“ah, aaah... I had no part in this! I tried to talk him out of it I swear! You must believe me!!“ she gasped out eventually.
I always loved how resilient she was.
I looked into her cold, mechanical, pleading eyes.
*BANG*
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The music was obnoxious.
I mean, all modern music was, either being violently for or against some Corps with little to no in between besides a few groups that barely qualified as music.
But the shit they’re playing here was somehow even more so. You could tell it was a playlist from some old Gonk trying to stay ‘in’ with the youth. Not that anyone here was particularly interested in what music was playing mind you.
“You want anything?” a disgruntled waitress asked with some bite, though with how many obnoxious drunks seemed to be about tonight it wasn’t all to surprising.
“Yeah, two Silverhands and a bottle of Conine.”
This place never upgraded to net ordering, citing ‘keeping its unique aesthetic’ and if tonight’s numbers were the norm it seemed to have worked.
I’d never really hung out at any bars before, and though I was a bit young too young to legally drink, local cultures really didn’t care. It’s about all the freedom available in this cursed fucking city.
The plan tonight is to make some connections with a fixer being the best outcome, but just jumping a gig with any random gonks missing a member or two was a lot more likely. Unfortunately for me, I never figured out socialising, which makes this rather difficult.
Oh well.
Something’s gonna happen eventually anyway!
Not that anything’s on tonight, just that a building full of chromed out lead-heads with unjust egos is a recipe for disaster? Like, always?
There’s some quick changes I want to make to LAG, mostly how the programs are partitioned across the 5 Cyberdeck slots, should be able to just jack into my laptop now that the codes stabilised... just in case I’ll remove the run command temporarily. For LAG to work against even the most basic of merc, it’d need to be invisible to pings, and other such Quickhacks.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Only problem is that’d mean cutting off all access and most functionality of any Cyberware. Right now it redirects and changes any attempt to access my shit so it matches with the LAG, just that the code is spread across the 5 parts, so I plan to separate it into its own chip used for any such cloaking abilities.
Should keep me occupied.
I was left to myself for over an hour while sipping some of the Conine, didn’t want to get too drunk too fast.
It was roughly 2 hours into my night here that a young man approached my desk. He seemed to have some cosmetic cyberware including a strip of glowing hair and metallic details on is neck, overall he didn’t look too threatening.
“Hey choom! Mind if I take this seat?” He asked leaning on the chair across from me.
“Yeah, sure.”
He wasn’t the ‘Merc trying to fill rank’ I was looking for.
It couldn’t hurt either way, though I noticed his gaze tended to stick to the terminal I was coding on so there is probably some sort of work in it for me.
“Thanks! There’s not much space left in this place, though that much should be expected with all the New Year Celebrations this year.”
“Mhm” I replied, mostly ignoring him.
“I haven’t seen you around here before, and you haven’t been drinking, so the Question stands... What’re you trying for tonight?”
Oh, he’s good.
“Looking to make some eddies, maybe something more permanent.” I tried to gauge his reaction but he stuck with a poker face smile.
“Nova, nova... Same thing here, really. Don’t got much rep, if any at all, and no team seems to want someone with only basic chrome and little experience.” He sighed, pouring a glass of Conine for himself. “Got one hell of a gun though, real preem shit... codes all messed up though, think you could sort it for me?” He asked, getting to the real reason he’s here.
“...Get me one one of those merc teams you talked about and we have a deal.” I offered.
“Sweet!”
The gun he unholstered was high tech as fuck, just its shell had all sorts of wiring and connections that on a closer look were fully functional. It was obviously a Smart-Weapon but of a level I hadn’t seen before. There was just something about it that even an untrained eye would gravitate towards.
“Real Nova shit isn’t it?” He said smugly, “This ain’t any ordinary Smart-Weapon, once you boot it up it’s got a fully functional integrated VI to always have the upper-hand!”
Connecting it to my terminal, it was just as he described. All the code worked just fine, but there were functions and callbacks all over the place, with the VI’s neural network also being in a few separate handlers it was no surprise when I saw the comments from past attempts at clean up. There was a whole graveyard of names with various comments and attempt lists each tried before giving up.
They were all dated at 5 years ago at the latest.
“Used to be a pair, y’know? My older brother, Danish, kelped the other one from my old boss for the few months we were there. That one was even better, bordering on AI allowing it to essentially never miss.” He explained.
“I didn’t steal this one none!! I’s earned this one fair as when my boss got flatlined and ‘Coincidental’ left the door to his personal armoury open!” he added defensively.
“Don’t care, didn’t ask.”
I had barely scratched the surface of this freakish abomination of code, but it was already looking impossible. As I worked on, an idea formed. If its twin was a powerful AI in the same form factor, then this one was probably just an unfinished, uninitialised or unoptimised version of the same weapon. So instead of spending weeks slowly unscrambling this mess I could spend an hour or so to alter the VI’s code to do it for me.
If I wanted to keep all the functionality in one piece, then It was probably best if i kept the changes small, and anyway it didn’t need it do it all in one go.
Instead, over the next few months, it should slowly handle all the problems in the background.
It seems just a few minutes quiet was uncomfortable for my choom here as he quickly attempted to fill the silence.
“Hey! How about we head to the front and try make one of these waitresses our Input?”
“Not interested.”
“Aww come on!”, He complained, “Are you scared or something, why not?!”
“Just put a bullet in the last one.”
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