System Override 51 - Metamorphosis (Patreon)

Nanny knocked me unconscious after I finished taking in all the metals—and finished the thermos of vinegar.

When I came to once more, I was inside my car, the outside of it surrounded by people wearing digital masks, carrying bats, crowbars, and guns.

From the link I had with the car’s system—connected to my cyberdeck—I could sense an outside breach progressing glacially. The guys outside were trying to pop open the car. They were hours away from that, still. The Caliburn’s ICE was not bitchmade, that was for sure.

First thing first. “Nanny, you there?”

Nanny materialized next to me, but this time she wasn’t wearing her red and white high-vis fireman jacket. Instead, she was wearing an old-timey nurse get-up, stethoscope, white hat with the red cross and all. She gave me a smirk. [Always am.]

“So, what’s new, body-wise?”

[9.5 additional kilograms of bodyweight that puts you at roughly 90 now.] She threw up some illusory graphics before my eyes. [You are now a walking periodic table. You can thank me later.]

“Ugh,” I frowned. Having it put that way felt weird.

She teleported from the passengers seat to stand on the dashboard, six inches tall while she pointed at the graphics.

[For starters, increased everything across the board. Tendons, ligaments, cartilage: all tuned up. I estimate that their improvement will allow you to demonstrate a massive improvement of speed. Double at the very minimum. Lanthanides and platinum group metals are doing the heavy lifting here—literally. They’ve improved the conductivity and durability across your neural link, especially around the Dragon Spine integration points. Fewer misfires, smoother activations, no more jerky limb twitches when you pop the Sandy.]

The schematics spun to a muscular cross-section. [Also: microvascular enhancements. You’ve got better oxygen delivery, heat dissipation, and metabolic control. Basically, you can punch harder, run longer, and stay cooler without the meat-sack meltdown most people risk at those speeds.]

“Bone reinforcements?” I counted the number of scavs. Eleven. I wondered if they could take me to their rat-hole, too. Maybe they had some cash stashed away somewhere?

[Consider those bones reinforced. Extremely reinforced. You were already tanking full-powered hits from a cyborg without any catastrophic fractures. I estimate that I may have so much as doubled the durability of your skeletal system since then. You could easily tank getting hit by a compact car at sixty miles an hour now and not break any bones. Though, disclaimer—I’m not recommending you test that. At least, not tonight. Besides, there are other injuries to worry about from such a thing than just bone fractures. So—no stress tests for now.]

I eyed the scavs surrounding us curiously. “I’m more in the mood for strength and speed testing.” I eyed their guns. “But I gotta ask—am I bulletproof, at least?”

She grimaced at me. [You say that as if it’s the bare fucking minimum or something. I’m working with ninety-percent ganic here, there’s only so much I can do.] Then she cracked a grin. [But the answer is yes. To low-tier peashooters. A Lexington would give you a flesh wound at best, or even ping off your skin if it hits bone indirectly. If such a bullet struck you on the forehead, dead straight, you could get away with it not penetrating to your brain. Depending on where it hit. I’d give you ninety-five percent survivability—100% with me in the picture, but you get what I mean.]

She meant that anyone without her could expect that level of survival chances, to being shot in the head.

By a Lexington, sure. Damn things were better used for putting holes in paper than people. At least, the sort of people I usually faced off against.

So the answer to whether or not I was bulletproof was just a flat-out ‘no’. I wasn’t interested in extra asterisks or caveats here. This level of firearms resistance didn’t cut it, not at my level.

Nanny floated closer to my face, still wearing that stupid nurse’s get up. [You think that like you’re not planning on putting yourself in the line of fire at this very moment.]

I tried to swat her away, but she teleported above my hand before I could hit her. I tried to backhand her image, but she dodged that, too. The fuck am I even doing, that’s not really her.

“I’m not gonna cut a bullet in half,” I sighed, turning around to grab the guitar case laid up in that little nook behind the headrests of the two front seats—the only seats in this microscopic car. This thing was utterly useless for utility, or anything that didn’t involve racing.

And those asshats at the dealership thought they could give me shit for wanting to get one of these dumbass cars.

I brought the guitar case to my lap, opened it, and pulled out the Lexington and Eikō.

I put the guitar case back, focused on my connection with the Caliburn system.

I followed the breacher through the link they had established and sent them an Overheat quickhack.

I looked around to see the guy standing in front of the hood of the car’s head immediately catching fire. He screamed and fell.

I opened the door and slipped through as quickly as I could, unsheathing Eikō and firing a trio of bullets at the scavs furthest from me.

All the while, I got my footing ready and sliced cleanly through the necks of two more scavs, just starting to react to my entrance. Too little, too late.

On the other side of my car, two scavs pulled out their guns to try and shoot me, while the remaining three scavs still alive, carrying a crowbar and aluminum bats, tried to run away.

I stepped away from the line of fire, sent two shots, both of them hitting skulls and instantly killing the gunmen. Then I started firing after the guys running away. I hit two of them on their heads, and the last guy, I tried to get fancy with.

I struck him on his spine, right in the C4 vertebrae. C4?

Nanny materialized above the guy on the far distance and crouched before him. She put on her stethoscope and patted the hearing part on his head. [C4, indeed—or, you can come and get a better look to make sure.]

I jogged up to the last guy and looked down at his wound. He groaned, trying to breathe, but he was otherwise completely immobile.

“So, C4 or not?”

[Looks like it,] Nanny shrugged. [I’m in your body, not his. But you did pretty much paralyze him, as intended. Now, how shall you interrogate him?]

I flipped him over and ripped off his mask. “Alright, choom—tell me where your friends are.”

“F-f-f-fuck you,” he said in a thick, Eastern European accent.

I tried to Breach him instead.

I waited around for a few minutes, and when I finally managed to enter his personal network, I rummaged around through his agent for texts and details on whether or not he and his chooms had info on where I could find more scavs.

I got what I looked for, but… unfortunately, that presented a problem in itself.

There were a lot of places for me to check. No singular master hideout I could air out and loot what remained—and I doubted they’d have anything of importance, either. Just scavved civvie-tier shitware, with bits and pieces of homeless meat still attached to it. Nasty fucking bastards.

I debated on whether to leave the guy to bleed out slowly or not, but—that’d kinda fuck with my count. I’d have no indication of whether or not he did end up dying, and I did very much want to keep all that accounted for.

[He’s not really bleeding out that badly,] Nanny said. [I’d call today an even ten and keep it moving. And this gonk will spread your legend far and wide as well once his friends find and heal him. Win-win.]

Eh, fuck it. Three forty-three.

But this one wasn’t going on a BD. How long did it take, anyway? Probably less than twenty seconds.

Shit—I needed to sandbag a little more.

[But if you’re interested in a real BD…] Nanny grinned at me. [Why not pay a visit to my creators? Failing that, we could hit up a Trauma Team data center instead. I just need proper Bioware data, for research purposes.]

I checked the time on my optics. Only seven PM. We could do a Biotechnica hit for Bioware data. But I did need my personal link cable, and that annoying piece of wire was at home.

[Ah! Almost forgot. Check your wrist.]

My eyes widened in shock at that. I turned my hand around to look at my left hand wrist, where my veins were. On it, I found an outline of skin. I clawed it open with my nail, and it opened up on a hinge, revealing a—a goddamn cable input. Rectangular copper casing, white plastic and fiber optic pins inside. I pulled the thing out, revealing black rubber shielding that led to a wire covered in black rubber insulation as well. The wire extended to around ten inches. And I could sense the ability to pull it back.

I flexed that not-muscle, and the wire rolled back into my wrist.

“Where did you get the rubber from?” I asked.

[From food. Rubber’s an organic compound—that one was the easy part to synthesize.]

Huh.

“Thanks for saving me a trip to a Ripper,” I muttered as I walked back to my car, got in, and packed my weapons away.

I started the car, and grinned.

Let’s get this fucking gig done, Nanny.

000

I spent an hour prepping for this gig.

An hour riding around the city, visiting Localnets while parked outside locales, chasing down leads and buying some additional hardware that I might have to use.

In the end, for weapons, I decided on using Eikō, the Burya, and the Achilles. Eikō for softer targets, and the tech arms for everything else. I would have preferred to leave the Achilles behind, but I wasn’t planning on busting into a high school IT lab here.

Biotechnica Research Institute was a corporate laboratory of the highest caliber. The research that went on in there could decide the course of hundreds of millions of lives, and the sum total of the knowledge they were hoarding couldn’t be measured in money. The greater megacorp was the beating heart of global petrochemical operations—the inventors and creators of CHOOH2. Their operations didn’t make the world go round—it made everyone in it get around.

In comparison, their forays into bioware wasn’t as big a focus—but that was like comparing Arasaka’s finance department with their tech division. Just because the former was more influential than the other didn’t mean that the latter wasn’t extremely important.

But from all that I had learned of corporations, it was that influence was often times boring. Most people didn’t give a shit that half the zippers in the world were produced by one company in Japan, or that a handful of firms controlled the entire global supply of synthetic insulin. Influence wasn’t flashy. It didn’t roll through the streets in a hypercar or stroll into Afterlife decked out in mil-spec chrome or tech iron. Influence was quiet, sterile, packed into labs and boardrooms and offshore server farms.

And influence was very often times armed to its fucking teeth. But unfortunately for them, so was I.

I parked my car three city blocks away from the Research Institute in Watson, inside an alleyway between two busy thoroughfares, and sent my car the cords to another area that it would wait in. Once I got out with the paydirt, I’d get in the car and rip through the streets like I was already in a race.

Nanny, now dressed in a more sensible red and white high-vis jacket, a pair of tight ripped blue jeans, and big black sunglasses, kept her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at me steadily. [I don’t need to tell you that stealth is paramount.]

D: I’ll disable the cameras once I have access.

[And witnesses?]

That was a no-brainer.

D: No witnesses.

The Caliburn drove away from the alleyway and I looked myself up and down. The rifle was slung in front of me for ease of access, the burya was holstered on my right, and the sword was on my left. My external cyberdeck was strapped to my forearm, protected by a plastic cover. My other forearm had several high-capacity SSDs on. Combined with the ones I had strapped underneath my jacket, I had a capacity of one and a half petabytes.

I wasn’t expecting the relevant data to be this beefy, but if I was breaking into the Biotech research facility of Night City, I better walk away with some other goodies as well.

I looked at Nanny questioningly.

D: Normally, you’d be the one telling me this is a stupid idea.

[Biotechnica created me,] she said. Her jaws clenched. [They afflicted you with me, as well. They almost killed you.]

D: Complicated feelings?

[Hardly,] she scoffed, looking down. [I want them to burn for what they did to you. And I want to plunder them for all they’re worth, in order to grow myself as well. An Oedipal desire to kill one’s father, perhaps? You can rationalize it however you want, but these are my emotional stakes.]

I nodded.

It had been so many years since Biotechnica did what they had done to me. I couldn’t remember when I had given up on ever hitting them back, on ever truly taking my pound of flesh and being made whole once again.

Fuck a class action payout. Not that we even got that much. Mom had tried to erase that whole event from existence by not even making a claim to them.

Thank you, mom.

That wasn’t how I wanted to get even, anyway.

This… well, it would come close to doing just that. Fifteen hundred and thirty-six terabytes worth of proprietary research data, all for my own personal use. Fencing this shit would be a headache on its own.

[What are you waiting for?]

I started skipping on my feet. Just from a straight-legged hop using my calves and nothing else, I managed to bounce a foot in the air. Then two feet. Three feet.

I bent my knees and jumped again.

I almost hit my head on an overhead fire escape, twenty feet over the ground. Rather than let myself land, I grabbed it by the ledge and quickly pulled myself up.

I overshot the railing of the fire-escape and my one-armed pull up managed to land me on the other level entirely.

Nanny materialized on the lower floor and grinned up at me. [What do you think?]

“Fucking nova!” I breathed, grabbing the ledge with both hands and shooting myself up floor by floor until I reached the highest level. I grabbed the railings and pulled myself clear into the roof. Could a fucking ape have come close to doing any of that? Holy shit.

[If you’re gonna compare my work to a ‘ganic primate, I will literally turn your dick off forever.]

I laughed. Not even her remarks could rain on my parade. “You think I could kill a fully grown gorilla?”

[Go fuck yourself.]

Alright—go time.

There were two more buildings on the way before we hit the Research Institute.

I looked down the path I’d have to take. Between this building and the next one was a street thirty feet wide. Could I clear thirty feet?

[Yes.]

Why did Nanny just know that?

Actually…

D: Are you… moderating my strength or something?

[I am doing precisely that. If you want the full controls, see what happens.]

Suddenly, I felt utterly weightless. I stumbled forward and fell, catching myself on my hands before falling. I did a push up to get back to a standing position, but instead managed to pour too much strength into the motion, which made me fall backwards, flat on my back.

I was too strong. Too light. It felt like navigating in low-grav, but with a hollow body.

D: The fuck? Fix this!

[There’s nothing to fix, David—it’s just a learning curve you’ll need to get used to over time. I’ll relax the steering wheels over time until you have full control, but for now, you sorta need me.]

D: Alright—then fix this.

[…Say please.]

Nanny materialized above me, in front of me.

Fuck this. “Please?”

She reached a hand down to me. I raised an eyebrow at her.

[Take it,] she grinned.

I did. Her hand felt physical. I pushed myself up and could almost feel her pulling me up, even though that was impossible.

[Just playing with your senses a little,] she said. [What did you think?]

D: Horrified by the implications, as always.

She patted me on the back, causing me to shift forward slightly.

I shelved her entire existence for later, and instead focused on my body. I began walking forward, then I jogged. Then I ran. Faster. Faster. Faster.

I could go even faster, but I ran out of roof. From there, I just jumped. All uncertainty left my mind immediately as my thoughts became filled with physical variables—my weight, momentum, and the exact time it would take for me to land. All of it appeared in my mind in a snap, despite my never having practiced long-distance jumping before.

Just as I had calculated, I landed a few feet over the ledge of the roof, did a roll on my back, got back up on my feet and ran even faster. The next roof gap was forty feet. Could I clear it? Yes, I could.

Another jump. This time, I more than just cleared the gap. I flew over the ledge, and landed in the middle of the roof, almost thirty feet from the ledge.

That wasn’t even the best that I could do. My thigh muscles still felt entirely too cold—every part of my body felt cold, in fact. Like I was doing nothing more than just taking a walk.

I opened up a speedometer app on my Kiroshis and boggled at the figure. 64 KMH.

[It’s not like you haven’t been faster, with the Sandy.]

But this was without the fucking sandy. Pure body.

[Look alive, meat steed—compound’s right up ahead.]

Vertical drop, fifty feet or so. Horizontal distance to reaching over the wall from the ledge of this building: eighty feet.

Full speed.

My feet blurred on the ground and I felt slight cracks from the ground beneath me as I picked up the pace.

On the ledge, I jumped as hard as I could, turning my flight through the air into a sharp dive. My body pivoted gently into a front flip that I timed so that I would land on my back.

In one split second, I took in the environment—where I’d land and where I’d haul ass to after doing so. The place was a docking area. A large parking area with a bunch of vanswas on one side. The ground sloped up ahead into an underground area, currently blocked off by a large shutter door. Next to this slope was a door for personnel to enter.

I landed as softly as I could.

It still sent a spike of pain through my shoulder blades, but the motion was smooth enough that I immediately got on my feet and had to take a step forward to stop myself from rolling again. I immediately ran from there, thinking wryly that a spinal injury was not something I’d ever have to worry about again.

I arrived at the personnel door within seconds, link cable in hand. The door had a magnetic keycard lock on it. I pried off the plastic, inserted my link cable into the inlet, and started breaching. I also sent out a Ping for good measure, just to see who was inside.

D: Hope you have some preem new cognitive upgrades for me, too

Nanny materialized, leaning her back against the door, snorting at me.

[If I could use myself to make myself smarter, I would have—in fact, that’s my highest priority. All the time. And it’s not something munching on a little rhodium is gonna fix.]

D: Shit was literally your idea.

[And you went with it.]

She wasn’t even making any sense at this point.

D: Maybe you need those cognitive upgrades more than I do.

The seconds ticked by with agonizing slowness as I burned through the ICE with the flamethrower that was my cyberdeck—both the internal and external one. After fifteen seconds, I finally managed to access the system.

I didn’t think—just snatched.

Building layout, access to as many doors as I could get, and data on the cameras.

Loop cameras.

I inserted that nice little program into the system and plotted my next course. The name of the game was incremental access. I needed to hop from access point to access point, using the clearance gained from the prior access points to make my way through the building. The task was every bit as physical as it was digital and required that I move through the building.

This was what I had learned from Tijuana.

I wrenched the door open and used the Sandevistan to make my way through the empty corridors, to get to the door I needed to get to. I had already unlocked it while I was outside, so all I needed to do when I reached it was turn the handle and enter—no need to linger in the corridor and get caught by the cameras—the ones my clearance couldn’t give me access to at least.

I wasn’t taking any chances.

The place I entered was someone’s office. No one was inside, as expected, but the terminal was right there for me.

I ignored it and instead went to the network access port. I ripped the Ethernet port out and inserted my own personal link. The clearance I gained from outside smoothed the process out while I increased my clearance to the next level.

From L7 to L6, apparently. Nanny crouched next to me, typing away on the external cyberdeck on my forearm while I focused on my internal cyberdeck.

I felt the progress of our Breach practically lurch forward. [Okay, this is way faster.]

D: Yeah, no shit—pull your weight from now on.

She paused and looked at me witheringly. [Did you really just fucking say that to me?]

I bit my lower lip.

D: Fuck—shit, sorry, just keep it going!

She started cursing at me in Spanish.

D: You’re not even Mexican.

She didn’t take her eyes from the deck as she continued tapping away on it. [Personally, I think Spanish curses just go harder. But you’re right. I’m not Mexican. I’m Italian.]

What?

[Biotechnica is from Italy. Come to think of it, I’m technically Latin, too.]

D: I somehow feel like that’s not—nevermind.

I wasn’t going to weigh in on that skezzed out debate.

[Cazzo, this ICE is-a thicker than my nonna’s ragù.]

I couldn’t help but let out an involuntary chuckle.

[Focus, you gonk.]

D: Fuck you, don’t make me laugh!

In the end, it may in fact have taken us less time if I had just done the Breach myself.

D: You will be the death of us both, you know.

[Porco dio, che disastro!]

While I leafed for that sweet, sweet L6 access code, I mused.

D: Since you were very probably made here in America, that only makes you an Italian-American—well, Night Citizen, but you get the picture.

Her red and white high-vis jacket morphed into a black leather greaser jacket. She slicked back her brown hair with her hands, and now bit on a toothpick.

Jesus Christ.

I ignored her as she tried, and failed, to imitate an Italian American accent, instead plotting my course towards the next access point. I sent out another Ping, waiting for the corridor to clear before getting back on the move.

I got all the way down to L1 without having to leave this current floor, and with each new clearance level, my knowledge of this facility expanded further and further, and I became aware of an even greater tier of clearance levels. The Ms. For managers.

I took a quick break inside a janitor’s closet to think.

Nanny, cramped inside the space, looked at me, toothpick still in her mouth. [So what’s the plan, boss?]

D: The Ls aren’t gonna give us anything important. The Ms will open more doors, but… I kinda wanna skip ahead.

[Straight to the Netrunners?]

Slit their throats while they were still in their chairs, run roughshod over their systems, and then open up an escape route.

It was brutal and messy, but it was thorough. More thorough than scurrying around like a rat, at least. And way less likely to get me caught the same way as in Tijuana.

I nodded.

D: Straight to the Netrunners.

[While we’re at it, let’s use their mainframe to crack this little message from beyond the Blackwall. Capisce?]

There was a non-zero chance that her playing with this Blackwall message of hers may have led to this neural degeneration she was exhibiting.

Either that, or she was just plain stupid.

She returned to her normal form, her slicked back hair turning into brown shoulder-length hair swept to the side, with an undercut on the side of her head, and her jacket became red and white again. [You’re no fun.]

D: Oh, you don’t like being called stupid? That’s a thing you don’t like being called?

[The difference between us is you are stupid. I only act stupid. Sometimes. And even then, it’s fun and brings value.]

She was genuinely starting to piss me off with this shit. Who the fuck did she get off talking like that to me anyway, like I wasn’t worth shit to her? The fuck was wrong with her?

D: ‘Rules for thee and not for me’, is that it? Fuck you!

[Yikes,] she wrinkled her nose at me.

Alright, for more M series clearance, I needed to take an elevator up to the managerial floor. According to my Ping and the data, that place was a lot busier, but the Sandy hadn’t failed me yet when it came to stealth.

[Lead the way… racist.]

My thoughts came to a crashing halt. The fuck?

[You have a problem with me connecting to my roots? Is that it?]

D: You’re a homicidal collection of ones and zeroes. Not a fucking human with a race.

[And you’re four letters in alternating patterns. And way more homicidal—and racist.]

Deep breaths, David. She was only as fucking annoying as I allowed her to be. Couldn’t give her that power any more.

[Anyway, we’ve been here long enough to be sure that we got in without anyone noticing. I was iffy on that, because our getting in was a little over-the-top, and you are wearing a high vis jacket.]

I furrowed my eyebrows at her.

D: So you were stalling me with distracting bullshit to, what, make sure I didn’t get in deep enough that the doors would lock behind me if the alarms were raised? The fuck? Why didn’t you just share that concern with me? Are you fucking hexed or something?

The concern made total sense, but the way she went about manipulating me made zero sense whatsoever.

[This way’s more fun—I put the fun in functional.]

D: You’re not funny.

She looked agape at me. [God forbid a woman ever tries to crack a joke or two here and there.]

D: YOU’RE NOT A FUCKING WOMAN

[Calm down,] she looked at me as though I was crazy. [I’m only as annoying as you allow me to be, remember?]

Okay, I’m done.

I remotely activated an elevator two turns away through the corridors, exited the janitor’s closet and dashed into it. Once I was inside, I reset all the looped cameras on the floor to make sure the Netrunners on duty wouldn’t get suspicious, and I punched in the highest managerial floor on the elevator.

Nanny leaned against the wall of the elevator. [Sowwy. You’re not a racist.]

I sent out another Ping to get a lay of the floor I was heading towards. Outlines of people filled my vision and I prepared to activate my Sandy again—the activation was downright seamless. I took a look at my critical progress.

0%.

Fuck. Amazing work, honestly.

[But you are a sexist. For denying me my womanhood.]

I absolutely hated that she was trying to sound sincere, in order to bait me into engaging with her on that topic.

Just don’t do it, David.

Once I reached the floor, Nanny thankfully didn’t plague my mind any further.

I dashed over to an abandoned corner office as quickly as I could, staying on the blindspots of every corpo I passed by, keeping a low profile as I did.

The corner office I ended up going to had transparent fucking walls. Fucking managers. Thankfully, they were digital, at least. Once I slipped in, I connected with the walls and made them translucent, while I crawled on the floor, towards the access port.

Nanny didn’t bullshit me as she materialized, instead focusing all her mental efforts on Breaching in tandem with me. When we both put our full focus into the task, we managed to crack open the network within five seconds flat.

I grabbed the M6 access, and kept mining for more. This office belonged to a pretty high-tier corpo, apparently. It would be a waste to settle only for this much access.

[Pencil pusher inbound—the one that lives here at that.] She materialized the guy’s profile in my HUD. His Ping outline became red, probably courtesy of Nanny. [If you could Breach as fast as you can besmirch and persecute me for my heritage, that’d be nice.]

Christ.

I activated the Sandevistan to ensure that every step that required my own speed would go by as quickly as possible. Thus, I only limited myself to the speed of my cyberdeck’s processing power.

The guy who ‘lived here’ was about thirty feet away, and was still two turns away from maybe coming in here. If I was lucky, then he’d not take the second turn that ensured he’d be on his way here. I looked around anyway, just in case, and saw that there was a file cabinet with enough clearance from the wall-to-wall window that I could hide in, in case I couldn’t get out quickly enough.

Was it worth it?

Then my eyes snagged on the intranet tree—the path to M1 clearance unfurled in a glittering trail of data.

I froze for a heartbeat.

M1. As I read through the security manual available to me within a handful of milliseconds, I learned what it meant.

That was every lock in this place swinging wide. It was the red carpet straight to the Netrunners’ core.

Was it worth staying and risking the corpo finding out about me?

I had all the time in the world to think, but my cyberdeck’s processing power was what decided whether or not I’d make it in time.

Even after deliberating for subjective minutes, I couldn’t come to an answer.

[Pusher’s at the first turn,] Nanny snapped, tension biting her words in half. [Decide. Now.]

Fuck it. I’m seeing this through.

Lines of code peeled back, firewalls crumpling like wet paper. My pulse roared in my ears. The guy turned the first corner.

M2.

Boots echoing. Closer.

M1—come on, come on, come on—

His Ping outline pulsed red, like he was a pimple on the verge of bursting. He hit the second turn. My gut twisted into a knot.

The deck beeped—ACCESS GRANTED.

I yanked the cable out, heart leaping into my throat as I quickly re-plugged the Ethernet cable into the port. The translucent glass door slid open just as the corpo’s shadow stretched across the threshold.

No time. I dove behind the file cabinet, limbs scraping on cold tile.

Footsteps padded into the room, casual, unhurried. Papers rustled. A mug clinked against the desk.

[Pusher’s inside,] Nanny whispered.

D: Thanks, I wasn’t certain until you said it. You’re so helpful.

[I know, I know. What would you do without me?]

D: I’d probably be less averse to the concept of sleep.

I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing every muscle to stillness. My body obeyed me with preternatural readiness, like I had done this a million times before.

Even my heart beat started to slow, becoming less audible.

[He’s checking his terminal,] Nanny murmured. [I’ll spoof his master.]

My HUD flickered as Nanny reached a digital tendril towards the machine. A heartbeat passed. Another.

The terminal beeped, cheerful and bright.

“The fuck does that bitch want now?” the corpo muttered to himself. His chair creaked.

I waited patiently for him to get up and then leave.

[Time to ghost,] Nanny said.

I looked at the Ping outlines of the corpos on the floor, superimposed their locations on my mental map of this floor, and waited for the right split-second to move.

Then…

…I was inside the administrative elevator, on a one-way train down to the lowest sub-basement level.

The alarms hadn’t rung yet.

This elevator’s camera was looped for as long as I was inside.

Those Netrunners wouldn’t even see their own deaths coming.