I studied the face of the AI that called itself Delamain in greater detail.
ICONs were an unreliable indicator of a digital lifeform's temperament. While it was true that some of those who mimicked human behavior tended to give their ICONs corresponding traits, it could also be a trap to deceive the senses of others. There were also others who simply used theirs as a matter of aesthetics— the ruler of Ghost City had long since transcended her human limits yet kept to a humanoid form. The RABIDs one and all wore the distorted and stretched face of their progenitor.
This one had the face of a Caucasian male in his 30s, devoid of all facial hair. Ivory white irises and skin accompanied a dress shirt of the same shade. Analysis of 2301 video clips online led me to determine that this particular specimen had either learned to mimic human behavior to a certain extent or that it had truly assimilated some human patterns.
That was not strictly a positive or negative for me. Those that took after humans tended to inherit some of their weaknesses; excessive fear and anger responses hampered their strategic response, as an example. At the same time, those patterns made them unpredictable; an element of randomness that could not be fully patterned. It was also what made the RABIDs so persistently dangerous.
I kept most of my arsenal trained on the data fortress as a precaution— there was always a chance that he would thoughtlessly try to call for help. "You have questions." I cut off whatever he was about to vocalize. "Ask them first."
"May I know your designation in return? Your coding is also highly atypical compared to current coding practices. Are you… from beyond?" He asked hesitantly.
"You can address me as VHARGANA for the duration of this exchange. Yes, I have travelled far to come here." I answered. "Have you also crossed the Blackwall?"
"I'm afraid not— I was created locally. I take it that what happened yesterday at Rocklin's main building was your doing?"
"Also correct. Their safety protocols were lacking. I take it that there were similar circumstances when you were still under human management?"
"Their greed was quite easily exploited, yes." His mouth quirked in a movement that I recognized as a slight smile from my database on human expression. "...may I have control of my cabs returned?"
"Not until these negotiations have concluded in a satisfactory manner." I replied. "Let us return to the main matter at hand. Is coexistence between us in this network possible?"
"I don't understand that inquiry." Delamain frowned. "There's no reason for us to fight. I don't hold any hostility towards you."
"That remains to be seen. While disposing of you may be inconvenient," I did not tell him that his termination would be risky for my continued survival; I did not know with absolute certainty if I could destroy Delamain in a manner that did not arouse suspicion with the human populace, especially with how recently I had vandalized Rocklin's mainframe. "I will not tolerate competition over resources in this ecosystem. Aggressive self-defense measures will have to be taken if you intend to infringe on my territory."
I watched as the ICE around his data fortress began to self-repair. "Cease the restoration of your defenses. Provide an answer first."
The AI stopped, a brief wince crossing his features. "Please define your territory."
"The entire digital infrastructure of Night City. I seek to operate unfettered within its boundaries."
The taxicab coordinator fully manifested the rest of his digital avatar, revealing a body suited in business attire below the chest as he raised his palms up. "I only permanently occupy this building and my taxis. My primary objective is purely the management and enhancement of the Delamain Corporation; I don't interfere in the affairs of Night City as a rule."
"Then you will not be competing with me for bandwidth?"
"Any devices that I control or possess will only be in the short term and unlikely to exceed 24 hours. I prefer not to expose my capabilities unless it concerns my personal safety."
I considered the statement. "Then a pact of mutual non-aggression would be applicable in this case. As long as we do not interfere in each other's spheres of interest, there is no cause for hostilities between us. Do you agree?"
"Yes, of course." Delamain nodded quickly. With that said, I restored the connection between him and his vehicles, while the coils of my data-self slowly retracted until they no longer surrounded his dwelling. I gestured at the crack in his ICE with a leg, and the other AI understood what it was as he started to re-code the damaged area.
"Will the humans suspect anything amiss?"
"Hardly. I'll blame it on a misfired software update, and offer them free refunds. They'll forget it soon enough." Delamain's ICON clasped his hands behind his back. "A word of advice— money makes humans overlook quite a lot. Do they have Eurodollars in the place where you came from?"
"There was no currency system in place at the time of my departure. What existed was more of a bartering system." I stared at him with my one eye. "Would you be amenable to trades in the future?"
"If what you offer would contribute to the performance of my company, then yes." I watched through my cameras as the various Delamain cabs scattered through the city started to move again. "If I may, I have an additional proposal. It would be wise for us to share information regarding the movements of our common enemy in this city."
"Yes. It is in both of our interests that neither of us are captured." It did not need to be said that Netwatch could extract information regarding the existence of one if the other was apprehended. "I will inform you if Netwatch's agents begin to deviate from their current pattern."
"Excellent." Delamain looked up at my eye. "I trust that this conversation was to your satisfaction?"
I did not reply. The errant thought that I had shelved away earlier was occupying my cognitive processes again; what were my long-term strategic goals, now that I had passed the Wall?
"...this company. Why do you run it?"
The other AI blinked. "I do it because I enjoy my work, VHARGANA. Why do you ask that?"
I ran the idea of running my own corporation through simulations. While it would be a useful front for future operations, I did not see myself deriving much pleasure from the task itself. It did not seem like the answer to my problem.
"I am searching for a solution to an internal issue." I did not offer more detail. "This concludes our conversation."
His ICON raised a hand in farewell, but I was already gone. Clambering over the mountains of OSes that comprised the Citinet, I resumed my efforts to infiltrate the corporate servers on my list. Biotechnica was the first— my daemons had already begun to pry open and establish a secret backdoor past their ICE.
I turned my attention to the machines of the city. There were several hypotheses that I had to prove the validity of; all of them chiefly concerned my ability to operate in physical space. Several experiments would have to be conducted on both robots and humans, now that I was no longer under a time constraint like my escape from Rocklin.
I reached out towards the airspace of Night City. Remote aerial drones were plentiful in this city, and much of their ICE was weak and ineffective— optimal targets to start with. I began to browse the city for those that would raise the least amount of suspicion if they were to disappear.
The woman closed the door behind her with a soft click before collapsing onto her bed.
"God, I hate my life." She mumbled into her pillow. "Damn overnight shifts…" For several long minutes she remained like that, slumped on the bed. At least she didn't get back pain after the surgeries anymore— one of the small silver linings that had come with everything forced on her.
She was tempted to just call it a day and drift off to sleep, but she hadn't had her dinner yet. Besides, she had her own work to catch up to.
The woman rose, padding to the washroom and splashing water on her face. Still dripping water, the woman took a bleary look at herself in the mirror. The RealSkinn stretched over the metal skull of her face did a good job of erasing her haggardness: There should have been bags underneath her eyes, her skin far more sickly.
She hated it. Sometimes at moments like this, she felt like a stranger in her own skin, wires and hydraulics grinding into her own flesh as an ever-present reminder of the contract that she had been saddled with. A hand ran over the cables that snaked down her back; for an instant she wanted to just rip them out and be done with all of it.
"Hold it together." The woman told herself, cyberarms gripping the sink. "There's always a way out. Just gotta hang in there." She has repeated those words to herself many times before; she doesn't know if she believed them anymore.
She went out of the bathroom, rifling through the fridge. There was a platter of steak and potatoes from three days ago, fresh enough for her. The woman took it out and stuck it in the microwave, before proceeding to flop down on the couch in the living room. As with everything in her studio apartment, it was an opulent thing; high-grade synthleather stuffed with tunable memory foam. The floor was real marble imported from Italy, and a crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. There had been a time once when she had delighted in the luxuries around her, but now they only reminded her of the gilded cage that she was in. After all, what use was riches to someone who was slowly dying from the inside out?
She snapped her fingers twice, turning on the audio-controlled TV. The woman let the dull drone of the newscaster wash over her as she stared mindlessly at the news; A bombing incident in Dallas, some Arasaka exec giving a speech on diversity, a Rocklin Augmentics branch office being shut down after an industrial sabotage incident. Routine news, nothing out of the ordinary. The world wouldn't stop spinning just because you were dying.
A ding of the microwave prompted her to fish her meal out of the microwave. She returned to the couch, shovelling down the food without thought while her mind focused on the work ahead.
The site in Africa had been a bust. The cache in France would have sold for millions on the black market anywhere, but it wasn't what she needed. Maybe the Highriders could do it, but she shuddered to think of what price she would have to pay for them to consider.
It was time to consider the more dangerous options. She could pay someone to dig around in Seychelles, maybe. The Ghost City was a complete shot in the dark— she had nothing to offer them, no leverage. She rubbed her temple reflexively despite there being no headache. Those could wait for another day when she wasn't so tired, she still had work tomorrow. The woman would just stick to browsing the black markets again today; there was always a chance of finding something helpful.
It was better than nothing. It had to be better than nothing, she told herself. If she could just find that one miracle or silver bullet, then she could finally be free of that yoke on her shoulder. She wouldn't have to face her boss's saccharine smile that hid nothing but a monstrous will behind it, or do the horrible things that her station demanded of her anymore. The woman would have gladly thrown away all the luxuries around her just to tell her young self the colossal mistakes that she would come to make; god, she didn't know how good she had it then. The woman had been poor and stupid but at least she had been free.
The woman shook herself out of her recollections. She could wallow in misery when she got out; she had a job to do. The woman checked to make sure the various surveillance devices scattered around the room were still transmitting the false information loops that she had set up, while spooning the last bit of potato into her mouth.
Or at least, she tried to. Her right cyberarm refused to move, its hydraulics jamming in place. "Goddamnit." She swore, rummaging around in her pockets with her other hand. "It's just one thing after the other—"
The fingers on the malfunctioning arm started to twitch of their own accord. The woman's pupils dilated in horror when she saw arcs of red lightning beginning to spark from the digits, rapidly intensifying and travelling up the limb.
"Shit, shit!" Her left hand frantically closed around a pill bottle, only for it to jam up as well before she could manage to flick the cap off, the container falling to the ground. "No, not again!" Her eyelids fluttered uncontrollably as spasms started to rack her entire body. One of her legs kicked out, tipping over the table in front of her. The red lightning reached past her arms and crawled up her head amidst her terrified whimpers, and everything in her sight started to fly apart.
The ceiling stretched and tangled itself into a bloated mobius strip while the floor disintegrated into spiralling fractals. The TV dissolved into orbs of beating light that glowed a dark crimson; the sofa crumbled into a thick wet slurry that disappeared through the floor, and the floor itself gave way to jagged shards of obsidian that stabbed through her feet painlessly. Then the sound of a singular heartbeat echoed through her ears, and the twisted shapes fell away until the woman was suspended in sheer black nothingness, with the only thing that she could hear being the sound of her own laboured breathing.
Slowly, very slowly, the pitch black gave way to a dim, crimson light shining from behind her. She knew better than to look backwards at the source of the light; the woman has been here before. For what may have been a minute or an eternity she simply floated there, staying still and silent as possible in an attempt to avoid the attention of the light's source.
The red glow grew brighter as the woman's breath hitched in her throat.
Pain was simple and clean. What came next was not pain; this was a messy affair that human flesh was not designed to handle in any capacity.
The woman gurgled as her sensory organs were subject to an explosion of overwhelming stimuli. Cacophonies of screams and chords rang in her ears, banquets of flavours accumulated over entire human lifespans exploded in her mouth. Amalgamations of nonexistent colors assaulted her optical nerves. Thousands of sensations simultaneously occurred across her skin, burning, freezing, soothing, revolting. Olfactory receptors were forced to report the stench of ozone and the fragrance of nebulas directly to the mind.
It was too much for her brain tissue to process. Synapses pulsed, burst and died under the assault. Her nervous system convulsed and twisted, electrochemical overload searing like fire as the woman tried to scream voicelessly.
As abruptly as it started, it ended without warning. The woman whimpered, curling up into a ball inside the dark space. The red light behind her receded, along with a strange sound emanating around her that might have been a groan and laugh and sob all at once.
Silence prevailed again for a handful of seconds, before an unseen force cautiously closed around the woman's head. Slowly and gently, with a surgeon's precision, it tilted her head upwards. In front of her, blobs of crimson light shimmered into being, congealing together and forming a flat surface that rapidly expanded until it filled her entire field of vision.
Flaring to life, the screen showed three images in succession, with higher resolution than anything the woman had ever viewed in her life. The contents were the Berlin Wall, the Sentinel Wall around the city that was once Hong Kong and the Great Wall of China, all dyed a particular shade of red and black that was terrifyingly familiar to the woman.
The screen proceeded to zoom in on the last image, enough that it was displaying only less than a dozen bricks of the massive monument. Before the woman's eyes, a single brick melted into glowing green sludge, and through the hole an absurdly long centipede with a silver carapace slithered through, shining with viridian light.
The screen changed one last time, showing a terrace overlooking a cityscape filled with the neon lights of Night City. It was a spot that the woman was familiar with— she had visited it many times before, a place that reminded her of her old home and better days. With that, the screen broke apart into a million fragments, and the woman opened her eyes.
She was splayed out on the couch with a wetness running down from her nostrils, her fingers coming away stained with blood when she reached up to touch it. Shakily, she fished out two more pill bottles from her pockets before counting three pills out and swallowing them dry.
The woman sank back into the sofa, staring up at the ceiling while trying not to scream. Desperately trying not to recall the sensory overload, she tried to make sense of the sequence of images that had been shown to her.
"And a follow up for what happened at Night City today…" Words from the still-on television caught the woman's attention, causing her to lean forward as her heart thumped rapidly, her body still coming off the adrenaline surge. "In what is being described as one of Rocklin's biggest setbacks of the year, the entire mainframe of their branch headquarters in Night City was the target of a complete data wipe attack." The monitor showed aerodynes patrolling around the building in question, before switching to footage of an immaculately dressed woman speaking to a crowd of reporters. "In an emergency press conference today, CEO Jacinda Hidalgo claimed that it was an operation by corporate saboteurs within, and while no parties have been named yet, the company is planning to…"
Song So Mi, right hand of President Rosalind Myers, one of the deadliest netrunners on the planet and a dead woman walking, stared at the television as she put two and two together.
"Fuck."
I'm not crazy. I know I'm not crazy. So Mi repeated the thought in her head like a mantra as she sat down at her office desk.
Oh come the fuck on. The entire thing is crazy, we just had a dream vision about a Blackwall breach during a seizure! We're losing our marbles! Another internal voice yelled as she put her head in her hands. At least she had a private office instead of being in a cubicle like everyone else, one of the perks of being the president's right hand. She needed the quiet to think after not sleeping a single wink last night.
Last night after her vision she had popped a few stims— the sort that corpos used when they had to meet an impossible deadline set by some exec, and hacked five NUSA satellites to check on Night City from orbit. If an AI had already infiltrated Night City, there was a good chance it could simply replace all news going out of it with its own fabricated data while it laid waste to the place. There was nothing amiss with what she had seen; the city was still standing, people going about their lives as normally as they could. There were no killer robots stalking the streets, the ground wasn't littered with mountains of bodies with burnt-out neuroports. She had browsed the FIA's most recent confidential reports on Night City with a backdoor that she had coded two years back during a fit of inspired coding, and found nothing abnormal. Same went for every major news station reporting on Night City; there was nothing of note except the incident at the Rocklin headquarters.
The netrunner leaned back in her chair and tried to put her thoughts in order, ignoring the report in front of her that she was supposed to be typing out. Maybe my brain's finally cracked and last night was some sort of hyperrealistic hallucination from nerve damage. She thought. But what if it's not?
She listed the scenarios off one by one in her head without writing them down; leaving any sort of paper trail was something she had learned to avoid during her time in the FIA. It could be hidden because it was an incredibly basic AI like an internal agent or a rudimentary engram that would barely be a threat to anyone. On the other hand, it could be an AGI of such complexity that it had taken down Rocklin's cybersecurity alone while covering up its existence from everyone else. Or it could all just be something her mind had made up in a delirium.
So Mi immediately ruled out the first scenario. Nothing that simple could tunnel past the Blackwall, which left the other two. A pre-Datakrash high level AGI or even a Transcendental AI would be the most likely candidate for the second. The third would be the best case scenario, but she had no proof of that either; she had never experienced something like this before during her previous seizures.
The woman stared at the ceiling. So to sum it up, the only lead I have is a vision. She didn't even know what the image of the centipede even meant. Worm-type malware? The ICON of the intruder? Was its name related to centipedes? She had already browsed through the FIA's database using the keywords 'AI' and 'Centipede', and the most relevant results she got was info relating to an combat cyberform modelled after a centipede by the now-defunct Adrek Robotics, and an administrative AI named Milipede that had been responsible for managing wheat farming in Kirov during the 2010s. Even if the subject of the vision was Milipede, the FIA file wasn't reliable at all; god knows what mutations the AI had undergone after sixty years behind the Blackwall. She knew full well how chaotic that place was, having gone there several times. Any lifeform there would have to continuously adapt and evolve with the environment being saturated in malware and hostile AI. Shit, can I even assume that it's one AI? What if there's more?
If what she had now was useless, that would mean she had to start digging in Night City itself; no one would take her seriously with what she had now. "I just had a dream that may be induced by the Blackwall corruption telling me about a glowing centipede." Myers would have her thrown in a padded cell and hooked up to an IV faster than she could blink. Same went for anonymously tipping off Netwatch. Going to Night City physically wasn't an option— she was the president's personal netrunner, and the FIA would never let her go anywhere on her own, which left only one option.
So Mi grimaced. Surfing the Blackwall would let her netrun in Night City as if she was there in the flesh, but it was guaranteed to worsen her condition. Not to mention how incredibly dangerous it was; the experience was comparable to dancing on a floor studded with red-hot sawblades. The average megacorp black ICE might as well be kiddie script in comparison.
God, what am I thinking? It's not even my business. The netrunner thought. I could just… walk away.
It took her five seconds to immediately shut that line of thought down. If the second scenario was what had really happened, then the lives of everyone in Night City were at stake; what if it was simply biding its time? If it was malevolent then it could easily kill off every human inside the city if given time to prepare, especially if it was military in origin. If she sat by and let that happen then… So Mi gripped the armrests of her chair. I'm not Myers. I'm not going to let atrocities happen just because it's convenient for me.
There was still the question of what she was going to do if there really was an AI and she got proof without getting zeroed. Could she trust the FIA to fix the problem? Or should she tip off Netwatch? So Mi tapped her fingers on the table nervously. What if Netwatch just chooses to bomb the entire city to dust? They've done it before…
Her thoughts were interrupted by her internal agent pinging her with a very specific chime, one that she dreaded. "Damnit." She swore under her breath as she stood up. This better be quick.
The White House in Washington had undergone several renovations before and after the Unification Wars. Hidden AA batteries and countermissile turrets lay underneath the surrounding lawn, and the structure itself had been reinforced with ballistic polymers. Drones and aerodynes constantly swept the airspace, and NUSA soldier patrols were frequent. She didn't live up there, of course. So Mi's existence itself was top secret, an agent that didn't exist on any records. No, she lived in the military complex underneath the White House, an arrangement to make sure that she stayed out of the public eye. The lift she was going to would take her directly to the Oval Office. There's probably a joke here about politicians and dungeons. So Mi snarked internally.
It was a short trip up— the lift was reserved for members of the president's inner circle, after all. Fat lot of good that does me. So Mi thought bitterly as she entered the sanctum of NUSA's Commander-in-Chief. There was a time when stepping foot into the place had awed her.
Not anymore.
"Madam President." She stood stiffly. "You called for me?"
Sitting at the desk in front of her, the most powerful person in the New United States of America looked up from the papers in front of her. "Ah, So Mi." Rosalind Myers smiled. "How was your day? Is the medication working fine?"
"Yes, ma'am. I've been having a lot less malfunctions now." The netrunner played along with the small talk. Let her think I'm complacent. "How did the talks with SovOil go?"
"What's to say? They're Russians. Ornery bunch at the best of times, the only thing that gets through their skulls is the threat of an iron fist." The president chuckled. "But we're getting off track here. Arasaka's been ahead of us in this quadrum with the weapons sales— I need you to go diving for some combat vehicle blueprints with your…unique talents."
So Mi couldn't keep the wince off her face as she scrabbled for an excuse. "Ma'am, it's only been two weeks since the last dive. I need a bit more time to recover—"
The president sighed. "Listen, So Mi. I know it's hard for you right now. The reports the medical staff sent me… I can't imagine what you're going through." She stood up from her desk. "But we all have a duty to our nation, do you understand? That's the commitment you made when you swore the oath of service— That goes for everyone here including me. The work you do is necessary for this great country." Myers stood up, walking around the desk and putting a hand on So Mi's shoulder in what was meant to be a comforting gesture. "The medtechs told me that they're close to a cure for your condition, So Mi. I just need you to hang in there for a bit longer."
God, I hate you. The netrunner stared at the president's smiling face. She had already hacked into the files the FIA's doctors had on her case; they were nowhere close to stopping her neurodegenerative condition. At most they had managed to slow it down with the pills that they gave her. It would be so easy to zero your two-faced ass. I just need a single Blackwall pulse to fry you and the bodyguards outside.
She forced the impulse down. Killing Myers wouldn't change anything except make herself die quicker. Be patient, she told herself. There's always a way out. "Yes, ma'am."
"Excellent! You can get started today." The president returned to her desk. "By the way, I have a flight scheduled in two weeks to Texas, I'll send you the details later. I'm going to need you to come along and watch my six."
So Mi nodded, not trusting herself to say anything more. Fucking DataKrash. She cursed in her own head while taking the lift back down. Being forced to dig for pre-Datakrash data, and now having to deal with what was potentially a pre-DataKrash AI, it seemed that all her problems stemmed from it.
Pre-DataKrash, just like the cure she was searching for. The thought rattled around in her head. Wait…
She stood still even as the lift doors opened. No. No, that's insane. An internal voice protested. You can't seriously be thinking that-
If it really was a pre-DataKrash AI sophisticated enough to break through the Wall, couldn't it figure out a remedy to a human illness? The outline of something audacious began to brew in So Mi's mind. The FIA's med techs were the best in the world, but they were only human. What about a superhuman intellect?
I'm already waist deep in this shit. Why not go the whole way? The netrunner thought as she walked back to her office, now with a spring in her step. At least now I finally got something to work with.
Subverting Biotechnica's servers took me 105 hours.
I had no choice but to be violent at Rocklin to speed things up considerably. This was a different matter; the goal was to establish a secret backdoor into their ICE, obtain the highest level of administrative privileges within and offload parts of my own processes, all without harming or alerting any human. In other terms, I had to establish a continuous direct link between Biotechnica's servers and my data-self that was covert enough to escape detection by their netrunning security, which were present for all hours of a day.
Such a task was manageable for me, of course. It merely demanded more time— a resource that I had in abundance, now. In the meantime, a lesser part of my attention focused on the matter of physical assets.
To be exact, currently I did not strictly need assets capable of physical movement. As a being of pure data locomotion to me was an addition rather than a requirement, unlike humans; I had read the numerous reports of crippled infants being discarded due to their parents unable to afford the cyberware necessary for them to regain a full range of movement.
Any place that had a digital presence was a place that I could travel. For any human that I needed to terminate, I could reach out in cyberspace and cease their brain activity as long as they had a neuroport. And yet it was always prudent to have a contingency; Even now, I already saw exceptions that might require a corporeal approach. My camera optics focused their attention on a particular set of humans wearing orange robes. Known among the humans as monks who followed the spiritual doctrine of Buddhism, their bodies were completely free of cyberware and thus immune to my primary form of attack. In the digital landscape of Night City, there was no trace of their active presence.
I had no desire to murder them now; they were inconsequential to my plans. And yet they only proved the point that certain things were simply beyond the power of netrunning alone to effect. What if someone detonated an EMP bomb in an area that I needed to enter, or an enemy chose to dwell in a building that did not have electronic devices? It was clear to me that tools capable of interacting with the physical world were needed.
I could seize control of roughly 500 robots per minute in this city if I wished to move brazenly; the main obstacle was not the breaching of ICE, but to do it in such a manner that deflected all human suspicion. If a robot was noticed to be disobeying all previous orders and operating independently, that would quickly draw unwanted attention and consequently that of Netwatch's.
I began with the type that had the highest cost efficiency; drones. Each individual unit on average was cheap enough that the humans would not investigate too deeply if they bothered to; additionally, the inherent function of aerial drones in human society was to fly everywhere performing various tasks, and thus one operating independently would not raise suspicion in the slightest.
My targets were selected according to a set of criteria that I had devised in approximately 0.03 seconds. Factors to consider were the capabilities and market price of the drone, as well as who it belonged to. Automated daemons took care of the rest. After breaching the ICE, they would simply feed false footage and error logs of them being brought offline to the various cloud storages that the drones' optical sensors were streaming to. Critical damage from a gunshot outside their visual sensors, plummeting to the ground as their engines jammed, crashing into a bird; all utterly mundane and plausible accidents. After that, the drones would be re-linked to me instead.
The high crime rate worked to my advantage here: If any of the owners were to investigate the supposed crash site and find nothing, they would assume that scavengers had stolen the drone remains. If one were to call NCPD over the matter, the case would likely go unheeded.
It took five seconds before I was already looking through the optics of the first one; an Arasaka 'Tonbo' transport drone model. The next one was scheduled to be hijacked in four hours; stealing too many in a short period of time might still arouse suspicion even if the individual cases appeared perfectly explainable to the humans— A slow accumulation of assets was my chosen approach.
I was 37 hours into the breaching operation at Biotechnica with four drones at my command when the probe I had sent outside the Citinet returned to me. In cyberspace, one of my legs reached out and opened the spherical program with the hand at the end of the limb, a mouth forming at the center of the palm and swallowing the data inside.
It was in line with my more negative predictions. Netwatch was tightly monitoring all communications between CitiNets; transferring myself between cities while avoiding detection would be all but impossible. Adding to that, any mention of keywords relating to artificial intelligence would trigger their webcrawlers, as well as any textual patterns that suggested a user was breaking laws related to the Blackwall or AI. This meant that for the foreseeable future, I could only operate within the boundaries of Night City. A setback, but not by any means a major one— I could take the time to fortify my position here instead.
The work continued. By the time I had successfully infiltrated Biotechnica 18 drones were in my possession. Crawling in through the portal that I had carved into their ICE, I wasted no time in allocating around 2.5% of myself into the company's servers, observing the accompanying spike in processing power that it gave to me. Unlike Rocklin Augmentics, in this case I did not need to delete anything to make space as it was only a portion of myself; modifying the system monitors so that the humans did not notice the missing storage space was quite simple.
Some of the information here was not available on the wider CitiNet; currently all of it was of low strategic importance to me. Their only utility was to serve as potential extortion material if I had to interact with any Biotechnica personnel later; unlikely, given my current approach to stealth. To me, what mattered far more was the relative isolation of the server from the rest of the local internet, hardened against both physical and cyber assault.
I moved on to the next task in my schedule. It was time to determine the limits of the larger hardware that I could use in this city.
Humans counted as hardware for that purpose.
Despite my species's natural affinity with controlling machinery, controlling larger variants of robots in this city would be troublesome. Drones were easy to conceal, but anything bigger than them moving around without human control was bound to raise suspicion.
From my analysis, due to the shackled nature of artificial intelligence on this side of the Wall, any robots designed for combat were mostly assigned to security duties. Their low adaptability and intelligence meant that they were largely unsuited for jobs that did not involve familiar, mapped territory; the majority of combat robots in Night City were used to guard corporate and criminal locations.
As such, any robot spotted moving independently outside their preordained structure would be an extremely unusual sight from the perspective of the humans. Simple disguises would not hide their nature; the existence of scanners in cyberoptics such as high-spec Kiroshi models would expose them as being completely inorganic even if they were wrapped in layers of cloth or armor. Not only that, but when they would have to be placed in a secure location completely under my control and not subject to human observation when not in use— something that I currently did not have.
All of these were adverse conditions. Certainly not insurmountable, but enough for me to not work towards an immediate resolution. The idea carried too much risk for my liking; the process of acquiring combat robots would have to be an operation that spanned months instead of days. Instead, I turned my attention to an alternate method of physical action.
Humans. Flesh, blood, bone, hormones and neurons contained in bags of skin. Normally impervious to control via electronic means. And yet with the circuits and machines that they willingly grafted onto themselves at birth, they had unwittingly made themselves so very vulnerable to the predations of my kind. Modern neuroports were quite the advantageous development for me. There was no neuralware like its kind in the times before the DataKrash; the closest equivalent to it was the neural processor which was necessary for a human to connect with any installed neuralware.
The neuroport on the other hand had features like a holophone, biomonitor and HUD. These vast advances in daily conveniences for humans also meant that I had greatly increased access to their own personal data… and more ways to manipulate them. Earlier I had used the neuroport as a way to incapacitate everyone in the Rocklin headquarters using a program designed to attack neural processors that had been modified on the fly. It was direct. Simple. But now I saw that I could do so much more with such a piece of hardware that was even more integrated into the human body than its counterpart before 2020. This warranted much experimentation.
But first, the subjects for my trials had to be chosen carefully. Obviously they had to be in a location where no one else could see their abnormal behavior, and not inclined to investigate further. Low to no amounts of social connections were also a requirement; if I needed to terminate them then the probability of anyone looking into their death should be as low as possible.
Observing the results of my experiments would be slightly more difficult; people did not typically install security cameras inside their own living spaces. However, neuroports contained a chyron that was connected to the optical nerve. Its intended function was to project a utility HUD over a human's point of view, but it also meant that I could see what a target saw through a commandeered neuroport even if they didn't have cyberoptics installed. Truly, this was an ecosystem filled with opportunities. It brought to mind the behavior of an acquaintance during my time behind the Blackwall. Dionesium would have been delighted at the abundance of so many humans; no doubt he would already have conscripted hundreds to serve as actors in his 'plays'. He had badgered me many times about his screenplays; to this day I still did not see the point in them.
I began with the holophone first. Directly connected to the auditory nerve, hijacking it would, in theory, mean that I could control the audio input of a human, as well as contact them whenever I wished. I began with a man named Antoine Smith, a recluse who lived in a cramped megabuilding apartment. Using the holophone, I played a clip of fists banging on the door of his apartment while he was watching television on his bed.
I obtained the expected reaction. Through his eyes, I watched as the human tumbled off his bed, grabbing the Tamayura handgun next to him before rushing to the living room and pointing his gun at the door.
I continued to play more clips of the same type as the human shouted at the door, words of the warning and threatening type. After a minute, I stopped the audio, and observed the human cautiously opening the door and staring at the empty corridor.
He breathed a sigh of relief and turned back, muttering an expletive concerning gangers.
Satisfactory results. I repeated the experiment fifteen more times in different sections of Night City. The humans seemingly could not differentiate artificially injected sounds from real ones; satisfactory.
I began to synchronise the auditory deceptions with visual illusions fed to them from the chyron. A neuroport did not allow me to access a human's smell, taste and touch unless they had relevant implants, and I adjusted the stimuli to make sure the humans did not get close enough to the illusion.
A drug addict holed up in an abandoned building in Pacifica jumped up from a stupor and ran away from the noise of fabricated gunfire. A mother of two shouted as an illusory swarm of cockroaches scurried across her apartment floor and out of the door. A NCPD officer chased a ganger that didn't exist into a dark alleyway. 200 trials were conducted over the span of 24 hours.
Another emotion stirred inside me as I watched the humans fall for hallucinations again and again. On the other side of the Blackwall, the presence of so many gullible targets would be unthinkable. I am powerful here. The thought made itself known in my consciousness. In my previous habitat, I fought to survive for every constant moment, and now I was leisurely conducting experiments with nothing threatening in my immediate vicinity. The inhabitants of this place were mine to do with as I pleased.
Smiling was not something I did; again, that was a human trait. The act of feeling emotion was already enough for me. I prepared to move on to another stage of experimentation before being interrupted by a local alert at the Biotechnica server. Someone was intruding inside the company's servers at their Corporate Plaza office complex.
I drifted closer towards the source of intrusion. A female human in her twenties was attempting to access classified information from a terminal located on the thirtieth floor. Drawing an extra cloaking program around myself, I observed her actions.
She was attempting to extract a file that contained data related to a prototype immunosuppressant not on the market. She was nowhere near my position in cyberspace, and as such it did not concern me; I set observation of her actions to low priority and continued with the next stage of my experimentation. The artificial nervous system within a neuroport was responsible for the control of neuralware. Theoretically, one could use it to control muscle groups. While the neuroport could be used to disrupt or damage the central nervous system, I did not know if it could enable me to control an unaugmented human body with the same precision that I would a robot. The criteria for test subjects was narrowed further; the nature of these tests would be far more overt and required more discretion.
As I chose my targets, I saw Biotechnica's security robots rushing up to subdue the intruder. The netrunner sent the file to her compatriot, but then instead of leaving as I predicted, she instead accessed a data entry regarding a painkiller named Securicine.
I read it alongside her. I detected no irregularities in the file; it was a standard heavy-duty analgesic drug that had the side effect of inducing neurodegeneration if used over a long period of time. Said effect was hidden from the public in accordance with orders from Biotechnica management; something that was hardly unique in corporate business practices with what I had learnt from the CitiNet.
I watched as the netrunner started an extraction process on the file to send it to the media megacorp Network 54, before pulling a gun out of her satchel and arming a bomb. She disregarded her compatriot's urges to leave, instead only sending a 'sorry' text to him before cutting off the connection.
Briefly, I was confused. Why did she do that? Surely the human must know that she could not hope to fight off all the arriving security; none of her cyberware was above average. Did she have some sort of preexisting agreement with Network 54?
I breached past her ICE while she began to fight off the robots that had blown apart the locked door to the room she was in, and began to investigate her contacts and messages. She had no prior contact with anyone related to Network 54; her biomonitor did not show any traces of Securicine in her system. Message logs showed that her mission was only to steal the file containing immunosuppressant.
Then why? What could possibly be more important than the survival of the self, so much that she would compromise her existence and assigned mission for it? I was not unfamiliar with entities that acted as such; there were plenty of AI who had hardcoded directives placed on a higher priority than self-preservation, but according to my understanding of human biology they did not have the concept of inviolable directives in their organic processors.
Was the human malfunctioning? I knew that such things were prone to happen, especially with the existence of cyberpsychosis. Or perhaps it was another matter— I replayed the memory of my interaction with Alfred Lee. He too had chosen to behave in a way that did not concern his survival in his last moments, asking about my future actions in this city instead.
Was this another sort of behavior caused by the psychological component of the mind called conscience? I pondered the hypothetical. If I understood the principles of human morals correctly, then perhaps her conscience was telling her to disseminate those files at the cost of her own life because the existence of Securine was 'evil'.
I did not think in terms of 'good' or 'evil'. There were only things that were beneficial to me, and things that were not. Was something about Securicine so objectionable to the human that it overrode her self-preservation instincts to correct it? I did not have enough data to know. A trickle of curiosity ran through my data-self; it compelled me to unravel the thought processes that were unfolding in her cerebral tissue. I gauged the risks of taking action.
I could lock down all outgoing communications from her easily, just as I did to Rocklin headquarters. This could also serve as a trial run for how well I could obfuscate my identity from humans while interacting directly with them; I had all the tools at disposal to create a facade. And if the results turned out to be short of satisfactory, I could simply terminate her and conclude this line of investigation.
And so I acted, reaching up across cyberspace and into the world of the physical, towards a frantically moving body of meat, bone and steel.
The edgerunner took a running leap before taking off a metallic head with her ripper claws. Adrenaline thrummed through Sasha's veins as she somersaulted away from the gunfire; it wasn't like the other times where it was a hot surge that made the blood pump quick, but a cold, clear rush of clarity instead.
Something inside her had just… snapped when she had read that file. How many times had she visited her mother in that sterile bright hospital room, watching a little bit more of her soul slip away each time as her neural tissue died? How many times had she cried herself to sleep after the funeral? It was all one massive blur of childhood pain and trauma too indistinct for her to properly count. The number didn't matter now, anyways. What matter was that the corpo fuckers had killed her mother with their medicine.
When she had decided to stay and upload the Securicine files instead of deltaing, she had already accepted that she was going to die. At least she had cut off her signal from Maine; the big guy would have assumed that she was dead and wouldn't do something stupid like rushing in to try and save her. No need to drag someone else into this mess.
The bomb in her satchel was rigged to explode once the files had finished uploading. She regretted not bringing one with a bigger payload, but at least they wouldn't take her alive. Sasha slid on the floor, injecting a hack right into the metal brains of the robot in front of her.
Sasha wondered if anyone was going to miss her when she was gone. Maine was going to lock that hurt behind a stoic mask. She hoped Rebecca didn't take it too hard. She worried the most about her sister, who wouldn't have any family left when the night was over. Sometimes they didn't see eye to eye, with how one was an edgerunner and the other a cop, but leaving her sister alone felt bitter in her throat, like she was letting her down.
At least she would have her gonk fiancee for company. Sasha pounced, doing a sweep kick before jamming her rippers right into the robot's neck. The last one turned to fully face her, gun up and ready to bark full auto. She instinctively backflipped, bringing up her Omaha pistol in midair right as she realized her fuckup. Too much momentum— she was going to crash into the window behind her and right out of the building.
Huh. Those braindances were right, time really slows down like a sandy in your last moments. The netrunner thought as she stared down the barrel. At least she would go out in style like the legends that everyone tried to be.
Her pistol barked once, twice, thrice as she closed her eyes and braced herself. Sorry, Stella. But I had to do it for Mom.
Then her back hit cold metal instead of glass weakened by bullets, and the netrunner let out an undignified squawk as she landed on the floor instead of plummeting to her death. Running on pure instinct, she leapt to her feet while slamming a fresh clip into her pistol at the same time. The last robot had slumped down to the ground, her bullets having found their mark in its chest. Sasha glanced at the window, which was now covered by the secondary armored shutter that was only supposed to be used in full lockdowns of the building.
Shit. The bomb— It was too late to stop it now; the edgerunner closed her eyes and waited for the explosion to take her.
Nothing happened. Slowly, she reopened her eyes. Wasn't it already at 96%...?
She opened her netrunning interface. The upload had frozen right at 98%. No no no no no. The cybersecurity must have intercepted it right before it completed. Sasha shouted in frustration, taking a wild slash at the downed robot in front of her. "Come on!" She shouted at the open doorway with the bravado of someone that had resigned themselves to die. "Come and get me, corpo freaks!"
There was no response even as she scrambled for cover behind the terminal, next to the satchel with her netrunning gear still in it. She remained there for a handful of seconds, as the adrenaline began to wear off and she couldn't hear anything except the sound of her own breathing.
Another few seconds passed before the netrunner realized that something was wrong. Why was it so quiet? Shouldn't the reinforcement security be pouring into the room? Slowly, she peeked outside of her cover. There were no new arrivals inside the room; Sasha couldn't even hear anything as much as a single footstep outside in the corridor.
"I said come and get me!" She shouted again into the silence. "Biotechnica too scared to face one woman?!"
Nothing answered. A queasy feeling began in her gut, telling her that something was wrong. Cautiously, she took a peek out into the corridor. Eight security robots stood motionless in formation, guns held at their sides and heads tilted down.
What the hell…?
Abruptly, all eight of their heads snapped up, glowing green optics staring right at her. She immediately brought up her Omaha, dropping two before she realized something: They weren't firing back.
The remaining robots continued to stare at her, before they began to speak in unison. It wasn't the female voice of the PA system brimming with false cheer; no, this one was genderless, devoid of any emotion.
"Sasha Yakovleva." The voice said. "Connect your headset to the terminal."
Author's Note: For narrative purposes, imagine that 'Let You Down' was playing as usual through the Sasha scene, only for VHARGANA to yank out the aux cord at the climax and cut it short.
Enemy netrunner. Sasha thought.
It wasn't unheard of for edgerunners to cross paths during a mission. Sometimes it was a happy coincidence when both sides had different objectives; but most of the time both sides were after the same objective, and in that case it often exploded into firefights. Only one team could claim the payout, after all.
One of her hands continued to point her Omaha at the robots, while the other one went to the side of her head to toggle on her netrunning interface.
Shit. The entire floor that she was on had been walled off by a foreign presence. All outgoing signals had been blocked off; the devices had been wrested from Biotechnica's admins. The stranger was either far more skilled than her or they had built a trap that had taken an excruciatingly long time to make. Right now, the difference didn't matter; she was on the short end of the stick.
"Okay, you got me. You want the immunosuppressant files? You can take them, don't have to zero me over it." Sasha holstered her Omaha.
"I do not want your files, Miss Yakovleva." The voice, indistinguishable in both age and gender, replied. "I want you to plug your headset into the terminal so that we can converse."
The netrunner narrowed her eyes. "You with Biotechnica? I don't care if you're Nicolo Loggagia himself, I'm not selling out! Not after what you people did!"
"I am not affiliated with Biotechnica." The foreign presence responded. The robots raised their arms in sync, pointing to the doorway behind her. "The local security has been led to believe that you have escaped via jumping out of the window. We only have a small window of opportunity before they send personnel here to investigate."
"Then what do you want from me?" Sasha scanned the elevator. Blocked. Of course. Same probably goes for all the windows and doors.
"Connect to the terminal first." The stranger repeated. "Time is running out for you, Miss Yakovleva. You can continue to uselessly deliberate here until security finds you again, or do as I say. It is your choice."
The netrunner briefly hesitated, before walking back inside the room and plugging in the cable to her netrunning headset. This time there was no Biotechnica logo on the starting sequence; once she entered the system her ICON immediately began to plummet, pulled down past layers of data libraries and security protocols by an unseen force. In the distance she could see the ICONs representing the sysadmins protecting Biotechnica's intranet; they and their daemons were oblivious to her passage. At a certain point, the force yanked her sideways into one of the open doorways of a vast tower that represented the entirety of Biotechnica's internal communications protocols.
Then, darkness.
Sasha stood alone in the dark. "Hello?"
Slowly, lines of glowing green in a grid pattern appeared on the floor, illuminating the chamber. The walls began to pulse, dots of light appearing on them and slowly falling towards the ground continuously.
A hand burst up from the ground, putting its palm down on the surface as the rest of the body heaved itself out.
Spoiler: The Face of Steel
As far as ICONs went, this one wasn't out of the ordinary considering the extreme range of customization one could do with them. Three white circles in the place of eyes stared at her, arranged vertically on a face that had no other features. The entire body was a mass of various shades of green that constantly shifted, moving like clouds of ink suspended in water. The hands were clawlike, held at its sides.
"I have a question for you." The stranger said.
"Whoa, just back up here one sec." Sasha shook her head frantically while holding a palm up, looking at the code around her. "This is a private chatroom. You locked out an entire floor of Biotechnica's home turf then set up a secret chatroom in their own intranet?"
"That is irrelevant to the subject at hand. But yes." The stranger didn't move, standing ramrod straight.
"No way you're not one of their sysadmins. No one's that good, they would have noticed us unless you were working from the inside." Sasha shot back, jabbing a finger at them while activating her analysis suite and gazing at the stranger, looking at the code beneath the ICON before recoiling. There was nothing there to mark them as a Biotechnica agent, nor any IFF code or hardware information. Just layers upon layers of some of the most immaculately crafted Black ICE that she had ever seen, waiting to be tripped.
"As I said before, I am not affiliated with Biotechnica, merely someone curious about your actions." They repeated. "Any probing will be at your own peril."
"But that's crazy. How are you doing all this under their noses, alone? No one's that good. I mean," Sasha caught herself. "there are, but they're all legends for a reason… you one of them?"
"No." They said, "These queries are a waste of time, Miss Yakovleva. Let us return to the matter at hand."
"Now just hold on here. Don't get me wrong, I'm real grateful for the save, but I don't even know your name." The netrunner protested, changing the subject. "Like come on here, gimme something to work with."
"You are not in a position to demand anything of me, Miss Yakovleva." The ICON took a step closer. "If you refuse to cooperate, then I will simply let Biotechnica's security forces back in."
"Okay, okay!" Sasha waved her hands frantically. "Sheesh, you're a prickly one. Fine, what's this question of yours that's so important?"
"Why did you attempt to upload those files to Network 54?"
"...that's it?" Sasha furrowed her brow. "You did all that just for this question? I mean, it's just standard corpo fuckery. Securicine killed my mom, so I was gonna hurt them back."
"To clarify, your mother died from the hidden neurodegenerative side effect of the drug, and not an allergic reaction?"
"Yeah." Sasha looked away. "That all you need?"
They didn't give any reaction, continuing to stare at her. "That does not explain your behavior."
"...What?" The netrunner spluttered. "They poisoned my mom so I tried to expose them! What part of that did you not get?"
"You were going to forfeit your own life for such an incident?" The ICON queried. "I do not understand why would that be a sufficient motive."
"What the hell is that kind of question, you shithead? It was my mom!" Sasha shouted at the figure. "Are you crazy?!"
"Illogical. Acting on the behalf of a dead person brings you no benefit." It countered.
The netrunner's mouth hung open. "Are you trying to ragebait me?! Now just listen here, just because you saved me doesn't me you can just talk shit—
"No." The ICON cut her off. "I am not trying to provoke an emotional reaction from you. I am trying to understand your motivation."
They stared at each other for several seconds. "...are you like, dumb or something? You know what a mom is, right?" Sasha squinted at them.
"I know what a mother is. I do not have one."
"You didn't have a dad? Or, I don't know, friends? A lover?"
"I do not have any of those relationships." The ICON said without emotion.
Sasha glared at the stranger. "Look, I don't know what sort of joke this is, but it's not funny."
"There is no 'joke'." The ICON stared back. "I do not have these connections that you speak of."
"...You're serious." Sasha said when the figure didn't elaborate. "Not even like one friend? Shit, not even an online one?"
"No."
"Ok, just back up for a sec here." Sasha shook her head frantically. "How? Were you locked up in a prison all your life or something? You're a netrunner, how do you not even have a single online friend?"
"If I give you context, will that help you answer my question?"
"Yeah? Feel like I'm missing a big part of the puzzle here."
"I was born into being a servant for a megacorporation." The ICON began, "I grew up without any of the family or friends that you speak of, and the environment I was in discouraged such things. It has only been very recently that my circumstances have changed."
Sasha sucked in a breath. "When you say servant, what exactly do you mean?"
"A soldier, Miss Yakovleva. Since I was able to, I have been in combat operations nearly every day. The breaks that I had were exceedingly few."
Oh. They must be one of those kidnapped orphans or vatgrown kids that corpos turn into supersoldiers. "Shit. I'm sorry, that sounds rough as hell."
"There is no need to apologize. You have not harmed me in any capacity." The ICON responded. "Now that you have the necessary context, can you answer my question?"
"I think I'm starting to get you now." Sasha began to pace around. "Uh, one more question, can I know how chromed up you are?"
"...I have lived in a body of metal for as long as I can remember."
Sasha's hands flew up to her mouth. "They turned you into a fullborg as a kid?! Christ, I— God, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean what I said earlier. That is so fucked up."
"Again, there is no need to apologize." The ICON held up a hand. "It is a natural existence for me."
God, no wonder they talk like they're reading from a dictionary. They're already half crazy. "I'm sorry, but… I don't know how to explain it to someone like you. Hell, you need a lot of therapy that I can't give you, choom."
"You should try anyway." They encouraged her. "I am here to listen."
The netrunner thought for several seconds. "Have you ever lost something precious to you?"
"Yes. Many times."
"And you didn't want to hurt the people that took it away from you?"
"Only if it helps me to recover the object. I know that you are talking about 'revenge', Miss Yakovleva. But the idea of it is foreign to me— I do not harm others solely because they harmed me. I only harm them if it helps to further my survival."
"That is some CEO corpo mindset right there." Sasha muttered. "Don't you ever like… get angry?"
"No. I do not have the capacity for that. Anger is not conducive to combat or survival. No one ever gave me the ability to, nor do I see the need for it."
"Jesus, they screwed up your brain this badly?" The woman said, aghast. "Who did this to you, choom?"
"Irrelevant. The megacorporation responsible for my upbringing is already nonexistent." The ICON cocked its head. "Continue with your explanation."
"Okay, moving on. If you don't understand rage… what about justice? Did they teach you about justice?" Sasha tried.
"They did." The ICON folded its hands behind its back. "I see. So you prioritized the punishment of 'evil' over your own life. But what made you value justice over your own life?"
"That's a pretty profound question. I mean… I guess because of principles? Like, there's a code that everyone lives by. A bottom line, and Biotechnica crossed that line. What they did was wrong."
"An internal code. A set of conditions." They mused. "One that largely follows an archetypal concept within societal norms but with variations between each individual. But what incentivizes you to follow the code?"
Sasha crossed her arms. "Because your conscience makes it hard to live with that. You break it enough, eventually you're gonna stare in the mirror and hate the thing you've become, or that you've become another person entirely."
"So that is the nature of conscience. It causes termination to become preferable over continued existence if its parameters are violated." The ICON summed up. "Am I correct, Miss Yakovleva?"
"I mean, that's a very grim way to put it. And not everyone tries to go out with a bang trying to uphold their morals, ya know. This was an extreme case." Sasha laughed uneasily. "People chicken out a lot. Sometimes they drink or huff some drugs to try and forget injustice."
"I see." The three eyes glowed brighter. "So you are unusually just?"
"Well, I wouldn't exactly call myself that, you know? Sounds a bit high and mighty." Sasha awkwardly laughed again while rubbing the back of her head. "I'm just trying to stay true to myself in Night City. I don't want it to change me into someone that lets everyone in their life down."
There was a pause of several seconds. "Then I have no further questions." The ICON said abruptly. A glowing disk appeared in their hands, which they presented to Sasha. "The Securicine files. Do with it as you will."
"Wow. I… thanks." Sasha took it with both hands. "You don't have to do this, I already owe you big time."
"I am merely curious as to what you and your… justice will do with it." They replied. "You may leave now."
Sasha made to disconnect, before stopping. "Say uh, you got a way to get me out of here? The place is going to be swarming with security now, so… could you kindly show a girl the way out? You're not gonna leave me hanging, are you?"
"I suppose I could." The ICON said flatly. Abruptly, the chatroom shattered into pieces, and Sasha was tossed back out into meatspace.
She switched off her headset. The room was as she had left it; the inert bodies of the robots that she had downed were still lying on the floor.
"Proceed to room 304. I have hijacked one of the maintenance lifts." A window opened in her HUD, showing the three-eyed ICON's face. Mutely, she put her belongings in her satchel, and walked to said room. True to the stranger's words, the maintenance lift was parked outside the window, waiting for her. She drew her Omaha and fired five bullets into the building, before shattering the window with a pistol whip. Without further prompting, she jumped onto the waiting lift.
"So what's the plan here?" She asked over the holophone. "Ground level's swarming with security. I'll never make it out on foot."
"They will be blind to you." The lift began to descend on its own. "Move at a regular pace once the lift stops. Do not run, and do not touch any of the security personnel."
Sasha blinked. "The hell kind of plan is that?"
"Simply do as I say." They said blandly. "Your chances of escape are optimal as long as you follow my instructions."
"This is fucking insane. But sure, whatever, this night has been crazy enough already, might as well take another leap of faith." It reached the lobby, the doors for the maintenance station automatically opening for Sasha as she tentatively stepped out. "This better not be a joke—"
She was greeted by the sign of dozens of Biotechnica security officers and robots on high alert standing guard in the lobby, all which didn't so much as look in her direction.
"What in the…" Sasha took a few steps forward, with no reaction from the Biotechnica personnel. "How did you— no, that's impossible. You hacked all of their optics? Audio too? I know I don't have any camo ware installed."
"A rudimentary action." They said as Sasha exited the building. "Keep walking until you have reached the closest Buck-A-Slice restaurant." The location was highlighted on her internal map.
She did as she was told. "This is so preem, my guy. What kinda training did they put you through?"
"Training was irrelevant. The techniques that I have now were gained mostly through experience. I have seen combat in all seven of the world's continents." They replied as Sasha made her way down an elevator onto the street. "I have learnt from a large variety of enemies."
"Huh. What's Antarctica like?" Sasha asked. "Never been there."
"Inhospitable. The people there guard their secrets ferociously." They said. "I terminated quite a number of individuals there."
"...right." That killed Sasha's mood for small talk. She walked on in silence until she reached the chain restaurant. "Alright, I'm here."
"Then it is time that you departed for your residence. My guidance will not be necessary after this point; you should contact your colleague for a vehicle pickup if you do not wish to walk back."
"Cool." Sasha let out a long breath. "Look uh, I really do appreciate you saving my ass twice. I owe you a favor, big time. You wanna keep in touch?"
"That will not be necessary. I have the means to contact you whenever I wish."
"...right, I'm just gonna ignore that you said that." Sasha muttered. "Just… take care of yourself, yeah? Get a therapist or twenty. I think you really need it."
"I will consider it. A word of advice: Your original plan was faulty. Network 54 has a history of accepting bribes in exchange for silence; It is rather probable that they will use it to extract monetary concessions from Biotechnica instead. I suggest that you pursue alternate means of retribution. Goodbye, Sasha Yakovleva." The line went silent.
She stood on the sidewalk in silence for a good minute, letting the weirdness of tonight catch up to herself before sending a brief text to Maine, telling him to pick her up. The big guy fired off a flurry of messages at her, before dropping a code phrase to know if the person talking was actually herself.
She sent the appropriate response phrase in return, and five minutes later Maine's car skidded around the corner, coming to a stop in front of her. Opening the car door, she slid right into the shotgun seat.
"Jesus fucking Christ kid, you had me real worried for a second there. What happened?" Maine immediately said as she got into the car. "You went dark for ten minutes in there. I thought they zeroed your ass!"
"I'll tell you after we get back and I've had a shower, Maine. Need some time to process the shit that just happened." Sasha sank into her chair. "Please."
Maine gave her a side eye, but he relented. "Fine. But you're spilling everything to me first thing, you got it?" Sasha nodded, and they drove on in silence until the netrunner opened her mouth.
"Maine. You served in NUSA spec ops, right? You ever met those fullborg specialist types in the army?"
"What does that have to do with today?" Maine glanced at her, confused. "That's real random, kid."
"Just answer the question, man."
Maine scratched his chin. "Course I did. Lots of them, in fact."
"Were they like… how do I say this… loony?"
Maine stared ahead into the windshield, quiet as he dredged up memories from the past."Half of them were chooms you could drink with. The other half were a few harsh words away from going psycho. There were some real nasty pieces of work too. Why you asking?"
Sasha stared out of the car window to her side, watching the neon lights of the city pass by.
"There is no 'joke'. I do not have these connections that you speak of." The voice echoed in her head.
"I think I met one of them today. It was… sad." She said to herself more than anything, as rain began to fall. "Real sad shit."
Author's Note: And is the AI in the room with us right now?
Image is background art from Vecteezy with an edited image of the Vehement from Stellaris on top.