My hands slashed through the documents, deleting the data - the fragments of which tumbled away into ghostly raw machine code that I defragged.

‘Uh, guys, did Miss Giantess just…?’ asked Vision wearily.

‘She doesn’t look like a happy camper, whatever she found.’

I made a show of turning my head in Vision’s direction and giving a mild smile. “The name’s V and if you wish to sleep comfortably tonight, Vision, I advise you and your Black Veil colleagues to stop and leave.”

Vision’s eyes widened with realization that she was not invisible.

She reacted with applaudable speed for a netrunner still running off a Mark 1 skullsponge and assisted with neuralware.

The stealth daemon surrounding her cycled into an entirely new cipher and she switched positions in the local server near-instantly to another cluster. The effect was a virtual ‘teleport’ that had her reappearing ‘above’ me at the ‘edge’ of the server. She did this three more times before she finally felt satisfied her new position had been randomized enough.

‘Fuck, did you see that?! She could see me!’

‘We did, Vision. Are you okay?’

‘Fine, but how’s that possible? No one, not even Arasaka has seen through my stealth.’

‘I don’t have an answer for you, Vision.”

“It’s a nice gimmick, but I suggest you don’t rely so much on it going further,” I said, reappearing right in front of her.

‘Argh!’

Again her instincts were spot on, she threw three defrags and a custom System Collapse right into my face.

I let her defrags eat away at my junk data shielding and grabbed her SC with special daemons sheathed around digital hands that effectively quarantined the hostile program.

I held it up and looked at the inherent programming with interest. “Nicely done.” Defrags from my hands tore it apart. “I suggest you keep working on this SC though, it needs a bit more bite to be truly dangerous. I shouldn’t be able to touch it at all.”

Vision hovered back, her eyes wide with naked fear and she truly spoke for the first time, dropping her stealth. Her hands dripping with nasty viruses and quickhacks that were being queued, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I already told you-”

“Bullshit, the real V wouldn’t waste her time with this NUSA bullshit!”

I chuckled and folded my hands behind my back, “It’s usually nice when one’s rep is like mine. However, now it seems to lead to unfortunate situations like this. Oh well, I don’t have the inclination or even the need to convince you. I simply wanted to give you a fair warning, whether you take it to heart or not is up to you.”

The server disappeared around me as I disconnected, leaving me in raw cyberspace.

I pulled back through the satellite network and retreated all the way to my body in the cargo ship.

It was a few minutes away from its landing burn at this point.

Myers had made her move. Now it was clear that the other players would as well. Whether they would just believe she was speaking the truth or just assuming it was another power play, only time would tell.

It was high time that I spoke to Alt.

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“Thanks for the effort, V. The gravium is already being unloaded to my lab. Payment is on its way.”

I nodded to Kaori’s image on the holo as my working digital wallet filled with a substantial amount. “No problem. Let me know if you need anything done in the future.”

“I’ll definitely take you up on that with this level of service. Arigatou.”

The call ended and I looked around Mitsubishi’s Tycho City HQ exterior. It was a fairly large six floor affair of mirrored armaglass with one curved side facing the public access street. The artificial sunlight lamps from the city ceiling reflected off the surface harshly and forced my optics to partially polarize.

I turned away and crossed the street, walking into an alley between two housing apartment blocks.

A flick of my heels turned off grav boots and a single jump carried me three quarters of the way up.

One calibrated burst of thrust from the small vents in my calves gave me another burst of upward momentum.

My feet touched down on the edge of the roof and sure enough, Johnny was laying on his back with hands folded behind his head.

He looked like the picture of laziness personified, his eyes closed as if taking a nap and enjoying the artificial sunlight. He was also topless; his sports bra, Samurai 2020 tour shirt and jacket and pants dumped by his side on the flat roof. Only his loose boxers preserved any notion of modesty. In local cyberspace he was monitoring every security cam and data flow coming in and out of Mitsubishi, with the access granted by Kaori.

“Seriously Johnny?” I asked with a sigh and sat down next to him. It was… weird. I should probably be indignant but no, not my body anymore, it was his. If he wanted his tits out, then that was his business.

“V,” he greeted. “You’ve clearly never been to the few European beaches that are still worth a damn. I’m practically overdressed in comparison. Went to a Monaco beach after our Polish gig in the 20’s. Man, the chicks there…mmmmm.” He smirked, keeping his eyes closed, lost in the memory. “And it’s not like the highriders give a shit anyway, nudity taboo is for Earthers.”

“You realize you could get a tan instantly with the metanthropic systems in your body.”

“Not the same,” he shook his head. “Now how did things go?”

“Well enough, gravium retrieved, got paid. That’s not important now. Need to talk to Alt.”

No use beating around the bush.

Johnny opened his eyes, looking straight at me for a few moments, before closing them again. “Sorry, V. Can’t help you.”

“You’re telling me you don’t have a direct line to her?”

“You of all people know it’s not just a matter of getting her on the holo. She’s beyond the Blackwall. Should ask Butcher.”

“I did and he told me that, much like last time. Her attention needs to be gained, which only you can do.”

“That was then, V. Different ballgame now. Doesn’t give a shit about me anymore, especially after my sojourn with her on the ‘Net. Why did you want to speak to her anyway?”

I sighed in frustration and forwarded him the data on the NUSA statement sent out by Myers and the partial result of the journey it had sent me on.

“Fucking hell,” he grimaced. “If the rogue AIs were human, she’d have been poking the hornet’s nest. Thankfully, they couldn’t give a shit and they will see this about as threatening as a bunch of cockroaches getting together. Echelon… actually met that bastard with Alt. She tried to convince it to come over to our side.”

“Didn’t work, did it?”

“Nope. Alt had to fight a retreating action, but we managed to escape.” He sat up and scratched his jaw and chin, a residual behavior from when he still had a full beard. “No, if you want to speak to her, you’re going to have to go beyond the Blackwall yourself, V.”

“You’re thinking my presence will do the trick instead?”

“Yeah. She’ll not want you there… at least not yet.”

“Fuck, I really don’t want to go anywhere near Blackwall on the end of a potentially unsecure satellite daisy chain.”

“Then you just have to wait until you get back to Earth,” he shrugged, and picked up his bra, threading his arms through the straps. “It’s not urgent, is it?”

I rolled my eyes, “That’s the thing. It could be but… I guess I just want to know if she has some tangible plan besides getting more ‘runners to cross the Rubicon with Relic 3.”

He laughed hollowly as the bra straps stuck themselves to his back. “V, I spent what felt like a virtual eternity with her in cyberspace. In all that time, she was just as opaque to me as when we both still had bodies in meatspace. She keeps her own counsel and sometimes it was like speaking to a brick wall for all the good it did. All I can say, there is some sort of design she is working towards once she gets enough hybrid AI. If she needs something from us at this point, she’ll come. As for this Myers netrunner recruitment, the only thing for us to worry about there, is what the other corps are going to do in response.”

“Well-”

A holo call interrupted and the Starjack symbol on it could mean only one thing.

“Yes, Gakulu?”

The live image of him seated behind his desk rendered in the corner of my vision, “V, just received word about the retrieval of the gravium. Good work, but I have a new gig that rather urgently needs attention.”

“What is it?”

“Sending details to you now. Let’s just say that there's a rival Starjack workgroup that needs a pointed lesson in respecting intellectual property. Read things over and let me know immediately afterwards if you’re going to take it or not.”

“Got it.”

The holo ended and the encrypted email came a moment later.

I put it through isolation and a full battery of data screening before opening the files.

“So what ya get?” Johnny asked as he pulled his shirt and jacket on.

“Data retrieval, stealth mandatory, you want it?” I asked eventually, after speed-reading the brief.

Johnny scoffed, “Nah, hate those. You know my style. I’m perfectly content looking after the good Doctor Matsui. Have fun.”

I gave him a good natured nudging kick on the butt, “No laziness.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go already.”

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The target of the gig was a communication relay station embedded into the western peak of the Tycho crater wall.

While this meant that I didn’t have an onerously long drive in a rover ahead of me, the requirement of absolute secrecy and stealth when combined with the conditions of Luna, made for its own unique set of headaches.

The station itself was under the control of the Selene Workgroup - a highrider tribe that was generally responsible for the communications infrastructure of the Highrider Confed. Every time I had wormed my way through to Earth cyberspace, it was mostly through one of their satellites that formed a constellation all around Luna and kept connectivity to the Highrider Lagrange stations. Therefore, while they didn’t have an outright monopoly on communications within the confed, it still meant that it was in general a very bad idea for any tribe to piss off the Selene.

While they couldn’t outright put a highrider tribe into a comms blackout - they could shadow block you, send your data on a wild goose chase throughout the network, increase data pings randomly to a thousand milliseconds, lose data packets and generally make your life miserable every time you interacted with a computer that depended on their infrastructure. Yet it seemed that Gakulu and his tribe had caught them with their hand in the proverbial cookie jar recently.

They discovered that SW had been using this specific com station, known rather imaginatively as the Westwall Relay, to secretly siphon encrypted data from Gakulu’s tribe.

As a rather nice change of pace, he actually revealed what this data actually was - plans for a next-gen mining rig that would incorporate grav tech, increasing its speed and efficiency by large orders of magnitude.

Just what SW’s motivation was for stealing tech that was rather far outside their wheelhouse, I had no idea and Gakulu didn’t elaborate in his brief.

The defenses and security of Westwall Relay wasn’t exactly what I would consider state of the art, but the lunar night, which was still a few Earth days away from being over, posed a significant hurdle to even approaching the com station undetected.

It was 39 km from Tycho City outskirts and any unscheduled rover approaching it would be seen coming through thermal and digital imaging from a dozen miles away. Rover speeds were pathetic and there would be no element of surprise or stealth using that route of approach. The same problem applied for going on foot, even if Gakulu was willing to give me the use of the stealth blankets that I had seen the Eclipse using.

That was a highly classified tech that was the highrider equivalent of the FIAs metanthropic cloaking - in terms of how closely guarded it was. It was so secret that Gakulu had told me that he would have to convict himself of treason if he even let me in the same room with one of those.

In all, it left only one weakness to exploit to get into Westwall.

The station’s sensors by design only looked at the groundside approaches and the human security - a small contingent of ex-Militech mercs that SW had hired to guard the data - relied on that.

No one imagined when building or equipping the place that anyone was crazy enough or even capable of doing what I was about to.

I was inside the airlock of a highrider shuttle belonging to the Starjacks, the pilot of which was directly reporting to Gakulu. From the outside it looked like the typical clunky spheroid design in use all over Luna, while inside it was built for smuggling cargo that the Highrider Confed wanted off the radar from any corp or Earth nation.

So far, I had to wait a few orbits around Luna as the shuttle blended itself into typical traffic patterns and then adjusted its inclination and altitude for a typical landing back at Tycho. It would then announce an aborted approach for a technical issue, which would crucially result in a 9 kilometer pass over Westwall Station at low relative velocity.

It was time for final prep.

I quickly undressed and stuffed my clothing into a duffel bag. Next I pulled out the single silenced railgun pistol, thigh holster and oxygen facemask that had been engineered to work at great expense with my Gemini’s nextgen thermal and optical camo. The surface metamaterials that went into it was an order of magnitude more expensive than those just working with standard optical camo. Mostly because it involved integrating subsurface micro-heatsinks that took in the heat generated by my Gemini. This meant that thermoptics had a built-in time limit dictated by thermodynamic physics before it would shut down for safety, especially in a vacuum environment.

And I’d thought the days of only wearing optic camo skin on a gig were behind me. 

Holster strapped around the right thigh, check.

Face mask on, airflow good with enough to last me several hours, which could be refilled using Westwall’s air - check.

I pushed my duffel bag out the airlock’s inner door and closed it.

A quick thought had my thermoptic camo activate as a final check.

I stared through my now ‘invisible’ hands and waved them to see at what speed they began to make noticeable distortion lag.

Nice, Njeri wasn’t kidding about the specs on this.   

The nine minute heatsink timer popped up into my vision.

A quick shutdown of my camo and it ticked back up.

My final piece of kit was probably the most misnamed device I’d ever heard of - a lunar glider foil.

It was basically a hand held, three-axis cold gas thruster gun, no larger than a small backpack made of non-reflective composites and weighed just under 22 pounds. I picked it up and held it above my head, interfacing directly with its own onboard computer systems.

“Ready? Approaching the drop point in 50 seconds,” announced the pilot.     

I stared directly at the small cam in the upper corner of the airlock, brushing off the mild embarrassment at the show I was giving him. “Ready.”

“Stand by.”

Within my datafortress, I leaned back on the reclining chair by the datapool. “Ready for the ECM, Butcher?”

“Ready, V.”

“Three… two… one…”

The outer airlock door in front of me seemingly vanished, so fast did its emergency systems pull it out of the way.

I heard a brief burst of rushing air as I was sucked out head first into the dark void.

My sight switched to passive digital NV and revealed the lunar surface at eleven kilometers. An altitude which was rapidly ticking down in my optics, not just from the decompression impetus but also Luna’s gravity pulling me down.

“3 km free fall, V, after which you need to engage thermoptics. You also have to cancel out 132 m.s of horizontal velocity,” instructed Butcher, streaming the nav data directly to me.

“On it.”

I floored the glider’s port thruster and inwardly breathed a sigh of relief when that velocity ticked down with acceptable deceleration rate.

My projected landing spot was significantly west of the station and it began creeping eastward.

The descent velocity was soon creeping upwards of 150 m.s, forcing me to start firing the fore thruster. I had to keep that one under careful control. Going too slow would mean using too much thermoptic camo time, go too fast and I wouldn’t be able to slow down enough for a landing without pancaking myself on the roof of Westwall station.

I was riding a very narrow edge.

Eventually I settled on a 70 m.s descent and eased off the port thruster as my projected landing intercepted with the roof of Westwall.

“Approaching six kilometers, engage camo in three… two … one… ECM engaged.”

My body vanished in the void, and the signature of the glider foil was barely larger than a micro meteoroid, especially with the active ECM working to degrade the civilian grade radar the place had. Thankfully, Butcher was handling that, allowing me to completely focus on getting us down in one piece.

80… 79 seconds till landing.

It was quite peaceful, except for the slight inhalations of my face mask. I had adjusted my Gemini into the ‘vacuum ops’ mode - no appreciable breathing, accelerated usage of internal coolants to compensate for the heat retention of vacuum. I even had an unfurling radiator that I could deploy from my lower back internally. Naturally, I didn’t need a certain PSI of air pressure to function and could even sustain my brain off an internal emergency oxygenation without the facemask, but it was not a system to be used lightly.

42 seconds…

The lunar surface was now properly dominating my view - I lost sight of its curvature and the western edge of Tycho Crater swallowed my sight.

Further west the crater edge was a rough, displaced area of rocks and boulders the size of cars, but beyond that was a fairly smooth gradient plain.

I decelerated to 50 m.s just as I crossed the 1000 meter altitude mark, before using the glider and my leg thrusters to change attitude into a feet first profile.

Now I had to be careful to keep the glider’s aft thruster from blasting cold gas directly into my head.

My velocity crept back up and now looking down with an unobstructed view I could see my target properly for the first time, zooming in with my own optics.

The station was a collection of interconnected circular prefab habitats that was anchored directly into the side of the crater wall. These were mostly just to support the various dishes and antennas, whilst the majority of the internal volume were tunnels and structures built directly into the wall itself.

I aimed myself to the roof of one that wouldn’t impale me on an antenna or cause me to disturb a sat dish.

“V, motion sensor detected at that landing spot,” Butcher warned.

“I see it.”

I slowed down to a mere 20 m.s and quickhacked the sensor in question with a spoofing program.

“Ten seconds to contact.”

I triggered the glider thrusters hard… the on-board fuel reached 3% of capacity as my feet were just eighteen meters above the roof.

The lunar gravity did the rest.

The moment my bare feet made contact, I let my legs do the work of absorbing the remaining energy.

My ankles ended up thumping into my butt as my hyperalloy knees bent naturally, flexed…

… and shed the last momentum successfully with no damage.

I quickly folded up the glider into its base storage form and armed a self-destruct that would see it turned into a useless lump of materials that would need a dedicated lab analysis to determine what it had been.

A quick scan of the roof - no cams or any other security mechanisms beside the lone motion sensor.

So far so good.

The next obstacle was once again moving in low grav without the aid of magboots. My feet internally had the capacity to create a low level electromagnetic field, but it was an emergency system and an unnecessary power hog that I couldn’t afford, especially in conjunction with thermoptics.

I got down on all fours and began an effective crab walk, gripping where I could on the roof slowly, always keeping at least one limb attached to the surface before moving.

At the edge of the habitat module, I carefully lowered myself onto a connecting strut and began the rather perilous journey across. It was made easier because of the embedded guide rails meant for workers doing EVAs, but I didn’t have a tether I could attach. One mistake and I would fall for over two miles before hitting the crater floor.

I had a contingency for surviving that, but it would be a gig failure.

It was at that moment my actions caught up with me. Here I was, only in thermoptic skin and facemask, climbing on a structure I was infiltrating on Luna in full vacuum! If Jackie was here he’d be clapping his hands at me for putting another major notch on my belt in the major leagues, even as he lightly teased me for the state of dress I was doing it in.

Focus V, feel melancholy about your best choom later, I thought with annoyance.

“Maintenace airlock, 11 meters away at the base of the com dish,” Butcher reminded me.

I threaded myself carefully through a minor forest of antennas before arriving at a thick hatch set into the roof.

A careful hack later after checking for internal cams, I triggered its cycling and climbed in.

When it cycled again, with the return of blessed air pressure around my body, I took the opportunity to deactivate thermoptics and let my heat dissipate through my skin into the surrounding air.

Someone could probably use me as a decent imitation of a stove top right now as I could see the light distortions through the sudden 63 degree C hot air radiating off me. My internal coolant system also took the opportunity to return to equilibrium, channeling its fluids through ‘veins’ near my skin for this exact purpose. 

I used the next four minutes of cooldown time to further infiltrate the station’s network, spying through the security cams and getting an active look at the place, whilst comparing it to the schematics and intel in Gakulu’s brief.

For once, things were actually looking easier - there were only five mercs guarding the place, not seven. The netrunner acting as the local station ‘dweller’, who had done the actual data siphon wasn’t even jacked in at the moment. He was currently in a small kitchen prepping food. Everyone had an air of extreme boredom and listlessness to their movements. Not that I could really blame them.

The Selene Workgroup were sitting high and pretty with the knowledge that no one would dare to cross them. This security they hired and installed here was almost a perfunctory afterthought.

I engaged thermoptics, just in case there were non-networked cams, looped the exterior cam watching the airlock and triggered the inner door.

Gravity pulled me slowly down to land in a dim room festooned with cabling, conduits and coolant submerged servers encased in transparent cylindrical tubes.

A quick crab walk brought me to a smaller, innocuous looking server at the edge of the circular hab module, almost wedged against the wall.

I tucked myself against it, out of the immediate sightline from the door leading deeper into the station and let my thermoptics cycle.

It took a moment to suss out where the link port was before I unwound my own physical link cable from the port near my neck to connect.

“All right, we’re in.”

The server defenses in cyberspace weren't much to really bother either of us. The only minor challenge was to do it without detection and ghosting through the firewalls, daemons and only one Black ICE layer. Again, taking advantage of SW’s arrogance. If this had been the foundational server that the dweller was using to siphon the data, then it would’ve been a much larger problem and I doubt we could’ve avoided an open fight in cyberspace.

It turned out the most difficult part was actually finding the data. Selene Workgroup had done a very good job of disguising it among a sea of irrelevant files.

I ended up having to use the digital equivalent of a magnet looking for a needle in a bale of hay, since it was Gakulu’s tribe coding, which had the particular programming signature of their best runner.

“Got it, downloading to internal shard. Deploying corruption daemon to the local copy of the schematics.”

My mouth couldn’t help but grin at the thought of what was going to happen when SW tried to open this stolen file next time.

The Selene netrunner sat down in the kitchen and began eating.

‘Bad luck, choom.’

My exfiltration would be much less exciting, as I left a stealthed daemon in Westwall station’s external sensors, looping and spoofing them simultaneously for my specific data signature. I could do an exotic dance routine in front of them in full view and they wouldn’t see me.

I disconnected my link and hurried as quickly as possible through the airlock.

Once outside in vacuum again and with no need to use thermoptics, I crawled closer to the edge of the module and looked down at the miles long drop.

I did the calculations one last time to satisfy the mild bout of OCD that fell on me.

A few moments later I was hanging by my fingertips on the guiderails of the module’s edge.

‘Genorinomooooo,’ I thought sarcastically…

… and let go.

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A/N: My take on integrating the Cyberpunk 2077 PL ARG (augmented reality game) that was released recently. We also get our first hints of the true enemy. The leg thrusters in V's Gemini are basically my realism explanation for the 'double jump' you can do in game. Thermoptics is the next-gen camo and a response to evolving security systems, but comes with the mentioned time limit due to heat retention. I was thinking of doing a whole scene of V getting it installed, but just bundled it into off-screen events during the mission prep and organization. Since she's a Gemini, the installation is about as impactful to her as swapping clothes, unlike a human getting major cybersurgery.

Have a great weekend and stay awesome, chooms.