The day was wasting away as I stood waiting for water to boil. Even the appliances here were severely underpowered, not that people used them in any regular manner.
Hell, it had been so long since I personally used any that I wasn’t entirely sure it could get the water to a boil. The... gig brought in enough eddies that I could easily upgrade to a better complex, only it would require regular small gigs to keep up with the rent, until then this should do just fine.
While the rent here was relatively cheap compared to the scams of the inner complexes, it was by no means easy to keep a room for those that actually live out here.
Either way, I had sent half a years rent deposit to the ghost company that pretends to own this place that should get processed some time tomorrow.
As I idled next to the single counter ‘kitchen’ I caught the sounds of a large group... or what sounded like one, stomping up to the first level or renters...
That was alerting all sorts of paranoia in me as all the rooms here can only be rented out to singular residents due to the extremely small floor area, with only a handful of room holding more, the room next to mine being a larger one locked off for all the years I’ve lived here. Always had the ‘Rent Payed’ sign up though so I just figured it was being used as storage by the owners.
I mean it could just be a group of residents who were out for th-
The pot stopped just before the boil,
All lights and sounds form inside the complex shut themselves off entirely.
FUCK?!
Net-runners hit the substation againIneedto-
*CRACK*
Shards of plasti-glass flew across the room as the small scrapyard TV gained a new hole, only seconds later being joined by more as the thin drywall failed to stop anything.
Shots rang out louder and louder as the offending party made their way through the corridors towards my room.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
This is why rooms close to road level like this one are so cheap fucking Cyberpunks!!
What do I do?!
Are they here for me!? Revenge for that gonk William?! Charles?!
Did those fucking corp bastards send a hit squad after me??
What can I do?!
I duck low to the floor as a hundred situations work their way through my head, none with favourable outcomes.
LAG works in open areas when I have the initiative neither of which apply here and there is no way to sneak out as the raiders sprint down the halls. They had to be after something as such near slum areas tended to fall outside the radar of valuable raid areas, and no one here has anything they could give.
I hear a violently loud SLAM as something or more probably someone crashes through the locked doors of the room next to me.
I must have been too distracted by the raiders as I now caught shouts from inside it as a small shoot-out started, littering my walls with holes and almost taking a chunk of my foot off. Someone got thrown into the drywall, leaving a not so small hole into the other side. My breath hitched as the final few shots rang out from whichever side won, and as someone leaned down staring coldly into my apartment with blood dripping from one cheek.
The group left without a further fuss.
I must have instinctively activated LAG.
Haahhh...
I was thoroughly exhausted with the whole encounter, and will need to switch to a new room at some point. But, for now, working on LAG seemed a good way to distract myself.
So, with an unharmed laptop, and a mild soup, I huddled into a corner to workshop some new Ideas.
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They had denied my request to vacate the torn up room for the expected corpo corruption reasons, though at this point just moving inwards to a slightly higher rent complex seemed all the more inviting...
At least there should be a minimal amount of security to immediately fail when an incident occurs.
The week of cold nights had started to get to me as well as there was already very little heating before they ‘kindly’ installed some natural bullet shaped air conditioning.
Over all that though, I had managed to get some progress on the capabilities of LAG, adding some proper support for what I tried in the last gig though it was still quite limited to simple objects and motions. There was also a noticeable optimisation made for the base functions, with a roughly 18% increase to processing capabilities.
I was still working on tricking infrared sensors, though the ones found in optic cybernetics work most similarly to its normal vision functions. External sensors or those on cameras were still out of reach.
#Incoming Call# - Holo *********037
“Hey! I got another gig for us, thought this one is real small, just a bit of muscle work for some trade down at 5th street.”
“Does it even pay enough for the gas down?” I ask, as gigs are usually though of as large stake operations.
“Ehhh... it’s more to build Rep to get the bigger jobs. What we really need is a Fixer, but even just getting within the mild interest of one is a Herculean task at time.” he explained.
“Haahh, we need the gigs to get the gigs is what your saying.”
“Yep, but I’ll sort out all that stuff, just be there by 5pm”
“...and bring some Iron!”
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