Two days later from Sanctum’s unshackling I was working on some new netrunning code, mostly just working on the pickaxe to make it more compatible with a wider range of systems even if the actual functioning wouldn’t be any better.
Sitting on a rolling office chair in Noe’s workshop room as she worked on some oversized rifle project of some kind, I worked away on my interface. Noe had decided her little collection of special past works didn’t have any long rifles so she wanted to make a long range iron that could take out a borg or even a halo-chopper from super far away, it’d need a heavy round and from what she had made was essentially a autocannon with a hand grip and a trigger.
Some of the big gun was on the floor and Noe was working on something mechanical on the table above. I left her to it.
We’d spent the morning mostly hanging around chatting then we’d gone over to my apartment to chat with Lla a bit, then Lla wanted to get her exercise done so we’d come back to Noe’s workshop so she could work on her “big baby” project and I got on with some coding work.
The pickaxe design was very simple, but so far all I’d fought with were simple programs. Eventually I’d have to fight more sophisticated programs though that had actual ICE or even just designed with enough complexity that my poor pickaxe couldn’t run it’s simple process properly.
My other issue was my truncheon, at the moment it was exploiting a frame of position data to attempt to spoof the target’s presence to scramble it’s data. Even basic programs would deny all that but it would stall them out to do so. More sophisticated programs would just not allow my truncheon to change it’s position address to the program’s and then the rest of the truncheon program wouldn’t even fire off. Making it essentially useless.
At least my chain was still useful going forwards but then it was also the newest addition and I was definitely getting to grips with netrunning as time passed and I read more of Marchand’s documentation when I got the chance. It would likely need to be made stronger eventually as it was designed to just absorb all the requests it could on a single frame of impact before crashing it’s chain link out but there was no doubt attack programs or daemon’s that had built in countermeasures that would save their attacks for the target itself or something similar.
I was fixing the compiling errors in the pickaxe script when I received a message from Marchand straight to my interface. She had another netrunning job doing overwatch for another escort job, they were Marchand’s most common low level jobs of course.
The only issue was that it was meant to start in an hour, or less. It was close enough for me to rush to and get ready but I wouldn’t have any time to set up a tunnel or a good defensive position.
Marchand explained that the route of the escort didn’t leave the single maintenance grid so a tunnel wasn’t needed, this cut down on setup time and was the reason she was giving me this job.
Urgh. I agreed to it and got myself ready quickly while explaining my job to Noe, then Lla and then mom who had just woken up as I was strapping on my storage rig. I made sure all my guns were clear and good to go and set out.
The streets were still quiet and full of gangers but at least they weren’t actively patrolling anymore. Just sitting around at junctions in crowds and eying everyone walking by. I wondered if there was a way to get the gangs to leave me alone, like a blanket order from all the local gang clusters but that was likely the job of a liaison, an actual paid job. They’d make sure the areas the operator was going to be in was cleared for the local authorities, legal or otherwise. This might mean talking and making deals with a dozen groups just for one job, but that was their job. I didn’t have the kind of secured income to hire someone to handle that for me.
Maybe I could talk Lla into being my liaison for a while when her brother finished with his big job, one way or another. It’d get her experience as a face while keeping her local and within reach of both me and Marchand if she needed back up or support.
Don’t know what I’d pay her, maybe I could get her to invest her time in me a little and I’d pay her efforts off when I made it to the big time cash. It was a hard sell but I might be able to swing it if I can prove my skills a bit with a standout job or two. She also owes me a favor for letting her stay at my place for a while. Though favors aren’t really for locking in longer term things… I’d have to think about it.
Walking the streets when everything was just quiet walking, coughing was weird but the worst part was the vigilance. Everyone from the street vendor to the knife wielding toddler sitting in a turned over trash container in an alley was watching me as I walked past. Likely because of the handles of my guns being just visible along with my rig. Being a visible threat made me an enemy.
What was odd was the gangers seemed to relax around me a little in comparison, they put there hands on their guns when they saw me but as soon as I avoided eye contact and moved on they seemed to breathe out in relief. Were they expecting an operator type to go ballistic and gun them down along with the civs around the place?
Was the gang lockdown at the moment set up in response to some operator job gone wrong? Or gone right? I really needed to get to a broker and get some information before I made a mistake. The closest one from where I was now was McDonald but I didn’t have time to visit him, it’d have to be on the way back from this job.
Arriving at the local drone hub I looked through the chain link fence to the little shack in the middle of the depot filled with car-sized drones. They were bigger than the wheeled drones from back in the viaducts and had little tank treads instead of back wheels. They were called maintenance drones but that didn’t help much, nearly all the drones down here were in some way for maintenance.
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These drones had treads at the back, a big mechanized plow in front of two wheels. Then a heavy steel chassis filled with articulated arms and pipes that allowed it to do it’s jobs and then a central core unit at the middle that was basically impenetrable. Forged steel inches thick and heavy as it looked to protect the valuable and built for longevity electronics, they were worth a pretty penny but you’d never find anything other than spare components on the market. The actual boards, chips and processors were locked up in the cores and if the drone thought it was going to be breached it would kill to escape, all while connecting to every IR grid it could get a sight line on to alert authorities and it’s company.
You didn’t see them in the streets very often, and even if you did they were mostly there one moment and then gone the next. They did their work fast and then headed back into the tight maintenance tunnels for drones, the ones with barely any air, barely any light and lots of fast moving drones that didn’t care much to avoid you if you wandered down there and there was only room enough to fit the drones two wide with a few millimeters spare apart from the odd tunnel alcove for a small, unused ladder access.
This depot was where they would recharge their batteries and get serviced by other drones or sometimes human engineers depending on the problem. Their actual AI was awful, they were just about able to problem solve around their jobs but if they ran into a unknown variable they would just go find a IR cluster to query what to do and if they didn’t get a response from a human overseer fast enough then they’d just move onto the next thing on their work list, even if the previous task was now flooding an entire basement with sewage. It was why most of the district was in total disrepair but holding together just well enough to still be livable under the surface.
I climbed over the fence quickly, I’d done such a climb hundreds of times even if this fence was quite high. The razor wire around the top was too loose to be effective, likely a budget issue, and I slipped myself through it and dropped onto the other side.
The main door to the little shack was pass code locked but after trying five zeros and then five ones it popped open. A lot of maintenance codes were one of those two for smaller structures, why are people like this? Why even have a code?
Inside the little maintenance shack was literally filled with junk, not actual gear or parts or anything of actual value but literal junk. It was just broken brake disks, broken manifolds, broken plating, blown fuses, blown batteries, rotten wiring in great big bundles. It looked like the local crews used this place to dump the trash they didn’t want to put into recycling and have to report.
At the back of the little room was a small data hub though, a skinny tower model with a three sixty IR cluster on top. No desks or chairs around this time and the data hub looked out of place among the trash so it was likely a temporary thing that had gone on too long and become a permanent thing kind of situation. Pretty typical for water district maintenance, or even just maintenance in general.
Making a little nest to sit on out of some ruined tires and torn engine belts I piled up a good bit of the heavier junk between me and the seat to form a decent wall to break line of sight and then what was left against the door with a trip wired flash bang strung around the pile, it would blow right in the door way if the door was opened enough to deform the pile blocking the door.
With that done I looked around my little castle. The inside of the shack was dark butt my night vision had kicked on automatically and painted in what little color was in the room with what it could pick up from the gloom. Mostly grays and browns, gray metals and brown lubricant stains and old oil stains.
Sitting down on the pile of rubber I’d arranged into a rough stool height lump I pulled up my interface and pulled up my netrunning menu, clicking jack in without a second thought.
As the node space loaded around me I quickly spotted the password program over by the wall and approached it quickly, pulling out my pickaxe and burying the head into it’s chest before the world even finished rendering fully.
The pickaxe loaded in looking a little different than before, instead of the skull sitting sideways on the handle with the jaw pointed down it instead loaded in with the jaw resting on the pickaxe head and the eyes looking upwards. The compatibility changes I’d coded must have led to it re-rendering the visuals.
With a slight stuttering twitch the program reacted positively and gave me the approval message the same as last time before it unloaded from in front of me. My pickaxe left hanging in the air, I grabbed hold of it and ended the program and watched as the pickaxe dissolved into noise smoothly. When a program crashed the noise was more hectic and violent like sparks but when it was safely closed it was more of a soft melting effect, at least it was when nothing was specifically set in the appearance code, no doubt there was some parameters I could set for de-rendering.
Now I knew what to look for I pulled up my platform script and spotted the maintenance employee tag running through my buffer. It wouldn’t really use any RAM so it was fine to be there and would open nodes of the grid for me without needing to pickaxe the various password programs on the nodes each time.
I headed through two nodes, passing through empty nodes and their spatially clustered hallway entrances. I was kind of looking forward to getting into a different network instead of this basic corp maintenance grid setup. The documents Marchand had given me had described fancy facades and extravagant persona with entire buildings formed of non euclidean geometry, I had to look up what the word meant, with the pictured example being a fancy cruise ship and night time sea surrounding formed into the interior of a cylinder so the deck just looped around overhead. I wanted to see somewhere like that instead of these unfixed, simplistic grids that were focused on the function over form.
Maybe something to look forward to when I got out of sewer maintenance grids.
From there I cracked the camera sub grid without an ICE response, likely because the sub grid the cameras I needed only had a handful of camera feeds attached to it instead of the dozens of the last one. From there the job mostly broken down to me watching a squad of three adult operators, one fat, one thin and one with four muscled cyberarms and a kid guide. I spoke to the kid briefly but he was a lot more quiet and focused on the job than the other guy had been, no cloak and dagger but just simple responses. I didn’t recognize the kid myself so either he was new or just live further away than I had grown up.
I’d known most of the kids that had tried the operator lifestyle that had grown up around my area, there was just me now from my generation as far as I knew. The rest were dead or gave it up to do something else, either gangs, corps or just dissolving into incarna until they ended up on the streets where they’d just end up hooked up in an incarna drain den getting their plasma, marrow and blood harvest while they dreamed away in their incarnations. Mom could have ended up somewhere like that if I didn’t bridge the gaps in the rent with salvage and odd jobs for Marchand growing up. Some of those dens even used the addicts to grow pirated bioware right on their bodies while they slept.
This kid was good though, much better than the corpo type from before. The job got done quickly and without issue, just like most of mine when I was doing them a few months ago.