35 Netrunning
My glorious victory over the state of Southern California did not come when the new Scorpitrons moved out with the recovered and repaired first wave. Turns out that the forces my units destroyed were meant to simply rush in and bog down NorCal while the main host invaded Arizona from the West while Utah - another Free State that flipped - invaded from the North.
In a remarkably unselfish move only two Scorpitrons would remain in Northern California while the remaining six would be sent to defend Phoenix, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Cheyenne, Helena, and Denver. While it was smart to prop up our allies while we are relatively safe, I was fairly certain the choice was pushed by Arasaka to get some distance between me and the units so that if one gets mission killed they could swoop in for the recovery and abscond with the hardware.
It was enough to drive a man mad with jealousy over his products, but I'm an arms dealer. If I froze because my products could get destroyed or stolen I'd never have the balls to sell anything in the first place.
Besides, what was going on in the outside world took less importance right now than what was happening in the digital world.
I stood atop a glossy black tower at the center of a trio of ringed walls, all barely illuminated by electric blue light strips and flashes of lighting across the stormy overhead skybox as the many armaments on the ring walls and tower fired upon a glowing blood red sea of data that pounded upon the outermost wall while constrained against it by a shimmering blue dome of energy.
Fully dived into the net, my desire for the Welles Arms data fortress to look like something out of Tron played out, all the while the enemy AI attempted to breach the incredibly tight walls of code that formed my protections, seeking to inject itself into the system and corrupt the code to its own control and design.
The list of suspects for who brought this Red Sea AI into Night City is short, and begins at Militech and ends at Techie Cultists, and I am not happy about this situation. Though not powerful, the Red Sea AI is particularly viral and malignant, and if it hadn't been specifically pointed at Welles Arms as its starting point, it could have spread out and infected Night City very swiftly, acquiring potency through the sheer mass of processors it existed on.
I doubt Netwatch wouldn't catch on and purge it quickly, as it is an overall quick and dirty intelligence rather than something profound and efficient, but the short term damage it could cause would be catastrophic, worse if it somehow managed to subvert any Blackwall servers before Netwatch detect it, allowing the truly powerful and malevolent AI's roaming the Old Net into Night City's closed system.
The AI had been let loose next to Welles Arms physical location and was detected, detained, and is in the process of being destroyed by my datafortress the same way the people involved in this plot have been detected, detained, and are being destroyed by a team of assaultrons.
They didn't matter in any capacity as witnesses to this digital equivalent of a bio-attack on Night City. Justice and truth haven't mattered since the 1940's. They weren't even able to point me in the right direction of my enemies, hired by a fixer hired by a fixer hired by a guy paying enough in cash that no one asked any questions. Anyone selling you on the idea that things are cut and dry in 2069 is lying.
With my defenses tested by this particular style of attack, I summoned up the final flourish for the fight from the dark depths of my data fortress. A host of Demons, armed and armored in the same high glossy black material as the fortress, glowing with the same electric blue light strips, carrying energy swords in one hand and laser cannons in the other. These were my take on the old Bartmoss classic, the Balmong - digital monsters that to this day terrorize anyone with the balls to slip into the Old Net in their R.A.B.I.D. forms - and I tip my cap to the man for how little I managed to improve them. Even from beyond the grave Bartmoss still runs circles around even the most veteran netrunners in the world.
I might not even consider going after his cyberdeck even when my Intelligence Mk II implant is installed. The wisdom in not inserting your neural link into the hardware of a man who made the whole world his bitch just because he was a big brain try hard hater cannot be overstated.
Of course that was just Silverhand's assessment of the man and they hated eachother despite basically being the same dude just one with a guitar and the other a cyberdeck. The man himself claimed the DataKrash was supposed to pierce the Mega-Corps datafortresses and expose all their dirty secrets to the world. How he missed the ball so hard on that one is anyone's guess, and maybe he simply wanted the girl he loved to think better of him, that it was some kind of tragic mistake.
Who knows for sure?
The host of Balmongs dove off the tower and into the Red Sea AI which flowed over them seeking openings in their airtight code to penetrate. It failed and the sadistic programs carried out their one purpose with great efficiency, annihilating every digit of enemy code. Trapped, the underpowered AI could only suffer as its processes faded away more and more with each contact with the hostile Demons, which played out in Cyberspace as them firing torrents of blue lasers and dragging beam swords through every fluid ounce of the glowing sanguine waters.
My Watchdog programs confirmed the complete destruction of the hostile AI and then double checked for the same result after I pulled back the Balmongs. They were efficient tools, but only good for one thing and one thing only, the destruction of any code not native to their own or the Data Fortress. That simplicity is what makes them so potent, but best to keep them tightly sealed at all times as they simply lack the complexity needed for more advanced IFF functions.
With them resealed my role in this battle ended and I returned to the net. Even powerful as I am, I still felt the jarring loss of freedom as the shackles of my body reassert themselves on my consciousness. Everything on the net is going FASTA and the real world felt shockingly slow by comparison.
I rose from my netrunner chair and shook off the cobwebs as I pulled the dataline out of the base of my skull.
"I'd have protested the move to this facility vehemently if you had bothered to inform me that you are storing weaponized cyber-AIDs in the basement." complained the AI AutoDoc that was prepping for the next step in my evolution.
"Noted." I gruffed and rubbed eyes, "Is everything ready?"
"It is." the AutoDoc answered, "Even with the upgrades to my hardware, this operation will take an entire week to finish."
"Better than the four weeks it would have taken back at the old place." I responded as I stood and stripped out of my netrunner suit.
We were in a sublevel deep under the Badlands Park Campus, my new workshop and the new home of my AutoDoc who'd gone from a tube to an entire room filled with cutting edge hardware for everything from surgery to pharmacology. Alot of it we'd developed together and the AutoDoc was even vital in the design of some of my new body parts.
At this point the only original parts will be a brain, digestive system from tongue to anus, and my dick and balls, but the skin on both of those is getting replaced making me thank God that I'll be in a medically induced coma for the operation. I didn't want to 'Chrome' my genitals, but if the rest of me is fireproof and my manhood is not… well, that just sounds like the cruelest of fates waiting to happen.
I did a final rundown of the install before confirming the procedure. Many of the smaller components such as the SPECIAL Implants, Bioconductors, and Microrotars would be entering the Grade 2 Welles Arms models. It meant anything from a 5 percent boost to a 100 percent boost, the jump in quality not exactly being even across the board, but I was damn impressed with some of the systems I managed to rig up. Getting an extra five percent out of Microrotors is critical as quickness is a game of moments and separates the living and the dead.
The big changes came in the complete revamp of my muscular-skeletal system. Titanium Gold is roughly four times more abrasion resistant than steel. Platinum Gold is more than a hundred times more resistant and has a tensile strength greater than structural steel. This made it the perfect material for artificial joints and my reworked hydraulic ram system, and with a little Osmium mixed in the bones performed incredibly, diamond hard but not brittle in the slightest.
The increased articulation in my resigned hydraulic system gained me a +1 to my Agility giving me hope for my new muscular system to gain me a +1 to strength, maybe more considering the thickness I intended, but I ended up with a +8 damage threshold. Not going to complain about muscles that can stop a twelve gauge, but a guy can hope.
My newly grown biotech muscles were as strong by volume as myomar strands, but far easier to anchor to my bones and would replace my entire musculature, meaning that even without any special modifiers I was still making gains in a lot of areas. Plus the organic material healed the same way human tissue would, enabling it to take advantage of my multiple healing factors including Solar Powered which by itself could see me from beaten near death to fully recovered in six minutes, something we had to disable during the procedure until the recovery phase.
Lastly came the nano-lamellar Realskin which combined the thermal and electrical insulation, subdermal armor, and a supradermal weave to come together to make me a bit of a juggernaut while also looking and more importantly behaving like real human skin and hair. I'd ultimately rejected the certainty of steel for a Herculean meat bod.
"We're good here." I declared and gave the system final approval before stepping into the AutoDoc suite that would serve as my cocoon for this transformation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our first experience with Netrunning in this story comes in the form of a short battle with an infant AI Versus Tron Orthanc and Juan's Army of cyber-AIDs level Demons. I've been reading up on the Netrunner characters and taking note of how they describe moving in the digital world. It seems to open up some frontiers for the story, but I don't want to get too bogged down on it at this point.
I have figured out the basic premise of the 'Send in the Juans' Interlude and it's sequal 'Send in Every Juan!' The first will happen sometime in the next ten chapters or so.
You can support me and my family at
ko - fi . com / jmanm
