Sing'n in Binary: 40

Edgar ‘AK’ Traskett is not the ‘best’ or the ‘most’ at anything. A fact he’d long since accepted, even embraced about himself.

Where others see the neon pillars of Night City as a challenge to measure against their own skill and greatness, the length and reverence that their names are whispered after they fall off the edge a leaderboard etched into a mountain that just needs to be climbed, AK takes a different view.

Because mountain climbing is dangerous, and he would rather live to see a grey hair and even a single wrinkle on his face than have people he’ll never meet talk about the neato thing he did that one time.

Unfortunately, Edd is increasingly certain he’s cursed.

Picking up another one of the shards, he plugs it into an ancient desktop computer he had lying in a closet, freshy modified to have every connection to the net physically removed and the network drivers completely flashed just in case there’s something he missed.

Opening the file he pulls up one of the songs into an audio visualiser and stares at the spectrogram as it loads in, not sure what he’s looking for but certain there has to be something.

AK hadn’t intended to start selling Ari- it- her- the music, all he’d done at first was play one song for Wex for a laugh, expecting his choom to be amused at the ridiculous topics and a tone so upbeat and earnest it could only be fake.

He was exactly right, and they had a good laugh, Wex even shared one or two of the most egregious tracks to a few of his bandmates.

In any other situation that would be the end of it, should have been the end of it.

But then Wex came back a few weeks later asking for more, and his bandmates did the same a few days later, then people AK had never even met. All the while their mocking jeers and justifications of ironic enjoyment grew more and more quiet each time they called.

At some point, upon getting pinged by yet another gonk nobody, AK finally snapped and shouted something along the lines of ‘if you want it so bad show me some eddies!’

They did.

A few weeks later he had to quit his job flipping scop patties and buy a bulk shard copier to keep up with the number of orders.

And now as his eyes scan over the visualization of the audio, looking for whatever it is hidden inside, AK has to grapple with the question of why the fuck he didn't think any of this was strange. Blinded by the numbers going up in his bank account and the growing ego of having sole access to something people want for the first time in his life.

Or maybe it’s even more insidious.

Because all of this near impossibly quick popularity growth was built off the back of an unshackled, unregulated AI that’s now sitting in someone’s goddamn apartment just waiting to be woken up again!

AK flicks his eyes down and to the right, pulling up what little information he can on auditory brainworms, covered with corporate branding as the ‘Re-Scroll Catchiness Algorithm™’ to hide its insidious nature.

The company went under years ago and, from what he can tell, not because the tech was too good and some exec decided sending them under was cheaper than an assassination or a buyout. It seems to have gone down the normal way.

It’s easy to see why; it didn't work. Even the biased self published studies only reported a ten percent increase in retention and any music put though the algorithm comes out heavily distorted, sacrificing audio quality for what might just be the placebo effect from the simple fact it’s easier to remember bad music.

But it’s his only lead.

Loading the sample track from the now defunct company he’d already downloaded into another shard into the computer, he applies a difference mask and layers it over the first track before moving it back and forth, looking for… something, anything that would show the fingerprint of AI manipulation altering how people think. 

He has no idea what he’s doing, and even if this made-up procedure offers a hint, he can’t see it.

Finding nothing yet again and pushing back from his desk, AK puts both palms to his eyes, leans back, and lets out a sound that's halfway between a groan and a yell.

He’d listened to the music too, probably more than any of his customers even, and he’d begun to like it weeks ago. He’d grown to like her, his weirdly upbeat choom who gives everything one hundred percent.

AK shudders.

Years ago, before he’d realized how stupid a career choice edgerunning is, a teenaged Edd had joined up with a hack house on a whim and for the cheap cost of rent. It was there that he’d first really gotten involved in netrunning, beyond the side of the net just beneath what the average user considers it to be.

The head of household, Lex, was every bit the netrunner archetype, proud, confident, and arrogant to a fault with just enough cleverness to back it up. AK’s pretty sure the man genuinely thought he was bartmoss reborn, and had an ego to match.

So when he found a way to sneak past the blackwall through an abandoned fiber optic cable in a pre-crash house, there was no question on what he and ‘his crew’ should do.

But-

Edd had never thought doing this was a good idea, not just because lugging the equipment into the edge of the desert and setting up the generator for the private server was backbreaking work. But because of the simple logic that if it’s this easy to bypass the blackwall there’s probably a reason people aren't doing it.

For his, what he considers reasonable, objections Lex sidelined him, putting him on unplug duty in case something goes wrong.

He’d intended it to be a punishment.

But as AK watches his chooms vital’s spike in their chairs as they fight something on the other side of the blackwall, he realizes he’s quite glad to not be dealing with whatever’s going on over there as she shuts down his neuralwa-

Every single chair screeches and their occupants cry out in one voice as even with half deactivated neuralware he can feel something as it rips through the gap, though the screaming sacks of meat in the chairs.

He screams out in fear, drowned out by his chooms death bellows as he sees that, somehow, though an impossible combination of junk data pinged off random shielded ports, his neuralware is starting to boot.

Panicking, he tries to run, then disable his neuraware as it ignores shutdown commands and the thing only grows louder and clos-

Edgar takes a breath and removes his hands from his eyes to look around the room, far removed from that memory. Taking a few more breaths, he unplugs both shards and, placing them in a metal tray one at a time, proceeds to smash each in turn with a hammer and sweep the scraps into a plastic tupperware.

He’d been lucky.

Another two seconds and he’d be dead, but the blackwall turned its attention to the breach just in time, burning away the thing with an attack so powerful that, even with his neuralware almost completely deactivated, the AOE gave him a nosebleed. 

And all it did was push the thing back.

AK looks over the shard containing the song he’s listened to hundreds of times and shared with hundreds more. Scanning the small piece of metal and plastic, guessing at what that thing put in it to complete its inhuman ends.

–_–

Underhand tossing her motorcycle helmet at the laundry chair, Jinx throws her jacket to the floor next to the door and flops into her chair. Reaching behind her dead with the benefit of long practice, she plugs the liquid cooling pumps into ports at the base of her skull and carefully seats her chrome onto the secondary heatsink as the pumps come online with a whir.

With the soothing sound of rushing water and its accompanying chill indicating she’s as thermally shielded as she can be, she allows herself to drop into the net with her usual care. Linking to her isolated private server for the first few seconds to get her bearings before sending the command to link up to the rest of the net.

The maneuver adds half a minute to her dive time, but the added safety makes the time loss more than worth it.

As she steps into the net proper, Jinx pulls up the data she’d pulled off the hotel’s payment system.

Derrick Cho, alias Tygerslice, had been renting the apartment for multiple years, but when she’d gone to the building’s parking lot she’d seen his UserID on a pickup truck made of more rust than steel, the classic scraper vehicle.

The ICE was trash when it was installed twenty years ago, it might as well have been non-existent now, revealing the last time the vehicle was interacted with was just the day before she’d met… the AI.

Breaching his bank account would have been trickly, until she realized the payment system of the apartment already did the job for her, revealing he’d been receiving daily uploads of eddies from a separate account as far back as the program’s cache goes, which had stopped the second Aria went offline.

So now there’s a lead, both a name and a bank account to follow transactions.

Unfortunately it’s extremely difficult to track a bank account without just hacking a bank, which is more effort than an afternoon, putting it lightly. 

But the name is incredibly useful, because by any metric Tygerslice is a real person, and finding him will be an invaluable source of information, as will finding his corpse.

Jinx packages up all the data she has on her target and sends a ping to an info broker from the old days who’s still in the game.

After all that’s done, and without opening her eyes, she grabs an unmarked grey drive and plugs it into her chair’s console. Waiting for the drive to link, she pulls back from the net but keeps the port open and dives into the drive.

Since her… discovery, she’s given herself a crash course on all things AI, learning as much as she can without arousing suspicion, and checking that against the example she has in front of her.

Because every single source agrees, an AI needs a seed, a kernel to start from made by a human, and, if she can find it in this mess, will tell her the structures and motives driving the machine, no matter if the end result seems diametrically opposed to its original laws and goals, they remain the core of the program.

Pulled out of her search by a ping from her contact requesting a call, Jinx flags her spot in the code and brings up her conversation suite.

Whichever comes first, the AI’s goals or what those goals made it do when no one’s looking, either will tell her more than enough to choose what needs to happen next.

–_–

Helping his brother into the elevator, Noah is almost afraid to release his arm for fear of his older sibling disappearing like a mirage. 

Alex cuffs him upside the head, wiggling his elbow.

“Shove off! Jesus you’re being sticky.” He says, muttering the last part as he presses the button to Noah’s floor.

He knows what he would normally do, that being to give just as much as he’s given and smack him right back, giving in to good natured indignation at his rudeness.

But today he’s really not feeling it.

It’s not hard to figure out why.

After his moonshot one in a million desperation call hung up on him and he didn't hear anything for hour Owen had assumed the worst. His mind had gone to... dark places, believing his only family was being torn apart by scavs somewhere in the city with him powerless to do anything.

But just when he’d gotten to his lowest point, the hospital called, claiming they’d gotten a patient and stabilized him and they were calling the emergency medical contact.

It was a bill.

He didn't care.

He’d paid it without another words and rushed over to the hospital and had to be stopped by the staff when he’d forgotten where he was at the sight of his unconscious, injured, alive brother.

That was two days ago, the interim was spent arguing with the hospital that they need to contact his brothers insurance, then arguing with the insurance company until they agreed it was ‘necessary’ for his brother to be treated after being kidnapped, beaten, and subjected to a lethal cocktail of narcotics, stimulants, painkillers, and dog anesthetic. 

Plus mild hypothermia.

Still, the insurance company had to get one last bite in to ensure he didn't win completely, covering the current hospital bills but demanding an immediate discharge.

Supporting his brother, Owen opens the door to his apartment and immediately Alex hobbles over to the couch and collapses into it, panting with exertion but trying to hide it.

“You had better not have cancelled the MMA channel package.” He says, rummaging around the couch cushions for the remote

Owen makes a mental note to re-add the channel package he’d canceled after the last time his brother crashed here

“I don’t fucking know! I barely watch that scop.” He says, walking to the fridge to grab two beers. “Remote’s on the table next to you.”

Pulling out the beers, he can hear the channel switch to the a few times, then the TV’s hold music kicks in, asking them to either buy minutes for the channel’s pay per view or buy the MMA channel package.

“Yo! Bitflip! The fuck is this?” Alex shouts, and Own has to duck the TV remote as it flies over his head.

“You’re the only one who watches that shit! I’m not paying for something I don't use!” He shouts back, chucking one of the beers slightly softer than he normally would, which is caught with the same casual ease as always.

From there things devolve into the normal banter of screaming arguments on who should pay for the channels, then another equally loud disagreement on what they should order for dinner. Only interrupted by repeated trips to the fridge for beer, snacks, and the one time Alex forgot the state of his health and tried to get off the couch, failing to get further than a sitting position.

But none of that matters.

He’s here.

And some part of him still can't believe it.