Scavenger hunt for the Brainiacs

J looked at the map of Night City she wanted to see how closely it corresponded to the maps in the game, and unsurprisingly it was pretty close. If you adjusted for a smaller scale map removing a huge amount of buildings and scaling down the megastructures. She had known this already it wasn’t a surprise. Night City is the biggest City in the world as it is the only city without a true government.

Every major corpo housing complex is over a hundred stories tall and spanned multiple blocks in size. Arcologies onto themselves if the corpos had wanted to make them self-sustaining and didn’t want to use importation of essentials to control the tenants. You could be born, go to school, work and die in the same building and have never stepped foot outside of it if you were so inclined. Even the one she and her brother secretly owned is 50 stories.

Night city in the game wasn’t even large enough for it’s estimated population of just under 7 million. 140 million lived in the one she was raised in.

But it did get her thinking when she reviewed an old map of night city before the nuke. In the tabletop there were a lot of gangs that were now in essence defunct for one reason or another, most of them could be attributed to time and demographics changing but one just disappeared overnight. The Brainiacs, pretty much the only pure netrunner gang to ever exist in night city. They were obsessively good at traps and plans within plans, but most agree that when Rabids killed the net he also killed them.

No one has ever found the bodies, but J considered it. Maybe she is the only one who knew roughly where their base was? She remembered looking at the old 2020 map where they were and the markers for where the different buildings were. Pulling up a pre-Krash she highlighted a block of old mega housing complexes that matched up. Looking through geotagged photos from before the nuke and finding some discreet brainiac tagging, then she overlapped it with the current map. What was revealed was a newly built shopping center. Pulling up the plans they had just paved over the old buildings. Connected to the utilities. Under that area was originally a defunct network of tunnels to an incomplete subway system.

As she read J began to get excited. A true treasure hunt, who knows what data might still be salvageable from the brainiacs’ base. This could be a big score, and I know just who would be interested in this kind of find.

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Activating her new built in phone! She contacted T-bug.

“T, guess who just got chipped~”

“Congrats J, send me the deets”

“That’s it?”T-bug responded incredulously after doing a check on the quick spec sheet on her new cyberdeck and ports

“That’s it”

“You didn’t even get new eyes”

“My visions better than your optics already. All I needed was the visual and mind interfaces.”

“You have got to be the strangest person in Night City J”

“Thank you I try” J responded blandly.before shifting into the original topic of her call.”In the spirit of celebration I would like to invite you on a grand adventure.”

“No, J”

“To find an ancient lost treasure”

“Not again J”

“To go where few have ever been and discover something both new and ancient.”

“J No!”

“Fine but your going to miss out on possible a huge score~ common it will be fun”

T-bug stared at her with squinted eyes before sighing“...what is it” Despite herself she was curious, and ther was no reason she couldn’t decline after finding out

“Ever hear of the Brainiacs?”

“Kinda, an old netrunner crew?”

“The original and only ever successful full gang of nothing but runners.”

“So they got gonk’d by the Krash”

“Probably but no one ever found the base.”

“So, what do we want with that ancient hardware”

“The brainiacs were a pre-Krash gang. So the tech is antique, but thats not why we would be interested. Their primary interest was data collection. Secrets, BDs, and Skill shards. Maybe some Eddies but there is definitely enough shard stored media that we could make a fortune.”

“Ok, so say you convinced me, how are we going to find it if its been lost for 50 years.”

“That’s the thing T I think I already have” J sent the data she had gathered.

“...fuck”

“Well you in? C’mon it will be fun, and hey if you don’t want to come I’m sure Yoko would be interested in all the possible net-treasure…?”