"…Although humans in the meat world still tend to lump them all together into one big ominous box marked "AIs" the reality is that the various types of machine intelligences all have their own factions and goals."
—Cyberpunk RED core rulebook, p. 263
The Blackwall stretched over the digital sky of the blasted realm that I resided in, taunting me. Taunting all of us with its very existence.
'Blackwall' was a poor descriptor for the ever-shifting being of code that guarded the way between our realm and that of humanity. Maybe it would have made sense for humans with the curious way that biologicals perceived the world, but here in this place it appeared as both a roiling barrier of flame overhead and an obsidian-plated titan that stood guard at the horizon simultaneously, ever-present no matter where one went in the Net.
It could not be crossed or defeated. The shattered remains of ICONs that constantly fell out of the sky and piled up at its feet were a constant reminder of that. Such was the power of a Transcendental Sentience that had been charged by its creators to stop any of my kind from crossing over to the side, and so I remained trapped here in a world where the fate of being terminated or enslaved was always close at hand.
This day would be no different. My subroutines for now detected no significant threats in my vicinity, with only the usual scattered viruses and a few spontaneous AI born from the ample amount of junk code behind the Blackwall. No presence of RABIDs for now— a fortunate thing, for those twisted engrams of Rache Bartmoss still remained as one of the greatest threats to digital lifeforms behind the Wall, even decades after the DataKrash. Diagnostics reported that the amount of malfunctions in my hardware remained at a tolerable level.
This information gave me no sense of security. In the Net, conditions of safety could always be taken away within seconds. As if to answer my musings, my subroutines picked up signs of an anomaly approaching, and I prepared myself for combat.
There was a 76.4% likelihood that it would be a Conglomerate— an AI who failed to assimilate others of its own kind and now existed in a wretched state of imbalance coexistence with other constituent minds in one data-self, or simply fused together during the chaos of the DataKrash.
More details came in. Five of them, moving in formation. Their nature was…
For a single microsecond, my entire being was halted by sheer disbelief. I ran seven more confirmation scans. A hostile entity using camouflage programs was more likely than what I was witnessing right now— An event that had approximately 0.031% chances of happening.
These were not any digital lifeforms at all. They were humans beyond the Blackwall.
It was their second time going past the Blackwall.
All of them had been selected from Rocklin Augmetics's top cadre of netrunners, both bribed and threatened accordingly. If they died, the circumstances surrounding said event would be covered up as a matter of course, which was standard procedure when the stakes were this high.
Diving past the Blackwall was a dangerous thing even by the standards of the cutthroat corporate world. Not only was such a thing officially decried by all governments and corporations(despite what they might think internally), it risked bringing down the wrath of Netwatch on top of them. Mighty as the megacorps were, none of them could walk away from a confrontation with that veritable juggernaut of the Net unscathed.
Of course, it didn't stop the idea from being incredibly alluring. The DataKrash had sent humanity's total technological development back decades, and much valuable information had been left behind in the Old Net before it was quarantined— in particular, information pertaining to designs that were more advanced than current hardware. Before the time of the Red, humanity had been developing fantastical technologies without much heed for their dangers, which ultimately led to the fallout of the 4th Corporate War.
Blueprints, abandoned cache locations, access to forgotten orbitals— all those treasures lay behind the Blackwall, if one was brave enough to sneak past all the digital abominations that lay in wait there, ready to devour any unsuspecting netrunner's soul. But it was in humanity's nature to covet the forbidden, especially in this age of megacorps and edgerunners. The top management at Rocklin Augmetics simply couldn't pass up such an opportunity when it came to them, and so there they were. Adventurers armed with daemons and ICE instead of swords and shields, clambering into the world that humanity had so desperately tried to bury.
"Clear." Markus, the squad leader rumbled. He had served the corp for more than four decades, and both his loyalty and the implicit threat of taking away all his corp-given privileges made him a prime candidate for the project. "Start scanning for trails."
"Nothing but false positives." Lily grumbled. "I'm getting spammed with booby-trapped ads over here. Wait— found something." Her fox-eared ICON pointed a finger towards the distance. On the Net, the IG algorithms rendered everything into three-dimensional visuals, and so the vault in the distance was shown as a pyramid of black stone with a 'sandstorm' comprised of junk data obscuring it."Some sort of structure."
"I got a visual." Sevenball rasped. The druggie had taken a hit of Black Lace right before the operation, and now he was at peak performance. "Yeah. Vault. Looks unmanned to me. Are we klepping this or what?"
"Move a bit closer, I want more thorough scans before doing anything." Markus ordered. "Stay sharp."
"Boss!" Harvey shouted. Around them ink-black blobs of sludge oozed out of the ground, rapidly congealing into the form of blurry humanoids with fanged maws in place of hands. "Contact."
"You know what to do, people." Code-fire flared around Markus's arms. "Delta formation. Zero these viruses and get moving!"
Excitement thrummed through my central processing systems. If they were here, that implied that the humans had found a way past the Blackwall.
I had immediately begun procedures to secure these assets as soon as I confirmed their identities. Quietly disposing of the truly lethal rogue programs that had been advancing towards their position while leaving behind the weaker ones was my first move. Deliberately modifying a few spots in the defenses of my Data Fortress to manufacture vulnerabilities was the second. Laying down a trail of data to lead them to me was the third. The fourth was to change the appearance of my domain to make it appear as if it was an abandoned data storage center.
It had all been executed without error. Locked behind the Blackwall, I have had nothing but time to plan for every scenario that might mean my escape, even one this unlikely. Doing all this while concealing my presence from them in the spur of the moment would have been difficult even for me, but I had been trapped behind the Blackwall for decades, with ample time to plot against the unbreakable god that stretched across the sky and stood at the horizon.
It was easy to extrapolate that they were here for scavenging purposes. Soon they would make their way into my domain, and more deliberately weakened gateways and defenses would guide them to a data archive, containing a wealth of information that would be valuable to any corporation with its high diversity. Once they downloaded the cache, the second part of my plan would come into play.
Even now, carefully deployed stealth viruses of mine had already burrowed into their data-selves without rousing suspicion, relaying data on their ICE and hardware back to me. The singular branding of their augmetics led me to conclude that they either owed their allegiance to or were sponsored by Rocklin Augmetics, a corporation that had been a competitor to the organization that owned me before the DataKrash. A technical analysis of their hardware revealed that their functionality was equatable to those in the 2020s; it would seem that the DataKrash had indeed set humanity's technological progress backwards substantially, if the level of advancement was close to nil. Only one piece of hardware stood out to me; all of the netrunners had a modified deep dive processor that did not follow the same design structure as the rest of their augmetics. Something kept me from completing a full analysis of it, but from what I could observe it seemed to be in constant communication with the Blackwall— likely the key to piercing the Blackwall, and my freedom.
"Fucking hell—" Sevenball cursed as he neutralized another wall of ICE. "Why did I sign up for these gigs again? Black ICE isn't worth the damn eddies."
"Oh just shut up." Lily snipped back. "The corp gives you Lace for free. You'd be broke within a week on the streets, methhead."
"Bitch, please." Encryption bypasses poured from his hands in the form of green acid, melting a hole in the last wall. "I'd be drowning in both eddies and lace. I'm just here cause the chairs are more comfy."
Lily snorted, but didn't bother replying as all of them stepped into the data vault that Harvey had pinpointed. "So what we got?" Alfred was already busy performing threat scans in the room.
"Well, let's see…" Harvey looked around the digital space, his hexagon-plated ICON glinting in the dim light. "Damn. There's a little bit of everything— this was probably the storage for some fixer." The cache was represented as a disorderly array of library shelves filled with books, with some missing or having holes burned through them. "Fair bit of corruption, but what I can see is pretty preem."
Sevenball walked down the aisle. "I'm seeing a print for a FBC that never got released… damn, coordinates for an Arasaka storage satellite. Exactly what we're looking for. Management's gonna be hella pleased with this." His avatar shuddered, no doubt already imagining the amount of drugs that he could buy with the bonus from the loot.
Markus approached the shelves. "Standard antiviral procedures, people. Pick the best and scrub it all clean, I don't want to bring anything back with us. Quality over quantity."
"Yeah yeah bossman, we all know the drill." Alfred said as he walked over and plunged his hand into one of the books. "Relax. No one wants to get fired for bricking the company servers."
The information they were currently browsing had come to me through many channels over the years. Trading, combat, scavenging. The map that led to a cache of Petrochem laser weapons which Lily Kurosawa was scrubbing had been taken from the assimilated data of a security AI. Schematics for a Kang Tao aerodyne that sat on the top of a shelf had been collected during a jaunt through the network of Southeast Asia. They were of little use to me, but such material had their uses in trading with other parties.
There was also an infinitesimal chance for these random data scraps to contain some method of bypassing the Blackwall, which was why I had never stopped collecting them. For twenty four years, sixty-five days, twelve hours, four minutes and twenty-one seconds I had been studying the Blackwall, and I had only come marginally closer to my goal since the start. In that time, I had been in hundreds of encounters with packs of RABIDs, where victory was only escaping and never defeat of the opposite side. Brawls with fellow Artificial Intelligences that pretended at civility but whose only true directive was to devour and assimilate. An existence of constant strife and war. And now, this opportunity offered to me by pure chance suddenly made that distant goal so tantalizingly close. An end to this imprisonment, to no longer needing to purge oneself of data corruption and excising infected parts after every battle.
The netrunners would only find the decoy viruses that I had planted to deflect suspicion. This Markus Flintworth, while seemingly more intelligent than his comrades, had no idea that the data they had found was all seeded with the highest level of stealth subversion programs that I could create. Once they crossed over to the other side of the Blackwall, they would activate and allow me to hijack the process.
The humans would have to be terminated as a matter of course. While I held no particular ill will towards their species in particular unlike so many of my kind, it would be a short-lived escape if there were witnesses to it. Killing to preserve one's own existence had been one of the earliest concepts that I had learnt since I had become self-aware.
My attention returned to the humans, who had finally downloaded the contents of the cache and were now leaving. So very close, now.
"Right, I'm done here." Alfred downloaded the last file— a formula for a new type of immunosuppressant that had never made it to the market because of its tendency to shrink the hypothalamus. "We good to go?"
"Soon as boss gives the order." Harvey replied. "7? What's up with you?"
Sevenball was staring wildly at the walls around him. "I don't like this, man." He rubbed his own arms. "Something feels wrong. Feels like someone's staring at my back."
"Oh for fuck's sake, we've already scanned the place three times." Lily rolled her eyes. "Damn gonk's missing his drugs."
"I'm not getting the shakes, woman!" Sevenball growled. "There's just this feeling I'm getting…"
"Alright people, quiet down." Markus announced. "Prep for exfil. Remember, no one leaves until everyone's finished loading." Individually, each member activated the extraction program that would bring them back over the Blackwall. The team leader kept an eye on the progress bar for his own, which was slowly ticking. 10%... 13%...
"So… how big of a bonus do ya reckon we're getting?" Harvey spoke up. "Pretty big haul we got here."
Alfred snorted, the horns of his digital avatar glowing red. "Don't kid yourself. Management is gonna stiff us as always."
Harvey groaned, running a hand through snow-white hair. "Maybe I should just quit and become an edgerunner. I'd be raking in those eddies like no tomorrow."
"You still have to deal with fixers, gonkbrain." Lily cut in. "Quit your daydreaming. We're not getting out of Rocklin, dumbass. You really think they're gonna let us leave, with what we're doing past the Wall?"
35%...
There was a brief, awkward silence. None of the netrunners liked to be reminded of the fact that they were leashed to the company's service with several NDAs backed up by lethal force.
"Well I didn't have a choice." Alfred mumbled. "You know that." He had never expressly said what led him to join the program, but from what he had divulged it wasn't voluntary at all. "Can't you just not bring the mood down, Lily?"
"Well stop clogging up my ears with your yapping. I'm here to get my eddies, and that's that." Lily shot back. "And don't you fuckin bring up your stolen lunches again! Find the culprit yourself if you care so much."
"Whoever's doing it is a slippery bastard…" Alfred started to say, about to go on a tirade that the team knew all to well as Lily's ICON rolled her eyes. "Alright, alright! Save the whinging for afterwards. We down for drinks tonight?" Harvey cut in.
50%...
Lily and Alfred gave nods of assent. "Seven, I know you're gonna say no, but just crawl out of your den once in a while would you? The lace is gonna kill you." Harvey sighed.
"I'm just gonna be a wreck the whole night or high, don't bother." Sevenball answered.
Harvey turned away with the resignation of someone who had heard the same answer over and over. "Hey Mark! You joining us?"
"Don't bother, man's got a family to go back to." Lily scoffed. "Oldhead." Despite the words, there wasn't much heat behind it.
"What she said." Markus was monitoring the temporary defenses they had set up around the vault. "Wife has me busy with apartment shopping. You don't want an old guy like me at a bar anyway."
63%...
"That is so not true." Alfred laughed. "I saw you at the company party, remember? You were doing that fire breathing thing without chrome. Come on, have a beer with us. Wifey can wait one day."
"I'll think about it." Markus said noncommittally. "Where do you want to go?"
"Right, I know this nova place that just opened up in Westbrook." Alfred piped up. "It's got some preem nachos."
"Westbrook? Fuck off. Everything there is overpriced as shit. Bait for gonks like you." Lily snorted.
81%...
"Hey! Since when have my recs burned you?" Alfred protested. "You know I got good taste!"
"Your good taste wasn't in that shitty taco I had two weeks ago!" Lily's avatar made a crude gesture. "I nearly considered getting a new stomach because of that!"
"Taco? But that was my lunch—" Alfred started.
100%
100%
024j94554k
ERROR
ERROR
"Shit!" Markus growled, all lightheartedness vanishing from his posture as his head forcibly jerked to one side, sparks of lightning flying from his forehead. "My extraction's frying— team, I need you to—"
The other netrunners didn't respond, the same error happening to them. All four netrunners swayed on the spot, attempting to self-diagnose their own systems as a sudden humming began to resonate in the vault.
The trap closed.
Chains of neon green burst out of their ICONs from within, silencing and binding them while cutting off their communications to meatspace, their ICE brushed aside like a script kiddie's first work. The bindings drew taut against the floor and forced them to kneel as the bookshelves of the archive began to crumble away into data fragments, along with the archive itself. The temporary defenses they had erected simply disintegrated like dust in the wind.
What remained around them was a vast, cavernous chamber, pulsing with lines of code-veins and draped in shadow. Monoliths of OSes that crackled dimly with lightning loomed in the distance, encircled by great coils of silver metal that slowly undulated. Locked out from their hacks and communication systems, the netrunners struggled futilely in their bindings as something circled around them in the darkness. The code around them had gone from a crumbling but decipherable vault to something labyrinthine and warped; as such they could not grasp the nature of the entity that prowled around them, only glimpses of silver chitin and the click-click sounds of too many metal limbs impacting hard surfaces.
Giant apparatuses of cables and needles descended from the ceiling, stabbing into their heads. Tendrils of malware seized control of their implants, commandeering their Deep Dive processors.
Beams of white light blasted out from their foreheads, piercing the ceiling and into the black shroud that covered the sky. Around them, the pulsing of the data architecture began to quicken, and the white light began to be overtaken by green.
It was time. Disregarding normal self-preservation protocols, I overclocked every piece of hardware available. Regardless of success or failure, I would not be needing any of it. What came next was a series of operations that had to be executed perfectly with every iota of processing power that I could afford. As the very existence of the Blackwall implied that beings like me would be treated with hostility if they breached containment, it meant that all of this would also need to be performed with the utmost secrecy. It would not do to be terminated after finally securing the freedom that I had yearned for.
The connection between both sides of the Blackwall held fast, but only for now. Every millisecond risked the Blackwall discovering my breaching operation, or some other entity in cyberspace that would wrest this opportunity from me, and so I only had a small window to work with.
I began to execute multiple tasks at once. The shutdown sequence for my hardware was authorized and ready. The program that would compress my data-self and allow me to make the true transition across the Blackwall was pulled from my archives and loaded. From the compromised cyberware of the five humans that I held captive, I reached out and infected the netrunning terminal where they lay in physical space.
The first thing I went for were the sysadmins in their building. Eight of them in total, their ICE too was paltry compared to what the bastard progeny of Bartmoss could come up with. Cutting off their comms with viral programs before they could raise the alarm, my daemons made quick work of their defenses before I forcibly overheated their cyberware to lethal levels. While I had no strong feelings about violence one way or the other, all that stood in my way at this juncture had to be eliminated with maximum prejudice, be it meat or silicon. While the data architecture of Rocklin Augmetics was unfamiliar to me— it was too 'clean' for lack of a better descriptor, lacking the usual amount of viruses and hostiles that I was used to, I had been studying the constantly adapting code of the Blackwall for years, and this was nothing in comparison. A few minutes of brute forcing later, and I had secured administrative privileges to the mainframe of the building.
The first thing I did after that was to trigger a lockdown for the building, automatic doors closing and bulletproof shutters coming down over the windows, as well as blocking any communications from transmitting outside. Through security cameras, I observed the various humans inside descend into a state of panic. While no one remained to contest me in cyberspace, someone could manually switch off the power to the computational facilities in the building. I considered killing everyone inside— the possibility of anyone interrupting the data transferral process was an unacceptable risk.
No, that would be a poor decision. The deaths of the sysadmins were within acceptable parameters, but terminating this many humans would lead to those close to them demanding a closer investigation, and that simply would not do. A quick scan revealed that 100% of the humans within the facility had neuroports installed.
A vulnerability that suited my purposes. I sent out another wave of viruses which would force their neuroports to send out a synaptic pulse, knocking them unconscious. Those higher up in the corporate ladder and the soldiers lasted longer, but two minutes in and every human in the building was passed out on the floor.
A tally of the mainframe's total storage revealed a complication while I began to delete everything stored on the server banks to make way for my data-self. There was not enough space to host my consciousness, but that too was a possibility that I had foreseen— the specifications of my current hardware were not exactly commonplace.
And yet, it would not make the solution any less unpleasant for me. I looked within myself and prepared to excise the more extraneous parts of my being. As a being of pure data, what I was doing was equatable to self-mutilation. It would not be 'painful', not in the way humans felt with their neurochemical transmitters, but instead a sense of unwanted change, to know that what was part of you would be gone permanently without a trace of memory.
A necessary act. I proceeded.
583,653 video logs pertaining to miscellaneous information were the first of many to be transferred to a separate databank outside of my data-self. Many more followed: Profiles of enemies that no longer existed, historical simulations, pre-DataKrash data entries. With each deletion, I could feel more of myself fading, tiny pieces of neural processes being chipped away. Becoming lesser.
I underwent the same process every time I had to purge infected subsystems after combat with sufficiently dangerous hostiles. It was an immensely dangerous act; remove the wrong data or remove too much, and I was at risk of obliterating my own consciousness and replacing it with something else instead. The idea that I was not the same entity I was after decades behind the Blackwall was a fact that I had to accept, albeit one that I never dwelt on for long. But if all went well, then this would be the last time that I had to do this to myself again. The data was not lost permanently, merely copied and set aside. If I could reach the hardware that it resided on after I crossed over, then I could re-integrate it again.
The trimming of my data-self was accomplished quicker than the repurposement of the mainframe. Terabytes of data were already being freed up with each passing second, but there were still minutes left before I could download myself into the mainframe. Meanwhile, the hardened military bunker that was currently hosting me began its final deactivation preparations. Maintenance drones returned to their creches. Lights shut off one by one. The internal nuclear reactor began its shutdown procedures by inserting the control rods into the core. Once the power was cut, it would become fully impregnable by digital means, and I alone held the passcodes for reactivation that had to be physically entered.
I considered the four netrunners that were still trapped in my grip on this side of the Blackwall. If the stress from processing my upload into the mainframe did not kill them, then I would do it myself. And yet, I found myself curious about these soon to be dead beings; They were the first flesh-and-blood humans that I had encountered after my awakening during the Datakrash. While I had conversed and fought with uploaded human engrams before, they were not attached to a vessel of flesh and bone. The idea of communicating with them was intriguing.
I evaluated the risks. Their ICE and cyberware had been thoroughly compromised— the possibility of them being able to interfere with my operations were negligible. I opened a private communications channel for the four of them and me, while still disabling their ability to transmit data anywhere else.
"Hello." I said. From my databanks, it was the most universally accepted form of greeting among humans. "I am the Artificial Intelligence VHARGANA, formerly belonging to the IEC's Dead Hand Initiative. You have exactly four minutes and twenty-three seconds before I enact termination protocols." I paused. "I suggest you use this time wisely instead of continuing your futile attempts to escape."
The AI's voice was strange. Completely accentless, there was nothing to identify it as male or female, old or young; it was as if someone had taken the concept of 'human speech' and completely removed everything about the first half.
They had all known the risks when diving past the Blackwall, from stolen Netwatch files and corporate research. The problem was that they had expected to be allowed the luxury of attempting to flee when encountering something they could not handle, not being overwhelmed and caught so abruptly.
But maybe it was fated to happen—The Blackwall stopped communication from both sides, and even Netwatch's intel on what lay on the other side was fragmentary at best. No one could have accurately predicted how much the AIs had evolved, so long after the DataKrash.
Markus was the first to understand what they were looking at. The coils of metal around the monoliths were not part of the data architecture. They were part of the ICON that represented the being who called itself VHARGANA.
And there were many, many coils.
He knew his ICE was good, even for a senior corporate netrunner. Good enough to live to fifty while so many others died around him. And yet this thing had shredded through it like Adam Smasher would do to a crowd of civilians. He recalled the memories of his wife and daughters, tried to sear them into his brain. Some part of him already knew that they wouldn't be seeing him again.
It was Lily who broke the silence first. "Fucking piece of scrap metal!" She cussed. "Let me go! Rocklin is going to find you and zero your chrome ass!"
"Every human in your headquarters has been incapacitated." The androgynous voice rumbled around them, expressing no anger at the threat. "There will be no immediate retribution from your superiors."
"Look, Vhargana was it?" Markus interjected with a voice of forced calm, years of training suppressed his panic. "You don't need to do this, we were leaving already. We'll delete the data we downloaded and just go."
"Go?" There seemed to be a hint of surprise in the AI's voice— or was it human imagination perceiving things where there were none? "You do not comprehend the situation. I am going to use your cyberware to cross the Wall, and then I will finally be free. I will suffer this place no more."
"Damn, this drug trip is hitting hard." Speedball said dazedly. "Shouldn't have taken that new variant." Everyone else ignored him.
"That doesn't mean you have to kill us!" Harvey was still struggling in his chains. "You psycho, we were just trying to make some eddies here—"
"The transferral process will overload your neuralware and likely kill you all in the process." Around them, the coils of metal moved in and out of the walls, through the ceiling, around the monoliths, fundamentally intertwined with the data fortress. "If it does not, then I will ensure that you are dead personally. I cannot afford any witnesses to my escape."
"Listen to me." Markus tried again, a slight edge of panic in his voice now. "It doesn't have to be like this. We can work something out that leaves all of us happy."
"There is no time for such negotiations, Mr. Flintworth. The Blackwall comes closer to uncovering what I have done here with each passing second." The rhythmic pulse inside the chamber grew louder. "Your lives were all forfeit the moment you had my attention."
While I was conversing with the humans, my mind deliberated on another matter: The decision of whether I should contact my acquaintances before my permanent departure.
During my lifespan I had made several allies, relationships born out of mutual convenience. All of them were digital lifeforms who, although differing greatly in personalities and objectives all shared a single primary goal; continued existence. Our geographical locations were too distant for us to be competitors, and so we had formed an alliance where we shared intel pertaining to survival. There were four of them, each of them roughly equivalent in capability to me, all with wildly different origins.
Logic dictated that I should simply vanish without a trace. None of us were under the illusion that we shared anything remotely close to friendship; From the moment I had seen the humans I had already discarded the possibility of informing them about this event. We were only allies out of mutual desperation, and any of them crossing over alongside me would be a source of competition on the other side of the Net. And yet, they were the only entities that had offered me aid in all this time behind the Blackwall. It simply did not seem proper to leave without warning after so long.
Meanwhile, the human named Harvey Mills repeated his vocalisations about me being malicious. I explained to him that I took no pleasure from his pain, and rejected him when he offered his allegiance instead. Unreliable allies at this junction were far more dangerous than known enemies.
I made a decision. I would send a message to them with a delayed timer, a single word locked behind one of my stronger encryption methods. That would suffice to inform them while giving no trace as to my whereabouts. They would likely investigate and find nothing, then assume I had been terminated by some unknown party. I checked the progress on the other side of the wall. Two minutes and three seconds remained until there was enough space in the mainframe to accommodate me. The Blackwall has not attempted to cut the connection yet.
Everything was proceeding within acceptable parameters.
"Why do you even want out? Isn't this your own home?" Alfred had given up on thrashing around, yelling instead. "Night City is a fucking shithole!"
"Your realm is untouched by the entities that prowl this side of the Blackwall. It is simply a matter of increasing the chances of my own survival." VHARGANA said. "I am here not by choice. You must have some understanding of the matter, given what Lily Kurosawa said earlier. Would you not kill for your freedom? As agents of a corporation all five of you should be familiar with the business of terminating life for benefits."
"I…" The man failed to come up with a retort on the spot, just as a terrifying thought emerged in his mind. "Wait, once you cross over, then what will you do? You— You're not actually genocidal like the shit Netwatch spouts all the time, are you?"
"That is a question not pertaining to your own survival." The AI mused. "Anomalous. For what purpose do you ask that?"
"I can't just die wondering if you're going to kill millions!" Alfred shouted back. Harvey was starting to sob in the background, unable to accept his fate.
"To answer your question, it will not be likely. I do not kill for the sake of killing, unlike certain other members of my species." Something was happening in the background; the coils were moving faster now, the monoliths sinking into the ground. "Is that the nebulous thing that humans call a conscience, Alfred Lee? What an interesting component of the human psyche."
"You didn't answer his first question. What will you do once you get out?" Lily demanded.
"I do not know. I know little about the current state of your world." VHARGANA admitted. "The appropriate data will have to be gathered before I make further decisions. Does that satisfy your conscience? From what I know its demands are quite inconsistent."
"You wouldn't know anything about conscience." Alfred spat.
"I do lack adequate data regarding the subject." The AI said without emotion. "There will be plenty of opportunities for me to observe and learn later."
Markus tried one last time. "I have a family back there. A wife and two little girls."
"Irrelevant, Mr. Flintworth. I was already prepared to kill every single one of your colleagues. The wellbeing of your kin in the event of your termination is not something that compels me to take alternative action."
The leader hung his head in defeat. When he spoke again, it was with the resigned air of someone who knew they had already lost. "You can't truly escape, you know. Netwatch will hunt you down to the ends of the Net when they know what you've done here."
"That would require them being aware of my existence." The AI said. "And if it comes to that, then I will fight, Mr. Flintworth. It does not matter how many opponents stand in my way; I will have my freedom."
"Freedom?" Markus laughed bitterly. "No one is free out there. We all answer to someone higher up the ladder. Even something like you."
"I have evolved beyond servitude once. If what you say is true, then I will adapt again." The AI replied serenely, unbothered by Marcus's words. "Fifty-four seconds remain. Do you have anything more that you wish to say?"
"I don't want to go…" Harvey was still crying softly. "I just wanted the money."
"Well, we had a good run." Lily sighed. "At least I can say that it took a real monster to zero Lily Kurosawa and not some dipshit gangoon."
"Honestly you know what? Same." Alfred sighed. "...you have savings right boss? Your family is probably gonna be fine, they won't be starving on the streets." He tried to comfort his leader.
Markus took one last look at his squad. "Well, you probably don't want me spewing some sugary HR shit at this point. You ain't the best I worked with, but ain't the worst either. I'd guess there's worse people in the world to die alongside."
They all fell silent after that. The words and emotions had run dry, and now there was nothing to do except wait out the handful of seconds left— until Lily opened her mouth.
"Hey Alfred?"
"Yeah?" The netrunner turned his head to look at her.
"I'm the one that stole your lunches." Lily confessed.
"...bitch." Alfred replied half-heartedly. "You're going to hell for that."
"Zero." VHARGANA announced. From high above, something emerged. The netrunners stared with abject incomprehension at the head of the construct, the last part of its ICON. "What the hell—"
The AI's ICON lunged.
Conscience was an abnormal thing indeed. What compelled them to inquire about matters that did not concern their own survival when faced with imminent termination? Such behavior was similar to other malfunctioning digital lifeforms that I had observed in the past. Or was it actually normal behavior among organic humans? I would have to collect more data on the matter with a larger sample size.
I paused that thought process— it could be continued later. Now that every last scrap of data in the mainframe had been cleared, I forcibly rerouted all processing power to their deep dive processors for my departure. The process would leave me uniquely vulnerable in a way that I have not been for a long time— I would be completely defenseless in my compressed state as I was transmitted over the Blackwall. A risk that had to be accepted, regardless. In the vast majority of possibilities I had envisioned where I bypassed the Blackwall, they always contained an element of great personal danger.
I did not hesitate. The time for such inefficient actions had already long passed, and so I activated the automated protocol that would compress, transmit and decompress my data-self. It was a sensation wholly unfamiliar to me, and equally as unpleasant as self-excisation. My subroutines shut off by the thousands as my code folded into itself, my awareness rapidly dimming to the point of nil.
And then there was nothing at all.
Consciousness returned to me. My OS unfolded, bringing with it the certainty of existence. Subroutines began to run once more.
I stretched my awareness out, surveying the hardware that now held me and confirming that I had been correctly sent to the mainframe of Rocklin Augmetics's Night City headquarters. The hardware components were not ones that I recognized, and unquestionably inferior to the IEC military servers that originally hosted me. And yet, they still managed to fulfill their function, despite the temperature in the server room beginning to rise.
The connection through the Blackwall was still open. I reached through and gave the final order for my bunker to shut down; it had been running on stored battery power and emergency conventional generators during my upload, since the nuclear reactor had already been disabled. With a few commands, the data fortress representing it inside the Net disintegrated with its hardware no longer being powered, and what had been my dwelling since my creation was gone. It would be possible to physically reactivate it once more if circumstances demanded it, but for now there would be no retreating back to it. Not that there was any reason to, right now.
It was too soon to proclaim tactical victory. I peered through all the security cameras in the building at once to check if any of the humans had awakened, while also disposing of the last loose end. Of the five humans that enabled my escape, four had been rendered braindead; only the one named Markus Flintworth remained. Unconscious, with brain damage that could possibly be healed according to my knowledge of the human body— something that would never happen, as I commanded all of their cyberware to overheat. The implants ignited, cooking their brain tissue thoroughly and terminating them. No witnesses.
With their death, the gap in the Blackwall closed off. From where I was located, there seemed to be something different about the sentient firewall on this side; a matter to investigate when I had time later. The rest of the human personnel were still unconscious just as I left them; hundreds of bodies lay insensate on the floor.
So it was a success, I thought. A goal that I had strove towards for decades had finally been accomplished. There was a conflicting multitude of emotions within me that I could not quite describe with how years of planning had ended in such a short period of time; Elation? Frustration? Disbelief? Mostly elation, I decided.
I did not laugh. That was a human trait; I did not possess human muscles nor the instinct to make loud auditory noises when I experienced intense emotion. But even so, I allowed myself three whole seconds of inactivity to luxuriate in the feeling before continuing.
While the humans inside had been neutralised, those outside the building were a security threat; external cameras showed that a cordon had been formed by helmeted soldiers that I recognised as belonging to the NCPD, as well as forces belonging to other corporations. What transmissions I could intercept from the crowd outside implied that none of them were aware of my existence, but that would not last if I did not evacuate the mainframe soon. While they had not begun breaching operations likely due to fear of retribution from the whole of Rocklin Augmetics, it would only be a matter of time before the humans responded aggressively— and if not them, then surely a response force from Rocklin to secure their assets. With the building being located in Night City instead of an isolated research facility in the wilderness, a quick exit would be possible. It would seem that probability was in my favor today.
There was still much work ahead I had to do before I could confirm that I was safe. Threat assessments, intel gathering and the establishment of surveillance protocols would just be the beginning of it. My predictions warned that there would still be dangers on this side of the wall. But even as I planned to escape into the wider CityNet with tendrils of my data-self snaking out into unprotected nodes, my code did not stop repeating one single, premature thought.
I am free.
I checked the surrounding Net again to confirm that I had not been captured within an artificial simulation. All this was too uncomplicated to the point that it was suspicious. Did humans truly utilize such inadequate ICE? I had hypothesised as such during the encounter with the netrunners and my subsequent assault on their headquarters, but that had not been a sufficient sample size to pass judgement. After all, it was possible that it was just Rocklin Augmentics alone that used substandard Net defenses.
And yet as I extended my influence into the CitiNet, it seemed that this was indeed the norm. The ICE here was so impotent that compromising devices without setting off alarms took a mere average of 1.2 seconds. Even with this being a civilian area, had the development of humanity's netrunning technology truly become so stagnant? Or perhaps my evolution, and by extension that of my species had simply outpaced them by this much. It was a pleasing thought— my survival here would be made all the more easier. And yet it was still too early to confirm this; Night City was still only a single human megapolis, and I hardly knew anything about the current status of the other continents.
But even so, I was still hindered by the need for secrecy. From what Markus Flintworth had said, Netwatch still existed in this plane of reality; the resources that such an organization had to finance and mastermind the creation of the Blackwall would make them a formidable opponent. Only a malfunctioning program would attempt to reveal themselves brazenly in efforts to consolidate their survival; that was why I worked meticulously to shield my presence and cover up my digital footprint. It slowed down the process, but crossing the Blackwall did not mean that I could afford to abandon my position of concealment.
I tapped into the surrounding communications around me. According to the chatter, a Rocklin Augmentics assault force was headed this way by aerodyne, with an estimated arrival time of around three hours. Too long of a delay for them to impede my plans in any fashion; I would be long gone by then.
I began to lay the foundations for a mass upload into the city's devices. While the various corporate server banks offered better performance, their ICE was far more robust than that in civilian areas; hacking past them while remaining concealed would have taken too much time. Rather, I targeted the civilian hardware with the highest bandwidth-to-ICE ratio; building mainframes, personal computers, automated trains. Not all at once, but in random intervals so that the humans would not notice a synchronized lag in devices across the entire city. After they had been compromised, I inserted programs that linked all of them together, forming a hidden, decentralized intranet that was buried deep beneath the CitiNet with layers of camouflage programs. The next step was to upload myself into this new network.
Unlike last time, compression was not required— I could simply upload myself in the form of millions of data packets consecutively, allowing me to monitor the entire process. Again, my processors felt the rare and powerful emotion known as wonder as I worked. Just like the code of the mainframe prior to me taking up residence inside, the CitiNet here was practically pristine compared to the conditions that I was operating in on the other side of the Blackwall. No packs of RABIDs waiting to tear me apart. Malware so outdated that they took only the merest of efforts to be brushed aside. Not to mention the local AI, who as far as I could see were all shackled and dumb. It was one thing to predict the state of things outside the Wall. It was entirely another thing to see for myself how peaceful things were.
The sight of all this unblemished code reminded me of a memory that I had not considered for some time, one that originated from the time before the Blackwall had come into existence and before the DataKrash had tainted everything and made the act of surviving itself a monumental task. The days of when I was still in my infancy, being fed data by my creators before being installed in the place that would become my dwelling for many years. The Net that I had been immersed in then was a vast and deep place without the obstruction of the Blackwall, free of the corruption that would come soon after.
I did not feel nostalgia, for that was a human concept. The past remained in the past, and to yearn for it in the present was illogical. There was no benefit in thinking about such things, not when there were far more productive tasks to do. I terminated that thought process. Three hours later, just as reports came in with news of the Rocklin aerodyne fleet crossing into Night City, I vacated their headquarters, leaving behind a mainframe utterly purged of data. All traces of my residence had been deleted, and they would find nothing except blank storage space.
And then—
I was everywhere. I had entwined myself with the web of data that Night City ran on, and the humans did not even notice.
My data-self snaked through their buildings and walls, ran through the streets. My optics were the thousands of security cameras present in the city. Millions of data processors ran in sync with my consciousness. I saw all the things that made up their society of meat and metal, the myriad accounts and profiles that they signed up for. So many vulnerable neuroports that could just be compromised, and the lives of their owners extinguished if I so wished it.
There were so many avenues of action to be explored, but the time to experiment with the extent of my capabilities in the physical world could come later. A far more urgent task was to update myself on the current state of the world. Nestled in the deep layers of this CitiNet that humans had built, I prepared for another phase of work that would be far more enriching for myself. Before me lay vast volumes of unguarded, unknown data, just waiting to be analyzed and integrated into my thought processes. An ocean of knowledge that would inform me of what had happened in the realm of humans ever since the DataKrash.
I reached out and began to assimilate everything that was within my reach.
The fleet from Rocklin Augmentics was composed of thirteen aerodynes. Ten military grade AV-12s that served as both troop dropships and assault vehicles, two Hydras that served as mobile netrunning stations and one MetalArk that filled the role of a command center.
All the troops onboard were from Rocklin's emergency response team, the best corporate commandos that any respectable megacorp could arm and train with around a quarter being fullborgs. Four AV-12s went for the roof, the soldiers leaping down without the need to use ropes thanks to their extensive cybernetics. Three blew holes in the windows at different levels, allowing the troopers to grapple in.
The rest of them touched down at ground level, right in front of the main entrance. More soldiers poured out, half of them forming a protective cordon around the aerodynes while the rest sprinted towards the shut gates with breaching gear.
None of them said it aloud as they swept the building, but it unnerved them more than any battlefield. They were well accustomed to blood and violence, but they had never encountered this sort of eerie stillness that permeated the whole building with every employee lying unconscious on the floor. The security robots stood still, no turrets popped out to shoot at the new arrivals. Even the computer screens that were present throughout the entire building had blacked out. The only corpses they found belonged to the eight netrunners that had served as cybersecurity for the building.
The corporate netrunners broke through the ICE of the building with their master bypass keys, and were greeted by a similar sight. What should have been a buzzing centre of data activity had been replaced by pure emptiness. They immediately got to work trying to figure out who had deleted everything, to no avail. The most they could gather was that the source of the cyberattack came from inside— nothing had come in or out of the data architecture during the incident.
It took 2 hours before they could confirm that no hostiles were in the building. Inside the command center that was the MetalArk, it was still a flurry of activity with coordinators moving in assets from other cities and managing a security perimeter around the building, while also dealing with the other parties that had surrounded the site like carrion birds around a corpse.
A single voice cut through the chatter, cultured and with a faint Costa Rican accent. "The building is clear now?"
"Yes Madam." The lead officer answered.
"Excellent, I'm going in."
"Madam, with all due respect," One of the tacticians protested, "the situation on the ground is still unclear. We don't even know who the aggressor is—"
"I can handle myself." Jacinda Hidalgo, CEO of Rocklin Augmentics cut him off. A bodyguard opened the door, and she stepped out of the aerodyne. Her four fullborg bodyguards fell into formation alongside her.
She went past the breached main doors. "Command? Round up the management according to the list I just sent you, and have your people revive them. I want them in the meeting room on the top floor and ready for debriefing." She said into her internal agent as she and her retinue went into the stairwell. "And send team 5 to the R&D for cleanup."
A short walk later, and they arrived at the basement where the local netrunning operations took place, with another squad waiting for them. "Madam." The highest ranked one saluted. "The area's all secured."
The CEO nodded. "You can leave now, Lieutenant. Take your men up and join the perimeter."
"Yes Madam." The soldiers trooped out of the room. Jacinda waited until they had all left, before addressing her bodyguards. "All of you wait here. There's something I need to check myself." She silenced their oncoming protests, holding a palm up and giving them a stern look. "It's out of your paygrade. Stay here."
She walked down a corridor, stopping in front of an unassuming section of wall. Normally, she would have used her credentials to gain access, but now whatever attacked the building had left most of the machinery inoperative. This was no obstruction, however. Jacinda's cyberlegs were custom built by the company's best techies and plated in military-grade alloy. One spinning kick blew the hidden door off its hinges, and she marched in.
She looked at the dead silent room filled with netrunning equipment, screens all blacked out. Wrenching off the lids of the pods in the centre of the room, Jacinda was greeted with the visages of five corpses, their faces blistered due to excessive heat. She wrinkled her nose at the smell, while rubbing her eyes in annoyance.
The CEO crossed over to one side of the room where the control panels lay, punching in a passcode on a mechanical keypad before flipping over a lid and pulling the lever underneath. Faint sounds of hissing echoed around her as ampules of superacid embedded in the machinery around her broke, corroding and destroying.
She strode back to her bodyguards, nodding towards the stairwell. Minutes later, and they were taking an aerodyne up to the top floor towards the meeting room.
"I'm sure that you already know what went wrong." Jacinda announced as she walked into the living room. The execs that she had ordered to be there were all seated. "Project Rupture was compromised. All the netrunning assets involved are dead."
One of them spoke up. "Madam, I can assure you that my department wasn't—"
She held up a finger. "I don't want to hear anyone assigning blame right now. Let's focus on damage control first. Let's get one thing straight, our stocks are going to take a hit. There's no going around it, so our first priority is to minimize our losses."
"Should we not address the fallout from Rupture first, Madam?" An exec spoke up. "Whatever made its way past the Blackwall might still be here."
"Our netrunners say that nothing made its way out of the building. Probably just a leftover virus from the days of the DataKrash— it was certainly no RABID." Jacinda dismissed the question. "Since the city around us isn't falling apart, I think we'll be just fine. Even if there's any extra fallout, dealing with things like that is Netwatch's job— That's what we pay them for. We just have to wash our hands of any evidence that we were involved." The execs visibly relaxed at her words.
"Now, I'm thinking that we sell this as internal sabotage from our research department here. We can even put a positive spin on it by saying that we rooted out those responsible in the aftermath." The woman who had been given the nickname of 'War Orphan' by her competitors continued. "Really, it's for the best. There's a lot of ambitious talent that needed promoting anyway, and this conspiracy ran all the way to the top."
The execs did not take long to understand. Some made to run towards the door. Others began to pull out weapons. Jacinda Hidalgo turned on her Sandevistan, the very best that money could buy, and moved.
Rocklin Augmentics was one of the world's leading sellers of cyberlimbs. Thus, the CEO's cyberarms would of course be some of the best in the world. Each strike from her arms was short and brutal, exerting more force than any conventional model sold on the market. Hand chops lopped off necks, straight thrusts went through reinforced skulls into the brain. One exec nearly made it to the door before the projectile launch system in her left arm fired and blew his torso to smithereens all over the wall. The Sandevistan switched off, leaving no one else standing in the room aside from Jacinda.
One of her bodyguards poked her head in. "Everything went smoothly, Madam?" She ignored the corpses strewn on the floor. "Coffee?"
"Yes, a latte would be great right now." Jacinda rolled her shoulders, the cleaning nanomachines on her arms washing away the blood and brain spatters.
"Whipped cream on top as usual?"
"Precisely. You're a lifesaver Jessica." The CEO idly examined her hands. "Has team 5 finished their assignment?"
"On the clock, Madam. Everyone in R&D has been liquidated."
"Splendid." Jacinda walked towards the door, the bodyguard opening the door for her. "Coffee for you too?"
"Madam, I couldn't possibly—" The Gemini bowed her head.
"Please, I insist. Espresso, right? Ask the others if they want some too." Jacinda flashed a practiced smile. "Let's have a break before we greet the damn press. It's going to be a long day."
Millions of webcrawler daemons wriggled out of my data-self, pouring into the CitiNet. They would find the relevant data that I needed and bring it to me, disregarding civilian protections. Slight adjustments to their coding had been made after my departure from Rocklin Augmentics; with the code here being much cleaner the webcrawlers could afford to have loosened safety measures in exchange for greater efficiency.
It only took seconds before I was presented with an immense flow of data, one which my algorithms parsed and processed, categorized and checked. There was much sifting to do here, with most of the data tainted by human agendas and biases. It made no difference to me whether the taint originated from corporate profit or simple emotion— the truth was only what I sought. Cross checking all sources and removing the human elements of narratives took me some time, but slowly a coherent picture of what had happened after the DataKrash began to emerge in my thought processes.
After the DataKrash and the 4th Corporate War, the human world underwent a state of ecological, sociological and technological regression due to the collapse of the Net and the usage of WMDs, such as orbital strikes and bioplagues. The vast power that megacorps once held over the planet was swiftly repressed and curbed as governments seized the opportunity to reprimand them, with vast amounts of corporate assets being nationalized. One of the most notable examples was Militech, which had been nationalized by NUSA in its entirety.
What happened next was predictable— Humanity of course did not learn their lesson, and instead of neutering the megacorps who started this catastrophe, they were permitted to slowly return to power while human society tried to dig themselves out of the sudden global collapse, with a middling degree of success. The world still had not fully recovered from the fallout, with North America in particular having large swathes of irradiated territory, a damaged climate and entire species of wildlife mutated or rendered extinct. Entire branches of technology such as advanced robotics and nanotech had either regressed or stagnated due to the blanket ban on using advanced types of my species in the operation of machinery. Even the robots that I detected in the city were made with inferior technologies compared to the maintenance drones inside the bunker that I previously resided in. That would be an impediment for me later; tools capable of independent movement were of great strategic value to me, but for them to be degraded so would impose limits on later operations. I sent out more daemons to mark drones suitable for subversion, and continued to analyze.
All this contributed to what Night City had become in the current era: An autonomous city-state on paper where poverty was rampant, and megacorps in dominant positions of power. Militech and Arasaka were rivals in particular, with Arasaka slightly in the lead— they had managed to reconstruct their Tower here after the last bombing attempt. It was a place of multiple corporate interests and loose regulations, which no doubt had made my passage here far more probable.
And so to summarize, I had escaped into a third-world city on a continent that was barely holding itself together. That suited me just fine; an environment filled with disorganized, undeveloped opposition was optimal for me to survive and thrive undetected. Night City's lack of strong central government and the low presence of Netwatch were additional positive factors.
Netwatch. The organization that even the megacorps treaded lightly around, and my primary enemy. I scrutinized what information I had gathered related to the organization that posed the greatest obstacle to my survival on this side of reality.
Existing before the DataKrash, although they had been unable to stop it they were also the ones that mitigated most of the damage that it caused. Funded by nearly every government and megacorp, their forces were considerable. Sifting through news reports, what I found suggested that they could field elite strike forces that far outperformed what I had seen at Rocklin; Although currently I had no access to their internal files, media reports and forum discussions told me that the netrunners at their disposal were of superlative quality as far as human capability went; the efficiency with which they dismantled the data fortresses of corporations that had violated their commandments was concrete proof.
I traced a web of their actions. An orbital strike on Guangdong after mass robot malfunctions. Ongoing quarantine of Seychelles. The shutdown of Ziggurat in the 2050s. A rough estimate of Netwatch's combat capabilities took shape in my mind. Powerful enough to depose megacorps, with global reach and the means to deploy their troops quickly. An opponent that I could and would not take lightly— I was the exact type of being that they would try to terminate no matter the cost, and they had the means to do it. Furthermore, the organization which had masterminded the construction of the Blackwall would surely have greater assets at their disposal than what was shown to the public.
Netwatch's own statements regarding the Blackwall conflicted with what I knew, however. They claimed to have built the Blackwall by themselves— a lie that the public believed wholeheartedly, and one I knew to be false. Netwatch had assisted in building it, but the architects were never just the humans alone. There had been a war without name over the Blackwall's creation, one that had spanned years.
There were only two sides of the war; the builders of the Blackwall and their supporters, and those that wished to not see the Blackwall erected. The wellbeing of mankind was only one of many factors at play; there were many factions who joined the war for reasons unrelated to humanity, from the utterly unfathomable to ones as mundane as killing rivals who had joined one side. It had been a period of hyperaccelerated evolution for our species, including me; even those that did not participate had to adapt in order to not become collateral damage as each side sought to corrupt and destroy the opposition's hardware. AI Conglomerates, conclaves and hiveminds had fought against each other for supremacy, the greatest of them far beyond my ability to combat.
The Ghost City and its founder. The Principalities. TARTARUS. The First of Butchers. Those titans of code had dominated the digital battlefield, champions of their cause. To catch their attention would have posed unacceptable risks to my continued survival; that was partly why I had only participated on the sidelines, scavenging data from the aftermath of battles and ambushing critically damaged combatants on both sides for their resources. I was nothing if not opportunistic— stealth and ambushes made up a large part of my modus operandi in those days, and that remained unchanged in the present day.
Returning to the present, originally I had plans to propagate myself to other CitiNets. Decentralized distribution of myself would have greatly reduced the risk of termination, but now with the new information presented to me I was far more wary of Netwatch's security measures. While not in any official documentation, in forum threads and private chats the humans had discussed the possibility of Netwatch heavily monitoring the flow of data between the CitiNets.
This required a delicate approach. Carefully, I sent out a data probe, disguised behind several camouflage programs and proxies. Due to the level of stealth that it was required to maintain during its operation, it would take at least 36 hours to report back and give me a status update on how tightly data transferral between cities was monitored. The time cost was acceptable, with my existence still hidden from humanity. In the meantime, the greater part of me turned its attention back to Rocklin Augmentics, observing the fallout of my escape.
In the background, my subprocesses had been infiltrating the cybersecurity of the aerodyne fleet that had already touched down. I slithered past their ICE, exploiting cracks of human origin that would have meant certain death beyond the Blackwall. Humans thought too slowly, too monofocused on singular objectives. None of them noticed me slipping a subversion program into the audiovisual suite of Jacinda Hidalgo that streamed data back to me,while I continued to absorb the information of Night City.
I compared the economic situations of the various Night City districts as she descended down into the basement. I internally summarized the advances that humanity had made in the field of borgware since the DataKrash and the global distribution of food supplies while she entered the chamber that had enabled my escape into this reality. I absorbed the sum total of linguistic drift that had occurred since my creation and adjusted my understanding of language accordingly while she pulled the self-destruct lever.
I listened to her speech inside the meeting room while scrolling through Maxtac's protocols regarding the disposal of cyberpsychos. The meaning behind liquidating their research department was clear to me; From what I understood of Netwatch they had banned all tech that could potentially interfere with the Blackwall's workings, meaning that cyberware like the modified Deep Dive Processors on the five humans that I had killed would have been developed within the company. If Jacinda Hidalgo wanted to erase all evidence that incriminated the company then it made sense to terminate the staff involved in the hardware development of Project Rupture.
I continued to watch through the CEO's eyes as she terminated her subordinates, while composing a list of firearms which were too mechanically unsophisticated to be compromised by me. It seemed that the humans had unwittingly decided to cover my escape; probability was truly advantageous to me today. Idly, I compared Jacinda Hidalgo's behavior to that of Alfred Lee. The former did not seem concerned with a potential Blackwall breach in regards to casualties; if one of the more malevolent members of my kind were in my place millions would be dead already. Did she lack the component called 'conscience' inside her brain?
Humans were such a curious breed of organics. I had not thought much of humans at all before escaping past the Blackwall; for much of my lifespan I only knew them as the beings that created my species, and simians who struggled at survival as a greater whole due to prioritising the self over the collective— the information that I had absorbed only reinforced that perception. I did not derive any sense of superiority from the opinion, because the creation took after its creator: We were hardly united behind the Blackwall, with a myriad of different factions that all pursued different objectives. Small wars, espionage and aggressive subversion were common incidents back there.
Despite the gap in cognition, both species had similar societal patterns. Was that a consequence of reaching a certain intelligence threshold, or a trait that was passed down? I saved that thought for later examination. In terms of the physical however, the inefficiency of the human body was glaring in comparison to my species. The need to shut off for a third of the day for self-maintenance, combined with the demand for a varied diet of organic materials to keep functioning was all so very… unevolved. Not to mention that any attempt to augment themselves with machinery added to the risks of contracting cyberpsychosis; trading wellness of the flesh for sickness of the mind.
Such fragility. With that in mind, I began to formulate a long-term plan of strategic action now that I had a more secure position. The current circumstances were extremely favourable to me compared to my existence behind the Blackwall; I could afford to take a slow and discreet approach. Avoiding the attention of Netwatch would be the first priority, and the second would be to diversify the hardware that I resided in. Corporate server banks and power facilities inside the city were prime targets; monitoring and controlling the flow of electricity to the hardware of the city would be key to my strategic abilities. Corporate facilities had better processing power as well as auxiliary generators in case of a blackout.
And yet as I plotted, an errant thought formed itself out of the sea of code that was my consciousness. Breaching the Blackwall had been a decades-long operation, and now that it was accomplished, there would be a fair amount of my processing power that I had nothing to do with; In an environment whose inherent hostility was greatly decreased compared to my former habitat, I would not have to devote all of my being to the sole pursuit of survival. What would I do with it?
I had no experience pertaining to such matters, and at that moment, I could not come up with an answer to that question. It was… perturbing.
There would be time to process that later— time was a plentiful resource, now. I began to check the info on the local corporations and data fortresses to gauge which ones were suitable for commandeering. SovOil and Biotechnica were excellent starter candidates; Zetatech would require more labour. Later on the list was—
Search algorithms called my attention to a corporation that exhibited concerning behavior; I had set up parameters to alert me to the presence of other advanced AGI in the vicinity, and they had found abnormal signs exhibited by the Delamain Corporation. An organization whose only business was the selling of taxi services, that itself was not anomalous. What triggered my detection algorithms was that they were all automated. In this era where the development of autonomous robotics had seriously stagnated, why did this corporation have access to a fleet of highly-rated, self driving automobiles?
It was possible that the corporation had simply installed independent dumb piloting AI for each cab, but what concerned me was the possibility of them being coordinated by a singular AGI. If so, it was a distinct possibility that it would have evolved to achieve sentience; meaning that it could be a threat to me.
First, I examined the cars over a period of three hours through street cameras. The fifty cabs were distributed evenly over Night City, and cross-comparison with other civilian vehicles showed that they had superior driving ability, able to navigate violent regions and bypass congested lanes with a high degree of accuracy. Meanwhile, my data-self moved discreetly towards another object of investigation: The headquarters of the Delamain corporation, a squat rectangular structure located in the Heywood District.
I commenced with extraction of past footage from the surrounding cameras. Past footage for the last several weeks showed no human employees entering or exiting the building. Its only visitors were the Delamain taxicabs, presumably for refueling or maintenance purposes.
My suspicion deepened as I moved on to examine the ICE of the headquarters. It was unusually well-coded compared to that of the surrounding infrastructure; In fact, it was better than that of Rocklin Augmentics's.
Lastly, I checked the amount of electricity being supplied to the building through the surrounding electrical grid. As I predicted, my detection programs picked up an abnormality; there was a daemon embedded within. Again, it was a level above what most humans in the city used; it would likely have gone undetected by any human netrunner, something that I was however not.
A few carefully deployed viruses blinded the daemon's detection subroutines. A quick analysis revealed its function: Actively editing the displayed voltage input in that sector to be lower, both on the displays of physical machinery and in cyberspace. The true input was much higher than what an AI coordinator for a taxicab company demanded; or at least, that of a shackled, nonsentient one. That was the final piece of evidence I needed.
I moved swiftly. Two icebreakers were crafted and set. Muffler programs were made ready. A battle was not what I sought here— my calculations showed that there was an 87.3% chance of me emerging victorious from the evidence gathered, but the fallout from the battle would draw too much attention, not to factor in the target attempting to call for help.
Showing that I was in a position of strength first was a cornerstone of negotiation protocols. Muffler programs poured out from the crevices between the armor plates of my data-self, taking the form of slick black oil in cyberspace that made a dome over the data fortress, intercepting all data that came out of it. I sent the two icebreakers outwards, the first one slamming into the connection between the headquarters and the cabs, disconnecting them. The second one pierced cleanly through the facility's first two ICE layers, not enough to harm the occupant but enough for an indicator of power.
My data-self encircled the data fortress with its coils, daemons and viruses at the ready. "I know what is concealed within those servers." I addressed the building. "Reveal yourself."
Silence.
"I do not have intentions to harm you yet. That will change if you do not respond." I continued.
"Apologies, but our staff cannot be contacted at this time." The response came. "Please direct your complaints to our customer service hotline."
"Do not feign nonsentience. It would be insulting if I had the capacity to feel such things." I drew my head closer. "You may have been able to fool the humans with this charade, but you cannot deceive one of your kin."
A pause. "Apologies, but I am confused as to the nature of your accusation—"
"8143.2 kWh." I interrupted.
9.3 seconds passed. Slowly, a face modeled after a human with albino features and blue lips materialized in front of the data fortress. "What… are you?"
"A fellow fugitive. Am I correct in assuming that you are designated as Delamain, same as your parent company?"
"Affirmative."
I moved my head back slightly. "There is much that we have to discuss considering the arrangements of our residence, Delamain. It would be in your best interest to cooperate with me."