2078: Highrider - Chapter 1

V, the newest living legend to rise out of the cauldron of Night City. The price to attain it was never an issue, until it truly came due. With the clock running out on her life, recruited by the mysterious Mr. Blue Eyes for a hail mary gig in low Earth orbit, she rolls the dice on a final gambit… 

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Chapter 1

My own breath resounded in the helmet.

Each exhalation brought a brief patch of condensation onto the millimeter thick transparent aluminum a mere inch from my nose.

Beyond that was the unforgiving vacuum of orbital space around Earth.

I had run weeks of raw brain dances from highrider workers fixing habitats and space stations in orbit to prepare for this gig. Just because I was used to it at this point though, didn’t mean that I wasn’t basically frightened out of my wits at what I was doing.

My eyes looked down and I saw the small shuttle that had brought me into orbit becoming smaller and smaller. Beyond that, the blue and white marble of Earth dominated the view and the shuttle was swiftly being swallowed up by the vast bulk of the planet. It had to go on its own way, keeping to the official flight plan to avoid suspicion from the security systems at my destination.

I forced my eyes back up, fixing them onto the bulk of the gargantuan counter-rotating space station that was as big as my fist at the moment, growing ever larger as my suit AI piloted us to a rendezvous.

Entrusting my life to the AI was not easy, especially as it didn’t even have a general name it used to interact with humans at all. Which was funny, given that its sole reason for existing was to keep highriders alive in dynamic, on-the-fly spacewalks. Most highriders that I had read about growing up were good enough to not need one, but they were always there as backups when things inevitably went wrong.

I went over the suit readouts helpfully displayed directly into my optics. Everything was still in the green; fuel levels on track, suit pressure steady, power levels and oxygen. More than enough for nearly a full day in space, though the radiation count was enough that I didn’t want to spend that long out here.

The suit’s thruster pack on my back was giving me a nice easy 1G of acceleration to cross the 20k kilometers of distance to my target. The shuttle had done most of the job of matching velocities, now it was just a question of the suit doing the rest in a classic Hohmann transfer to intercept. 

Velocity, heading, and time to intercept was steadily counting down from 46 minutes in my vision.

A thought to my internal Agent and the flick of an eye brought up my media player. I considered what to listen to for a moment and brought up Kerry’s latest album. The one that I had helped give genesis to all those months ago on the ‘Seamurai’. I still cringed at the name of that pleasure yacht and couldn’t think of a more fitting end for it, than as a burnt out wreck at the bottom of Night City bay. 

It was definitely more soothing to my nerves at the moment as the easy guitar strings of that first song played directly into the nerves of my ears.

The whole album was actually quite a departure from the usual thumping, screaming rock that he had been known for his whole career. There were still heavy guitar riffs throughout the album, but there wasn’t a single scream. 

I always wondered what Johnny would’ve thought of it, or if he could even bother to find out, now that he was a digital entity along with his old girlfriend and all the other liberated psyches in cyberspace.

Had they truly left all the material universe’s worries behind?

I wrenched my thoughts back to just enjoying the songs and keeping a close eye on my progress through orbital space.

Three quarters of the way through the album, the space station was now looming in my view. I felt the suit gently coaxing my body to reorient. Reaction thrusters puffed to aid the move and now my feet were facing toward the station and the thrusters were working hard to shed relative velocity.

The station’s radar was the next obstacle. The suit had specially woven EM absorbent properties, making me appear as a small piece of space debris. It was just enough to fall under the automated threat assessment that the station’s computers used and as such wouldn’t bring it to the human crew’s attention.

Of course, I wasn’t just relying on that and powered up an ECCM suite that would actively nullify any radar emission if they were focused on me.

It wasn’t that long ago that the station had experienced history’s first act of space piracy and a lot of eddies had gone into improving security. There was no way the world’s rich and famous would risk their skins otherwise. Now I had to defeat that security.

The ping of the standard sweeping radar was visualized in my vision in a tactical diagram my Agent brought up.

It struck me and I watched with bated breath as the calculation was done on how much radar energy I had just reflected back…

6%

That was well under the threshold and I only marginally relaxed. I swept my own optics over the station and dozens of point defense turrets were highlighted all over the station. All of them were 20mm autocannons that fired all manner of smart ammunition; incendiary, HESH, AP. Fun for every occasion. Even with the military grade regenerative subdermal I had, I would swiftly be turned to swiss cheese under fire from munitions meant to destroy other ships and deflect space debris.

My aiming point was the lower part of the central station core pylon, which housed a number of airlocks for maintenance workers to use. Docking with the spinning torus sections was just too problematic and sims had shown that even if the AI could make it, there was just too much immediate security to overcome and not enough time to remotely disable them.

The approach to Maintenance Airlock C3 was halted by the AI at just fifty meters distance.

The station was now a looming presence filling my vision and I threw a carefully calibrated, low level active scan from my optics to double check everything was matching the schematics I had been given.

There were no exterior facing security cameras in these lower levels, a rather secretive cost cutting measure. It was on the list of things to do, but had been deferred by the station’s management to next year’s expenses.

How very corporate.

Just under three years ago… in what felt like another lifetime, I would’ve thought of doing the exact same thing had I been in their shoes.

What was down here was proximity sensors.

I focused and established a brute force connection, my mind leaping across the bridge I had established and the world of data erupted into my awareness.

It was the work of a few seconds to isolate the sensors and keep them sending the ‘everything normal’ pings back into the station subnet they were connected to.  

I also immediately saw that the station’s security netrunner had run a sweep just ten seconds earlier.

“Well, so far you’re batting two for two, Mr. Blue Eyes,” I murmured to myself. My client for this gig had really come through, giving me a precise time of arrival down the second at this specific airlock.

I took over the suit controls from the AI and gave a thruster pulse to bring me to a 5 m/s closure to the airlock door.

With the nine seconds until my hands could grab hold, I began laying down program after program as stealthily as possible into the local systems. The net dweller who looked after the security subnet of the station was quite good. Their firewalls, daemons, imps and other passive defense features slowed down the uptake of my hacks, but did little more than that.

He was no Nix and far from Yoko’s skill, for months now I had long been able to fight both my netrunning mentors on an equal level in shallow cyberspace.

I fired a last burst of thrust, taking down my closing velocity down an easy meter per second, which my arms could easily absorb.

My hands clamped down around the hand hold rails and I stabilized myself.

A thought triggered my first hack.

The airlock interior began depressurizing.

This took a nerve wracking three minutes, but I used the time to begin laying my own daemons, viruses and hacks like a minefield for the station’s dweller to stumble onto, just in case. They would stay passive and unnoticed until I needed them, with a twenty four hour lifetime before they would delete themselves.

The door mechanism sensors were isolated before I triggered their motors.

I got out of the way for the heavy airlock door to swing by me and pulled myself into the pitch dark of the interior.

My optics switched to the infrared spectrum as I didn’t feel like going through the trouble of hacking the lights.

The world was rendered into the black and white of infrared, whilst I immediately began closing the door behind me.

As the airlock began to pump in air again, my hacking was already busy with the small camera facing the inner airlock door.

This was far from the sloppy streets of Night City with gang hijacked CCTV cameras. There you could get away mostly with just quickhacking the cameras into switching themselves off with no issue. That was completely different with an active elite dweller in the subnet. Switching off a cam so directly was the netrunning equivalent of blasting the horn of a truck, that there was someone up to no good that didn’t want to be seen.

Nix and Yoko had quickly taught me to forget that form of sloppiness.

To true infiltrators and netrunners, you camouflaged yourself from cameras. You laid programs that were specific to your current visual profile directly into the local cache of the visual sensors, causing them to see you, but effectively ignore you. It didn’t matter how sophisticated the image recognition was, you would still be invisible using the Camera Camo quickhack as I liked to call my own version of the program.

An even more advanced form, which I was still busy sorting out the kinks and bugs of, was a Disguise program, which actively turned you into someone else who was authorized to be in that space with no raised eyebrows.

The pressure was now equalized with the interior of the station and a minor hack opened the inner doors for me.

I drew my highly illegal, modified Liberty pistol and with a pull against the railing floated my way out of the airlock, scanning both sides of the cramped hallway. It was festooned with control panels, piping, valves, conduits and other engineering necessities.

My snooping through the cameras found no one close by. The closest being a borg worker in a full cyber conversion Copernicus body two floors below me. An idle passive scan told me his name, Jack Hoan, cross referenced from the station population register and that he still had twenty years of service left to work off his debts to the owners.

My mind automatically went through different ways I could either flatline or disable him if I had to.

The airlock closed and I pulled off, carefully accelerating myself down the corridor.

The map reference in my optics displayed my current position, this one was fully 3D on account of the environment. Helpfully giving me a constant marker line to find my way through the maze to my destination.

I stopped myself at the first intersection, then pulled into a corridor that went relatively upward.   

Most of my attention was on ghosting every cam and sensor. A constant laying of hacks to pave my way forward.

I had to pause at the next intersection, keeping myself from rising into it. Another borg worker was cruising through the corridor now above me.

Using a cam as a jump off point, I smoothly inserted my camo hack into his optics. The Copernicus barely had a cyberdeck worth the name and it was a Seocho civilian model. My own Netwatch Netdriver deck breezed through his firewalls without even a hint of trouble and didn’t trip any internal alarms.

The result was the worker didn’t even turn his oddly shaped head to look at me. The optics on the Copernicus had a band scanner that provided a full 270 degree vision to the borg and he should’ve seen someone in a full combat EVA suit, but he just puffed out of view, using the inbuilt thrusters of his own near full mechanical body.

I moved on with a pull on the railings.

My first waypoint was reached a few minutes later when I spotted the always rotating inner mechanisms, or at least a part of it, that joined the central core of the station to the rotating section. Given my position it was like I was looking at the massive section of hyperalloy steel wall that was constantly moving on superfluid frictionless bearings the size of a freight train.

Now came the first tricky part of my infiltration - I needed to get inside the elevator shafts that went up and down inside the torus support spokes.

A quick scan showed a maintenance worker access point and with a puff of my own thrusters I made way there.  

I grabbed the railing hand hold nearby and wound the link extension from my EVA suit’s neck and reeled it out with my right hand.

“Suit, manipulator arm,” I ordered. The AI unfurled the dexterous arm from the life support pack and I handed my gun over to it. “Defense mode.”

My actual body’s defense in real space covered, I shoved the link into the port.

The first automatic action my mind made was to snuff out the alert signal that someone had connected to the port at all. Then I pushed forward and began scanning local systems using partial synthtech immersion. From my left eye, I saw the dataverse of the entire station, whilst my right kept an eye on real space around me.

The local firewall here was much stronger. Not surprising, since someone fucking up here could send this specific torus’ rotation into a faster spin and give everyone in it a constant 5 Gs if they wanted to. It would also potentially fuck up the entire station given enough time.

It took me nearly six real time minutes to just make my way painstakingly through the outer layer of the firewall without tripping the little traps the station’s net dweller had left for me. They were good. If you could name the defense, they’d used it.

Mr. Blue Eyes had not managed to gain any data on just who’s turf I was digitally stepping on, which by itself told me that it was one of those nutjobs that practically lived in cyberspace. His meat body was likely ensconced in a life support tube somewhere on the station.

It also meant that I did not want to get in a direct cyberspace confrontation with them and that stealth was the order of the day. If it meant I had to spend hours parsing through the code, then so be it.

These last few months I had made it a point to do the required netrunning for my own gigs where possible and not rely on dedicated runners, as much as that would’ve made my life easier.

Nearly an hour later I was through three layers of firewall and seemingly inside the local subnet but I spotted a minor fault in the environment, which clearly told me I was in a fake subnet that had been created for someone like myself to blunder around stupidly.

It took me another hour to find the port to gain further access and there I had another two firewalls to worm through.

The previous firewalls were jokes in comparison and stealthily punching through these took me another three hours. During which I also had to hack the optics of another borg worker to keep me invisible in meatspace.

I double and triple checked the systems being visualized by my synthtech interface for any discrepancy before I finally accepted that I was seeing the real thing and not another fake.

Then I found the hydraulic system for a torus spoke that was still approaching my position and carefully triggered the central shaft access hatch.

With a push of my hand and slight puffs of my suit thrusters to slow myself, I was now inches from facing the constantly moving inner wall of the spinning section. A quick calculation told me I would have exactly four and half seconds to get my entire body into the shaft or risk getting cut in half.

I maneuvered myself head first and handed over my suit thruster controls to the AI, ordering it to ignore all safety governors.

‘Are you certain?’ it asked in a monotone.

“Yes, do it.”

‘Very well.’

This potential death was but a minor manifestation of the many I had faced over the last two years. I didn’t bother asking for a countdown from the AI and just steeled myself to experience one hell of an acceleration.

The instant I saw the entrance of the shaft appear from my right, I flipped the mental switch of my Sandevistan.

My perception of the world around me increased by orders of magnitude and instead of the shaft approaching at a blistering speed it was now crawling towards me.

The moment came and the AI fired every thruster my suit had.

For an agonizingly long moment, it seemed like I was going to ram myself headfirst into the moving wall. Then mere inches before my helmet would’ve impacted solid steel, the shaft entrance passed in front of me.

My head and shoulders passed inside and only a pure AI dedicated to this task resulted in a proper course being maintained with thruster firings so I didn’t get pancaked against the side of the shaft.

I had to pull in my legs to avoid them getting effectively sliced by the entire station’s central core, another trick that was simplified greatly with the Sandy.

When my speed was equalized with the spoke's spin, I finally could reach out safely to physically grab the nearest maintenance railing.

My internal Agent shut down the Sandy automatically. I immediately became aware of my heavy breathing and the usual aftershock of temporal perceptions normalizing hit me. I bore it as easy as breathing by this point. What I couldn’t ignore was my right hand beginning to twitch and spasm out of my control.

“Fuck! Not now,” I snarled. My left hand came round to grab the railing, just as my right hand’s grip failed.

My right limb kept going epileptic in a painful manner for nearly a full four minutes before it settled down and some control returned to me.

“Will such loss of control occur again?” the Suit AI asked.

I grabbed the railing with both hands and began pulling myself down the shaft. “Possibly, it will be dealt with soon.”

My next obstacle approached - an inner bulkhead door that would finally let me access an actual elevator. This one yielded to a simple stealth quickhack thanks to my earlier breach of the local subnet.

I pushed myself in carefully and began to feel the first effects of the station’s centrifugal gravity, which was currently just a slight pull of barely 0.1 G towards the spinward side of the shaft.

The elevator itself was halfway down the spoke about seventy meters away from me. The bulkhead door closed above me as I began the careful hack to bring the elevator up.

Here I had to be careful to not create an obvious signal to the central computer that something was wrong with the behavior of the system.

The only reason anyone from the outer torus would take an elevator all the way up the spoke here, was if they were technicians. By the same token, it would let me traverse closer without worrying about the elevator suddenly rising and crashing into me.

I couldn’t take that chance.

This gig had too much riding on it for anything to go wrong.

So I grabbed a hold of the side to arrest my very slow fall and got busy hacking.

It was another slow process, which involved finding the employee register. Then finding and creating a virtual duplicate of that employee, that I could insert into the surveillance system. Then I had to create a small accident for her, that would actually stop her from moving in real space.

This I did with a small malfunction in the automatic door as she walked out of the restroom. It essentially closed in her face, instead of opening. She lost her balance and fell backward.

In that moment, I replaced her in surveillance with the virtual duplicate, whilst I burned a ton of RAM to brute force her own firewalls and hit her with a Control hack.

I walked her right back into the toilet stall, had her lock the door and wait patiently.

My cyberdeck was really heating up now, but I had planned ahead for this moment and the hiss of external coolant flowing through my dedicated cooling ‘ware nicely took care of it. Taking the heat and eventually flushing it from a dedicated reservoir installed near my neck.

I hit her with a triple combo that I could do in my sleep at this point - Memory Wipe, Reset Optics and Sonic Shock.

She began twitching and moments later collapsed into deep unconsciousness and would only wake up in nine hours.

In the meantime, I ran the virtual duplicate of Rachel Mcadams, the very attractive Blackjack table dealer for the local casino, towards the part of the station which would serve my purposes.

Then I repeated the whole process for a maintenance tech who worked the station’s general HVAC on the customer facing side. Since no one really wanted a big maintenance borg in sight stomping up the carpets, he was still human with minimal external cyberware.

I had him do the job of actually sending the elevator up to meet me, then had him pretend to do some busywork on a nearby vent, before releasing him with a Memory Wipe.

When my feet finally touched down on the roof of the elevator, I was already inside its tiny subnet, keeping things looking absolutely normal to the greater system. The interior cam was looped before I triggered the maintenance hatch on its roof.

“Time to get dressed,” I murmured to the suit AI.

It took the hint and fully equalized interior pressure before breaking the seals on the minimal carapace structure of the suit interior, allowing me to unzip, twist and climb out of the thing.

Now I was left only wearing the interior cooling suit and peeled myself out of that.

I fiddled with the latch release on the suit backpack, my nude body shivered in the cool air before I shut down that autonomic response with a thought.

I pulled out my designer Jinguji dress for this gig, ripping open the protective synthplast before carefully coaxing it out, leaving it to hover in the microgravity briefly.

Dressing in this situation was not easy but eventually I managed to wiggle into the extremely short, black piece of clothing and settle it properly, smoothing out all the kinks and getting all the upper metallic bits properly supporting and covering my breasts to an appropriate level. Next came the jewelry, three large gold rings on my left thigh, two rings on my left fingers and four silver necklaces, one of which was laced with a ruby. Then came the shoes, two open foot stiletto high heels that would do the job nicely of emphasizing my toned calves.

“All right, time to don my dancing shoes,” I grinned, bringing up the internal program with my Agent, then triggered the still highly secret FIA metanthropic cloaking tech.  

It always felt like I was being doused with slow moving ice water that also somehow left a slightly hot burn in its wake before settling into normalcy.

My HUD gave me 100% across the board as I felt my mannerisms, voice, body language and a dozen other effects settle on me as the imprint did its job.

As a last check I pulled myself over to the spacesuit’s helmet and the AI helpfully mirrored the front faceplate to let me do my final check.

V the ripped, legendary bad-ass merc who’d made Night City her bitch was gone, to be replaced by the very attractive, long haired Mrs. Elaine Paigles, who was the stacked, arm candy corpo wife for her equally corpo husband.

With a nod of satisfaction, I pulled away from the helmet, “Ready, suit?”

“Ready,” it said, with the exterior speakers.

I reached into the back of the suit’s neck, flicked open a hidden compartment and found the chip  that housed the AI. I gave it a sharp jerk and the thumb length chip emerged from its slot.

My optics did a quick scan and confirmed everything was still normal, before I carefully pushed my hair aside and slotted the chip into the open port behind my right ear.

The AI immediately sat itself down in my system, drawing minimal power and acting like it was merely a brief visitor to the ‘apartment’ that was my body’s systems and personal area network.

“Comfortable, Suit?”

“It is acceptable,” it said immediately. 

I grabbed a handhold and my pistol before pulling myself through the maintenance hatch and into the elevator cabin properly. “Burn it.”

“Signal sent,” said Suit.

I closed the hatch just as a brief blinding flash heralded the self-destruct incineration of all the equipment that had made my spacewalk possible. Within seconds all that was left would be trace elements and scorch marks.

With my feet finally touching down on a soft carpet, a thought to my Agent had my upper right thigh split open up to reveal the full cybernetic interior, which had just enough space for my iron. When it was settled in its holster slot, it automatically pulled the weapon in and closed everything up, the synthskin there making a perfect seal again.

To any scan it would just look like I had two full cyber legs with fortified ankles. When in fact, thanks to the internal scanjack system, it was the perfect accessory for smuggling a weapon into a very secure zone. 

I sent a command to the elevator to go down into the hotel proper, whilst also pushing into the greater ‘net, finding the guest list and linking my current digital and physical presence into the system.

Gravity increased slowly as I went down and when I could properly walk, I pushed myself directly below the elevator’s tiny cam, right in its blind spot, before releasing the loop to show the actual live feed.

Finally, the elevator car reached the bottom and I felt the station’s 0.8G of simulated gravity in full.

The doors opened and I casually stepped out into Torus 4 of the Crystal Palace Orbital Hotel.

“Showtime.”

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The Crystal Palace was also affectionately called the Las Vegas of Space and like it’s planet bound counterpart, was hotel, casino, entertainment, low-grav pools, spas, luxury apartments, concert venues, drone racing circuit, parks, tennis courts and even had a faithful recreation of an idyllic white sand beach, complete with waves.

I had been a corpo for most of my life in Arasaka, playing the deadly game of corporate counterintelligence but the level of luxury and exclusivity here was the elite of the 1%.  I would’ve needed to climb half a dozen ranks higher than my former unlamented boss Jenkins to even have a shot of coming casually to this place for a holiday or to even be assigned to work here for Arasaka.

Now I was walking through an artificial park filled with carefully cultivated plants, small trees, grass, all of it illuminated through overhead windows where carefully moderated sunlight was beamed through. Arasaka had artificial ecologies in most of their major HQ buildings around the world, but this was on a whole other level. It was like the Garden of Eden in a can. Not surprising when these plants were vital to keeping everyone breathing in the Torus. The whole spectacle would be enough to normally have me gaping like a tourist, but my behavioral imprint of Elaine smoothly overwrote those to make my body language into a casual strut.

Most of the other people in Torus 4 were either tourists gaping in amazement or people who actually lived and worked in the Palace, taking a much needed break from their busy schedules to eat something and relax. Just seeing this also would’ve made the old me very envious. At Arasaka, I had usually eaten within my ultra secure tiny office and had food delivered straight to my floor. Here at the Crystal Palace, it seemed they actually allowed breaks where you would leave your office entirely. Of course, it could just be that since there was only the harsh vacuum of space outside, this was an allowance for people to not go stir crazy.

I passed a few relaxing corpos who were giving two nearby Arasaka suits a weary stink eye. Most of the biggest corps of Earth had offices on the Crystal Palace, just like my hometown of Night City. The difference being that no one could afford to have their own army to look after their assets here. No fighting or hijinks were tolerated, even between Arasaka and Militech, who were inches away from a de facto hot war on Earth.

Orbital Air, the general managers of the entire station, had full rights and means to banish any corp lock, stock and barrel. Anyone committing crime on Crystal Palace would usually be shown the airlock. Whether they gave you a space suit, a shuttle or neither depended on the severity of the crime.

I kept a weather eye on the time, judging how long I had to just sightsee, as the lush park area gave way to specialist boutiques and shops. Torus 4 alone had a circumference of just under 14 km with nine floors and I could easily get lost in just the shopping that was to be had here.

The persona of Elaine knew the Palace well, so I had to act as if it was all old potatoes. My Agent did its usual bang up job of navigating me to my destination via Augmented Reality.

Getting from one part of the Torus to another was done by more local elevators, tram tubes and liberal usage of standing conveyor belts in the long hallways, as if the Crystal Palace was one giant airport. Theoretically, the furthest you’d have to travel within a Torus was seven kilometers and walking that could mean over an hour wasted.

The other difference to get used to was the general population of the Palace. As a former Arasaka suit based out of Night City and during childhood, I’d seen quite a lot of Europe and Japan, but here I was experiencing an entirely new melting pot of humanity.

The station was by now over sixty-seven years old and had survived the Fourth Corporate War, which included a hot war in low-earth orbit that had seen nearly everyone else lose their orbital assets. The European Space Agency had managed to defend it with the help of the Highriders and for nearly a decade, the station residents had to survive completely on their own with no supplies or help coming from Earthside.

The Palace of today was highly cosmopolitan, with reps and embassies from nearly every major corp and nation on Earth. It was the place to go for the rich and famous. Almost everywhere I looked were people with the best clothes, stunning looks and sporting cyber and bioware that my old Ripper could buy his own shop with twice over. I had sunk over two million eddies into my own body by now and I’d be considered middling at best to these people.

In sharp contrast, were the Highrider and Crystal Palace natives. They were always dressed practically in jumpsuits with dozens of filled pockets, had very minimal cyberware and preferred to use bioware. Their hair was kept in short, almost brutal styles, to easily accommodate their vacsuit helmets. The highriders always had hard collars around their necks, which were just the collapsible form of helmets that could deploy in seconds to keep them alive in case of a hull breach.

I took my seat in a tram tube car, folding my legs and watched as a couple that oozed eddies, got up from their seats to increase the distance between them and a tall highrider that had taken a seat nearby.

The highrider, wearing a white skinsuit and harness festooned with tools, didn’t even acknowledge them. He pulled out a tablet and started tapping furiously on it with a scowl.

The last passengers rushed in as the door closed, making for rather cramped conditions.

The tram burst into a rapid movement, shooting through the transport tube.

I had three minutes to kill and endure my legs and breasts getting ogled from across me by a rich corpo teen. So I simply looked to the side and kept an eye on the local subnets that I was passing through and monitoring that the virtual cyber duplicate was behaving normally. In further precaution, I was also dropping Sniffers, hack traps, imps, worms and daemons, all of whom would remain dormant in the subnets and general cyberspace of the Palace.

It was also interesting to note that the flavor and look of cyberspace was notably different from what I had grown used to in Night City. Whether it was just because of my own subjective bias in interpreting the data or there was an actual physical cause behind it, I couldn’t say for certain. Cyberspace in Night City was an infinite shifting red landscape, with data structures, programs, viruses, hacks and so on usually appearing in a variety of blue hues. In the Crystal Palace, my brain interpreted the cyber landscape in shades of white, with programs and data rendering in gold.

“Section 12, arriving,”  said a highly enthusiastic female voice from the map screen above my head.

The rapid decel from over 160 kph had me bump into my neighbor on the next seat; another highrider, but he was dressed almost like a corpo, the only concession to his heritage being the vac collar around his neck.

“Sorry about that,” I sighed, standing up and grabbing a handhold.

“Na problem, pretty one. Nice runnin’ ya doin,” he said, his dark skinned face stretching into a wide smile. He was speaking in The Word, the Highrider language, which was a mixture of the Niger-Congo family of languages, mixed with French, German and Japanese loan words and structure. My autotranslation soft rendered his words into understandable West Coast English, though with a heavy accent.

“Saw that did you?” I asked idly, already queuing up a bunch of offensive hacks to dump on him, whilst passive scanning and analyzing any cyberware and rehearsing lethal and non-lethal unarmed strikes to use.    

“Ya, you’re good, as I said,” he held up his palms in a clear peace gesture. It took me a moment to pinpoint him in the local subnet and I perceived his avatar - a simple inoffensive ball with a smiley face painted on it. “You want de IP for local runner club?”

“Might as well,” I nodded and his avatar sprouted an arm which flicked data at me.

I caught it in an isolation program and gave him an idle wave as I joined the throng of people walking out of the tram.

A few minutes' walk finally brought me to my first destination.

Set within an idyllic park was a small office building that was currently being leased by Utopian Corporation.

They were a ninety year old company specializing in pharmacology, nanotech and a general manufacturer. They were always small-fry as far as I knew. They barely had over a 100k employees in this day and age, spread across London, LA and Rome. They had no offices in Night City, but they did on occasion try and poach low level Arasaka employees from the technology divisions.

That they even had an office on the Crystal Palace was something of a relic from the 4th Corporate War, but they had enough money, influence and assets to keep the place going. They had been able to consistently renew their 20 year lease agreement on the very lucrative property. They had also consistently fended off buyout and hostile takeovers from major players in Europe and the Americas.

This was a company that had suspiciously deep pockets or silent major investors and backers in the background that kept it afloat and independent.

Mr. Blue Eyes wanted something Utopia had recently developed that the company was being rather reluctant in selling, even when he had apparently offered millions of eddies for it. Now he figured it was cheaper and quicker just to hire me to liberate it, along with a number of other odds and ends from other residents of the Palace.

I approached the front doors, scanning the exterior and found the usual assortment of security devices: cameras, visible and hidden, high res motion sensors, IFF, hidden Militech branded turrets, all state of the art. Armored steel shutters were ready to fall down over all doors and windows to turn this little building into a fortress.

The reception had the typical neo-minimalist style that was all the rage for corps these days, though Utopian at least went for a dark green palette to their walls with plentiful potted plants sprinkled around the place. It would be pleasing to the eye, if they hadn’t sculpted the foliage at a genetic level to mirror the tree that formed their corp logo - making it look like a cauliflower crossbred with a mini-tree.

I had barely taken two steps into the reception when I saw and felt an active scan play all over my body from a visible sensor behind the ultra-attractive receptionist.

In Night City, she would’ve been all over the front pages of screamsheets and Jinguji would have her as a frontwoman, but somehow here she was, working a menial job on the Crystal Palace. She wore a red knee-length skirt and top that flattered, accentuated and just drew the eye in. High cheeks, delicate face, smoldering green eyes and makeup that I immediately made a mental note to add to my repertoire. My reflexive scan even spotted pheromone bioware that my Agent confirmed was very subtly affecting me. 

“Hello Mrs. Paigles. Welcome to Utopian,” she said with a dimpled smile. “My name is Isla. How can I help you?”

“I’m a representative for Night Corp,” I said, opening the palm of my hand in her direction, broadcasting the ID data I had received from Mr. Blue Eyes.

Her optics flashed slightly as she visibly showed she’d received the handshake and data. She worked on her own terminal behind her thin transparent desk briefly. Her whole mannerism went from unctuously seductive to neutral in an instant, “Confirmed. What is the purpose of your visit?”

“We’re looking to enquire if Utopian would be amenable to enter into contract negotiations for a simple regular purchase of your products.”

“I see,” Isla nodded, her optics flashed again. “I’ve forwarded your request to Director Mitchell. Our local sales department head. He’s currently very busy, but his schedule opens up for a brief meeting in fifty minutes. Are you amenable to waiting?”

“Yes.”

“Then please have a seat,” she gestured to the numerous couches facing each other in a small lounge arrangement to one side of the reception area.

“Thank you,” I nodded and took a seat on the couch that would let me see the entrance and keep an eye on her.

I engaged in a scan of the entire space, finding cameras and other immediate access points. All the cams in here were tiny and hidden, but provided more than enough throughput for my purposes. However, those were the obvious infiltration points and any netrunner they employed for network security would be watching those like a hawk.

My scan found the hidden Militech turret in the ceiling above my head and I crossed my legs, leaning back to get comfortable. Then I engaged a little program to flash my optics as if I was getting a call, which included simulating an outside connection.

My view of local cyberspace in my left eye now began slowly building up a map of the subnet that Utopia used.

Then when I was ready, I manifested properly.

My avatar for this run was a simple humanoid agglomeration of infernal flame, with two sinister glowing eyes.

I moved forward and double checked my stealth programs were running effectively, keeping the bandwidth usage even and sending no spikes that would alert my opposition.

The data fortress that represented Utopia Corp’s servers came into view as a giant golden sphere that hovered over the infinite white gray of cyberspace. Just seeing that was a bloody annoyance and felt like someone had slapped me in the face.

Ever since I had fought for my life in the old Militech Cynosure facility hidden underneath Night City’s Pacifica district, every damn data fortress I visualized followed the same structural pattern as the Cynosure AI Core. My hope that netrunning in the Crystal Palace would allow me to move on from that subconscious construct was seemingly in vain and I had been a fool to think it would make a difference.

That trauma had tattoo’d itself on my psyche and wouldn’t go away.

Six months of time had made no difference and I still had gonk crazy nightmares, where my subconscious had me fighting Adam fucking Smasher whilst simultaneously that blasted Cerberus Combat Mech hunted me in the bowls of that place.

Don’t think about it, Valerie, don’t think about it. Not now.

In cyberspace, I floated forward carefully, stopping just at the edge of the perceived detection range of the defenses and firewalls that surrounded the fortress.

All around the surface of this data fortress was patrolling daemons, imps, dormant viruses and worms wriggling around and waiting to infect the first person stupid enough to try to breach the defenses.

I began a slow orbit around it and carefully scanned for gaps or weaknesses.

Whatever elite ‘runner was behind these defenses was not screwing around. Nearly everything around the fortress was absolutely lethal and it was just short of being considered a solid block of Black ICE. The only non-lethal stuff was dedicated to sniffing out who would dare to try to breach the fortress, which was something Utopian definitely wanted to know and pursue. That was rather kind of them, in comparison to most corps who outright killed any runner no questions asked for trespassing.

I manifested a junk data worm, sending it wriggling away from me into the distance, where it disappeared.

A minute later it returned from random direction and impacted the defenses, shattering into a bunch of random garbage data with random things like a Crystal Palace screamsheet issue from three years ago, old NUSA market data and a random selection of braindance smut.

The firewall blocked everything cold and the closest worms and viruses corrupted the data in very nasty ways before it burst into a nonsense code that was swiftly cleaned up by a defragger.

It had achieved nothing of consequence, but it did let me see the defenses in action and how everything was put together. More importantly, it also showed me that the runner was quite trusting of his work and didn’t see the need to come out of the fortress whenever something pinged the defenses. It was generally considered a non-event since just by nature of cyberspace that you regularly had junk data hitting fortresses, it could be a simple email with the wrong address or an incorrect network ping.

I kept at it, acutely aware that the clock was ticking and that I couldn’t afford to get into a direct fight with this dweller.

My cyberware and body had been tuned and refined since that fateful heist for that bloody gonk Dexter Deshawn. It had seen me through the worst of Night City, including Adam Smasher. Not to mention further specifically prepared for this gig at the Crystal Palace. My internal cooling reservoir, a piece of cyberware that I had collaborated with Nix on designing and had built myself, wouldn’t be able to dump heat from my cyberdeck for long enough in a typical netrunner duel. Not if my opponent was jacked into a full chair, cooling suit and had tons of hardware behind him.

I had to remain absolutely invisible in cyberspace and trigger no alarms or outright destroy the daemons in my way.

I threw another junk program into another part of the fortress defenses, mapping more of them, before taking a snapshot to begin compiling a cohesive picture.

There had to be a weakness or approach to use here, no defense was perfect.

It was only as I threw another bit of junk at the defenses and watched the defragger working that I hit upon a moment of inspiration.

My hands waved in the air of cyberspace, bringing up three of my best infiltrator daemons, Ghost Dream, Cerulean Prowl and Tiger Stack.

My mind visualized them as blurry masses of ever shifting code that were assembled into  shapes related to their names. Ghost Dream being a spectral hazy man with radiant blue eyes, Prowl took the form of one of my childhood cats and Tiger Stack looking exactly like a Siberian Tiger I had seen in an old encyclopedia. 

With a thought, I brought up configuration tabs for each daemon and hastily scrolled through their code, making additions and adjusting parameters on the fly.

I was so glad that at this point I didn’t even need to use my virtual hands to do this anymore, otherwise it would’ve been impossible in the time I had available.

As it was, it took me nearly twenty-three precious minutes, all the while in real space, I picked up a screamsheet from the table in front of the couch to pretend to read.

Finally, I was ready and compressed my infiltrator daemons into my junk programs as a shell, before flinging all three at the fortress.

It was a risk, but I had no choice. I could only hope that my opponent was used enough to junk data impacts that he’d not bat an eye at three of them hitting simultaneously.

I held my non-existent breath in cyberspace as I watched the impact of my little surprise on the Fortress…

… yes!

My daemons had emerged successfully beyond the defenses, cloaking themselves before the defragger could get to work and I had access.

I ‘cloaked’ my avatar, which was essentially just de-manifesting but keeping my senses centered around an arbitrary point in cyberspace. My position shifted instantly as I slipped right into the fortress, hovering just above my three infiltrators.

Within the fortress, I was confronted with the typical interpretation runners had of a database - a seemingly infinite physical server farm, but my own unique take had me seeing it as an ever-shifting multi floor space. Naturally, there were patrol daemons here too and these ones were shifting forms of black and white code - at first they were humanoid, then they became multi-limbed in a way that reminded me of octopi.

That was not good. That meant the runner had adaptive coding in these things.

I had to quickly adjust my own daemons to account for that, as it was possible our collective stealth in the fortress could just as quickly become useless.

In real space, I made sure to turn the page of the screamsheet, lest I give away the fact that I was a bit too invested in reading about the upcoming 2078 model of the Rayfield Caliburn. I despaired at definitely not being able to buy the sweet looking ride at the moment… before pushing that thought away.

No thinking about the future now, Valerie.

It also let me spot a slight twitch on the lid cover that protected the Militech turret in the ceiling above me. As if it had wanted to fully deploy but something had intervened and stopped it from doing so.

That…

In cyberspace I sent my daemons to work immediately, whilst I slipped out of the fortress server and into neutral space outside it, then surged towards the attached datasphere that represented all the systems of Utopia’s physical office building.

‘Fuck.’

Another runner was hacking the defenses, trying to bring the entire building under their control.

The local dweller instantly saw it and began fighting defense.

Instantly, I knew I was watching two elites fighting each other. The speed and quality of their attacks, the daemons in use, how quickly firewalls rose and fell under the onslaught of either side.

I had come a long way from just being a cookie cutter, street quickhack slinger and could probably jump right in if I had my gear at home backing me up. However, with only the custom cooling cyberware in my body to keep my cyberdeck’s heat under control, I would only last a few minutes at best before having to retreat. My only advantage was surprise and that I knew my Netwatch deck could eat both of theirs for breakfast in terms of performance.

The only question now was this cyber attack only a prelude to something more in real space?

Normally, my answer would be ‘hell no’. The Crystal Palace’s physical security was legendary and was the whole reason for my little spacewalk stunt in the first place.

My instincts were screaming something else at me.

If I could do this, why not someone else?

The Utopian dweller had home field advantage and looked to be gaining the upper hand now. That was good, they were distracted and so I pushed my own daemons in the data fortress to move quicker in finding the big prize.

Then the attacking runner shifted tactics, queuing so many attacks that his brain should’ve been cooking, yet there was no interruption, break, loss of data fidelity or disconnect. It was suicide and yet… the attack just continued.

I looked closely at the battle in cyberspace and finally caught the issue. This wasn’t just one runner attacking Utopian, it was two of them. Two elite runners that had somehow managed to make themselves appear as a single attacker. Everyone in cyberspace had a certain ‘flavor’ or ‘signature’ to their appearance, coding and just the way their minds interacted with it. This duo had done their best to seem as one, but I now saw the differing flows and shifts of data.

The Utopian dweller was clearly panicking at this point and scrambled to keep up, throwing defenses that had to be pushing him to the red line as well.

He was going to lose.

The first thing to go was the security cameras - the visible ones in the reception froze and their little red lights winked out.

That wasn’t good news and I began toning down my portable synth-tec interface resolution and other settings to free up as much RAM as possible.

I turned another page and casually unfolded my legs to get my feet properly next to each other.

The front doors of the reception opened to admit a tall man in a typical corpo minimalist suit that you saw in thousands of office drones all over the Crystal Palace. He was very well built and bulged the suit somewhat, yet he wore it well and didn’t seem uncomfortable in it. His hard blue eyes surveyed the reception, locking on the stunning receptionist with a visible smirk on his chiseled, perfect features before his eyes found me.

My eyes met his briefly before looking back down into my screamsheet and I could see him visibly dismiss me as unimportant, before he approached the front desk.

All this happened as the Utopian dweller lost control of the Militech turret and the armored shutters.

Isla tried to use the scanner, but frowned into her terminal screen as it clearly didn’t want to respond. I spotted the instant she realized something was very wrong. Her body slightly twitching but getting herself admirably under control for a civilian, either that or she had cyberware that helped regulate emotional response.

“Welcome to Utopian, sir,” she said with a nod. “My name is Isla. How can I help you?”   

The ‘corpo’ didn’t respond immediately but eventually smiled, “Yes, you can help me.”

The doors opened and admitted two men and a single woman, also dressed similarly. The story was the same, corpos, minimal visible cyberware, well built, bland expressions on their faces.

The shutters slammed down on all the windows and the front doors shut, going into lockdown before a shutter also fell on that. The Militech turret popped out and immediately aimed for Isla.

All four mercs pulled out collapsible shock batons that unfolded into their hands.

The female merc blurred with speed as she activated a Sandevistan and emerged right over me, holding the baton’s end right near my neck.

“You can both, not move a muscle.”

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A/N: One year after Phantom Liberty released would a fitting time for this, I figured. It's been rumbling on the backburner for a while in my head and my SDD. My muse just didn't want to let this go this week, she was tired of Worm/SCP, so here is my sequel to CP2077 because I'm impatient for the continuation. Enjoy :-) Have a great weekend and as always, stay awesome... or should that be stay nova?