This is a series. See the previous story here.

The First Gig

Rain spattered across the stock of a submachine gun. The neon lights of the city reflected off the barrel in a kaleidoscope of pinks, yellows, and blues - ending where the nonreflective polymer of the suppressor began. The moon was dark - but the city made up for it on it’s own. They didn’t call it Night City because it was quiet. It was the city where nobody slept. Employees were at home debriefing after a day of corporate masking and the stress of being backstabbed by their suited boss. Shopkeepers were closing their stores before it turned two, hoping no final sales would be made in the next five minutes - lest they clean all over again. Junkies and gangs were scouring the streets, looking for easy prey. And aside from all of that - Snow; perched along the side of a concrete wall, on the tips of his paws. Surrounded by garbage and puddles, he waited.

Around the corner of that wall, sat a small box. Inside, a guard. Next to that - a terminal that in one motion, would call a response force of four AVs filled with incident response agents right on top of the compound he now had his back against. It was a night to be alert, not sleepy. Snow shook his head of rain, using his free hand to push the water droplets off his visor and tried to focus. For the fourth time, he scanned around, noting the locations of the cameras, lights, guards, and any other potential variables in play. Then, he looked up towards a vacant construction site one hundred and eighteen meters away. There, sat a half built apartment complex. Abandoned for some unknown reason. Sigils of gangs adorned the building, but otherwise, it was rather unthreatening. Or - that’s what they had hoped it seemed. What was actually up there - was Eris. Gun barrel propped up on a empty crate of screws. Snow couldn’t see them, and couldn’t scan them, but he knew they were there - he could feel it. They carried some sort of long range rifle. Before the op, they had shown it to Snow. It was a charging rifle with a hyperthermal scope. It was quite loud within twenty meters or so, but the rain and distance would mask the sound to Snow’s current location.

He took a second to admire the stupidity of the task they were about to take on. Here he was, trusting a stranger he didn’t even know to have his back. The only thing he felt comfortable with was the fact that Eris was definitely not part of Arasaka. Not as a spy, not as an agent, not as a soldier or a suit. They were far too… strange. Snow couldn’t imagine the megacorp ever hiring such a being. Arasaka was cold, calculated, and above anything else - formal. Their roots in traditional Japanese culture grew far deeper and carried far more weight to them than their business in the western world. To them, Night City was a place of barbarians, not for the unfortunate. It was dirt to be cleaned out. Eris was greatly unlike that. They carried a venom for the company that seemed similar enough to Snow’s own vitriol. While he didn’t know why, he trusted them on the basis of a gut feeling that they didn’t mind what kind of operation it was - as long as they were able to crack a few ‘Saka heads.

Their voice rang in Snow’s ear. “Get ready, guard’s patrolling right.” At the mention of the direction, Snow lept out and began running low to the ground. His synthetic paws were much quieter than the boots of regular soldier, and his digigrade legs allowed him to run much faster along the length of the wall. He looked up to the spot where he knew the camera resided, and with the intuition that only a netrunner could have, he disabled it and looped its footage. In seconds, he was behind the guard with a mantis blade springing out of his forearm and through the guard’s neck. He was dead instantly, and Snow pushed the body into the shadows. “It’s not going to take long for them to notice the missing patrol. Move fast,” Eris whispered through the air and into Snow’s ear. Snow interfaced with the guard’s cyberware, and was able to decrypt and copy the access key. They had gone through this a number of times in practice, and Snow’s movements felt organic and natural. This was what he was built for. Truly, this is what Arasaka had designed him for. Then he was off again, running back down the length of the wall to the entrance. Paw over paw as he darted towards the entrance gate. The guard inside the guard shack operated the terminal, no doubt checking messages, the status of the transformers - and maybe catching an episode of Wattson Whore on his Kiroshi eye implants. As Snow approached, he spoofed an emergency update to the guard’s Kiroshis. It would cause an emergency reboot and fallback to a previous version, effectively blinding him temporarily and giving Snow enough time to remotely open the gate and slip inside.

It wasn’t a big compound, this was only a transformer site. Arasaka had bought up a bunch of these sites all over the city for some unknown reason. Whatever they were doing cost a lot of power. A few vehicles were parked outside the central building. Cameras were dotted around the entrances, and remote turrets in sleep mode covered the entrances. The guard’s access key had been disabled for the door; Snow would have to manually find an exposed access point. “Eris, do you see anywhere I could jack into?” he asked, being mindful that the guard by the entrance would have recovered by now, and that he had no easy escape. “By that garage door,” they replied quickly as they gave him a visual ping. Snow could feel their eyes tracking the exits of the building. He disabled a monitoring camera, and sprinted over to the garage door where a small panel sat near the ground. He crouched, and his claw felt around the panel to find a spot he could pry at. He pulled, and the cheap plastic cover of the panel popped off and shattered in his paws. Typical Night City construction. Beneath the cover lay an exposed circuit board connected elsewhere by a ribbon cable. On it was a debug bridge port, which Snow extended a thin cable from his wrist, and connected to. It was a serial connection - pretty typical of older buildings like this. Snow adjusted the baud rate of the connection until he got a clock speed match. The panel had some basic security settings but Snow’s internal computing unit was able to bruteforce it quickly. He found the firmware root, and began to upload the program that would escalate his privileges and dig into the operating system. Then, he could get the fuck out. This was the tricky part, he would have to sit here vulnerable for a couple minutes as the malware trickled into the system. Serial was not known for its throughput. “Heads up!” Eris hissed. A rattling noise started to emanate from the building, and the garage door began to open. Snow was just around the corner, so as long as no guards stepped out of the building, he would remain hidden. However, people didn’t tend to open garage doors just to not walk out. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The upload was at sixty-eight percent. He just needed a little more time. He could hear voices coming out from the garage. “They’re coming out, get ready,” Eris said; Snow heard something off in their voice - like they were puzzled at what they were seeing. He fumbled for his gun as he heard boots on the concrete coming towards him. “They’re right on top of you!” Eris shouted. He looked up and froze as a guard stood before him, seemingly confused as to why an Arasaka-brand android was crouched on the ground, connected to the building. His submachinegun was pointed at the ground but in a split second, Snow could see his vitals elevate as his eyes tried to understand what he was seeing. The gun rose from it’s inert position facing the ground to the very real, and very deadly position, facing Snow. Snow, suddenly realizing what was about to happen, pulled out his own gun, which got caught on the serial cable. A barely audible zap sounded, and the guard’s eyes suddenly dimmed as he fell to the ground. A bullet had smashed through the side of his helmet and shattered bits of his skull onto the ground. Shards of bone and metal. Snow looked up to where he knew Eris was perched, just as two more guards walked out, and promptly had their heads turned inside-out by two more sniper shots. Snow’s HUD lit up with an alert that the upload had completed, and a subsequent alert notified him that an Arasaka response force had been dispatched and the ETA was about forty seconds. He needed to GTFO. He bolted from the access panel and took a glance inside the garage. Snow had expected to see parked vehicles, storage, etc. What he actually saw was an enormous glowing blue cylinder in the center of the garage. Wires and tubes containing electrons and coolant snaked across the floor, hastily covered by ramps for carts holding pallets of power cells and expensive looking computer parts. The central blue mass looked to be divided into three segments, two visible through the opening of the garage, and one hidden from view. One of the segments that was visible was closed, but Snow could make out an outline floating in what seemed to be water or coolant inside. The other segment was open, drained, and devoid of any such creature - although puddles on the ground suggested it had been taken out rather recently. “I see it too, what the hell is that?” Eris whispered over the comm link. “I don’t know but I’m in their system. We can look after.” Snow replied as he stared at the machine. Two guards seemed to come from the depths of the garage, and Snow took two shots at them, both cracking against the metal walls and missing. He started running towards the gate and issued the open command, squeezing through as soon as there was a gap wide enough for him. He could hear the buzzing of AVs approaching the compound. “Eri, we’re gonna have to go like - yesterday,” he panted as he darted past the surprised guard in the security booth, unable to do anything as the glass that had protected him now prevented him from firing back. “No kidding. I can see their AVs uhhh- twenty seconds out. Get over here. Also, what did you call me?” “Nothing, whatever. Just get down here so we can leave!” “You’re cute,” Snow could hear a small laugh over the connection. “I’m not cute! You probably didn’t hear me properly,” he shot back in between breaths as his paws pounded the concrete. “I’m down here waiting for you. We can take the canal for cover out of the city and wait there for things to get less hot. Although I’m not sure that’s what you want,” the fox said with a warm hiss. Snow’s heatsinks felt hot. He kept running, darting around construction materials as alarms and the propulsion jets of AVs sounded behind him. They would have to find somewhere quiet, the corp wasn’t going to let them off that easy. Snow wondered how fast they could purge the system of his malware. They would investigate the compound and find the access point he had hacked into. He’d have to download any info he could before that point. Hopefully, something would come from it.