Sewers

October 23rd

2069

Sophie sat on her mattress, leaning against the wall. Tentatively, she pressed the purchase button in the system interface before bracing herself for the flood of information she knew would appear. All my coins, gone so quickly, she thought, watching 25,000 L-Coins vanish.

Skill: Basic Netrunning has been purchased!

Basic Netrunning [1/100]

As the message appeared, an enormous amount of knowledge, matched only by what she acquired with Engineering, slammed into her mind. The pain of it was so intense she even got a level in Iron Will.

It took over half an hour for the intense sensation to disappear, finally allowing her to think straight. As she always did, Sophie began mentally examining what information she now had access to.

It was, like all of her skills at the initial level, filled with gaps and unanswered questions. However, she had a basic understanding of how to go about performing a basic hack. The rest of the information told her the best ways to program things or navigate systems once inside.

To begin with though, her focus was on how to actually get inside a device. And with her new cyberdeck, freshly installed, along with the purchase of the netrunning skill, she felt prepared to give it a go.

Remaining on her bed, she sat a previously scavenged laptop in front of her. Its surface was scratched and worn, the keyboard missing a few keys, but it could still turn on which was all she needed.

Taking a deep breath, she activated the scanning mode of her Kiroshi optics for the first time. The world around her shifted slightly as her vision became overlaid with faint grids and glowing markers, highlighting objects and surfaces in her environment. Along with the visual image was the realisation that it would change the way she fought forever.

The scanning mode allowed her to identify weak points in a wall, electrical devices or hidden objects. She could tell because the laptop in front of her was shining faintly, suggesting it was something of note. She rubbed her face a bit, bringing her mind back to the present.

“Alright Sophie. Think about that stuff later,” she muttered to herself. “First step of hacking: scan for an access point.”

She leaned in closer to the laptop, her optics working perfectly as they zoomed in. After what felt like an eternity, a faint, pulsing spot appeared in the corner of her vision, hovering over the laptop’s base. The basic information provided by her new skill told Sophie the access point was there. She allowed herself a small, triumphant smile.

“Found you,” she murmured.

Continuing to utilise her optics, she sent a connection from her cyberdeck and plugged it into the access point in cyberspace. The moment the connection was established, her optics flared, and a new interface appeared before her eyes; a virtual representation of the laptop’s internal network.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

The datastream stretched out in front of her, a digital landscape rendered in stark black and neon blue. A closer look revealed lines of pulsing code flowing through the small, isolated space. The data streams seemed to twist and turn as though alive, giving birth to strange shapes before they disintegrated once more.

Sophie’s breath stopped as she took it in. It was beautiful and slightly nostalgic, raising memories of the movie Tron from her first life.

Alright, focus, she told herself. Now I have to find a weakness. Basic Netrunning says it looks like a hole? I wonder if that’s literal?

She moved cautiously through the datastream, her mind slowly adapting to the strange sensation of controlling her presence within the network. It was like moving through a river; slow and constantly fighting against a current. Her optics displayed streams of data as glowing lines of blue text, flowing past in all directions. She extended her focus outward, trying to sift through the noise.

It felt…harder than it should have. Sophie wasn’t sure why that was the feeling she got but it felt as though she was being held back or restricted in some way.

Minutes turned into an hour as she searched, her patience wearing thin. Every time she thought she’d found something, it turned out to be a dead end. Just more code that she struggled to understand, more encrypted pathways that led nowhere. The frustration built steadily but she was stubborn, refusing to give up easily.

Finally, after what felt like days, she noticed something different. Among the glowing streams of data, there was a strange patch of darkness; a jagged void where no light or code existed. It was small, barely visible and it was moving along with the other data. Fucker! Seriously? It was running away from me the whole time!?

Despite her annoyance, she approached the void cautiously. However, the moment she got too close, an invisible force seemingly threw her backwards, ejecting her from the datastream entirely. Her optics went dark for a moment, and she found herself staring at the laptop’s exterior.

“Damn it!” she hissed, rubbing the back of neck and feeling a slight heat.

Basic Netrunning Proficiency +1

Basic Netrunning [2/100]

Sophie quickly got excited after scanning through the filled gaps from the level.

She took a few deep breaths, reestablished the connection, and dove back in. The datastream reappeared before her, just as vast and disorienting as before. This time, she adjusted her approach. It still took a while, around half the time compared to her first attempt, but she found the weird void again. This time however, she analysed it more carefully from a distance.

Observing it more intently, she was able to make out faint ripples of energy around its edges, like a digital barrier designed to repel intruders. Sophie frowned, searching through her skill knowledge for a way to bypass the barrier before picking an approach at random.

Her first few attempts were clumsy and unsuccessful. She tried brute-forcing her way in, only to be ejected again and again. Each failure left her more frustrated, but she refused to give up. In fact, the part she hated the most was finding the void.

She studied the barrier closely each time, noticing tiny fluctuations in its energy; small windows of vulnerability that appeared for mere milliseconds at a time.

“Alright,” she muttered. “If I time it right…”

She waited, watching the fluctuations carefully. When the next window appeared, she made her move, slipping through the barrier just before it could close. For a brief, heart-stopping moment, she felt resistance, as if the system was about to push her out again. But then she was through.

Inside the void, the datastream changed. The black and neon blue aesthetic remained, but everything felt quieter, more controlled. In front of her, appearing like a gargantuan tree, was the laptop’s core systems.

Sophie exhaled in relief, a small grin spreading across her face. “I did it!” She cheered mentally at her success.

Once inside, navigating was far easier though still slow. She found directories and files, each represented as ‘branches’ on the tree within the digital space. There was nothing of value but the fact she could access it was, in her opinion, cause for great joy.

She spent the next hour sifting through the data, her confidence growing as she became more familiar with the process. Data retrieval was an important skill for netrunners, so she saw no harm in practicing it. More importantly, it was proof that she could do this.

By the time Sophie disconnected from the laptop, a process far easier than getting in, her body was stiff from sitting for so long, but her mind buzzed with excitement. She leaned back against the wall of her hideout with a satisfied smile on her face.

“Not bad for my first time,” she said softly. Once I get better at breaching a device, maybe I should try doing it with a vending machine? Giving it a go shouldn’t hurt at least. Oh! And I should definitely find somewhere that sells soft’. That’d get me started with quickhacks.