Checking my markings on the map there were two possible positions in walking distance, one was a spot that had a engineer office next to a viaduct readout system and the other was a likely more busy drone repair bay off the side of the viaducts. The office would be the best choice. I checked in front of me on the net and saw one of the corridors led right to that node, seeing as was nearby.
Walking along the corridor, I looked back to see the previous node space dissolve into nothing leaving me with only the corridor around me. But as I turned back around and looked forward the space in front distorted and developed into a new square room with a connection point on the floor for people to join the node from the real world.
That didn’t take long but that was how cyberspace tended to work. Unless there were specific defensive setups to protect a certain node or program at a node that kept the space within fixed then most actual distances within cyberspace didn’t really matter.
I looked around the node to see it was just another blank space, the KCI must really kept they’re technicians on a budget. This node at least didn’t have a password program loaded, likely because the only user here had already passed one. I was likely wearing a code tag somewhere on my platform or shell that the node was recognizing and leaving me alone because of it.
This was the right node to set up an outside connection in though, a hole as netrunners had named it. First you make a hole, then you hook it up to the next grid and you have a tunnel. Secret travel under the walls between grids.
I pulled up my coding program again and started writing a very, very simple daemon script. It wouldn’t do anything except route data through this node to and from the outside world without using the standard and likely tracked connection point. The actual programming was simple by design as it mostly used the infrastructure already in place within the node and simply added additional addresses that were outside of the registry of the security and tracking protocols. It was likely that an administrator would notice either the daemon or the new registry entries quickly if they visited but a quick look at the node user log showed that only happened every year or so and the last had been three months ago, so no issue.
Finishing the daemon quickly I hit the compile button, failed. I fixed some of the code near the top, failed. I gave it a full look over for what was wrong and noticed that unlike my pickaxe this daemon would need a shell and a tool tip popped up to tell me where to put it and what the most common way to set it up was. I’d already done something similar for my own shell so soon enough the daemon had all it’s variables to exist and do it’s job and I once more hit compile.
[Name daemon and touch to attempt to load and launch.]
It was a daemon that touched the real world a little so I thought I’d name it Outsider, make it a little eyeball with three hands so it could move around but still keep itself simple. It was meant to be lightweight after all. A complicated or large avatar would just bloat the ram requirement or hit some set cap limit for the node. Some admins set the actual use of program RAM for users to their nodes very, very low to prevent this kind of thing or worse.
[Loaded daemon Outsdr1.dae by Mal to Platform.]
[Reading intent for program avatar…]
[Instantiating one Outsdr1.dae daemon.]
A red glow appeared in front of me and then formed into a red blob that grew limbs and then hands until the red color faded away leaving me with a huge, sticky looking white eyeball with a red iris and black pupil, the arms were covered with a wrinkly, blood red skin and lacked finger nails.
Did it have to be gross? I didn’t choose for the avatar to look like that. I meant a more cartoony and simple design. It could have been a shiny and smooth cute little thing but instead apparently my mind had come up with this weird sticky old man arm creature. Gonk brain.
The daemon looked at me and it’s little pupil opened a little to look at me clearly and just waited.
“Just hang around here in this node but try to stay out of sight, I’ll connect to you from meat space and just handle the data with my tags on it like I programmed you to do, okay? Do you understand the job?” I asked, a little unsure of what level of intelligence or reactivity the daemon had. The code was simple and mostly pulled daemon behavior libraries from the coding program Sanctum had retroengineered. I hadn’t allowed for much of the file size to be behavior so it likely couldn’t do much.
The little daemon just nodded and backed away at an angle from me never breaking eye contact. Once it reached the corner of the node, as far as I could tell through the distortion, it stood still and stared at me from there. A bit creepy.
With that done my netrunning for today was basically finished. I checked through my shell, avatar and platform to check they were normal and the nodes hadn’t added or changed anything and everything looked fine, no tracking or forced programs or subroutines. Good. I pulled up my cyberware management panel and selected “Jack Out” from the options. The node around me including my distant daemon flickered and then melted away as the front and avatar code was among the first to stop being received.
Quickly I was back to perceiving the real world around me which was much darker, grimier and smellier than I remembered. I could see why some people tried their best to just live their lives on the net. It could be the whole being in a dark flood shelter room lit by computer lights with a dead body on a nearby table thing though.
I shook my head clear and got up on alert, I was back in the real world and the real world was a lot more dangerous than a cheap maintenance grid in cyberspace.
Getting up off the office chair I quickly began securing the room, checking my trap, checking the body, checking the area. No one had entered and there wasn’t any changes. Perfect. I was still safe for now.
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A quick dismantling of the trap after moving the desks out of the way gave me access to the doorway out. I considered shutting down the computer to cover my tracks a little but seeing as I was leaving a pair of bodies behind it was a wasted effort so I just left.
Opening the front door of the flood shelter took a few minutes as it had to unseal but soon enough I was walking through the wide hallways of the viaducts. The deep clunking of the giant pipes overhead the only real noise of the area as the green biosludge was pumped along them, apart from my footsteps on the fercrete.
As I wandered the wide hallway I found myself thinking a little about the two guys I’d just killed, not a normal thing for me. Reflecting on the people you had to kill was not a fun time and often ate away at people I’d known and I didn’t find it gained me anything. You’d hope for some philosophical peace after such thinking but mostly it just made me a bit sad and helpless, not like I could undo the deaths and I couldn’t not attack to kill deadly threats even if they weren’t actively trying to kill me. If them being alive would get me killed, they were a deadly threat to me, no question about it.
Kind of the same way Marchand thought it occurred to me then, although she seemed to get through the whole process a bit quickly for my taste. There should be a bit of time to it, a bit of human dignity even if you couldn’t give them human decency. Maybe I was naive. I’m still young enough to get away with some naivety.
I wondered if the guy on the table had a family, that would suck. Or the knife guy, maybe he had a kid like me waiting around somewhere for him. They’d have to figure out some way to make it on their own, a lot of kids didn’t manage to make it like that from what I’d seen growing up. Mom might have been more than half asleep most of my life but she at least got the ball rolling on a lot of my life stuff, a little bit of backing even if it was just an apartment or a little bit of leftover cash.
The only thing I could do and stay sane would just be to file the whole thing under the ever present city rules folder in my head. You could live however you could but you’d never escape the rules of the city, and one of the big ones was “Sometimes you’ll just be killed and that’s that. Be prepared and try not to let it happen.”
If they had shot me or that knife had skewered my head and Sanctum couldn’t glue me back together then that was that. It’d suck and maybe they’d feel bad like I did now, but there wouldn’t be anything they could do, I would be dead and that’s just how the city was.
Another body into the recycling. Some of those bodies were likely flowing over my head through the biosludge pipes right this second.
The city was very hungry and I was walking through it’s stomach. No, maybe it’s intestines? Or it’s throat? It’s just pipes after all, no digestion going on. Whatever the metaphor would be, I’m walking through it.
Before long I arrived at the big industrial readout block set into an alcove of the wall, full of dials both digital and physical all over it with lots of lights and bars and numbers and clock things. Lots of wires going in and out of the block. There were switches and buttons all over the thing and even special buttons that had covers and locks on them, very tempted to break them open and press them but it would probably fire off an alarm.
Right next to it was a simple steel door with the word maintenance on it, the handle had a simple shard lock with a keypad under it. Door looked to be standard steel frame with likely a hollow or polystyrene core, the actual face of the door was steel but the thickness was almost certainly just a one millimeter or two millimeter plate at most. I pulled out my guest key.
A quick three round burst from my smg into the handle had the door swinging inwards. I really had to think of a name for the gun, Gibson model one? She’d made a few guns by the time she’d got to this one though. Gibson model five? Noe model five? I’d talk to her about it when I got back.
The interior of the little outpost office was sparse with it just being a place to stop and take a break or work on documents. Not meant to be used as an actual office all day. It did have a little computer bank and a terminal though with a nice IR cluster built into the wall above the desk. I quickly pinged it to connect to the network and smiled when I didn’t see a password prompt, the netrunning from earlier still working for me.
Once I was connected I sent a ping through the grid to the registry address for my outsider daemon for a connection request. It responded with an acceptance and with that I was linked to my daemon from outside the net. I reached into the storage pouch under my right arm and pulled out a little tripod and placed it down on the floor of the room in line of sight to the cluster. I quickly connected to the tripod myself and had it connect to the cluster through my interface, it took a few seconds for the command to make it through the tiny and simple circuitry of the tripod but it made the connection.
With that I made it send a similar connection request to the outsider daemon but this time through the tripod. It accepted the connection and the first laser in the tunnel was complete. I headed outside the room and placed down a tripod with a prism on it and painstakingly lined it up with the laser from the first tripod. There had to be a better, automatic way of doing this. I’d have to look into later for new designs.
I just walked along the green viaduct placing prism tripods or emitter receiver tripods every hundred yards or so. I could likely go longer but it wasn’t far to the next grid from this location.
Another half a mile and I reached what seemed to be another albeit smaller office outpost but this one had a bathroom as well as a set of three vending machines. Again I wondered who actually refilled these vending machines. Was it drones? Magical pixies? Ghosts? Other more mobile vending machines?
I let myself into the office noisily once more and found a similar IR cluster on the wall. It really was great I hadn’t run into anyone wandering around down here. There was the two gonks in the shelter but they were up to something like me, I’m talking about actual civilians or engineers who might wander about down here from time to time. Drones handled most stuff like this these days but you always had to have the odd human give everything a once over.
I lined up the final emitter receiver tripod from outside the door to the cluster and sent a connection request through my interface again.
This time I was expecting another password request but it didn’t ask for one. So either this grid didn’t have a password for connection, unlikely, or it accepted recent password acceptance tags from other grids, which was an insane security risk for no real gain. Amazing. Why did people even learn how to be elite netrunners when it seemed cybersecurity was in general designed by throwing keyboards and walls and drinking heavily.
Putting that aside I’d just successfully created my first ever tunnel between two grids and bypassed the junction. I was a true criminal netrunner now. Breaking the law and hacking the cyberspace.
I also killed two guys but they were just operator stuff, random job obstacles. Technically murder in the first degree and thus a crime but nothing to do with netrunning and so of no interest right now.
Elite criminal netrunner Mal.
Maybe I should think of a netrunning name, the alias is a big part of the scene. A lot of operators use aliases as well when they start to pull in big numbers, maybe I should just do both now?
I’d run through some names with Noe when I got back, she didn’t like my gun name idea and she’d never let me hear the end of it if I ended up with a gonk operator slash netrunner name.