Jack thought music was obnoxious.
Though he thought the same of all modern music, either being violently for or against some Corps with little to no in between besides a few groups that barely qualified as music.
It was the type of music chosen only by the older folk trying to stay ‘in’ with the youth. Not that anyone here was particularly interested in what music was playing mind you. This was a place to drown your fears or make a few bets, nothing much else.
“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.” Jack replied in kind.
This place never upgraded to net ordering, the owner cited ‘keeping its unique aesthetic’ and with how full the place was it seemed to have worked out. You could also atribute that to the New Years celebrations ongoing.
Jack waited rather paranoid, as was his default state, for the drinks to arrive. This was his first time in such a place as a customer, mostly because it wasn’t exactly legal at his age. No one would ask mind you, local cultures really didn’t care and it would be all fine by midnight anyway.
‘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.
Pouring some from the bottle, Jack tried his first bit of Conine. It was one of the cheapest but still reasonable drinks in the city, along with being on the lighter side. Must have just been because it’s his first but he cringed a bit at the taste, with a little burn to go with it.
whether that was the alcohol or whatever chemicals they use to supplement it for the cost.
Oh well.
Something would happen eventually.
There’s some quick changes he want to make to LAG, mostly how the programs are partitioned across the 5 Cyberdeck slots.
He should be able to just jack into hi laptop now that the codes stabilised, remove the run command temporarily of course. For LAG to work against even the most basic of merc, it’d need to be invisible to pings, and other such Quickhacks and scans.
Only problem is that would mean cutting off all access and most functionality of any Cyberware, any connection could be detected through ping packages alone. Right now it redirects and changes any attempt to access so it matches with LAG subversion, just that the code is spread across the 5 parts mostly at random
‘Isolating the cloaking section is priority’
Stolen story; please report.
Should keep him occupied.
If he had to break it down, then the main functions would be a simple image recognition and generative fill, aka the ‘Cloak’,
An infiltrating program directed solely at optics, that can detect the local systems, the ‘Scan’,
Finally a system that handles all the many ways Jack would need their view manipulated, the ‘Mirage’.
In it’s current form it connects to two sets of optics with low chances of a burnout, and delays the visual information defining him the slightest amount. Over the course of a minute, the targets view falls 2-3 seconds behind.
He worked uninterrupted for over an hour while sipping some of the Conine, the slight buzz he got kept him awake for now. It was only minutes later that a young man approached Jacks table. 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 Jack.
“Yeah, sure.”
He wasn’t the ‘Merc trying to fill rank’ Jack was looking for, his gaze tended to stick to the terminal he was coding on so there is probably some sort of work in it at the very least.
‘Couldn’t hurt I guess...’
“Thanks! There’s not much space left in this place, though that much should be expected with all the New Year Celebrations this year.” The still unnamed merc started cheerily. “Ah, you can call me Holo!”
“Mhm” Jack replied, mostly ignoring him. “The name’s Jack”
“None of that nickname nonsense.
“I haven’t seen you around here before, what’re you trying for tonight?” Holo asked, annoying grin still plastered on his face.
“Looking to make some eddies, maybe something more permanent.” Jack 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 down to the deets.
“...Get me one one of those merc teams you talked about and we have a deal.” Jack offered.
“Sweet!”
In Jacks professional opinion 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 he hadn’t seen before. There was just something about it that even an untrained eye would gravitate towards.
“Real Nova shit isn’t it?” Holo 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 his terminal, it was just as Holo 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 he 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.” Holo 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.”
Jack had barely scratched the surface of this freakish abomination of code, but it was already looking impossible. As he 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 Jack decided he could spend an hour or so trying to alter the VI’s code to do it for him.
It seems just a few minutes quiet was uncomfortable for his choom here as he quickly attempted to fill the silence.
“Hey! How about we head to the front and try make one of those cute waitresses our Input?”
“Not interested.” Holo was starting to give him a headache.
“Aww come on!”, He complained, “Are you scared or something, why not?!”
“Just put a bullet in the last one.”
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