Chương 36: The Aiden Protocol I

"The perfect crime is not the one where the criminal is never caught, but the one where the victim never realizes a crime has been committed." - Unkown Time in Night City had the bad habit of burying wounds under a fresh layer of neon, concrete, and synthetic distractions. It had already been ten months since I had walked out of that server room in Arroyo with shattered ribs and my first confirmed kill. The calendar had flipped forward, dragging me into late February of 2069.

I was sixteen years old now, and my body had finally stabilized after months of aching from rapid bone growth.

I was still six-foot-two, but the awkward, lanky teenage phase was slowly being replaced by the dense musculature I had inherited from my father, which had been enhanced by the constant physical conditioning I had put myself through once Vik had officially cleared me for strenuous activities. The patchy hair growing on my jawline had filled in slightly, framing my face in a way that made me look much older than I was, and colder too, especially for a kid who hadn't even finished high school.

Well, it's not like I even went to it. But I had learned my lesson in Arroyo. That illusion of my untouchable digital godhood had been shattered by a Solo with a Sandy, which I had learned was the correct name for mercs in this city, and I had adapted accordingly.

For the past seven months, I had completely avoided any high-risk, physical-retrieval gigs and stuck to the Net, pulling mid-tier, strictly remote gigs that paid decent scratch but kept my body miles away from the crosshairs of corporate assassins or teh average gonked gangoons. I mean, I was still Ghost, the phantom who could slip through military-grade ICE without tripping a single alarm, but I was a much more cautious and paranoid phantom now.

The matte-black Malorian Overture I had taken as my own was never far from my reach. It would always sit in the deep pocket of my jacket whenever I left the house. But while my professional life had deliberately slowed down, my personal obsessions had accelerated into overdrive, and I had been pulling deep-dive BD sessions into the world of automotive engineering and underground street racing.

I had spent these past months mentally stripping down just about every single engine of a car available for sale, though my true sights were set on something much more specific, and infinitely more elusive, than a standard Quadra or an Archer. In a city dominated by Rayfields, Thortons, Mizutanis, Villeforts, and heavily armored corporate transports, a pre-Krash internal combustion muscle car from the late twentieth century was the definition of a unicorn.

They didn't exist in showrooms, and they sure as hell weren't sitting in used car lots in Santo Domingo. To the average Night City resident, a car that ran on actual refined petroleum and required manual gear shifting was a museum relic, an inefficient piece of ancient history. But to me, with my brain flooded by the mechanical poetry of the racing BDs, the Boss 429 represented the ultimate canvas. It was a raw soul waiting to be resurrected.

I wanted the heavy steel, the widebody potential, the sheer, unapologetic roar of a massive V8 engine that I could rebuild from the block up. But I'd probably end up putting something else in it and modifying it to accept CHOOH2. I had put the word out to every mid-tier fixer, scrapper, and junk-peddler from Pacifica to Watson, and had even offered finders' fees that made grown men double-take. For seven months, I had chased down endless dead ends.

I had trudged through flooded junkyards in the rain only to find the rusted-out chassis of old Chevys, or worse, cheap replica shells made of molded fiberglass of other cars. It felt like an impossible dream, a stupid teenage fantasy that I was throwing eddies at. But for some reason, I refused to let it go. While I waited for a miracle from the scrapyards, I kept myself busy in the Net.

My partnership with Kotka had deepened, and with the immediate threat of corporate exposure somewhat mitigated by our careful planning, we had started taking risks that didn't involve stealing eddies or blackmailing Tyger Claw bosses. We started exploring the Old Net. However, we were no longer exploring the long-abandoned parts of it as we had once done. No, that would be too smart for us.

Our gonk asses went into sections of the Old Net that had recently had activity, and by recently, I mean five years ago, which is pretty damn recent for the old net. It was a dangerous and stupid hobby, and we both knew it. Venturing into the fragmented sectors of the pre-Krash internet meant brushing dangerously close to the Blackwall, which kept the rogue AIs of the old world from completely annihilating the modern Net. But the thrill of discovery was too intoxicating to ignore. I had to be careful, though.

I had realized over the past few months exactly what my 15 terabytes per second of processing power actually meant. It's not like I was a damn beacon glowing in the dark, begging Netwatch to orbital-strike my location, but if five terabytes a second was an elite killer, 15 terabytes made me an apex predator that nobody spotted until I was already inside the walls. I realized that I had the ability to operate at a speed where most systems simply responded more slowly than my own decision-making.

Against another runner, they'd feel like they were buffering mid-thought, while I could inject, probe, and adapt before they even finished compiling their first countermeasure. I had the ability to fake attack vectors while hitting the real one simultaneously, winning through tempo and misdirection. Defensive AI only started reacting after I had already moved twice, meaning that almost getting zeroed in the Net ten months ago was all due to my lack of skill and experience.

I know, funny, considering how long I had been pulling gigs on the Net, yet I was somehow inexperienced. Turns out that filling my brain with knowledge and finding the things I was doing as easy was because I wasn't really having my skills put to the test, which basically meant I stagnated, mistaking mediocracy for perfection. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. But the most important part of having 15 TB/s of bandwidth was the cognitive load.

At 15 TB/s, my brain could still anchor itself, allowing me to run multiple threads without fragmenting my identity. It felt like pure instinct, as if I was skimming across data at impossible speeds. But if I was so fast that systems couldn't even register me, why did I need to keep my data output throttled? Because of the wake. It was basic digital physics.

You might not be able to see a stealth jet on radar, but if it flies low enough, you're still going to hear the sonic boom and watch the windows shatter as it flies past. It was the same concept for me. Moving 15 terabytes of data every single second creates a massive footprint in bandwidth consumption. If I ran at full capacity all the time, Netwatch might not be able to read my code, but their regional traffic scanners would absolutely notice an inexplicable black hole of data moving through Santo Domingo.

Not to mention the physical toll it would take. I mean, sustained full output wasn't free. Pushing that much data constantly without specialized, high-end liquid cooling would literally cook my frontal lobe in its own juices. Extended multi-threading at max speed could cause cognitive drift, which meant tiny cracks in my psyche that would eventually cause me to go loco. So I was able to learn the simple golden rule. As long as I wasn't sloppy, I'd be safe.

During one of our deep-dive expeditions back in November, carefully keeping my output throttled, we had stumbled upon something that fundamentally altered my approach to the hustle. We had slipped past a decayed, ancient military firewall and found ourselves standing in the digital ruins of a massive, late 20th-century entertainment archive. The data was heavily corrupted, and the architecture resembled a crumbling, pixelated library floating in an endless void of static.

My avatar floated next to Kotka's neon-pink cyber-cat as we sifted through the fragmented files.

"Look at this ancient drek, Ghost," Kotka had said, her digital tail flicking with amusement as she pulled up a compressed file directory.

"These baseline humans used to simulate reality for fun. They didn't have braindances or neural feedback, so they would just stare at flat screens with a controller in their hands." I had analyzed the file she was holding. It was an ancient video game from the 1990s. The title string decoded itself in my HUD: Watch Dogs.

Driven by my curiosity, I used a quick microburst of my processing power to instantly reconstruct the corrupted game files, compiling the ancient code into a playable simulation within our isolated sandbox. We spent three hours messing around with it, and what I saw completely blew my mind. The protagonist of the game was a vigilante hacker who walked around a simulated city with a primitive smartphone, pressing a single button to siphon money from the bank accounts of the pedestrians walking past him.

He hacked traffic lights, stole cars, and breached security cameras, all with a simple, wireless command.

"This is hilarious," Kotka had laughed, her avatar doing a digital flip.

"They literally fantasized about what we do for a living. Look at him, he just tapped a screen and stole five hundred eds from a barista. If only corporate ICE was that pathetic." Kotka saw it as a joke. I mean, who wouldn't? This was essentially a primitive piece of historical comedy. But I, on the other hand, saw a blueprint. I couldn't stop thinking about that game mechanic.

The ability to simply walk past a target, execute a silent daemon, and walk away with their eddies without ever physically touching them or breaching a localized server terminal. Directly hacking a personal link to steal funds was a guaranteed way to get a corporate tracing algorithm shoved down your throat since the banking security protocols were too tight. If you forced a transfer, the system flagged it as theft, locked the account, and sent the NCPD tracking your IP within sixty seconds.

But what if the transaction wasn't forced? What if it was authorized? I spent the next two months locked in my bedroom, building isolated digital sandboxes and working through the most complex coding sessions of my life in an attempt to design an invisible, self-executing financial ecosystem. And I'll be damned. I guess pops wasn't so off in calling me his little Einstein when I was a little kid, because I had just created the "Aiden" protocol.

I named it like that because I wanted to offer a small tribute to the ancient game that had inspired it. The essence of the daemon lay in its subtlety. When I deployed the quickhack into a corporate target's personal link, it wouldn't immediately demand a transfer of funds. Instead, it quietly peeled their banking subroutines apart layer by layer and generated a spoofed, biometric authorization for a background subscription service.

To the bank's automated security ICE, it looked exactly like the Corpo had just decided to sign up for a premium, encrypted data-storage plan, authorized by their own digital signature. But that was only the first step. I would have probably had Bartmoss himself gushing at my routing. If I transferred a lump sum of five hundred eddies directly into an account I controlled, it would eventually be traced.

So, I built a digital labyrinth where the authorized funds would be immediately blasted out of Night City, wired to a series of encrypted automated proxy accounts in the Cayman Islands, Zurich, and Orbital banking satellites. Once the money hit those international proxies, my daemon initiated a process known in the old days as "salami slicing," but I took it to an atomic level. The lump sum was fragmented into millions of microscopic fractional transactions. We were talking about fractions of a single eddie. 0.

00058 eds here, 0. 00012 there. To the sweeping algorithms of the global banking sector, these transactions were statistically insignificant and would just be registered as floating-point errors, the digital equivalent of dust falling off a ledger. These millions of fractional pennies were bounced through thousands of dummy shell corporations, crossing international borders and sub-nets so many times that the original source was completely lost in a sea of white noise.

Finally, after hours of endless routing, the fractions slowly began to coalesce, trickling silently into the credit chip that I kept buried in a lead-lined lockbox under the floorboards of my bedroom in Rancho Coronado. It was completely untraceable. I had essentially automated the perfect crime. But it's not like I was stupid. I knew that greed was the ultimate downfall of every good runner, which is why I hard-coded three unbreakable rules into the Aiden protocol to ensure I was never caught.

First, the daemon was programmed to never siphon more than a thousand eddies from a single target. Anything higher might trigger a manual audit from an executive's personal accountant. A thousand eddies was a rounding error to a Corpo, a high-end dinner they forgot they paid for. Second, the daemon was highly selective. It only targeted accounts with balances exceeding fifty thousand eddies. I wasn't going to steal from the desperate baseline civilians since Night City was already doing its part in crushing them.

I was strictly hunting the corporate predators. And third, the most crucial rule: a delayed-acting trigger. The quickhack itself didn't initiate the transaction the moment I uploaded it. It would embed itself in the target's personal link and go dormant, actively tracking the GPS distance between my deck and the target. The transaction was only executed once I was a minimum of five miles away from the victim.

That way, if a paranoid Corpo happened to get a notification on their retinal display about an authorized payment, the teenage kid who had bumped into them on the metro was already in a different district, completely disconnected from the event.