Chapter 89 Punishment Party Part 4

“You are maguro, I am saba.”

“You are maguro, I am saba.”

“You are maguro, I am saba.”

“You are maguro, I am saba.”

It was a testament to Us Cracks’ musical prowess that I genuinely couldn’t decide whether it felt worse to listen to this song or to be on the brink of death.

I had been on the brink of death enough times that I could easily recall the feeling and compare it to my present circumstances.

I wasn’t comparing the gravity of both situations, of course. If I had to choose, I would listen to this song over being an inch from death. The real difficulty in deciding which was worse was from the feeling of it. The sensations in me that the music inspired. The raw despair, the anger. And there was so much anger.

The singing trio began to chant the words “eat me” as the beat sped up, and I found myself having to tamp down on my growing anger at effectively being forced to listen to this while I was already having a rather difficult day.

A notification pinged in my HUD, and I saw that it was from Rebecca, though the ID was a random string of letters and numbers. She was using a chip I had sent her to contact me.

Though I had spent the majority of my day on working on QianT’s case, I had also spent some of the downtime working on a system of secure communication between myself and the other members of my crew. My solution was a software that would encrypt communications in real time, making it so that even if someone were to wiretap even one of us, the contents of our messages would be unintelligible to anyone without the decryption key. I also added some countermeasures to being wiretapped which, combined with my access to Night City’s security infrastructure, made it vanishingly unlikely that anyone would be able to wiretap me without my notice.

I pulled up Rebecca’s message.

‘Had an interesting day. You?’ she had written to me.

“Sushi party, sushi party, sushi party, sushi party~!”

I had to get out of here. To somewhere the music wouldn’t reach me as loudly as where I currently was, on the mezzanine overlooking the dance floor and the pop trio singing their hearts out.

I shot Rebecca a message. ‘Wanna call?’

‘Hell yeah!’

I turned to Jin, who was next to me, watching all the dancing bodies, grinning hungrily as he did. Knowing him, I assumed that he was browsing for bullying targets and coming up with fresh humiliations for them for the public’s entertainment.

I had no love for these corp students, so I didn’t actually care what he did to them. It was the way that he relished in his brutality that slightly bothered me. Still, I wouldn’t spend a shred of my dwindling social capital just to get in his way.

“I’m gonna go and make a call, Jin.”

“Huh?” He tore his gaze from the party-goers and fixed me with a questioning glare. “You keep disappearing from your own party, man. What gives?”

“I have work to do, man.”

“Work later!”

I could easily just toss him down from the mezzanine floor. The only problem with that was that he’d survive with an almost absolute certainty.

“I can’t,” I told him. “Just give me five minutes.”

He groaned. “Fine.” Then, he grinned. “And I’ll have a surprise for you when you’re back. You ever play human furniture before?”

Oh god.

I was almost desperate for Hiroto to come now, if only to spare me from having to indulge Jin and his sick games.

“Sounds riveting,” I said as I walked away.

“You have no idea!” Jin shouted after me as I left. On the edge of the mezzanine floor, a staircase to the second floor awaited me, where the hallways there were a lot quieter. I didn’t stop until I hit the unused dining room of the apartment. It had a long and wide table, and an old-style crystal chandelier dangling up ahead.

Lucy and I almost exclusively ate next to the kitchen, or on a couch while watching TV. I was surprised that the room hadn’t collected dust by now. Then I remembered that the apartment came with some tech that used static to collect and dispose of dust particles.

I pulled a chair and sat down with a sigh. Nannie materialized on the table in front of me, lying there on her back.

I made the call to Rebecca.

She picked up very quickly.

David: Sup?

Rebecca: Saw you on TV. Declaring war on yourself? Ballsy.

While talking, I was gauging the performance of the encryption software, how it scrambled Rebecca’s words locally, transmitting to me a string of nonsense that my system then decoded and made intelligible. It detected context quite easily, and masked that as well. I felt a surge of pride in my work.

David: It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.

Rebecca: You actually gonna do it? False-flag yourself or whatever? Is that the word?

David: I get the gist. My answer is: I’m thinking about it. And for the record, no, that’s not the right use of that phrase. Anyway, how does the encryption software feel?

Rebecca: the lag is weird, but it doesn’t bother me much. It would suck in a fire fight though.

That was why I intended to give everyone external communication devices in such situations. Relying too much on phone lines was suicide now that we had become so high profile.

Amateur hour was over. If we wanted to win this, then we had to truly become ghosts.

David: So the way the encryption works is—

Rebecca: Explain it in English.

I smirked.

David: Sure.

I thought for a moment on how to word myself, then decided to axe the comp-sci lesson altogether in favor of giving her the practical facts.

David: We make sure that everyone we communicate with have the software. You can send it to them and have them installed it into a chip, or buy a bunch of chips, install the software yourself, and hand them out. Of course, there are countermeasures for if an enemy gets their hands on the software—codes that get sent out indiscriminately, alerting everyone of the breach in the communications network. Other than that, the software also deletes comm logs, meaning it’s your responsibility to remember or note down any pertinent information.

Rebecca: Damn, choom. You run a tight ship.

David: I’ve already sent the soft to the rest of the crew. We’re gonna have to think about who else to give it to now that we’re expanding. Make sure they’re trustworthy and all.

Rebecca: Oh yeah, speaking of expanding, I met a street kid earlier today that belonged to a fanclub of yours. D superfans. It is bizarre to see people so obsessed with you. Like you weren’t a total rookie just a few months ago.

David: I’d like to meet them at some point.

Rebecca: So how was your day?

David: Didn’t get a lick of sleep after seeing Falco off. Went straight to work for twelve hours straight, then did the TV thing. Then my corpo… ‘friend’ decided to punish me because I didn’t rim him as hard as he wanted.

Rebecca: Fucking dick! What’d he do?

David: Made me throw a party.

Rebecca: Ah. Oh. You’re partying?

David: Yep. Managed to get Ratboy and Us Cracks to show up. Or, Lucy did. She saved my ass.

Rebecca: Can I come?

David: You know the rules. Besides, we just partied last night.

Rebecca: I always have room for more partying. Besides, I’ll disguise myself.

David: Corpo parties aren’t your thing. Trust me. Unless you know someone, you’ll be ganged up on. Everyone’s just here to start shit. No one is just having fun. It’s angles within angles with these people.

Rebecca: Yeah, on second thought, nevermind. Partying with a bunch of ruthless teens ain’t really my scene either, choom.

David: Besides, this party is technically a punishment. Trust me: I’m not having a shred of fun. At all. This fucking sucks.

Rebecca: How much did you pay to set it up?

I had tried my best not to look too closely at the numbers Lucy and Nannie had given me, tried not to think about the implication of that number, but upon being directly asked, I was forced to remember it. And accept it.

David: Half.

Rebecca: Half? Half of what?

David: Half of my money in liquid form. The truth is, I’m a lot broker than I look after buying those shares. This stupid shindig cost half of what little was left in my wallet after buying in.

Rebecca: Hah. Tough break, choom. That corpo friend of yours is a fucking gonk. What are you gonna do about him?

David: Me? Nothing.

Rebecca: And what will D do?

David: D has bigger fish to fry.

Rebecca: And what about me, boss man? I’m fucking bored, dude. Give me something to do.

David: I’ve actually got some gigs for you. Was thinking about doing them myself, but Lucy talked me into laying low for the time being. Thing is, I need some real estate.

Rebecca: A base?

David: More like… a lab.

I had yet to truly decide on my next major piece of cyberware, but at this point, I doubted I’d get anything at all. I was far from unhappy with my current loadout coupled with Nannie’s many bioaugmentations. In terms of pure enhancements, I was already more modded than natural. Damn-near every type of cell in my body was operating on another level from all of Nannie’s improvements, which put me head and shoulders above a regular human, and also allowed me to be far lighter, faster on my feet, and more coordinated than even high-end cyborgs.

I still wanted to hack into Biotechnica as well. That corporation contained the bleeding edge of biomodification, and I had history with it as well. Once I was done mining them for decades of research data, I’d need a place to reproduce their results.

Rebecca: Neeeerd. I keep forgetting that you’re such a huge nerd. You’re really not doing your image favors, you know. Nobody is scared of nerds.

David: That’s bullshit and you know it. Nerds can be terrifying. Rache Bartmoss was a nerd.

Rebecca: Who the fuck is she?

David: You better not be trolling. He was only the best Netrunner that ever lived. He caused the DataKrash!

Rebecca: I wasn’t trolling—I just don’t give a shit. The streets have spoken: nerds are gonks.

David: Shows what you know, pipsqueak. Anyway, all I need from you is to break and enter a couple of places, insert some chips into some terminals, and there we go. It’s the same technique that scavs use to appropriate apartments and building floors. You’re basically infecting a system with a virus that deletes a physical location from all databases, making it so that it doesn’t exist on paper. The suits don’t physically survey their locations, and rely on digital info to keep track of them. This way, we can squat wherever we want without anyone the wiser. Apparently, Kiwi did the same for Pilar’s techie basement, the one we were in yesterday.

Rebecca: BnE, then insert a chip. Easy.

David: I’ll work on finding a target. In the meantime, maybe try getting in touch with those street kids you were talking about. Sounds like it could be interesting. I won’t have much time for it for the foreseeable future, though. I’ll be working on uncovering a corpo conspiracy. And dealing with an old… friend.

Hiroto.

David: Remember the Toge Oni, right? He told me he knows my secret.

Rebecca: Shit. Like, does he actually know your secret, or did he just say that he knows your secret?

David: the second, but I’m pretty sure he does.

Rebecca: What are you gonna do about that?

David: What I have to do.

Rebecca: Well, good luck with that. I’m sure you’ll be able to kick his scrawny ass easy.

I received a call from Hiroto.

David: Speak of the fucking devil. Gotta hang up, Becca. It was nice chatting with you.

Rebecca: Let’s grab some drinks sometime. Just you and me. And no crazy girlfriend hovering by. I kinda miss just us hanging out, you know? And now that Pilar and the rest are all in Bumfuck, Mexico roleplaying as drill sergeants, I’m more bored than ever. Shit, choom!

Nannie, who was still lying on the table, raised a finger. [I have an idea for something that she can do. It’s a mental exercise that I believe may be able to improve her mind-body connection by neurally jailbreaking her chrome, specifically her Neural Link. Activate the Sandy to full throttle while I spend an objective second writing the software out.]

One second at full throttle equaled a thousand subjective seconds. Sixteen minutes and forty seconds to be exact. That usually wasn’t enough time to build anything of value, but Nannie was far from a human mind. In only a subjective quarter of an hour, she managed to far outstrip the daily output of a professional programmer.

The program she was writing would have to be inserted into a chip, and then into someone’s chipsocket. Once done, the chip would take control of a person’s Neural Link and use it to edit the balance of their brain chemicals, and then guiding them along this neural training regimen, which involved…

…solving geometry puzzles.

They were exercises meant to push and stretch the brain, warming it up for a greater rate of learning.

Nannie and I intended on scaling this up and making the effect more dramatic through the use of chemicals in order to… help my allies keep up with me.

It was becoming increasingly clear as time passed that I was a uniquely powerful and skilled solo, better than anyone else I knew. Having had a first-person point of view of Maine while he was working, I could say that I would have taken out Lazurnyy with considerably less effort.

And the MaxTac AV for that matter.

Maine was strong and experienced, but the rate at which he perceived time was far slower than mine.

I was faster on the draw. That made me stronger in any gunfight.

And what was more, I was learning quickly as well. My aim was all but perfect already, my hand-to-hand skills were coming along nicely, and if all else failed, my quickhacking would take out pretty much anyone that wasn’t filled to their gills with high-grade corporate ICE.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelFire. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

At this point, if I were to take on a risky gig like storming another corpo building, I doubted that my crew would do anything but slow me down. I was too fast for them.

This experiment could change things. Potentially, it could help condense years of military-level weapons training in a far shorter timespan.

Apart from the race I’d had with Hiroto, I had yet to truly push my limits. Especially not while working as an Edgerunner.

I feared that when that day came, and even I was pushed to the ropes, then my allies wouldn’t be prepared for whatever shitstorm was pressuring me to such an extent.

Times like these, I remembered that I was lucky to have so few dead friends in this biz. Night City had been, weirdly enough, good to us.

I couldn’t forget how the old saying went, though: This, too, shall pass.

The good times would come to an end at any moment, and I had to be prepared for that.

[Aaand done.]

I quickly skimmed through the code. Nannie’s memories and knowledge filled me in on all the neuroscience as I read the program. Having nothing to add, I approved it and Nannie sent it over to Rebecca. Then I deactivated the Sandevistan.

One second had passed.

Rebecca: What’s this?

David: Something you can do. It’s like a game you play in your head. Just follow the instructions in the text file to figure out how to install it.

Rebecca: Did you make this? Shit, choom. I’m not really all that into experimental tech. Ugh, fuck it. Nothing else to do anyway.

David: Gotta go. Have fun.

I stood up and accepted Hiroto’s call.

Hiroto: Knock, knock, knock.

I received a notification from the lobby. A guest requesting access to my apartment.

David: What do you want from me?

Hiroto: A race.

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

David: You know, your whole ‘obsessed athlete’ persona is cute when we’re on the track, but I will really just flatline you if you toy with me

Hiroto sent a quick 3D render of his facial expression, which was bent into a shocked grimace and a look of hurt.

Hiroto: Okay! Listen, I suppose I came on too strongly what with the whole ‘I know your secret’ thing, but I promise I come in peace. I want to be your friend.

David: You know, we almost killed each other in the Nightmare Rally. Do you remember that?

Hiroto: Honestly? Just barely! I was so filled with adrenaline that I only remember bits and pieces of the end. I think you spared me, right?

David: Well, I’m too busy with work to make friends.

Hiroto: Then I’ll help you! At work! The secret work!

I balled my hands into fists, my arms shaking.

David: Don’t fuck with me.

Hiroto: Okay, sure—blackmail is a rocky start to what I no doubt believe will turn into a long and fruitful friendship. I get that. But rocky starts are what all the greatest things in history began on. Like America, for instance. Right? Or-or our very own Night City.

His examples were so utterly awful that I was stunned into silence for a moment.

Hiroto: Okay, so not those two. Ugh, fuck, can’t think of an example. I just looked it up on the Net, ‘great things that began with a rocky start’ and all I got were forum threads about romantic relationships and random junk. Okay, listen, I’m sure a couple of great things had rough starts, and this could be one of them. So let me in, let’s race a little, and talk!

I activated the Sandevistan to give myself more time to think.

[I just checked all the chatter in the Task Force. It’s unlikely that Hiroto made a report on us. He might genuinely just be here to talk.]

But why?

Hiroto wasn’t exactly the sort of person who had any material reason to dislike the corps. They signed his checks, they enabled his obsession, and allowed him to live a good and dignified life in Night City, as one of the one-percenters.

He was incalculably far from the ultra-wealthy, same as anyone else of course, but he had a lot to lose.

No.

He had everything to lose.

And what did he have to gain? What was in it for him, in his mind?

What reward was enough that he would bite the hand that fed him?

[Maybe he’s just very empathetic to the plight of the poor? Maybe he grew up poor?]

When you grew up poor, it was hard to feel bad for the poor. Most of the time, it was just resentment. I resented my neighbors a whole bunch, too. I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust anyone who lived in my area.

Nothing had really changed since then.

[Then… why? Why are you doing all of this, if you don’t even like the people you are purportedly doing it for?]

For Lucy.

For mom.

Because it fucking sucks to live in this hellhole, no matter how wealthy you are.

I wasn’t doing this to help people that would screw me over in a heartbeat. I was doing this because I wanted my city to be a better place for people to live in, so that I’d feel better. The suffering of the undeserving pissed me off. It offended me.

My motives selfish, but they worked for me.

The most important fact was that Hiroto hadn’t reported me yet. I had to hear him out, then.

And this would be a nice chance to get out of the house. And get everyone else out of my house, too. We could rent a parking garage, do some low intensity drift racing for everyone’s amusement, and then I could probably convince Jin to allow me to end this party of mine.

I doubted that he would push the issue after that.

I deactivated the Sandevistan.

David: Alright. You’re welcome

Hiroto: YES

I accepted the request of entry from the lobby’s net and disconnected from the call, walking out of the dining room and towards the party proper.

[On the bright side, if Hiroto does expose us, we won’t have to suffer under Jin any longer. Think you’ll take him out on the way out of your corpo life or what?]

In the event that the gig was up for me, I’d mostly be thinking about getting Lucy out of dodge and figuring out how to save the most amount of my money. Unfortunately, I’d likely be losing all that I invested into QianT.

Therefore, in real terms, I was only really as wealthy as D was. That was the wealth that the corpos couldn’t take from me, and luckily for me, a lot of that wealth consisted of weapons, vehicles and technology.

All the means I needed to attain more wealth.

[But would you kill Jin?]

I was already constantly lying to him and betraying him. Realistically, going from that to killing him shouldn’t be such a big deal.

Still, I couldn’t find it in myself to go out of my way just for that. Jin was many things to many people, but he wasn’t a Katsuo to me. Neither were there that many edds in just killing him. Besides, having gotten to know the kid, I had developed something of a bond with him on account of the few flickers of humanity I had seen in him. Those glimpses were few and far away, but I appreciated them nonetheless.

But only enough to not kill him, unless he gave me a proper reason to. I still had no qualms about lying to him.

Fei-Fei, on the other hand…

As I walked back into the mezzanine floor, I saw her and Lucy dancing. They had gotten along like a house on fire. I was happy for the both of them, and I couldn’t wait to hear Lucy’s thoughts on her.

Things were stabilizing on the homefront.

The elevator on the edge of the dance floor opened its doors, revealing the spindly Hiroto Nakamura flashing a halogen smile as he honed in on me in a near instant. We were almost thirty meters away from each other.

[His situational awareness is top-notch, as always.]

And it was slowly dawning on me that the thing that made him so fucking frustrating to race against might also be the thing that would make him a troublesome enemy in combat.

With the Sandevistan, there were few threats I couldn’t neutralize, and none of them were as small and lightly armed as Hiroto was. Unfortunately for David Martinez, he didn’t have a mil-spec experimental Sandevistan of a possibly extraterrestrial origin.

Without leaning into the Sandy, my options narrowed, and more collateral damage would be imminent.

I descended the stairs to meet him in the middle. He easily slipped past the dancing bodies, having not attracted much attention at all, until we collided.

He was dressed in a black suit without a tie or a shirt—but a white turtleneck. His hair had changed too, from an inoffensive bob to a bun on the top back of his head.

And he looked giddy, like he had taken something. While waiting for Nannie’s analysis, I reached my hand towards him. He grabbed it and we shook in greeting. His hand was solid. Probably just chrome without a hint of ganic left. The grip strength a person would need to operate the monster that was a Caliburn at full speed was beyond human.

He must have replaced most of his neck with chrome, too. Lightweight and subtle, but definitely there.

His eyes flickered and vibrated in thoughts that were sped up beyond human limits. Nannie delivered her report, and determined that he was likely not intoxicated—just living in a realm of constant speed.

The dedication necessary to pull off such an existence, your perception constantly sped up by the Kerenzikov system, bordered on fanatical. Perhaps it was spiritual? I had heard that most speedware users who succeeded in adapting to their systems were obsessive freaks of nature that didn’t think like normal humans to begin with.

They were zealots, and highly devoted to a particular pursuit.

I imagined that such an existence would get boring for me very quickly. I’d have more time to daydream and do my shit, but I’d also be forced to endure bullshit for longer. I supposed one just had to take the good with the bad.

“Hello, my friend,” Hiroto bowed his head.

“Don’t get hasty,” I said. “So, how do you want to do this?”

Hiroto’s eyes widened and he raised his hands almost placatingly. “I am down for anything you’re down for.”

He really wanted to race.

But first thing’s first, “We need to talk. Now.”

“Let’s talk while racing!”

I frowned. “What’s on the line? What are we racing for?”

He sent me a message, grinning as he did.

‘I win, and everyone finds out who you are. You win, and I’ll join you.’

‘No,’ I immediately sent back.

He groaned. ‘But we gotta play for something and that sounded dramatic enough to make you give it your all, right?’

‘What’s your game?’

‘I’ll tell you. During the race.’

‘Not like this. Not over text.’

I sighed. For talk like this, I’d have preferred it if he was chipped up with my encryption software. The problem was, I didn’t trust him to entrust him with such a thing.

‘You don’t have to worry about comms,’ he texted back. ‘I’ve got good encryption. Some Netrunners in Pacifica owed me a favor. Still, that only gave me a seat at a table with them to talk biz. Still had to pay out my nose for the stuff I got.’

‘I’m not interested in chatting with someone who’s backdoored to hell and back by the fucking Voodoo Boys. It was them, right?’

‘I got a second opinion! They found all the backdoors! Plus, I’m something of a programmer myself. Though I mostly just flip old code.’

It was exhausting to hear from this guy.

‘Give me one good reason why I should trust you.’

For his part, he took a moment to think, losing that guileless smile of his as he did.

Then he spoke out loud.

“I gave it my all in that race and you still beat me. That is impossible. Unless…”

He looked me up and down.

“What?” I asked him.

“I know how the world works,” Hiroto said. “A random high school student from a corp academy with no racing experience whatsoever beating me? That’s not how the world works.”

“You’re delusional.”

“Sure, maybe I exaggerated by claiming that I know how the world works,” Hiroto said, “but I know how mine works. I know what rules can and cannot be broken. And I know what it takes for a human to break them. You… break rules. It’s abundantly clear to see for anyone else who understands what it means to be in these heights. What it means to exist at this level of skill and competence.”

The party was too loud for anyone to hear our conversation, but I still didn’t trust anyone not to try and read Hiroto’s lips, so I dragged him down a quiet hallway, past a couple making out, and further into the apartment, to a place I hadn’t explored almost at all. I had too much space in this house that it was almost uncomfortable.

“I dug deeper,” he continued as we finally reached a place of privacy. His voice softened to a more appropriate volume level. “Your mom worked as an EMT. You grew up in Arroyo. You even cashed in some scav bounties with the NCPD. Then, mysteriously, the records of that disappeared days after I checked it. I know.”

Fuck.

D: And he still wants to be a friend. Do you buy that?

[He didn’t talk to the corpos. He went straight to you. He put himself in grave danger for no reason if his intention was really to cause your downfall.]

That was why I was hesitant to dismiss him and continue denying. At this point, I doubted that any further denial would ring as anything but childish.

Hiroto knew, and he wasn’t against me. Now, I just had to deal with it.

“You have a mother in the hospital,” I said to him. He had revealed this fact to me before our race, to compare the factors that drove us to win. Mine was money. He had doubted my resolve, and had been wrong for it.

“Yes,” he said, tensing up slightly.

“If my mother were alive, I doubt I’d be doing this,” I said. “And you… you have so much more to lose than I ever did before mine passed.”

He smirked. “You don’t know me at all.”

Perhaps I didn’t. I’d like for that to change.

“I can’t race you,” I told him frankly. “Not the way we once raced. There’s not enough in it for me that would make me want to spend those resources.”

“Then we cap the speed,” he said. “Cat and mouse up a parking tower. What do you say?”

A parking tower track would make it impossible for our Caliburns to get up to full speed, which would allow me to go easier on the Sandevistan.

Still, I couldn’t justify this exertion if it wasn’t completely necessary. One upside would be ending the party earlier and impressing Jin. Another would be making inroads with a possible ally.

And blowing off some steam, too. Unsurprisingly, I was pretty pent up with tension from this party.

Some light exertion would do me some good.

[And you are better than you were a week ago. I’ve worked hard to bolster all your weak points since the big race. You might not need the Sandevistan at all depending on how fast we’re going.]

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll split the cost of the race course.”

“Nah, I’ll cover it! As an apology for being so confrontational. I just really want to race you again.”

“So you resort to blackmail and threats.”

He sighed. “I was just trying to scare you into giving it your all.”

“Fair warning, Hiroto: don’t make me give it my all. That’s not a pretty sight.”

“So we’re racing, then?!” His halogen grin returned and he jumped, arms raised in the air. “Hell yeah!” He then pointed both index fingers at me. “You won’t regret it, I promise!”

I had no room for regret at this point. This was happening, and now I had to deal with it.

Along with that, I had to deal with the implication that there may be others out there with enough pieces of the puzzle to see the truth.

Dammit.

000

Sam Gibson plied his self-learned trade with a feverish intensity and a laser-sharp focus, feeling a certain way that couldn’t really be replicated with chems or trad-drugs. His fingers danced across the keyboard of his terminal, currently jacked into a bound and broken, whimpering little baby corpo on the floor next to him, lying next to his friend, equally bound and broken.

Breaking corpo ICE was always a hassle, but Sam appreciated the challenge and the opportunity to break corpo ICE without having to worry about black ICE. By hacking while he was mentally still in meatspace, he got to avoid all those hazards and pitfalls of dealing with deadly digital countermeasures at the cost of going at the task with a dramatically reduced efficiency.

Real, experienced Netrunners would usually jack their brains straight into their target’s system and hack at the speed of thought. Sam could do something like that as well, but for this gig, it wasn’t necessary. The kid’s ICE would give in time, and Sam would have the added benefit of getting to take his time, letting the code marinate in his mind and stay there.

He had always been sharper than all of his friends. He never fancied himself as their leader, but he was definitely their prime money-maker, and they followed whatever plans he laid out. He usually relied on them to cover him in meatspace while he jacked into a system to steal data or eddies, dividing the bounty up equally as was proper.

After he chipped in his first real Netrunner chrome, a Cyberdeck by Militech, he had gained a newfound fascination for the digital world. With his subsequent pieces of chrome that he had installed, he found that he had lost some of his usual eloquence and sharpness in speech, but he more than made up for that in his understanding of code.

That, and his sensitivity to greater, loftier ideals.

Ideals like the ones that D espoused, the ones that purported that the bottom of society could strike a real and lasting blow against the megacorps.

That it was possible for a punk with a chipped in attitude to win.

He and his friends had heard of D before the big gig in Tijuana. Of course, they had never been invited as only the baddest Edgerunners in town had ridden with the masked vigilante across the border. The stories they had brought back had reshaped the streets of Night City.

Now, Sam and his friends were ready to ride the wave that D had started. Down with the corpos. And they would make their debut by killing that fucking traitor Martinez, who thought his shit didn’t stink just because he had made it out of Arroyo.

He was dead meat. Sam and his friends would present the yuppy’s head to the main man himself, and they would become bigshots themselves.

His three friends hung back, lying on some couches, smoking but not drinking. Jake had made a big deal about not drinking before any gig, and he was loud enough about it that no one wanted to hear yet another lecture. Besides, it was solo tradition to drink after a race. Sam preferred his energy drinks over the usual alcoholic swill in the city. If he had to, he preferred to mix a strong drink with his energy drink to mask the sickening taste.

Sam was more into psychedelics, anyhow. They paired well with programming. Of course, not so well with actual Netrunning, on account of all the hallucinations distracting you and making life in the Net a hundred times harder.

The best substance of them all was, however, devotion. Everyone in the room were dressed proudly in high vis jackets: red, blue, green. Pointedly, none of them were yellow. His gang made it a point to press all the other kiddies whenever they dared to put on yellow, as if they had any right. The organization hadn’t fully taken form yet—D had yet to make an appearance during the week—but there needed to be some order to things, or it would all devolve into chaos.

“Done yet?” Jake drawled from where he sat. He wore a blue jacket and a white ski mask bunched up on his head that he could pull down to cover his face. Obviously, the ski mask had a skull on its face.

His jacket was a different blue from Sam’s, much lighter where Sam’s was navy blue and had circuitry stitching all over it, displaying his specialty proudly.

Sam looked at the monitor, searching for a way forward, but finding very few.

“Martinez left them with an access key that expires in a couple of hours,” Sam explained. It had taken a while to crack the key and learn more about Martinez’s building’s security protocol, but it had become increasingly clear that a key wouldn’t be enough. “I’ve pretty much cracked their systems to the point that we can take their IDs and the key, buying us two tickets back into the apartment building, but the chatter in their comms isn’t really all that optimistic. The chucklefucks were kicked out of the party,” he kicked the closest one in frustration. “If we go back with their IDs, chances are we might not even make it in, and that’s in the best case scenario where they don’t immediately suspect that we’re fucking with them. An apartment building in Charter Hill? Forget about it.”

Jake stood up and walked over to Sam. “So it’s over? We can’t get in? The fuck are we gonna do about those two?” he nodded at the baby corpos.

“Those two?” Sam looked at them and shrugged. “If we kill them, we could get away with it. We extracted them pretty cleanly, plus we jammed their biomons, so no Trauma Team for now.”

Don, who wore a red jacket, flicked his cigarette into the ashtray on the nearby table a few meters away and intertwined his fingers. He wore a retro hairstyle—an afro if Sam recalled correctly—and a pair of shades that he wore everywhere he went, no matter the time of day. On his neck was a white bandana with black scribbles on it. When he chose to mask up, the scribbles revealed a detailed drawing of the lower half of a sugar skull. “I don’t mind catching bodies, but I want it to mean something. This? Feels like a fucking waste. Getting on the city’s shitlist for fuckall.”

Sam cleared his throat. “We also aren’t out of the running just yet. I’m tapped into their socials. If the party leaves the building, we’ll know. That’ll make things easier too, unless they ordered security to protect them or some shit.”

“We can flatline them,” Don said. “And anyone else that gets in our way as long as we get Martinez, right? That’s the moneyshot.”

“Ew, moneyshot,” Steven, who wore a green jacket, chuckled to himself.

“What’s their security?” Jake asked, ignoring Steven’s remark.

“The comms don’t get into that, and I don’t really have any other ins on what’s going on in that apartment.” Sam made some turns on his chair, thinking as he did. “Honestly, guys, I think we’ve done enough. We have Martinez’s dox. We can hand that over to D and see what he does.”

“Fuck that,” Don said. “We need to show some initiative. That’s how we climb the ladder. More status means more money, which means better chrome.” And no one was as chromed up as Don was. He was the muscle of the group, and also the one that supplied a large portion of the ambition.

Jake, the voice of reason, shrugged. “We don’t know what we’re up against. When people in Night City go in blind, they fucking die. That’s a story as old as fucking time, Don.”

“He-he-hey!” Steven yelled, grinning in delight as he did. His eyes shone gold, revealing that he was in a call with someone. “Nothing much, what about you?”

Jake threw Steven a withering glare. “Not the time.”

“She’s a choom,” Steven replied to Jake before refocusing on the conversation. “We were thinking about hitting a pretty juicy target. You want in?”

“Who the fuck is this?” Jake hissed.

Steven waved his hands in a downward-pushing motion to calm Jake down. Sam, however, was just curious. Steven wasn’t an idiot. He wouldn’t just bring any old random person into an op as sensitive as this one.

“Alright,” Steven said. “Talk to you soon.” The person on the other end must have said something particularly foul then, as Steven’s expression twisted into disgust and a slight amount of fear. “I promise you, it ain’t like that. It’s an actual job. Me and my chooms? We respect women. Trust me, you’re in good hands.”

The gold shine disappeared, signaling that the call finally disconnected.

“Who the fuck is this bitch?” Don asked Steven, giving him a look over his sunglasses.

“Watch your mouth around her,” Steven said. “She might genuinely flatline you if you call her that. She’s a friend of D’s.” He gave Jake a nod. “In case we need more guns for this op. We don’t know how secure the place is, and she’s pretty fucking cracked. We could use her. And get on D’s good side through her.”

“When did you meet this girl?” Jake asked.

“Six hours ago? Met her at a gun range.”

As they discussed the newcomer, Sam’s focus returned to his monitor. There, he saw a new development on the baby corpo’s group chat.

The party was leaving the apartment, on their way to a parking tower to watch a race.

“Boys,” Sam said, his tone grave. The word instantly quieted the room, and everyone’s attention turned to Sam. “Looks like we got our window of opportunity after all.”

The boys chuckled in anticipation. After tonight, if all went well?

They would all become legends.