Trace was standing on the bottom floor of the target’s apartment building, waiting for them to leave so he could begin. The system breaching module had been picked up without a problem, and a basic plan had been made. By which he meant that he had decided to just enter through the front door.

The security of the building was relatively impressive, but only if it was tripped. As long as he didn’t manage to do that when he was opening the door, then he would be fine. And if there was one thing Trace knew how to do, it was open doors. He had been doing it for a long time without the help of a NetConnect to back him up.

Tripping the locks was almost as easy as breathing for him at this point. Granted, he had rarely had to worry about building alarms in the places he was entering. The locks were also usually a little on the older side…

Suddenly, Trace found himself sweating as he began to imagine all the different things that could go wrong with his simplistic plan.

Why did he think he could do this? He wasn’t equipped to handle something like this. All of his experience in popping locks was in older buildings where everything was so out of date a baby could break into most of the places with minimal difficulty.

In the midst of his panicked thoughts, he saw the target leaving the elevator and knew he was on. It was time to act. He either needed to bail on the job, or head toward the elevator and head on up.

Despite himself, he found himself waiting until the target had fully left the building before walking toward the elevator. Stick-Point had believed he could do this job, and he was going to do his best to prove the old man’s faith in him was warranted. This was the first proper job he had given him, not some half-bit scrap that no proper edger would take.

He needed to prove himself with this job. Both of these jobs.

At least the nanites were doing their thing. He could no longer feel the weight of the metal in his stomach. That was something, and it had been a little uncomfortable.

Trace kept his mind occupied with meaningless thoughts as he rode the elevator to the ninth floor. His duffel bag was pressed flat and stuffed inside his courier bag for later, leaving his hands free. He didn’t want to be seen carrying the extra bag, just in case, and he wasn’t worried about the gun. It would be stranger not to carry one openly.

The ninth floor was decently upscale to his street-rat sensibilities. That said, the sensor suite in his eyes automatically told him that the domes in the ceiling were empty. Each one that was meant to look like a camera was simply an empty housing.

He had learned about this feature the other day when he was familiarizing himself with what they could do. They also had a minor facial blurring ability, but he wasn’t sure how much that could be trusted. The tech was several generations old after all, but there was also the counterargument that it was a mil-spec ability. That could mean it was still better than the average stuff on the market or was absolute bargain basement trash even when it first rolled out.

No one had told him the actual make and model of his eyes, and the information screen was suspiciously lacking. It made it hard to do his own research on the subject.

Regardless, the lack of cameras was good news for him, as it meant he didn’t need to worry about being watched.

He found the target’s door and walked up to it, after a quick scan of the hallway to make sure there really were no cameras. With that worry settled, he went to work.

Popping the cover off the encrypted lock receiver, he exposed the secondary access point. These locks were meant to be opened through an automatic encrypted handshake to the owner’s NetConnect. However, there was a secondary slot on these that most people seemed to forget about in case there was a power outage.

These sorts of locks were even easier to open than some of the more high-tech but low-end models, like what was fitted in his current apartment.

A simple set of lock picks and some know-how and anyone could gain access to this person’s apartment.

Sure enough, a minute later he was inside, and the cover was back in place on the lock. No one would ever know he had gotten in that way. Honestly, he shouldn't have been panicking. Stick-Point wouldn’t give him a job he couldn’t accomplish. Other job brokers might do that, but not him.

Inside the apartment, he stopped in the entryway and looked around. No cameras lit up automatically. However, he was feeling cautious. Connecting to his NetConnect, his eyes pulsed a single time, sending out an active signal that searched for everything connected to the net in the apartment.

The normal scan merely saw the cameras that were connected to the main network of the building. There was so much data flowing through it that it was easy for them to identify connections, if not gain access.

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The active scan, however, looked for private or closed networks and data connections with little information being passed through them. One worked great in the commercial spaces. The other worked better in residential or security-conscious people.

Which apparently this person was.

Almost immediately, he picked up five different cameras inside the house. Trace waited for their locations to be highlighted in his eyes and then shook his head.

Never mind. The target was simply a pervert. Three of the cameras were in the bedroom, while the other two were in the bathroom. At least now he knew which rooms to avoid while he looted the place. There was no guilt involved with weird perverts, not that there would have been any guilt anyway.

Feeling safer with the knowledge that there were no cameras around, he sped through the rooms in search of the computer.

He was glad there was a clause on this job about stealing from the target. While none of the items he was seeing were particularly high-end looking, there were a lot of them. There was enough here to fill his duffel bag several times over. If he chose the right items to take away and bring to the pawnshop, though, then he might walk away from this job with another hundred, maybe even one-fifty in credits.

How life had changed in such a short amount of time.

It was no wonder Stick-Point had kept telling him to save up and get new cyberware. If this was the sort of money he could expect to walk away with on the lowest-tiered job, then his days of fighting the rats for food were over.

First though, he had to find the computer.

The room that was set up as an office had a desk and a very nice screen attached to it. However, he couldn’t find a computer anywhere in the room.

It was only after running another active network scan that he saw the data from the five cameras going into the desk. He wasn’t able to find a computer in the place because his poor, cheap mind couldn’t fathom something as custom as an entire desk being turned into a computer. The cost for something like that would have been nearly as much as his new eyes.

Suddenly, he knew what it was he wanted to steal in the place, even if he knew it wasn’t possible at the moment. Maybe at some point in the future, if he remembered, he would come back for it.

Regardless, at the moment, he needed to retrieve the requested information from it. Then he could take a proper look around for additional information and documents for the bonus credits. If he could disable the cameras, then he would enter the bedroom, otherwise, that room would remain off-limits as far as he was concerned.

It didn’t matter if all the extra information was in there. No good wraith would let themselves be caught on their target’s camera.

Trace pulled out the system breaching module and plugged it into one of the ports in his neck. Next, he pulled out a connecting cable. The end going into his neck port had already been sanitized and gelled by him earlier in preparation for this. Supposedly, you didn’t need to keep your neck ports super clean, but if there was ever a part of yourself to keep clean, that was it.

On his main HUD, a new icon appeared for the system breaching module. His NetConnect had taken a moment to scan it for malicious code, before allowing him access to it. If the need had arisen and he had been desperate, he could have overridden that setting. However, he obviously would have been opening his NetConnect to danger if he had done that.

As it was, he was running the system breaching module in a virtual sandboxed environment. That meant it had no access to anything but what he allowed it to. As far as that module was concerned, his NetConnect was a blank slate. All it consisted of was an environment to run the module and the three ports he had given it access to. Two of which it required to run. That was it.

Trace’s old NetConnect hadn’t been capable of doing something like this, but this model had the feature built in.

He activated the module, letting the program run as he connected the cable to the port he found behind a sliding plate on the side. It was slick, and despite not having a use for the computer, he still wanted it.

The screen lit up as the system breaching module went to work. All he could do was stand there and wait while he waited for it to work. Thankfully, it didn’t take long, and two minutes later the computer was unlocked, and its encryption broken. Everything contained on its silica drives was now open to him.

Trace slid an unused data prism into an open slot on his neck and began copying over everything on the drive. Most NetConnects came with four usable connections, though there were some models that had more or less. They were generally specialized models built around specific uses and not for the average consumer.

He felt the port beginning to heat up as a large amount of data began transferring over. He would go through it all later. Right now, he just wanted to get what he could. The pervert’s little home movies would be the first thing he purged when he got the chance later.

Now that he was inside the computer, he was able to find the settings for the cameras easily enough and turn them off. Now, as soon as the transfer finished, he would be able to go through the man’s bedroom.

Trace waited impatiently for the transfer to finish. There were so many files that it was taking a while. He had been standing there for close to five minutes when he noticed that the cameras had all come back online at some point.

The bottom of his stomach fell out as a sense of unease began to grow inside him. He had screwed up by disabling them so early. There must have been an alert sent out when they were disabled that he hadn’t noticed.

Why would he? Trace had just barely upgraded from baby’s first NetConnect a couple of days earlier. He still had no idea how any of these things worked.

That was something he would need to fix after he completed this job. Stick-Point had said he knew where Trace could buy learning modules, well getting some had just taken a large step up in priority.

Missing that alert was somewhat forgivable due to his ignorance. However, turning the cameras off so early had just been stupid. Now the pervert knew someone was in his apartment and was likely on his way back already.

He watched, his leg bumping repeatedly against the table, as the last few files were transferred over and shut down the computer. Only then did he pull out the cable and the data prism, shoving them both into his courier bag where they would be safe.

Hurrying from the office, he began snatching up anything that looked worthwhile, and stuffing it into the duffel bag. As long as it looked expensive, it went inside. He had never seen anything lying about that looked like useful documents. Hopefully, there would be more on the files he had taken.