Walking over to the computer bank the two gonks were picking through I noticed they’d pulled the big power cable out of it’s wall mount. The computer bank was hooked up to a tall data rack of some kind and had a draw full of slotted data cards. I closed the drawer and plugged the power cable back in.

The computer bank lit up and started to boot but I didn’t need to access the computer, I just needed the IR cluster attached to it to be powered. As soon as the lights on the little round half sphere lit up I sent a ping to it to connect and watched it deny me over and over as it was still starting up.

Finally the thing accepts and a password request pops up on my interface. Leaving it there idle, I minimized it out of the way and started setting up. I went to the front of the shelter and closed the front door for now and dragged the body out of the way. Bodies are heavy. Damn.

Then I returned to the computer room and set up another flash bang trip wire at the door and arranged a few of the steel desks around the door so they’d need to be moved to enter while also drawing attention away from the wire at foot height. Then I shut the door most of the way to cut down on the spilled light but enough to hear noises from outside. Hopefully being tucked away behind the big computer bank would shield me from the worst of the flash bang grenade on the tripwire trap. I didn’t have any other grenades or trap parts on me, another thing Noe would likely shout at me for. I should make some bear traps.

With the set up done it was time to do some netrunning. This would be my first time, very excited. Kind of wish it wasn’t in a room with a corpse but you had to work with what you had.

I rolled an office chair from one of the already moved desks over behind the computer bank and up against the wall. I sat down and placed my smg in my lap, still had a lot of rounds in it so no need to reload just yet. I had my pistol holstered and ready to draw. Damn. I could really see why netrunners had field teams, they could focus on the net and leave the real world to their partners.

This would just have to do. It was a little bit of an amateur defensive set up but I wouldn’t be on the net very long hopefully. I was just getting the access I’d need for the actual job and setting up back doors for the different things I’d need to do quickly then. I wouldn’t actually be waiting for people to move to the right positions or anything.

Settling into the office chair and bringing up the lowered arms to keep myself steady I opened the password request interface and then opened my cyberware management panel and chose the netrunning profile that had been created by the doctors that linked the netrunning cyberware together. Then I chose to initiate the “Jack” option from the settings and readouts on the management panel. I think it was short for hijack which is basically what the cyberware was doing to my brain so it could take my body’s inputs for itself and convert them to net inputs. I’d have to ask Marchand or search the myriad documentation to be sure though.

[Shell Launched.]

For a moment I thought it was broken and then I felt an odd falling sensation while sitting. The next moment my vision was replaced with a black expanse where my only sense of space was a floor under my feet and the feeling of a chair under me but weirdly I couldn’t feel my own arm when I touched it with my other hand.

[Avatar Launched.]

[Platform Launched.]

Suddenly I could see myself and feel myself grabbing my arm, then an vague area faded into view around me. It looked sort of gray and blurry until I focused on one spot and then it was further away but clear and red. Just blank walls and a blank floor of a single shifting color. Not as boring as it could have been but hardly the most amazing front that it could be as far as the documentation said anyway. According to the books a front was just the visual representation of a node of a grid, I was connected to the node at the computer hub of a shelter so it wouldn’t really be a public facing node.

Hence the simplicity.

I was standing on a slightly raised platform, only a few inches high, that was the connection point for people from the real world to enter the node here.

From here I’d need to get past the password request by either cracking it, slicing it or having the password. The first two were slang for different methods of hacking on the net. Cracking a program was to open it up and use the information inside it to solve the issue and slicing a program is where you crash the program and before it can reboot you end the process that’s running it by severing it’s connection to the grid by deleting it’s node address and requires a local grid administrator to come by and restart the program. Some netrunners could sever a process so quickly that it would literally keep running on the grid, taking up grid speed but just running the same connection to nothing over and over.

I looked around the virtual space but the hazy dimensions were messing me up, you’d think a square room would be fine but the distances changing based on attention was weirding me out. I’d read this was normal and was the closest fit for the human mind, that netrunners got used to it quickly and just focused on nodes and targets.

Something to do with the whole amount of data being too much so it just streamed in what was being requested, the warping was the data being understood by the mind. Better cyberware or hardware could make the warping faster or raise the amount that you could keep in mind at once. Some hardware even let users keep a patch of cyberspace always loaded externally so that area never warped, like a permanent digitalized memory.

Eventually I found a spot that didn’t warp the same on the right hand side of me and focused on it until it resolved into a floor and wall like elsewhere but stood by the wall was a simple human entity devoid of features apart from a simple hard hat and a KCI logo on it’s chest. The worrying thing was it also had a club, or a cuboid it was using as a club anyway.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

I walked towards it and the world seemed to melt away from the sides and behind as all the focus ringed itself around the KCI entity. I got within a few yards and it spoke in a human sounding but monotone voice.

“Password required for entry into KCI civic maintenance grid ID one hundred and thirty four. Please state the password to continue.” It stated, not moving a single time during it.

First problem of my netrunning career then. Bypass the security to get onto the local net.

I could find the password by phishing or bribing an engineer, but that would take a while and I wasn’t up for it.

Second would be to crack the password program in front of me, which would take some method of attack program that could exploit a weakness to access the data it had to check against offered passwords, see what it would accept and then offer it that when it restarted.

Third method would be to literally slice the program by crashing it with a brute force attack program and then use the time before it respawned to remove the coordinate data from the exposed program before the program popped back up in front of me.

First would be the most elegant and the safest depending on how it was done, second would be the next best but would leave some traces. The third was just breaking and entering. Even people who were just using the grid in the real world would notice the password check missing.

Option two first and then I’ll try three.

First I’d need to build a relevant attack program. Marchand’s documentation said these can be near limitless in variance and new designs were made constantly with most netrunners making their own all the time and selling old methods once they stopped working on different things. If you made a great program to attack smaller daemon programs but then the companies or systems you usually broke into patched an exploit your program was using you’d just sell it off, maybe another person attacking somewhere else could use it better.

I opened up the netcoding interface and got something that reminded me of the normal coding interface Sanctum had made out of my basic version but with a load more physical space in it and a third dimension which was odd to look at.

According to the books, attack programs could be simple or complex from the start and both had their place but a good first attack program was a precise tool that could be altered to fit the target. Something slow to set up but powerful in a single strike, like a pickaxe.

I started writing the start of the script for the program based on what I could remember from the books and had some nice prompts from the program guessing what I was trying to do and offering tooltips, suggestions and autofills as I went. Most of them weren’t needed but for a newbie like me they were nice to know they were there at least.

The rough shape of the program came together quickly as I stood in front of the password program. Fortunately it was just an interface program and not a daemon program, it wasn’t smart enough to adapt or recognize user behaviors. It was just there to receive input, check it against stored data and then give a response. It wouldn’t care if I worked in front of it like a daemon would.

I just needed to give the attack program I was working on an exploit that would work here… I could try to force it to receive thousands of password entries at the same moment causing it to lag the grid and maybe stop responding. Or I could give try to inject a compressed string that would just expand infinitely as soon as it was accepted by the program so it would take forever to read. Maybe something with the internals, I could try to submit an identification that injected a file into it’s buffer that would fail to load and cause a fail loop.

There were hundreds of the most common methods in the books and I’d only read a few. Even the term buffer was given to me by Sanctum with the skill integration. I didn’t know enough about netrunning yet.

I stood there thinking for a few moments when it came to me, this was a simple password program. I could just hit it with a password submission that wasn’t anything in particular but could be resolved into what it was being compared to when the program checked. It would have to pull up the password result to check and the moment the password result was loaded into the program buffer

I could pull it into my submission packet and overwrite it with the result.

A simple skeleton key that fit the lock it was offered into as it was offered into it. No doubt there were a million ways to prevent this, protected buffers or encrypted checking being two that leaped to my mind right away. But this program was extremely likely to be lowest bidder, bottom rung trash. It was protecting a small grid in a bunker of a maintenance sector in a poor district.

I finished up the attack program with the simple buffer request overwrite function and let it compile. It didn’t compile. I fixed up some of the syntax that I hadn’t used properly and compiled it again.

The program compiled and I had a vague red blob in front of me with a gray rectangle floating over it.

[Name program and grasp to attempt to load and launch.]

I thought of it’s name and grabbed at the red blob until I had a hold of a liquid mass of it.

[Loaded program PkAx_SkltnKy1.to by Mal to Platform.]

[Reading intent for program avatar…]

[Launched PkAx_SkltnKy1.to]

The red blob quickly resolved into a smooth red wooden pickaxe handle that seemed very light despite it’s size, I could even hold it in one hand. Then the rest of the blob stuck to the top of it resolved into a smooth skull with a bone stuck through it sideways that then gradually curved before ending in cracked spiked point.

I could see the skeleton but not so much the key with this. Also why bright red? As I watched though the red faded from the object leaving it with a rough wooden beige and an old yellowed bone color to it. Fair enough.

Walking forward toward the password program I raised the pickaxe over my head a little hesitantly as it stood there uncaring. The program had a method of retaliation, likely too many failed attempts forced a disconnect, that would be the purpose of the stick it had.

I used both hands and brought the pickaxe down on the program’s head and was surprised when the head of the pickaxe buried itself in and the program seemed to take a moment to react before the pickaxe pulsed in my hand and seemed to be pushed out from the program. I took it back to me and lowered it into a defensive posture on instinct.

“Password accepted. Have a productive day engineer.” The program said before vanishing almost instantly.

The wall behind it pulled back into an alcove that seemed filled with light for a moment until it shifted into a series of corridors, but too many to fit into the same small alcove. The more I looked in one direction from left to right, the more there were to the left or right and the more I looked straight forward the more space the ones straight ahead seemed to take up. This unreal space stuff was very alien to me.

I checked the route on my maps and saw that I’d need to be able to go from this grid to the grid next door. For that I could just connect through the junction about a mile north but that wasn’t the goal here, I needed to make a hole on the grid near physically close point. Then I could jump out of the net to the real world, go find whatever point the hole I’d made would be and then set up my lasers to connect from the hole to the second grid access point which would give me access to both grids at the same time from cyberspace without going through the junction.