Chương 32: First Blood I

"It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have." - Clint Eastwood A couple of months had gone by, and the calendar had flipped over to April of 2068. With the welcome of spring also came the constant acidic rains this damn city was so well known for. They had pretty much settled over Rancho, basically turning into background music as I heard it drumming constantly as if it were a beat against the roof of our detached garage.

I had visited Vik a month ago because I was bored, didn't have a gig, and Kotka was nowhere to be found.

While I was at his clinic, watching a boxing match with the man and even doing a bit of sparring, that 'Tino gonk had managed to rear his head in. He was injured, which, wow, shocker, a 'Tino got shot. But the gonk had looked at me while bleeding on Vik's clinic, and instead of getting ready to lie down on the chair, he approached me and ruffled my hair. My pristine, white as snow, hair. With his dirty, blood-soaked, right hand...

And then all he did was say "Lo siento muchacho," as if an "I'm sorry" was supposed to take the blood out of my hair. Gonks, this damn city was full of them. Especially this 'Tino, who looked like he'd smile ear to ear if I gave him a lollipop. But aside from that, the physical world had decided to catch up with the digital maturity of my mind, and it had done so with a brutal, aching suddenness.

I was fifteen years old now, and I had been over 6 feet tall for about a year now, but after having grown to my current height of six feet and two inches, my joints ached constantly from the rapid bone growth, a dull, persistent throb that I usually just ignored or drowned out with the hum of the Net. My body was still developing and had been caught in that awkward space between the lean agility of a teenager and the broad, heavy-set muscularity of a grown man.

Even though I was making sure to get more than enough protein, my body refused to obey and help me develop. However, I had noticed the beginning of faint and uneven patches of dark facial hair growing along my jawline, which I refused to shave off simply because it made me look slightly older, which allowed me to get away with driving without the buzzkill NCPD deciding to pull me over. And to help with that, I made sure to be a good boy and follow all traffic laws... most of the time...

okay whenever the law was around. My reputation was also solidifying even more, and the name of Ghost was spreading, with some even hitting my direct line to inquire about jobs. I was known by no one... well, almost no one. Wakako Okada, that shrewd old hag over on Jig-Jig Street, was the only fixer in the entire city that actually knew my face and my age because I had been dumb and inexperienced enough to show up to her front door and announce who I was.

But to the rest of the underground in Watson and Santo Domingo, I was just the Ghost. They knew that if you needed a system breached without leaving a single trace of forensic data, without triggering a single tripwire, you dropped the eddies into an encrypted escrow account and let me do my work. My completely unique neuroplasticity, combined with the 15-terabyte processing power humming in my skull, made me a terror in the digital realm.

And now that I had even surpassed Kotka in skill, I could claim that I was a god in the Net. While I was feeling good about myself, chilling on my bed late at night, I noticed a gig hit my encrypted local drop. The message was anonymous, routed through a dizzying maze of proxy servers that bounced from Pacifica to the Badlands before finally pinging my personal Agent.

"Well, so much for being a god," I said to myself, kind of annoyed that I didn't know who was offering me this- "Holy mother of God. This joint right here was some preem and professional work. Where the hell is the usual street-slang and posturing that most low-tier fixers used to sound tough?" Target: Mid-tier corporate logistics node. Location: Remote access via Subnet 4-Alpha. Objective: Extraction of a single, highly encrypted data shard containing routing schedules. Threat Level: Minimal.

No physical presence required. Payout: 40, 000 Eurodollars. I stared at the glowing green text, my brow furrowing in deep suspicion.

"Who in their right mind would offer forty thousand eddies for this?" I asked myself. That was an astronomical sum of money for a simple data extraction from a mid-tier logistics firm. Usually, a gig like this paid out five, maybe eight grand on a good day. The high payout immediately sent a red flag up my spine, since I knew nowhere in Night City did anybody pay forty grand for an easy job unless there was a catch.

But I didn't really have time to think before my escrow pinged with the anonymous client having already deposited the full forty thousand into a secure, neutral holding account. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. The scratch was sitting right there, locked behind a completion protocol, waiting to be claimed. I let out a small chuckle, "Well, at least the eddies are real." I looked around my bedroom.

Mom had knocked out a while ago, no longer stressing about anything, and the new solar panels had helped to keep the house cool and the lights on. Things were stable for now, and I wasn't in the immediate need of a gig. But forty grand was forty grand. That kind of scratch could buy top-tier chrome... or it could buy me two or three advanced netrunning educational BDs. Things had gotten expensive as of late, especially with the rising tension in the air of a possible war about to break out.

My pride, fueled by months of flawless netrunning, whispered in my ear that whatever the catch was, I was skilled enough to handle it. After all, I was Ghost, and ghosts could never be caught. So without much thought, I sent the confirmation ping and accepted the job. I didn't even bother to leave my bed, lying back against the pillows, closing my eyes, and I let the Paraline Mk. 1 take the wheel. A split second later, and I was in the infinite, sprawling neon geometry of the Net.

I routed my connection through three separate proxy layers before approaching Subnet 4-Alpha, and, contrary to the heavy resistance I expected, instead of hitting a wall of Black ICE the moment I pinged the perimeter, I was met with the digital equivalent of an unlocked screen door. The architecture of the mid-tier corporate node visualized itself as a white, minimalist office building suspended in the digital void.

I approached the primary firewall, preparing to compile a complex series of polymorphic subversion daemons. But after scanning the defensive protocols, I almost laughed. The ICE was incredibly weak, and it was running on outdated, easily recognizable Watchdog algorithms that hadn't been an industry standard for at least three years. Its defensive daemons were sluggish, moving along predictable and telegraphed patrol routes.

'Too easy,' I felt my instincts screaming at me as I slipped through the primary firewall without exerting even a fraction of my processing power.

'This is way too damn easy.' My avatar drifted through the digital corridors of the node, and as it did, I noticed that the environment felt unnatural, and... empty. There was no background chatter of corporate wageslaves filing data, no automated subroutines organizing the archives whatsoever. It felt abandoned, like a hollow shell of a building just waiting for someone to step inside.

"Oh well, it's probably due to my superiority," I said to myself.

"I mean, I am running at zero latency, so of course their outdated systems couldn't perceive me." I let my confidence swell, pushing deeper into the system, navigating the suspiciously direct path toward the central data vault, where I found the target shard hovering in the center of a wide, circular digital room. It was a dense, heavily encrypted block of crimson data, rotating slowly on a pedestal of blue light. I reached out with a hand made of glitching static and wrapped my digital fingers around the shard.

However, the second I made contact, the illusion shattered, and the white walls of the digital room instantly shifted, bleeding into a harsh, blinding, predatory red. The outdated Watchdog daemons I had slipped past simply vanished, immediately replaced by towering, jagged monoliths of military-grade Black ICE that slammed down from the digital ceiling, completely sealing off the exit behind me.

"Oh shit, not good," I said as I realized I had just walked right into a trap. My internal systems screamed, and my HUD flashed with a frantic flurry of proximity warnings and critical threat alerts. The architecture restructured dynamically around me, and the floor beneath my avatar fell away, forcing me to compile a localized gravity-suspend protocol just to keep myself from falling into a pit of active, corrupting viruses. Then, I felt a trace being.

But there was something off about this trace since it clearly wasn't even remotely interested in pinging my IP address. This was some highly aggressive, deeply invasive hunter-killer algorithm. It bypassed my primary proxy servers in a matter of nanoseconds, tearing through my spoofed routing with terrifying efficiency, digging its claws into my active connection and pulling hard, trying to pinpoint the exact physical location of my meat body lying on my bed in Rancho Coronado.

A microsecond was all it had taken for things to go from a casual exploration into a desperate fight for my actual life. I unleashed my full processing power, throwing a massive wave of localized static interference against the trace to slow it down. I needed to jack out. I needed to sever the connection, abandon the forty thousand eddies, and vanish before the trace locked onto my coordinates and sent God knows what to my front door.

But as I tried to pull the crimson data shard into my Ex-Disk to take it with me, a heavy, unbreakable digital tether materialized, anchoring the shard to the floor of the room. WARNING: LOCAL AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED. HARDWARE AIRGAP DETECTED. The damn shard wasn't fully digitized and was most likely physically locked inside a localized server that was disconnected from the external Net.

The remote access I was currently in was nothing but a honeypot designed solely to trap a runner, trace them, and hold them in place. The only way to actually retrieve the data and complete the gig was to physically interface with the server. I could either jack out right now, admit defeat, lose the payout, and risk my reputation, or sever the digital connection safely, drive to the physical location of the server, and manually rip the data from the hardware before the people who set this trap could close the net.

Pride, urgency, and the pull of forty thousand eddies made the decision for me. I compiled a massive, hyper-dense logic bomb and detonated it directly in the face of the tracing algorithm, blinding it for exactly three seconds, which gave me a brief window of digital chaos to sever my connection, pulling my consciousness violently out of the Net and slamming back into my physical body.

I gasped, my eyes flying open in my bedroom, my chest heaving, covered in a cold sweat as a head-splitting headache quickly passed through the back of my head. After a few seconds of calming down, I realized I was still here and that I desperately needed to assemble a diving rig, because diving with no rig was clearly beginning to get dangerous. After composing myself, I threw my legs over the side of the bed, laced up my boots, and grabbed one of my jackets.

I then reached into the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out the tactical balaclava painted with the grinning human skull, and shoved it into my pocket. I grabbed the keys to the Galena, and moved silently through the house, slipping out the back door without waking my mother. The rain was coming down hard tonight, a torrential downpour that slicked the streets of Rancho.

I threw the Thorton Galena into gear, its refurbished engine roaring to life, and tore out of Rancho Coronado, pushing the rustbucket to its limits.