Sam's footsteps weighed heavily as he climbed down the ladder and made his way to his destination. He paused right next to the Deep Diver room and began scanning. The Deep Diver seemed to have a camera pointed at himself to be able to keep his body in view, that was a problem, because Sam had to pass through this field of vision. He started recording a loop and tried to install it as inconspicuously as possible. In order to distract the diver for a short time so that he would not notice this, he used the distributor box on the road to briefly reduce the power connection by 70%. The diver immediately began to raise his defenses, expecting an attack and left the camera unprotected, as he was only superficially connected to it. Sam installed the loop and at the same moment began to create loops for the webcam of the Cyberdeck, but this was more difficult because a pretty corpo lady in a dark blazer was in front of it and seemed to be working. Sam reactivated the power and realized how the people in the room were panicking for the cause. And all of a sudden, Sam realized how he could proceed so as not to kill anyone in the process. It overloaded the distributor outside and sent all the available power through the cable leading here. When the distribution box in the house flew into the air due to the load, everything went dark. The Deep Diver was locked into a kind of quarantine by the protection program that every diver had until power was available again. Sam opened the hidden little door that led from the maintenance corridor into the room where the massive diving chair stood. Sam had to move some boxes aside until he got through, but since they were all empty, it didn't make much noise. Sam activated the low light function of his eyes and peered into the second room. Three people. The handsome one in a blazer, a little fat one in a suit and what was probably the second Mancer who was now jacketed out and tried to turn on the lights manually. "Damn Karl, what's this all about?" the little one barked at the mancer, who replied "The power is gone, there was a short spike in the power and then a fuse probably failed. I'm going to look, sir" "And you Sarah? What are you doing? Just sit around on your ass like usual?" "T-sorry, sir. I don't know what I can do without electricity. I'm just an analyst," the woman stammered in panic. Sam crept up to the two of them and grabbed the little fat bag from behind. No one would miss someone like that. He drew his hamatachi and shot two bullets into the side of his head. The woman screamed and threw herself to the ground with her arms raised "PLEASE DON'T, PLEASE" but Sam stepped past her, connected his data cable to the Cyberdeck and installed a daemon that would boot as soon as the Cyberdeck was booted up. From then on, Sam would have free access to the entire network. He bent down to the woman: "Leave the building and your employer. Then I won't hurt you" With these words, Sam turned and began to write the codes he could send to the daemon as soon as it was online. With these codes, the entire system would be destroyed from the ground up. But while Sam was still in the middle of his work, the light came back on and blinded him. He deactivated his low light and sprinted to the small door. How the hell the guy had managed to get the power running again. Sam crawled through the passageway, pulled some of the boxes behind him and closed the door. Before he climbed the ladder again, however, he checked his daemon. The Cyberdeck was immediately booted up again with the returning power and the daemon was now deeply anchored in the system. At least that worked as hoped. He activated the daemon and let it rage in the system to do as much damage as possible.
The whole thing got too out of control. Sam had made up his mind not to kill anyone, but now there was a corpse in the middle of the room, he had planned to control the daemon himself to destroy every file, but now he had to do it autonomously before the Mancer returned. He really had to start thinking through his plans more than once. Carefully he climbed the ladder and crept into the stairwell. He stayed there for a few moments and listened. Dripping water somewhere above him, the tapping of rats scurrying through the empty corridors and the distant appearance of soft shoes, barely visible, far below him. Sam had never been much of a gambler, but he would bet his new bike that it had to be the Mancer. The steps were slow and cautious, but determined. Sam imagined his counterpart slowly climbing the stairs, gun in hand and peering around every bend, ready to shoot immediately. To level the playing field, Sam also drew his weapon, but remained in the maintenance door and looked down.
The faint glow of the not yet shattered fake neon tubes cast a shadow on the floor, which carefully went around the bend of the stairwell. Sam aimed the simple sight of his Hamatachi at the bend, but the shadow seemed to be frozen. Had Sam betrayed himself by something? The shadow disappeared and Sam heard the sound of sprinting feet. He jumped up from his position and chased after his target. When he passed the hallway where the rooms of the Corpos were located, he saw the figure of the Corpo Woman, who seemed to have given a signal. But Sam didn't have the time to worry about it and instead raced down the stairs. Knack. Darkness. Sam fell and fell down the stairs a few steps, completely disoriented. "What..." he began, but then he felt the dainty digital fingers of the cybermancer who was influencing Sam's cyberware. He immediately concentrated on his defense and pulled up several ICE layers. He activated his emergency daemons and threw the intruder out of his system. Light and sound returned to Sam, but his defenses were so resource-heavy that he could hardly do anything else that affected his eyes. The corpo stood over Sam and seemed stunned from being kicked out of his system, if only for a brief moment. Sam jumped to the side around the bend in the stairwell, and managed to fire three shots before he was out of the mancer's field of vision. He didn't know if he scored, because his aiming system was offline and Sam had never been particularly accurate. Sam picked himself up and waited for him to be attacked immediately, but he only heard footsteps moving away. "You can't get out of here," Sam growled and went back up the stairs a bit. Gun at the ready, he turned to the dimly lit hallway. Only a fluorescent tube was still operable here, but flickered like in a horror movie. Sam moved slowly and deliberately. One foot in front of the other, knees slightly bent and looking over the rudimentary aiming device of his weapon. He tried to make as few noises as possible while concentrating to make out sounds coming from his surroundings. But wherever his opponent was hiding, he didn't seem to move and didn't make a sound. Sam stopped and began to reduce his ICE a bit, trying to keep an eye on all the data streams around him. The bait seemed to work, as after a few seconds there was an attack on Sam's neural network. Sam retraced this attack and saw that it had to come from one of the last rooms on the left side. All of a sudden, he pulled up his defense again and started running. He had seen so far that most of the doors in this building were closed, so he only had to pay attention to which door was open, or at least unlocked, to find the right room.
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The last room stood with the door wide open, and Sam slowed his pace. He leaned against the wall, right next to the door frame, and shouted, "Hey, if you want to survive this, just give up. I didn't do anything to your partner upstairs either. I just want to make sure you don't interfere with what I have to do here" "Lick me. I used to be an operative myself. I know how something like that works. I can't just get out of here." Even as he spoke, the Cybermancer began to shoot and sparks flew close, too close, past Sam's face. Sam jerked back and took a step away from the door. "Damn it, I really don't want to hurt you as long as it's not necessary," Sam shouted, calling up his daemon's data to check how far the data shredding had progressed. To his horror, he saw that only 27% had been done and the daemon had disappeared. The Deep Diver must have come out of quarantine and regained control. That explained why the previous attack on its hardware was so strong. The Cybermancer Sam was dealing with was supported by the Deep Diver.
It all went down the drain, nothing went as expected and Sam began to wonder if he himself was the prey. He could remember seeing an old anti-violence system in the lobby of the building. A self-firing system, which was usually loaded with rubber bullets and was directly connected to the police network. But it was child's play to force access via the system if you were a reasonably good mancer. Sam couldn't tell if the system was still working, because it didn't even do a scan when he entered. But he didn't want to find out in a situation like now.
Sam saw more sparks coming from the door frame and decided to end the matter more directly than he wanted to. He turned to the side and took the fluorescent tube to the finish. It cost him three shots to hit, but when the tube burst, the hallway fell into darkness. Sam activated his low light night vision and lay down on the ground. As Sam suspected, the entrenched Mancer began to shoot at the door in panic, but still at body and head level. Sam crawled forward just far enough to be able to see into the room. The corpo had taken cover behind a couch and had an SMG in his hand, with which he shot at irregular intervals, probably hoping to hit Sam by chance. Sam pulled his gun past his body and aimed. With bated breath, Sam fired. To his shame, the first 7 shots didn't hit, only with shots 8 and 10 did he hit the head of the corpo behind the couch, Sam couldn't even see the entry hole of bullet 9, it was that far away from his target. In my defense, I've never really needed to aim manually, he tried to rationalize things in front of himself. Sam stood up and suddenly felt a stabbing pain in his back, he turned, during another stab of the pain that ran through his body. In the hallway entrance, the woman from earlier stood with a raised pistol in her hand and a frightened posture. Sam slipped through the open door and looked down at himself. Blood flowed down his left flank unchecked, and judging by the pain, the same was true for his upper back.
Damn it. He should have just ignored his curiosity about this place. He should have done his stupid job and returned to EEI. But no. He had to stick his nose into everything. And that in itself was not enough. Why had he gone so far? If it had been his assignment, it would have been something else, but Sam got absolutely nothing in return for taking on a corp here to protect the data of people he would never meet.
Sam let a scream of hatred and despair come deep from his throat and grabbed the SMG of the corpse next to him, set it to fully automatic and threw himself out of the room. As he flew out of the door, he shot at the Shadowy Figure. He was still firing as he hit the ground hard. A second later, the submachine gun clicked empty and silence settled over the dark hallway. Sam, however, remained lying down. He threw the MP aside and looked down the corridor to the Corpo Frau, who was now lying on the ground. Around her, he saw the ground darken, turning the illuminated part of the floor red.
"Fuck."
That was the only thing that came out of Sam's mouth. It was the only thing in his head. He cursed the Corpos for fighting back like that, he cursed the Corp for the situation even existing, and he cursed himself for just messing up all the time. The Deep Diver was now the last survivor and Sam prayed to the non-existent gods that he could leave the building behind without causing another death.
Slowly and dazedly, he rose. The pain of his wounds was almost forgotten and Sam staggered slowly through the hallway towards the stairs. He kept his pistol in his hand and went downstairs. What he would do because of the anti-violence system was to be a spontaneous decision. He accepted that he had no right to get out of here just like that. To his surprise, the system appeared to be disabled, although it appeared to be functioning on the surface. The pressure against his ICE had also disappeared, as he noticed when leaving the lobby. The Deep Diver may have moved out of the chair, or aborted all systems. For whatever reason.
Sam turned to the front door after a few numb steps, half expecting to see the diver there with a gun. But no one came. The lobby remained empty. Sam was grateful. He stowed the pistol and walked towards the shadows of the large buildings to disappear into one of the many alleys.
When he could no longer recognize the building, he leaned against the wall and let himself slide down it. With bitter irony, he realized that just like in the previous situation, he was sitting there and feeling sorry for himself. Only that he was at least paid for it. He had just failed on a full level in his action. Only a quarter of the data was destroyed, three were dead.
"Fuck"
That's all he had to do. His mind was empty and he drifted into a sleep that threw Sam into a hellish nightmare land. And Sam welcomed it.