Sam was pursuing his goal, who was stumbling drunk through the streets of New Berlin. He always stayed a few meters behind the target, trying to look as ordinary as possible as he followed him. What made this person his target, Sam didn't know. He just hoped it was someone who deserved to die and didn't leave a family behind that would miss him. Sam had to force himself to see him again only as a target and not as a human being. The destination crossed the road to get something to eat at a Grub Dog Stand and then made its way back down the road. Sam stayed on his side of the road to avoid attracting attention and had to concentrate not to lose his goal in the crowd.
It was Saturday and one of the biggest party miles in the city, it was hard to describe how crowded and cramped everything was here. Sam's goal began to slow down at first, but then he started swaying and Sam thought he had been spotted. But instead of running away from Sam, he ran around a corner into an alley and vomited. Probably wouldn't have been able to cope with the Grub Dog. Which Sam could have said before. These things were difficult to digest even on an unupset stomach. The protein in it was supposedly natural, but it was an open secret that most street stalls mainly used synth proteins, which are used for animal husbandry. Sam tried to cross the street and waited for a few more to do the same so that he could merge with this group. Once on the other side, he went to the alley from which he already heard the unpleasant noises of his destination. It's now or never. Sam went into the darkness of the alley and pulled out his tech pistol, which he had loaded with slightly weaker ammunition to reduce the volume as much as possible. But because of that ammunition, he had to get very close. So he used the choking and vomiting of the target to drown out his own steps and put the barrel of the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger twice. His target collapsed in the middle of his vomit, ruining his suit. Not that he would ever need it again.
Sam turned away and walked along the alley, but in the opposite direction from which he had come. He turned north at a junction into another alley and began to make his way back. He had been given the task of carrying out an assassination attempt to show that he was willing to do anything for his new organization. He knew very well that the Aizutachi assassinations were carried out by veer44, but even being commissioned to do so had taken its toll on him. He was a hacker and cybermancer. Not a contract killer. Not that he had never killed before, but these situations were always against someone who wanted him dead. Not against a drunk, from behind in a shabby alley. "Fuck," he exclaimed, leaning against a house wall. It was good that it hadn't been easy for him, it showed that he wasn't a monster, but the fact that it was so much of a burden to him was nothing more than weakness. But he knew that if he didn't work as an operative for the Aizutachi, he would do so as a cyberslave in their network machines. Slowly he slid down with his back to the wall and sat quietly on the slightly wet floor for a few minutes. It had rained much more than usual in the last few weeks, so that even the Sub Terra slums became damp. It had caused Sam some problems while riding, because his bike had too much power for a beginner like him, despite his downloaded training program.
To distract himself, Sam began to scan his surroundings, hoping to find something interesting. Most of what he found were ordinary signals, such as public network accesses, Neo Euro transfers, communications. But a signal demanded his attention. Unlike all the others, this one was encrypted in a different way. A much more secure method that was usually used by high-end devices, as it was impossible to crack without direct port access. Sam tried to trace the origin of the signal, but there were too many people here for him to pinpoint the origin directly. He got up and followed the signal to the rough place of origin. An old social building, from the time when there were social projects for the lower town and it was not pretended that none of this existed here. The building had to be at least 90 years old. The façade bore witness to the fact that no renovation or even cleaning had taken place since the construction. Green plants that crept up on all four sides of the almost square building, surrounded by the dirt that drifted through the city with the smog, as well as graffiti that were in places that were downright impressive. Sam didn't want to go directly to the building in case there were scouts here. One street away, he sat down and began to analyze the signal. He couldn't decrypt it, but that didn't stop him from finding out everything about the encryption, origin, and other factors that couldn't be encrypted.
The signal definitely came from this building. It had been routed through an amplifier, so it was exposed to transmitting intercontinentally. But that also meant that the necessary hardware had to be nearby, which in turn helped Sam to find out where exactly the signal was coming from. He scanned the power lines and followed them until he found the next distributor box. From there, he searched for which line needed the most electricity and then followed it. As suspected, she ran directly towards the building and into the distributor of the house itself. It was so old that Sam couldn't scan it, so it had to go straight there. He went back to the building and looked around. Most of the people here were simply dressed with few eyes. Many covered their heads with hoods and kept their heads singed. Perfect. Sam did the same and walked towards the main entrance with a sluggish, unmotivated gait. Two children were loitering around next to the double door, presumably noting everyone who went in or out. So Sam didn't have too much time to look around and find out where the signal was coming from. He went upstairs and tried to find the perfect mix between fast and inconspicuous. It was only when he found a floor where countless cables were winding across the dirty floor that the question came to his head that he should have asked himself from the beginning. Why did he do what he did? It wouldn't give him any advantage in finding out what the signal was all about, and it was far too risky to jack the hardware to steal the data. What he saw here indicated top tier equipment. Equipment that ordinary street rats and punks could never use or even afford. It was most likely a corpo action staffed with security personnel and top mancers. But even as these thoughts went through his head, Sam moved further and further towards the signal. By now he was close enough to recognize from which room it was broadcasting and where the amplifier and Commando control center were located. This was more than just a temporary hideout for a job. There was too much equipment for that, which was difficult to cover up when you dragged it through the city. A camera turned to Sam and tried to record him. Luckily, Sam noticed it in time and forced her to play a loop of the last 30 seconds.
On quiet soles he walked towards the room where the Commando had to be center. He recognized a mancer in a full dive, which was completely in the net with the help of a cybermancing chair, and another that was only connected by a port and probably acted as an intermediate piece for full diver and on-site personnel. The security protocols were military standard and thus protected from Sam's eyes, which Sam had rarely seen before. He knew that he was putting himself in massive danger unnecessarily, but he couldn't bring himself to leave the building like anyone else would have done. He checked a door that was a little way away from the center and saw that it was only secured by a very outdated electronic lock, which he could open unnoticed. He peeked through the door as he slowly opened it and saw neither person nor equipment. But the wall on the right had been torn down and only covered with a plastic tarpaulin. Behind it he saw the light of working machines, which after a short scan turned out to be servers and the associated cooling module. Quietly he pushed the tarpaulin a little bit to the side to see if there was anyone in the server room, but the air seemed to be clean. So he went a little further towards danger. He took a quick look around the room and then spotted the data port. He knelt next to it and took his data cable, which was in his neck, and plugged it into the port, only turned off, in case the port was a kill trap that would fry the brains of any jacker who connected unprotected. He waited a moment, keeping an eye on the port to see the telltale flash of small flashes. But the port seemed safe, since Sam couldn't see anything, so he activated the connection and started to crack the ICE of the server farm. Whoever was here knew what he was doing. The security measures were impressive. Sam was in Level 6 of the defense after a good ten minutes and still not broken by the ICE. He kept an eye during the entire process without a HUD to be able to keep an eye on the door, which didn't make hacking any easier. After another ten minutes, he had broken the ICE, but now had to bypass a dead man switch that ensured that everything would blow up if someone worked their way through the second ICE shift. The type of defense was sophisticated and testified to a very, very experienced Cybermancer, or a whole team of talented Mancer. The programs that were designed to sound the alarm and activate the Dead Man were all linked together, so Sam couldn't turn them off one by one as he had done before. He was forced to write an attack program that was especially for this situation and could kill them all at once, but that was easier said than done. It took a huge amount of CPU power to create the program and even more to run it. He was able to overclock his hardware so that he could just about do it, but that would melt his head off. So he withdrew, the ICE had won the fight, but Sam would win the war. He stowed away his cable again and got up to look around for the farm's cooling unit. It was a standard electric cooling unit with large VF plugs into which 5cm cables could be plugged in, but also a few B plugs on the side in which Sam could hook himself. To do this, he used his data cable from his neck and walked as far as the cable would allow him towards the port.
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He realized that the distance was short enough that he could use the data cable that was embedded in his arm. So it unhooked itself from the cooling unit for the moment and reconnected to the data port. He walked backwards to let the cable run out of his arm until it was slightly tensioned. Then he unplugged this cable from his arm, went to the cooling unit, hooked himself up there and walked towards his other cable. After he had reconnected with it, he went on the offensive again. He went to the place where he was too stuck and activated the cooling. To do this, he lowered the cooling of one of the servers by 50% and instead made that energy work for him to keep his head unmelted. Sam activated the program and managed to turn off all programs at the same time and thus neutralize the Dead Man. Now he could get to work and tackle the second ICE shift. It takes him a precious 15 minutes to wriggle through it without triggering an alarm, during which he looked paranoid at the door. It was not impossible that someone saw the increased temperature of one server and came to check on it. But when he finally saw the port's data, he knew he had won. At least here. He began to search through the data and kept coming across the name "Tradek". He knew that it was a megacorp from the south of Germany, but that was where his knowledge ended.
Continuing his search, he found thousands of folders, all of which contained similar things: data from the vicinity of the building, video recordings, people, profiles and construction plans. Apparently, however, any information that would provide more information was on another server, presumably near the Mancer. This seemed to be just the storage location for data that was archived here after whatever the Corp did with it. Sam tried to dig deeper into the servers, but quickly realized that he couldn't find anything important here. After all the effort it had taken to hack into here, it was quite anticlimactic. So Sam would have to get closer to the others to learn more. Still unable to explain why he was here, he installed a backdoor into the servers, which he can use without physical contact, and terminated the connection. He pulled back his cables and let the cooling system's power management do its job again. He looked at the door that probably led into one of the rooms where there were people and couldn't resist the temptation. He opened the electronic lock and opened the door a small crack. Through this gap, he could see a cyberdeck set up, where someone with long hair and an expensive suit was sitting. Next to it, a broadly built corpo in an equally expensive suit leaned down to the cyberdeck and seemed to be talking to the seated person. Sam tried to see more, but didn't dare to open the door any further in case someone outside his field of vision could see the door.
Sam forced himself to close the door again and think about his situation first. Something he should have done quite a while ago. But better late than never. He crossed the cool server room and stepped into the stale warm air of the room he had broken into at the beginning. With a cautious look, he peered out into the hallway to make sure there was no one there and left the room. The thick power cables all ended in the first three rooms of the hallway, so he turned towards the rooms that were further down the hallway. These doors were also all equipped with simple locks, so it was no difficulty for Sam to set up the farthest room as a temporary camp. He closed the door behind him and programmed a daemon that triggered an alarm as soon as someone tampered with the lock. The room was similar to the previous one, but there was some outdated furniture. A couch that had a large crack in the middle, through which several springs stood out, a small living room table and an old large closet. Sam made himself comfortable on the couch as best he could and began to access the net to find out information about Tradek, the area and the building. The dusty window had a roller blind that was largely lowered, so he didn't have to worry much about being discovered from the outside.
Sam closed his eyes and lost himself in the calming world of the Net. Thousands of lines of code flew around him, ensuring that he could browse unnoticed and was untrackable. At least for most. Colors filled his field of vision and formed various netsites, from which Sam first went to a forum where, for the right price, the blueprint of every building in New Berlin could be obtained. There he downloaded the blueprints of the social housing and from surrounding buildings. On various other sites and forums, he used his reputation and money to find insider information about Tradek. As a cover, he used the excuse to perform corpo espionage for a high-end client. As it turned out, Tradek was primarily involved in social engineering, which Corps used to improve their sales and customer service. To do this, they bought vast amounts of personal data and analyzed it, most likely, without the knowledge of the data subjects. However, business seemed to be rather sluggish lately, as data became more and more expensive. Sam was sure that Tradek was now collecting their own data and looking much deeper into those affected than anything they could have acquired. Nothing was sacred to these corps, and Sam knew exactly why everything he did was obscured by his programs. Sam spent most of the evening doing more research and planning how he would get to the Cyberdeck unseen. The layout of the building turned out to be quite useful when he realized that there were maintenance corridors between some walls. One of these paths led past the room where the Deep Diver had to be, that would be his entry. But first he had to have eyes inside the rooms, so he scanned everything on this floor to be able to recognize any cameras, be they real CCTV cameras, or even just the webcam of the cyberdeck or a smartphone camera. Sam would make sure that the data collected there is destroyed. Whether it was a twisted sense of justice or his hatred of corpos and their machinations, however, he could not say. It wasn't important to him either.
When the first rays of the sun made their way through the crack in the window and shone in Sam's face, he woke up and had to get his bearings. After a few seconds he remembered where he was and what he had been up to during the night. He couldn't remember falling asleep and on his HUD there were still parts of the floor plan he had studied for a long time. He emptied the HUD and stood up to stretch. His back hurt like hell and every muscle was tense. But at least he hadn't been discovered here, so he couldn't complain too much. He stretched his arms, shoulders and legs and then dared to look outside the room into the hallway. Like yesterday, there was no one to be seen. Perfect. So nothing stood in his way. He called up the plans he had drawn up yesterday and familiarized himself once again with everything he had to consider. The entrance to the maintenance corridor was one floor up in a side room of the stairwell. From there, he was able to go right next to the room where he had seen the Cybermancer in a deep dive yesterday. Even though Sam had never been in a deep dive himself, he at least knew the basic knowledge. Thus, most Mancers often stayed in the dive for days or weeks and were almost completely separated from their bodies. So if Sam were to cross the room, there was only a very small risk of being noticed. The bigger problem was the second Mancer he had recognized. He seemed to be only superficially connected to the system, as Sam usually was. Sam would have to hack into a camera, or preferably several, to find a safe route through the rooms. Then he just had to find a port and.... And then what? As soon as he accessed the system, he would sound an alarm and he would be detected. Even if not. What was the chance of getting in, sabotaging the system and getting out again without being noticed? It would be noticed immediately if the data could no longer be sent. The same if data could not be collected. Sam didn't have a weapon that could take out without killing in the process, and would he really kill a room full of people just because he didn't like the way a corp did it that didn't concern him? Just yesterday he had to fight with himself because of the murder of one of the Aizutachi targets. Especially since all this started here because Sam was curious, nothing more. Sam became uncomfortable at the thought that his curiosity would be the reason for corpses. He sat back down in the old ruined couch and rested his head in the palms of his hands. He would find a way, he doesn't have to kill, he would certainly come up with something as soon as he was close enough to be able to access the cameras. Absolutely. While he kept repeating this in his mind, Sam got up and made his way to the stairwell.