Chương 22: Ghost I

"First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics." - Bertolt Brecht Updated Image of Santi The combat BD faded from my mind, dissolving into the familiar, suffocating darkness of my own eyelids before blinding the shit out of me with a barrage of white flashes. I ripped the silver halo of the braindance wreath from my temples, my chest heaving as my Neural Link systematically detached from the simulated environment and re-anchored my consciousness to the cold, damp garage.

I sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, running a trembling hand through my sweat-soaked hair.

My brain was buzzing, running hot and saturated with thousands of pages of advanced counter-intrusion schematics, polymorphic viral coding structures, and military-grade ICE evasion tactics. The corporate educational BDs were a goldmine, but I now found myself facing a new wall. And it wasn't a wall of code, shit, I wish it was, would've been a hell of a lot easier to get my hands on what I wanted if it was just code. When I first started buying skill-acquisition BDs, I was dropping about 600 eddies a pop.

Those were mid-tier modules. You know, the regular shit. Some more basic Krav Maga, standard Net-architecture history, entry-level network routing, shit that I needed to learn if I was going to survive like I promised Maya I would. But as my skills compounded, pushed into overdrive by natural intellect, I burned through the amateur hour content faster than a junkie blowing through a hit of Black Lace. I needed heavier data.

I needed the raw, unfiltered telemetry used to train elite Arasaka netrunners and Militech black-ops specialists. And the megacorps didn't let that kind of biz go cheap. And shit, the modules I required to actually build myself up into someone capable of surviving Night City were starting to push past the 2, 000 to 3, 000 eddie range per BD. I looked down at my hands, flexing my calloused fingers in the freezing air. The trickle of eddies I was netting from my [RatATax. exe] daemon wasn't cutting it anymore.

Skimming 0. 5 percent off thirty-eight vending machines in a single plaza had kept us afloat and stopped us from drowning. But it was just a drop in the ocean compared to the scratch I needed to scale up my operations. I had to start making real money. But I wasn't a gonk. I knew that no matter how smart I was, taking real gigs right now, with my current hardware and my still-developing skillset, was a good way to get my brain melted by some corporate sysadmin.

Maybe I wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't gone a few years without seeing a line of code, but that didn't matter now. I needed to expand my current hustle first, to cast a wider net before I started swimming with the sharks. I grabbed my handheld cyberdeck, packed it into my sling bag, and threw on my thick dark grey hoodie. It was time to put my plans into action and expand the franchise. My first target was easy since it was literally one block away from my house.

Just a massive, dilapidated parking lot that was supposed to be for a set of 2 buildings, one of which didn't house anyone. The whole place stank of stale urine and was primarily used by the factory workers commuting into Arroyo. I had scouted it a few days ago, counted that the lot housed twenty-three total SCSMs. However, of those twenty-three, only sixteen actually worked without swallowing your eddies and flashing a malfunction error.

I kept my head down, crossed our unnamed street, cut through a couple of overgrown, junk-filled backyards, hopped a rusted fence, and crossed another unnamed street to arrive right at the parking lot. Once here, I realized that I didn't even need to hardline into a maintenance port. The security was so pathetically outdated that I just leaned against one of the SCSMs, pulled out my deck, and synced to the local wireless junction.

It literally took me less than 2 minutes to slip past the baseline firewall and inject the daemon into the inventory ledger of those sixteen machines. I set the routing protocols, ensured the crypto-mixers were properly aligned to wash the funds, and wiped my digital footprints clean. I then walked back home, doing the math in my head. Between the thirty-eight machines in the plaza and the sixteen in the parking lot, I had fifty-four total machines feeding the chip.

Based on the average daily foot traffic, I calculated that the expansion would bring my monthly income to a highly predictable range of about 1, 600 eddies. It was a solid bump, especially when I took into consideration that for most kids my age in Rancho Coronado, 1, 600 eddies a month was unimaginable wealth. But I knew it was still far, far from enough. 1, 600 eduardos a month wouldn't do anything for the time being.

Mom was breaking her back for sixteen hours a day, and the BDs I needed to level up my game cost twice that amount. I needed a bigger target. A place with higher density and more purchases. I pulled up a holographic map of Santo Domingo on my deck, my eyes tracking the glowing blue lines of the municipal grid, and settling my gaze on Megabuilding 07. The metro station adjacent to the Megabuilding was a goldmine.

The foot traffic there was astronomical as thousands of corporate wageslaves, gangoons, and street-rats passed through those turnstiles every single day, and they all bought shit from the massive banks of SCSMs lining the exterior of the station walls. But as I made my plan, I realized that there was a catch.

Because the 101 pretty much made Crestmont come to an end, the gonks that made the subsystems thought it would be a great idea to split the zones, which, sure, was a great idea to allow better management, but it fucks with my plan, so fuck them. The metro station machines were wired directly into the municipal transit authority's network, which was a separate, significantly heavier grid.

If I tried to access that network remotely by jacking into the holographic advertisement tower across from my house, the latency ping would immediately flag me. The transit authority's ICE would trace the signal back to my street in seconds, and NetWatch's chronies would be kicking my door down before I could even unplug. To pull this heist off, I had to reduce the physical distance. I needed to hardline into a localized access port directly tied to the station's grid.

I closed my eyes, leaning back against the wall of my bedroom, and sifted through the archives of my memory. Back to the times Leo, Jax, Maya, and I used to run these streets like we owned them. We had explored every abandoned building, every alleyway, and every forgotten corner around our neighborhood. Right across the street from the metro station sat a single-story storage facility. It was a maze of metal units used by locals to hoard their junk.

But more importantly, it housed a municipal utility access port that hooked directly into the underground fiber-optic lines running to the station. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. The only problem was the security. Unfortunately for me, when the previous owners of the facility foreclosed, instead of being abandoned, the place was claimed by 6th Street.

It was an open secret that they used a block of units in the back as a stash house for smuggled chrome and illegal munitions. Because of that, the place was locked down with active cameras and regular gang patrols. It was a massive risk, and I knew that if I got caught sneaking around a 6th Street stash house, they wouldn't ask questions and simply put a bullet in my head and dump my body in the nearest incinerator. But I thought about my mother's swollen, bleeding hands.

I thought about the crushing exhaustion in her eyes every time she unlocked the front door around 2: 30 in the morning. I opened my eyes, the faint glow of the neon ad-tower outside casting long shadows across my room, nodding to myself as I made my choice. I was going to put my plan into action tomorrow night, at 2: 00 AM. When the time to act came, the freezing rain had returned, turning the streets of Rancho Coronado into a slick mirror.

I dressed in all black, slung my deck over my shoulder, and slipped out of my bedroom window, dropping silently into the mud. I could've taken the straight route and walked the five or six blocks, but I wanted to stay away from the city's cameras. So I stuck to the shadows, navigating the labyrinth of alleys and backstreets until the massive, glowing structure of Megabuilding 07 loomed over the skyline.

The NCART metro station sat bathed in harsh, fluorescent light right by it, buzzing with the late-night dregs of the city. I kept my distance, creeping toward the storage facility opposite the station. The entrance was just a wide, open walkway cut between two heavy concrete walls. It looked like a simple alleyway, but I knew it opened up into the maze of metal units. Directly above the entrance, bolted to the concrete wall, was a security camera that swept its red optical laser back and forth, guarding the gap.

I took a slow breath, pressing my back against the exterior concrete, just out of the camera's line of sight. My Neural Link instantly suppressed the spike of adrenaline, slowing my heart rate to a steady, rhythmic thud. I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, calling up the mental map I had memorized from my childhood explorations.

"Slip past this front camera. Make a right. Walk past the center units. Make another right, then a left, then another right at the end," I said to myself in a low voice. I peeked around the corner and saw a 6th Street ganger leaning against a unit door, seeking shelter from the freezing rain beneath the small aluminum awning about fifty yards down the central corridor. He was wearing a tactical vest over a heavy jacket and had a shotgun resting lazily against his leg.

The glowing cherry of a synth-cigar illuminated his face as he took a drag. There was a second camera mounted at the far end of the lane, its sweep overlapping the visual cone of the entrance camera. I waited a bit as the ganger took another long drag of his cigar, completely oblivious to my presence. The entrance camera swept right, and the second camera swept left, giving me a three-second window where the center of the corridor was entirely blind.

I glided forward, stepping directly into the open entrance between the walls, keeping my center of gravity low, my boots rolling perfectly from heel to toe to muffle my footsteps on the wet concrete. I slipped right beneath the first camera's optical cone just as it panned away, holding my breath as I closed the distance toward the ganger. He coughed, turning his head to spit a wad of phlegm onto the pavement.

I used the ambient noise of his cough to mask my movement, sliding silently past the second camera's blind spot and making a sharp right turn down a narrow, pitch-black lane between two rows of units. I let out a silent exhale, pressing my back against the metal wall. My heart was pounding inside my chest, but my hands were completely steady. I moved down the dark lane, passing five locked doors, and made another right turn, holding my breath as I checked for patrols, then a quick left.

The maze was exactly how I remembered it from when we had snuck around here 3 years ago. The memory sent an ache through my chest, but I shoved it down into the dark, locked box in my mind. Grief was a distraction, and I couldn't afford distractions right this moment. I reached the end of the facility and made one final right turn to face the unit. The rolling metal door was heavily dented, knocked completely off its tracks at the bottom corner, leaving a permanent, jagged opening about three feet high.

It had been broken for years, the gangers too lazy and uncaring to bother fixing it. I dropped to my hands and knees and shimmied under the jagged metal, slipping into the pitch-black interior of the unit. The air inside reminded me of when we first moved into our current house, smelling of damp cardboard, rat shit, and the unmistakable metallic tang of exposed copper wiring. I pulled a small penlight from my pocket and clicked it on, shielding the beam with my hand to keep the light localized.

The unit was filled with rotting municipal junk. There were broken traffic light casings, shattered server racks, and coils of degraded fiber-optic cable. I pushed a stack of soggy cardboard boxes aside, revealing the municipal access port, which was a steel utility box bolted directly into the concrete floor. I knelt down in the dirt and pulled my cyberdeck from my bag.

My hands moved with practiced efficiency as I unwound my personal link cable, slotting one end into the deck, and jamming the other directly into the neural port behind my right ear. I then took a heavy data cable and connected the deck to the port on the utility box. I took a deep breath, steeling my mind, and initiated the dive. I visualized myself as a featureless silhouette of shifting violet code, standing at the edge of the network.

The SCSM inventory ledger was housed in a heavily fortified digital vault near the center of the grid, surrounded by thick, pulsing walls of municipal Black ICE. And just as I had predicted, this wasn't the cheap, off-the-shelf security I had bypassed at the plaza. This ICE was aggressive. I was pretty confident that if I triggered an alarm here, the system wouldn't just log my IP, but actually launch an offensive counter-hack designed to fry my synapses and leave me brain-dead on the floor of that storage unit.

But I wasn't the same clumsy twelve-year-old who had written the original RatATax. I had spent the last year absorbing a lot of coding knowledge. And for someone who was technically self-taught, being able to understand how this ICE was constructed, and more importantly, understand how to unweave it, was nothing short of a miracle. I approached the pulsing firewall without any plans to attack it or to brute-force the decryption key through the front door.

I analyzed the flow of traffic passing through the gate, seeing as thousands of tiny data packets were constantly entering and exiting the vault. They were most likely inventory updates, banking pings, and maintenance logs. When I was ready, I pulled up the upgraded version of my daemon, the [RatATax_v2. 0]. With the progress I had made since I was twelve, this new daemon was a masterpiece of polymorphic stealth. I had designed it to mimic the exact digital signature of a municipal maintenance protocol.

I waited for a cluster of legitimate inventory updates from the vending machines to approach the firewall, and slipped myself into the data stream, riding the slipstream of the authorized packets directly through the Black ICE. Inside the ICE, the vault was a blinding sphere of scrolling green ledgers. I moved quickly, locating the core logic loops that governed the transaction processing for the machines across the street.

Once I found it, I surgically unwove the base code of the network itself and spliced my daemon directly into the foundational architecture, changing the surrounding parameters so the system would simply register my skim-code as a native, inherent subroutine. In terms appropriate for a gonk, I made it look like it had always been there. Every time one of the dozens of machines at the station processed a transaction, my daemon would effortlessly slice off its 0.

5 percent, encrypt the stolen data using a shifting, multi-layered cipher, and route it through twenty different international proxy servers before dropping it into my mother's cred-chip. I know, I know, I'm humble enough to say that it was flawless. I scrubbed every single microscopic trace of my entry, erased the utility port connection logs, and pulled myself backward out of the vault, slipping back through the ICE without triggering a single tripwire. Once I was safe, I severed the connection.

A second later, I found myself gasping as my eyes flew open in the pitch-black darkness of the storage unit. The freezing air rushed into my lungs, and I realized I was drenched in a cold sweat. My heart was hammering against my ribs, but I didn't sit around and waste any time.

I disconnected the cables, shoved the deck into my bag, and shimmied back under the broken metal door, retracing my steps through the 6th Street facility, slipping past the cameras and the smoking ganger, and walking back out through the open entrance. I didn't stop moving until I climbed back through my bedroom window and collapsed onto my mattress.