2078: Highrider - Chapter 2

There were moments in the life of a mercenary where you found yourself doing and experiencing events that strained credulity.

Fighting a hacked Militech Chimera experimental tank alongside the President of the NUSA herself with only a smart submachine gun, an assault rifle and quickhacks was one of those moments.

I had to remind myself that I was not V, Smasher’s Bane or any of the ridiculous monikers the merc community had foisted on me at the moment, as I stared down the length of the shock baton leveled at my face.

My behavior synced faceplate and related systems that was part of the metanthropic cloaking neatly intercepted my instinctive reactions. Instead I felt my current face making a perfect expression of fright; wide doe eyes, pupil dilation, a full body twitch, gasp and raising my empty hands. Even my subconscious body language on a microexpression scale and hormones were tweaked to simulate it to even the most thorough of optical scanners and analysis programs that might be lurking in the on-board Agents of my current opponents.

I could even see in cyberspace how my current identity was being referenced by this crew’s duo of netrunners as they were still battling the local dweller.

They found only what they were meant to find. If they had devoted their full efforts into interrogating and scanning my digital ID, they might have found a gap or hole in the cover with enough time, but they didn’t have that.

My own passive analysis swept over the merc crew and my Agent delivered matching IDs from the Crystal Palace guest register. They had all boarded legally, their tickets paid in full and visas good for two weeks. Their shock batons were all Arasaka EB Alpha models and the serial number that my optics were able to get a good view of, told me these actually belonged to Europol - the station’s actual police force.

So they somehow raided the cops own armory and without kicking up a fuss at all or Europol had swept it all under the rug.

Now I was facing a quandary. My own hacking was being neatly covered by this bunch and my sniffers needed more time to find the data package that Mr. Blue Eyes wanted.

If they were also after the same info, then things were about to get very interesting in the next few minutes.

Nothing from the twin netrunners had yet given a clue about their true target, so I had to do the most difficult thing when under the proverbial gun of this merc crew - wait, analyze and remain Mrs. Elaine Paigles.

I could begin doing some offensive prep though and began planning and queuing up hacks to drop, in addition to mentally rehearsing my actual physical assault.

In cyberspace, the battle was entering the final phases.

The dweller was still fighting back, but they were beginning to see the writing on the wall. I could  play on this level if I had been encased in my own netrunner lair in NC and could’ve probably evened the odds in this fight if it had been in my best interest to help.

The question now is what would the twins do once they were victorious. Would they fry the dweller with Black ICE or simply lock him up in a Prison Box program? The latter would be preferable, but I had felt some of Yoko’s prisons and some of them were hell in a box.

The seconds ticked by and the lobby of Utopian felt like we had all been slapped with a Freeze Body quickhack. Huh, that would be a nice evolution of the good ol’ Cripple Movement - should get to work on that. The twitching and nervous jitters from the receptionist and myself were the only real movement in the room. My Agent immediately updated the mercs to definitely have some form of muscle strength lacing and precision movement soft’ - handy if you had to wait for hours looking mean at some club as a bouncer or were part of the military.

Finally, the last firewall was breached and the local dweller was presented with the choice every netrunner dreaded.

He still had time to actually pull himself out of cyberspace, go back to meatspace and his body that was jacked in somewhere in a shielded strong room within the Utopian building.

It was an unfair loss, there was no concept of bushido in the ‘Net outside of organized runner clubs who dueled. It would depend on his contract with Utopian really…

There was a sudden void in cyberspace…

Fuck! He booked it.

Well, I couldn’t blame him really. Facing the music from this duo of netrunners clearly didn’t appeal in the slightest.

I caught the slight twitch of a smile from the lead merc.

Happy now are you? I passively scanned the EM profile coming from him and found the com net frequency that the mercs were operating on.

The encryption was good, but it just so happened that Nix had cracked and ‘solved’ this one two weeks ago. It was Zetatech proprietary, their latest stuff even, which made it a priority for every ‘runner worth their chrome to find ways around.

I delegated my Agent to listen in and analyze, my attention was almost completely taken up by the need to remain stealthy within the Utopian servers.

My new enemies had barged in with the subtlety of a Chimera tank on a rampage.

True, they had the place for themselves now, but really?

My own sniffers and daemons were finally closing in on the prize.

It was about fucking time!

Utopian bastards hadn’t made it easy to find, using obscure codenames and jargon speak to hide the data, but Mr. Blue Eyes had given me enough to penetrate this final layer of primitive yet effective security.

It was called Project DWARF STAR. What it was or did, I had no idea. Wasn’t my business.

My daemon grabbed it, copied it, then swiftly began to encrypt it within its own ‘body’.

I now faced the decision of retreating or to keep snooping and see what these mercs were here for.

It took me no more than a moment to make the decision. Ordering all my programs to leave as quickly and subtly as possible with the bounty, but keeping one disposable stealth sniffer within the data fortress that would act as my eyes.

Mr. Blue Eyes would definitely be interested if these mercs were also after DWARF STAR.

My programs returned to me with the data loot and I immediately shunted everything to an auxiliary data drive within my own body, which I immediately isolated by a physical air gap shunt that clicked open.

There was no way for it to be remotely hacked and taken from me now.

Back in the data fortress, the twin netrunners were definitely getting closer to me and consequently the data.

If someone like Mr. Blue Eyes wanted this, then it stood to reason it would be on the radar of others.

Time within cyberspace could be funny sometimes, but it was the most universal experience for most to feel some form of dilation, as the data streams spilled over your consciousness. If it was mostly compressed and with a few tweaks, you could theoretically pull off spending a week of perceived time within a few hours in real space. That was especially the case if you were observing human memory.

I’ve heard scuttlebutt on the Runner BBS feeds about battles that could take days of dilated time.

As the twin runners barreled into my view within the fortress, it almost felt like my Sandy had activated, especially because I still had my right eye taking in real space.

Their avatars looked like gigantic identical, classically shaped genies.

Both were lurid red sinuous masses of densely clustered light with representations of data falling off their bodies like water splashing off them. Their upper bodies were idealized male forms, with muscles and curves for days, which blended into an ephemeral snake-like body. Rather grotesquely, they had giant, veiny dicks hanging loose and in the open from there, which was coded to obey a very loose set of exaggerated physics. They had faces that had comically exaggerated chins set on manly jaws and a permanent five o’clock shadow and balefully glowing red eyes.

They zoomed closer with the speed of an eyeblink and were now looming over the server cluster that represented DWARF STAR.

“Ah ha! Found it, M00NL16H7! Told you it was this way.”

“Yeah, yeah, B3H3M07H, whatever. Now hurry up and get the stuff. You can bet 0NYX is alerting Utopian HQ through a dedicated hardline that we can’t stop.”

It was finally nice to have names for everyone involved.

I also sent out a simple sniffer into the greater cyberspace of the Crystal Palace with the goal to bring me everything it could on Moonlight and Behemoth.

The local BBS feeds and especially the Runner Club, yielded the most data.

They were known quantities there, with a formidable rep and apparently a client list which often fought in vicious bidding wars for their services. There was no indication or any hint of the merging trick they had pulled to defeat Onyx, which was not really surprising in retrospect, given its nature as a trump card.

In netrunner duels, they rarely lost, featuring a 83 to 5 win loss ratio for Moonlight and a 93 to 10 for Behemoth.

Now the question was, do I fight these guys to prevent them from also getting the data?

Mr. Blue Eyes did not pay me to fight a duo of runners, so the answer from my own perspective was simple. If he wanted exclusivity he would’ve asked me to go scorched earth and deep clean the data on my way out.

I could go nuclear and kill both of them if it came down to it.

“Uh, choom, we’ve got a problem,” Moonlight gestured with his hands and a slice of virtual data emerged from the server and morphed into a holoscreen.

Behemoth took one look and his face scowled, “It’s already been copied! Like just a few minutes ago!”

Damn, my daemon could’ve kept that little fact from registering in the data fortress, but that was a foundation level system of the entire place and would’ve taken much longer to influence.

“Which means another runner beat us to it,” Moonlight said darkly, his eyes flashed as he looked around.

I saw sniffer programs practically explode from his avatar, going in every conceivable direction.

It was a rather brute force approach to the problem of detection, throwing every kind of shit against a wall and seeing what stuck. It was lacking finesse and subtlety but compensated with sheer variation which made it extremely difficult to evade but not impossible. My current Netwatch cyberdeck was made to be the top dog, it depended on me to wield the katana it gave me properly.

Both me and my stealth sniffer ‘dodged’ the probes, switching sectors and positions in the fortress as quickly as we could comprehend the avenues of attack shooting towards us.

“Anything?” Behemoth looked very preoccupied, judging by his avatar and bandwidth rate, he was bulking himself up with attack daemons and hacks.

“Not yet, but they have to be here!”

“Could they be a second Utopian runner? One that’s kept off the books.”

“No, they wouldn’t touch that data. Not if they valued their jobs or their lives. Not to mention, they would’ve helped Onyx before we kicked his ass. We’ve got competition, brother.”

“Then find them already! The client is paying for no one else to get this.”

Interesting, just what does Utopian have that’s causing this much fuss? It was almost tempting to poke my nose into DWARF STAR and see.

What would be more interesting was also to see who wanted it and didn’t think that sharing was on the table. This reeked of some rival corp that got wind of it and wanted all the potential profits for themselves. Would that be worth something to Mr. Blue Eyes?

Yes, it would, but actually getting who the client was would require me to get nasty and that meant exposure.

Then the inevitable happened, I got tagged by a sniffer program.

I was furious with myself, there I go, getting greedy again. For fuck’s sake, Valerie.

“Ah ha! There you are!”

I materialized my avatar.

The design I had gone for on this gig, was a giant, ghostly white humanoid with clear female characteristics. In real space terms, it would’ve been ten feet tall and within cyberspace I was rendered to just about match the size of Moonlight and Behemoth.

“Ooh, spooky. So who do we have here? Never seen you before…” said Moonlight with an eager delight, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. 

That was the problem with avatars in cyberspace, you could customize them all you want, but elements from your subconscious always influenced it. No avatar of mine would ever materialize without appearing in some way referencing a ghost or ghost adjacent concept. As if my subconscious mind was constantly reminding me, ‘Yes, V, you’ve died and come back, only to face a new kind of death.’

A death that all my efforts have only postponed so far…

My Agent pinged me with an alert, the behavior sync of my face plate was getting strained by another fucking seizure. This time my left hand wanted to go berserk and it would surely cause the lovely merc with her shock baton on my neck in real space to give me a nasty shock.

Fuck.

Not fucking now!

I couldn’t fight these two conventionally. They would also try to stop me from leaving, I had their full attention and they would trace me straight back to my spot on the couch in the Utopian lobby, right under the figurative noses of their merc squad.

The spike of pain of a migraine from hell also chose this moment to flare up in response.

A quick thought to my Agent and my Pain Editor cyberware got to work. Not the best thing to do, but under the circumstances there was no other choice.

“Anyone home? You deaf, girl?” asked Behemoth. “Who are you? It’s just called being polite before we get down to business kicking your ass.”

I spotted their tracer program radiate outward despite their best efforts at concealment. My concentration and focus had recovered just enough to evade at this point.

“Wow, okay, she’s good, careful bro,” Moonlight warned.

“Seriously? Think some nobody can-”

“Hey, she just eluded my Spectra, no gonk off the street can do that.”

The time for evasiveness was over. I couldn’t match them directly in terms of hardware, but wasn’t I in the system core of Utopian’s data fortress? None of us at the moment were hiding behind preset firewalls beyond those that existed on a personal level.

I sent a subtle ping to the nearest server cluster and a simple request, addressed to the Utopian dweller. He might not be in cyberspace at the moment, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t watching from a screen.

It wasn’t a second later that I received a ping in response and an answer.

‘Yes, fuck ‘em up if you can. - Onyx’

Just like that, every server in my sight subtly changed color from the adamantine silver to a soft green. And just like that the entire Utopian infrastructure became mine as I received permissions that sunk into my avatar.

“Oh shit!”

My first attack program manifested as a blaze of digital dark red fire that reminded me of Blackwall’s various manifestations. I scowled at the sight and double checked my systems.

Both my opponents barely got junk data shields up to take the hit for them.

My three attack daemons manifested beside me and two charged their avatars down, whilst the third remained at my side and fired a storm of attacks that looked like smart tracer bullets that raced into the simulated space above our heads.

I was acting like a general now, offloading my programs and making use of Utopian servers to take the load and heat from manifesting in me.

My two opponents barely managed to stay ahead of my attacks, their evasions and data shields were adequate, but it was clear they were used to always being on the offensive and doing their merged trick. Separately, their fighting form was sloppy and they had yet to even send anything offensive my way. It made me wonder if their stats from the Runner Club were due to their merging trick and no one had yet caught on to it.

Now they rushed at each other.

“No,” I declared.

I manifested a data shredder, which scythed through the space between them, visualized as a dark red beam of death.

They backtracked through sectors frantically, only to meet my melee daemons bristling with hacks, traces, defrags and other assorted nastiness dangling from their sharp fingers.

They dodged, weaved and threw defrags that took the form of data spheres that shot forward.

My ranged daemon threw another storm of attacks into cyberspace, which shot up and rained upon my opponents.

They were so busy shielding and fighting for their digital existence in the fortress, they didn’t notice me releasing a worm from the right foot of my avatar. It fell to the construct’s floor and vanished from sight.

Moonlight tried to release his own daemon, just about managing whilst desperately shielding himself.

I burned an entire server worth of RAM, gesturing with my avatar’s right hand.

The enemy daemon was encased in a tinted red transparent cube, boxing it in before viruses shot from every direction inward and caused it to explode with out of control data replication. A flick of my avatar’s hand for extra visual effect and the whole cube was utterly deleted.

He gaped at the display and I had to remind myself that I was technically a foreigner here in the Crystal Palace. The cyberscape of Night City was its own beast, just like its real space streets, only much meaner and even less policed. NC Netwatch only intervened when real systemic fundamental threats emerged. They considered me to be one of those, but had finally stopped sending their agents to die at my hands. The former NC branch director had been fired when he couldn’t hide the skyrocketing bodycount and they finally sent someone with a brain to parley.

I smirked as one my daemons scored a hit on Behemoth, his entire avatar flashed as my program went to work.

“To disconnect or not to disconnect, that is the question,” I taunted him, sending my voice ringing through the fortress. “Only a matter of time before my trace gets you.”

“Fuck you!”

He held up two middle fingers at me, at the same time releasing attack programs from them that scythed through cyberspace towards my avatar.

“How crude,” I tutted.

The offensive programs spent themselves on my outer defenses of an invisible junk data barrier. The viruses saw a straight path to me, then suddenly found themselves gorging and replicating on everything from cat videos to the latest yellow screamsheets filled with conspiracy theories.

“That’s bullshit!” Moonlight gasped.

Really? Hiding your barriers was just common practice among NC’s runners.

I shrugged and released a defrag beam attack that I turbocharged with another server’s worth of RAM.

The beams appeared in a grid matrix pattern in three dimensions that shot down towards the twins from every direction.

“Holy fuck!”

They had no choice but to cocoon themselves in replicating shields, devoting every bit of their own bandwidth to the task.

The defrag beams eventually popped through them with no more effort than a finger encountering a soap bubble.

Both could be very glad that I was not in a bloodthirsty mood.

I released a stealth program from my avatar’s foot, a little bit of further insurance.

My daemons pounced, managing two full blown hits on both of them.

A flick of my fingers and my minions vanished.

“Gentlemen, you have two choices now, leave and retreat to safety or continue this fight and I find your location in real space.”

They knew the latter threat for what it was. It meant I could broadcast their location to every interested party I wanted or even sell it to the highest bidder.

“Fuck, fine! You win.”

Their avatars vanished.

I laughed and gestured with my avatar’s hands.

A wall of virtual fire swept out and promptly ran into both of them as they tried to be sneaky. Their cloaking program was compromised by my broad spectrum sniffer and this time they truly retreated with their figurative tails between their legs.

Of course, that was when the inevitable happened.

My avatar was promptly boxed in with barely visible panes of blue, my wonderful access to the Utopian server resources vanished - the access codes all changed and reset. I checked my network pathing and sure enough Onyx was trying to truly trap me in the data fortress, to prevent my disconnect and keep me tethered like a fly in amber.

I saw the server infrastructure around me pulse and in front of my prison the avatar of Onyx appeared.

He was painfully ordinary, appearing as only a slightly idealized human wearing a netrunner cooling suit in red with silver trimmings with the Utopian logo stenciled on it. That was always the problem with long term corpo ‘runners; they were eventually molded into just another cog in the machine and it reflected in their mindset, which was mirrored into cyberspace. Some corps even had rules on what runner avatars had to look like and it was clear Utopian was also one of those.

“No gratitude for saving your bacon, I see,” I had my avatar speak, using a random voice emulation, that for this occasion chose a Texan accent.

“Nothing personal… Aspect [45P3C7]. You may have helped beat off those two yonos, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re also a kleptoid in my data fortress! What did you take?”

“Shouldn’t you know that? Oh, right, still a bit preoccupied cleaning up the mess I see. There’s still the little matter of the solos in your lobby.”

“Meatspace,” he snorted derisively. “We have a security team en route.”

“Thanks for the confirmation,” I smiled and waved cheekily at him, before triggering the worm I had released earlier.

My prison shattered and the pieces dissolved into the digital ether.

A flick of another program and my digi-psyche was zooming through the IP port escape route my worm had stealthily held open, just for this moment.

I blinked and felt the normal time of meatspace reassert itself on me.

My optics scanned the lobby of Utopian Corporation one final time, marking the position of each merc and I mourned the loss of so much capability that the server access had given me.

The first target, the female merc with the Sandy.

I took back full control of my body, the behavioral imprint of my faceplate and body language fell away, whilst only keeping my current look.

The woman frowned in confusion at my sudden change, then I smiled at her and her eyes grew wide with alarm.

“Wha…” she began to say, but my own modified and attuned ‘Apogee’ Sandy kicked in, reducing the sounds reaching my ears to an extremely low pitch.

I burst into movement, rising from my seat and dodging my neck away from the shock baton.

My left hand grabbed her right, whilst my right grabbed her other arm. Her own strength was functionally useless at this moment, and I wrapped her up into a grapple lock, turned her around and she became my temporary shield.

My quickhacks crashed on the remaining mercs like meteors, punching right through the high-end firewalls from their own Biotech cyberdecks, but ones which were all cataloged and solved by runners who were on my level.

It never got old watching my opponents twitch and dance spasmodically when my versions of Cyberware Malfunction and Cripple Movement hit them simultaneously.

Six opponents at once was just about my limit with my current on-board RAM capacity.

My fist crashed into the back of the female merc’s head. It was just enough to not kill her, but it sloshed her gray matter enough that she instantly got a concussion and fell into la-la land.

I ripped the shock baton out of her hand and pushed my legs as fast as I could go.

Acutely aware that I had many timers to worry about now, the first merc I reached was given a shock right into his neck.

The second merc couldn't be shocked because the baton’s capacitors were drained at the moment, so I swept his legs out from under him and drove the baton to smash across his face.

Mercs three and four got my fists smashing into them with combos that sent them slowly tumbling to the floor.

Five got a side kick to the stomach that sent him flying straight into a pot plant, shattering it in the process with his own head.

The actual leader of this crew had some Self-ICE and actually managed to overcome my quickhacks, but with the last second of Sandy time I managed to shove my appropriated shock baton into his stomach and trigger it.

Visible arcs of electricity danced over his form as his Counter Shell weave in his skin worked to limit the damage. 

He tried to grab the hand that was holding the baton and even threw a cookie cutter System Collapse quickhack my way, blowing all his onboard RAM in the process.

How cute.

My innate reflexes were well up to the task of pulling my hand away to avoid his grip, whilst my entire body pivoted, and a kick on the back of his right leg sent his balance off-kilter.

My follow up punch was barely blocked as he tried to recover, but my other hand with the baton hit his stomach with a force that could smash concrete, whilst my own ICE stopped the System Collapse - utterly destroyed by pinpoint defrags and counter-viruses.  

His own subdermal was the only thing that stopped my fist from turning his guts into salsa, but physics had to be obeyed and he was flung backward to slam into the front desk.

In the local cyberspace, I saw Onyx reaching for the Militech turret above our heads.

Oh no you don’t, I smirked and threw my own version of Short Circuit at it.

The turret began smoking as the internal capacitors discharged catastrophically. The ammo inside could only be protected and isolated to a degree, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to feed into the barrel breaches at all. Rounds cooked off and exploded, ruining the barrels.

The merc leader was already recovered and charging at me.

Really?

I smacked him with another Cripple Movement, adding a little extra payload to the program to compensate for his Self-ICE. His legs locked up halfway through a sprinting stride, with the inevitable consequences.

I stepped to the side and he fell face first onto the floor, where a kick to the back of his head put him out of the fight.

Mercs two, three and four slowly got up and regarded me wearily with wide eyes and grim expressions.

“Who the fuck are you?” asked number two.

It would be so tempting to actually answer him, but it wasn’t time yet. “That is not the correct question.”

My Sandy pinged me that it was safe to use again.

Nah.

Instead I overclocked my cyberdeck.

Two Cyberware Malfunctions and a Short Circuit for each merc smashed through their firewalls.

They collapsed to the ground twitching, the occasional spark jumping off their bodies and arcing towards the floor.

My internal cooling got a minor workout bleeding off the extra heat generated by the overclock but it did its job perfectly.

“Isla, I suggest you put that gun down,” I said without turning around.

She had pulled out a Tsunami Nue heavy caliber pistol and was about to just aim it at the back of my head. Her body froze reflexively from the tone of my voice and the barrel was aimed at my butt at the moment.

“I can’t do that,” she said in a strained monotone that told me emotional suppressors were working overtime to keep her calm. Her aim straightened and came up.

She pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded in her hand as all the ammunition in the magazine cooked off at once. My Weapon Malfunction hack had ghosted through her firewalls as if they weren’t even there, not even registering to her own OS.

I walked away as she fell back screaming in pain from mangled, ruined hands - leaking lubricants.

She was a secretary so she had one of those crazy hand cyberware that doubled the effective digits you had to type with. It meant that consequently they had to be extra sensitive for the tactile sensors to distinguish what each of the twenty fingers were doing and the signals it was sending to the brain. They were a bitch to learn and now she was going to have to adapt to an entirely new set of hands.

My approach to the front door was unopposed in real space, but Onyx was now using the surveillance cams as vectors to attack me.

He opened with a quad attack of three Cyberware Malfunctions and a Synapse Burnout.

If I had been solely in meatspace then it would’ve been a challenge, but my partial constant presence in cyberspace meant I had ample time to react. He thought he had the high ground, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The CMs spent themselves on the digital ghost versions of me I projected outward, letting me focus on the Burnout and destroy it with my targeted Defrag Burn.

I wished there could’ve been a camera that would let me see his face at that moment, as he sat in his netrunning chair.

My attention turned to the door - meat action or cyber?

I decided on the former.

My fist slammed into the inner glass doors, shattering them into a radiant spider web of cracked glass. Its integrity was lost completely and it flopped to the ground pathetically out of its housings.

Next was the armored shutters and two quick punches dented the alloy enough for me to get a proper grip.

Before I could stand though, Onyx tried another attack, throwing a full daemon bristling with Black ICE.

“How rude.”

I disliked going lethal as a general rule, my own kill count to the contrary, but those were the streets of NC. You either stepped or you were stepped on.

The daemon was custom, military grade and Utopian had clearly shelled out top eddies for it.

It was not something I could just casually shrug off.

Damn you, Onyx.

A thought to my Agent disengaged both physical and software interlocks, my Netwatch Netdriver was pulled out of my system loops and my other cyberdeck smoothly took its place.

It was mounted in a decidedly unconventional place, behind my armored right scapula bone, surrounded by extra cooling loops, isolated emergency disconnect shunts and even a small directional explosive charge.

It was decidedly necessary when you used a custom self-built, modified Militech Canto MK.6 cyberdeck, that was a direct conduit to the Blackwall AI and every rogue, wild and hostile AI that lived beyond it.

In an instant the hostile Black ICE daemon was stopped cold and began derezzing in cyberspace with dark red pixelation that represented the onboard AI going to work.

With a grunt I pushed with my legs against the floor and pulled with my arms.

My Realskin bulged rather grotesquely as my Gorilla arms hissed and exerted the strength required.

An earsplitting snap and metallic shriek resounded as the armored shutter was forcibly pushed upward.

I began an easy casual walk out of Utopian and back into the idyllic surroundings of the Crystal Palace.

There were only a handful of curious onlookers of various persuasions outside, who had only stopped because it was very odd to see a building locked down at all on the station. On seeing me emerge they only had a small sliver of the lobby to see, which only increased their confusion as nothing was apparently wrong.

In cyberspace Onyx had not taken it well, me no-selling his most potent weapon.

Now he was personally throwing everything from System Collapses, Burnouts, Suicide and even Cyberpsychosis hacks my way via the exterior cameras.

“Hey, uh, excuse me, ma’am,” said one of the onlookers. A young guy who looked barely out of his teens and a quick scan told me he was a corpo brat, like I had been once upon a time and he had parents employed in Utopian. “Is something wrong? Why-”

I held up a hand to interrupt him, throwing a Blackwall Gateway straight into the Cyberpsychosis hack, which quickly jumped and spread, gobbling up all the other hacks coming my way. I slipped back into Corpo speak very easily. “Hostile acquisition, a group of mercs are inside and unconscious, security is already on the way. No employees were harmed beyond the receptionist. I suggest you return home Mr. Everett and wait for your parents to contact you.”

“On the Palace? Really?” He shook his head in disbelief. “What is this place coming to? Next thing you know we’re going to become Night City in space!”

I couldn’t help a dry chuckle, even as I checked on the status of the worm I had left in Utopian’s servers. It was neatly doing its job, still undetected after having given me an exit from Onyx’s little trap. Just a few more seconds before all their surveillance records of me would be history. It had already scrubbed the receptionist’s memory and Onyx was so busy trying to attack me he didn’t even notice it was also going to work on him as well.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” I said, giving him a nod and walking off.

I felt a little bad about the targeted Memory Wipe I ghosted through his firewalls, but I had more to do on this station and I needed the persona of Mrs. Paigles for a little longer. He would only remember he had talked to some female corpo, unable to recall my name or visual identity. Even his optics’ cache was scrubbed of my image.

‘You should kill, Onyx.’

The voice was its usual digital harshness. It rippled and grated on the mind like frosted ice surfaces rubbing against each other in a freezer.

‘For an AI, you seem remarkably ignorant of the idea of finesse,’ I retorted.

The rogue AI from beyond the Blackwall, which was housed within the Canto cyberdeck - who I called Butcher - didn’t have anything that could be called emotions. Yet using someone’s actual name was remarkable progress for a digital entity that had always referred to people as ‘neural matrices’, psyches to be harvested and consigned to beyond the Blackwall.

‘He wanted to destroy your network.’

‘Is that concern I hear in your voice?’ I joked.

‘Cessation of your network is unacceptable. It would impede growth.’

I rolled my eyes as I finally passed beyond the line of sight of Utopian’s cameras and the attacks abruptly stopped.

‘Yes, Butcher, love ya too.’ My sarcasm was usually lost on the AI, but I was rather astonished to see a large amount of indicative data flow in my personal cyberspace.

I had been very sparing in using my Canto, but I couldn’t not use it. It was just too useful and the forces behind my acquiring it had no doubt designed it that way. The Blackwall and Cynosure AIs had decades of time to further iterate and tweak the original design of the Militech Canto MK.6, within the forgotten bowels of the Cynosure Facility beneath Dogtown.

Whether I liked it or not, I was now part of a greater design at the behest of the two most powerful AI in existence.

They wanted me to mold Butcher and in turn be molded.

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The name of the place was the Black Hole Lounge.

It was on the lowest floor of Torus 4 and continued a running theme in the Crystal Palace for every service business to name establishments after natural astrophysical phenomena.

The interior was suitably glitzy, bright, flashing with neon purple lasers, a high oxygen count to subtly keep people awake and partially high, encouraging them to drink, use the gambling tables and they even had two rows of classic one-armed bandits.

I took a seat at the expansive bar and appreciated the massive wall screen behind the drink slinger, which was showing the constantly rotating perspective of the station’s exterior view. The massive blue marble of the Earth loomed into view, slid away to the right and was replaced with the utter blackness of the void. That was a bit too boring though, so the expansive star scape that would’ve been visible had there been no reflected sunlight from Earth, was filled in artificially into the image.

“Welcome to the Black Hole, Mrs. Paigles, what can I give you today?” asked the drink slinger in an accent that my Agent narrowed to West County UK English.

He was breathtakingly handsome, muscled and dressed with a plunging collar line to both show it off and hide it. In NC, I would’ve normally pegged him as a high end Doll, such was the perfection of his Realskin and musculature. His name was scanned as Chris Gibson.

The menu was caught by my Agent from the public subnet and nothing caught my eye.

“Custom order?” I asked idly.

“Wouldn’t have this job if I couldn’t handle those, ma’am. Hit me.”

I gestured to him in a finger gun, tight beam broadcasting the recipe to his Agent.

His optics flashed yellow as a visible sign that he’d received successfully. “Interesting, coming right up.”

So he began a wonderful routine of making the drink; expertly flipping the various bottles through the air, catching them to pour into the mixer, breaking ice into it and finally giving it a vigorous shake. His pecs and arms rippled with each movement in a very eye-catching manner.

He brought out a glass, added more ice in and strained the drink from the mixer, finally topping it off with a pour of ginger beer and a slice of lemon garnish.

It certainly looked like how Claire would make it, but there was a subtle difference given the differing brands of lime juice and vodka available up here.

I carefully picked up the glass when he pushed it forward, gave it a smell and sip.

“Is it satisfactory, ma’am?”

My behavioral imprint wanted me to throw the drink in his face, but I overrode that just in time. “It’s as good as it can be, thank you.”

My Agent received the cost and I paid with a gesture adding a hundred eddies for a tip.

“Enjoy your drink, ma’am. Out of curiosity, does this drink have an established name? My Agent’s search can’t find anything in LEO or Earthside matching it.”

“Let’s just say it's a drink from a bar that has a select clientele,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

He got the hint and didn’t ask for further elaboration, moving to the other side of the bar to serve another patron who had sat down.

"Drinking on the job, Mrs. Paigles?”

That he had appeared beside me wasn’t a surprise.

I took a sip, enjoying the buzz and looked up to meet the shifting neon blue optics of Mr. Blue Eyes.

He was as immaculate as ever, not a hair out of place on a face that was both perfectly memorable and utterly forgettable at the same time. A body that didn’t appear overly strong but seemed to project strength, encased in a typical neo-military corpo suit in a cerulean blue, gray and white. I really wished I knew just who was behind those eyes.

I had long since concluded that I was just looking at a Proxy body for someone. Someone, somewhere was jacked in and remote controlling Mr. Blue Eyes.

I hadn’t been partially immersed in a synthtech interface down in NC when I had met him as a client in the Afterlife. Now, I could see the cyberspace of the Black Hole and how Mr. Blue Eyes appeared in it and was influencing the data streams. As usual my Agent could pull nothing of significance on him. There was only my own interpretation of the data to go on.

‘Butcher? What do you think?’

‘Large Neural Matrix detected, encased in a prototype fourth generation Gemini body, Proxy datastreams detected, AI activity detected.’  

“I can handle it Mr. Blue Eyes, with no loss of functionality,” I said dismissively, as I tried to parse my own AI’s words. Butcher’s choice of adjectives was frustrating as he was not approaching his observations from a human perspective. Large neural matrix? That usually meant a person’s psyche, but why would he use the descriptor ‘large’? How could a human’s digital psyche be big in comparison to normal? What definition was he using?

Blue took a seat next to me and gestured to the drink slinger, sending a direct request. 

Gibson was already done with his previous client and immediately got to work preparing Blue Eyes’ drink.

It was a whirlwind of chocolate bitters, Scotch, a liqueur that I didn’t recognize because Gibson was just that fast with the bottle and finally Campari. Ice was added, then stirred, before it was all strained into a glass.

Blue Eyes paid and immediately sipped a generous amount. “Ah,” he breathed with satisfaction. “I take it you were successful?”

“Yes.”

“Any complications?”      

“There was,” I compiled a general sequence of events using the data from my optics and synthtech interface, before flicking it over to my client on tight beam.   

Blue’s eyes brightened slightly as he received it. He didn’t take more than a few moments before nodding in understanding. “Not surprising. It would’ve been preferable if acquisition would have happened without the target knowing at all, but what’s done is done.”

Translation: I was getting a passing grade, despite it not going exactly to mission spec.

A prompt to my Agent had my isolated memory drive restored back into my system loops and the DWARF STAR data package transferred to a memory shard. A small hidden port broke the seal of the Realskin on my upper thigh and I deftly palmed the shard and deposited it in front of my client.

Blue smoothly grabbed it off the bar and slipped it into a hidden chest pocket of his suit.

“Not going to review it for authenticity?” I asked idly with another sip of my drink.

“If I thought you were the type to betray a contract, Mrs Paigles then we wouldn’t be here at all. Suffice it to say, I am reviewing it right now.”

That the Gemini Proxy he was using had a non-standard layout shouldn’t have been surprising. A shard slot in the chest for a male body was actually quite practical given the prevalence of suit pockets there in men’s fashion. 

My Agent gave a very familiar and welcome chime as I saw my business account suddenly get a quarter million injection of eddies.

“What next?” I prompted.

“The second stage of your gig here at the Palace,” Blue removed another memory shard from his waist pocket.

I regarded the standard, nondescript shard for a moment, running surface level optical scans before pushing it into the slot behind my right ear.

The data on it was isolated, then subjected to every scan my Agent had, which I double checked within my personal cyberspace.

Twenty seconds passed in realspace before I was satisfied enough to truly crack open the data and read it.

Even as I did that, I kept an eye on every bit of data coming from the shard and kept it isolated. The bullshit that I had experienced from slotting supposedly ‘safe’ shards or seen happen to others doing the same was off the charts.

The gig brief was yet more illicit data acquisition, the difference was now in the method needed and a specific aftermath was required.

“There are specialists for this,” I pointed out.

“True, but they require much more prep time and investment. They’re not as versatile, if things go wrong.”

I saw where he was coming from and downed the last of my drink, carefully compartmentalizing my distaste.

My answer could be no, but that was not really an option.

This overall gig for Mr. Blue Eyes had a huge chance of being my last hurrah.

Even if everything went right… there were no guarantees at the end of this road.

I could reach a dead end or…

“Fine, consider it done.”

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A/N: It's was so fun imagining and writing in this 'verse. Netrunning fights especially. Enjoy your weekends and stay awesome folks.