Chương 37: The Aiden Protocol II

While I was rewriting the rules of digital theft, I also took the time to revisit my roots. The old, primitive daemon I had coded a couple years ago to siphon loose change from the SCSM vending machines around Rancho Coronado felt sloppy compared to my new toy. So I decided to completely overhaul it. I refined the extraction process so that skimming the digital funds acted the exact same way as the Aiden quickhack.

In other words, this was another security layer that, by integrating a polymorphic encryption and a localized wipe protocol that spoofed a diagnostic routine, altered the machine's internal ledger to write off the siphoned digital eddies as fractional network transaction fees or dropped connection losses. It was a lucrative and relatively peaceful existence I was building up. I was stockpiling untraceable funds, refining my skills, and waiting for my unicorn to come calling. Which brings me to today.

A good old freezing Tuesday evening in late February. I was sitting on the NCART metro line as the train shot above the neon-drenched streets of Night City, leaving the suburban sprawl of Rancho Coronado far behind. The rain was coming down in sheets, streaking the reinforced glass windows of the train car, blurring the monolithic skyscrapers of City Center into distorted smears of corporate branding.

I was on the move because my Agent had chimed thirty minutes ago with a message from a trusted, mid-tier scrapper operating out of Watson. [Ghost. Think I found your ghost. Rotting frame. Stripped down, but the chassis matches the specs you sent for the 1970 ride. It's sitting in an abandoned shipping warehouse right on the edge of Northside, just before the oil fields. Owner got zeroed a week ago, place is up for grabs. Sent the coordinates. First come, first served.] My heart had actually skipped a beat.

After seven months of dead ends, the prospect of finally laying my hands on the rusted steel of a genuine Boss 429 was intoxicating. I had thrown my jacket on, checked the Malorian Overture in my pocket, and sprinted for the nearest metro station. As the train rattled toward its final stop in Little China, I leaned back against the plastic seat, pulling my hood up over my white hair.

The train car was moderately crowded, a mix of exhausted wage-slaves heading home from their shifts and high-end corporate executives transitioning between boardrooms. Which meant it was the perfect hunting ground. I engaged my deck, my vision dropping into the translucent, overlaid green vectors of my internal HUD, and ran a passive, wide-spectrum scan of the train car, filtering the data feeds by banking authorizations and localized ICE strength.

My gaze settled on two men sitting across the aisle, near the doors, wearing immaculately tailored suits that screamed Jinguji bespoke. The subtle, chrome-plated seams of high-end subdermal armor lined their necks, and they both sported Kiroshi optics that scanned the train car with the arrogant, bored superiority of men who believed they owned the city. My scanner identified their corporate signatures as Militech logistics execs.

Their personal ICE was strong with mil-spec defensive protocols around their personal links. But to my fifteen-terabyte processing power, their firewalls looked like chain-link fences holding back a tidal wave. I sat there, my hands resting casually in my jacket pockets, keeping my signature masked deep inside the ambient NCART traffic data. With a simple, frictionless thought, I compiled the Aiden daemon in a concentrated microburst.

I slipped through the microscopic gaps in the Militech executives' localized firewalls, completely bypassing their intrusion countermeasures before they even had a chance to buffer a response. I embedded the dormant protocol directly into their primary banking subroutines, spoofing the biometric authorizations flawlessly. [Target 1 acquired. Balance verified. Extraction set: 985 Eurodollars. Trigger condition: 5. 0 miles.] [Target 2 acquired. Balance verified. Extraction set: 920 Eurodollars. Trigger condition: 5. 0 miles.] The entire process took less than a millisecond, and the execs didn't even register a single anomaly. They just kept talking about quarterly projections, completely oblivious to the fact that they had just unknowingly authorized a phantom subscription service that would silently drain nearly two grand from their combined accounts the moment I was safely out of the district. I smiled beneath the shadow of my hood, the thrill of the invisible heist sending a warm spike of dopamine through my system.

Kotka was right. The people of the past had dreamed of this power, but they lacked the chrome to make it a reality.

"Next stop, Little China," the automated voice of the NCART announced over the intercom, snapping me out of my digital high.

"End of the line. Please ensure all personal belongings are secured." The train ground to a smooth halt, and the doors hissed open, letting in the damp, freezing air of the Watson district. I stood up, adjusting my jacket, and stepped out onto the crowded platform, but I wasn't staying here. The coordinates the scrapper had sent me were way out on the northern edge of the district, right where the concrete of the city gave way to the toxic wasteland of the oil fields.

And unfortunately for me, the metro didn't run out that far. I stepped up to the curb and hailed a passing combat cab, some heavily armored yellow Villefort Cortes with reinforced grating over the windows. As the driver unlocked the back door, I noted that he looked bored and had a cheap, exposed cyber-jaw. I slid into the vinyl backseat, shaking the rain from my hood, and forwarded the coordinates from my Agent to the cab's navigation system.

The driver glanced at the destination on his dashboard, his metallic jaw clicking slightly.

"Edge of Northside, huh? Nothin' out there but abandoned warehouses, scavs, and bad air, kid. You sure about this?"

"I'm paying you to drive," I said, my voice flat and uninviting.

"So drive." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. The driver shrugged, hit the accelerator, and the heavy cab lurched forward, merging into the chaotic flow of traffic heading north. I leaned my head against the cold, reinforced glass of the window, watching the city roll by. As we pushed deeper into Northside, the vibrant neon and towering skyscrapers of Little China slowly gave way to a much bleaker landscape.

The buildings grew shorter, wider, and more depressing. Massive factories belched thick columns of toxic grey smoke into the heavy rain clouds, and the streets were less crowded, the slick pavement reflecting the harsh glare of sodium streetlights. We drove for twenty minutes, the urban density thinning out entirely until we were cruising down a cracked, poorly maintained two-lane highway, and the structures of the industrial zone began to fall behind us.

The cab took a sharp right turn, exiting the highway and turning onto a heavily degraded, pothole-riddled service road that led toward a cluster of massive, isolated shipping warehouses. As the cab made the turn, my eyes caught an illuminated green sign hanging over the main highway we had just left. The paint was peeling, and half the neon tubes were dead, but the words were still legible. YOU ARE NOW LEAVING NIGHT CITY. ENTERING THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA OIL FIELDS.

I stared at the sign as it faded into the rainy gloom behind us, a sudden knot forming in my chest. The oil fields. The great, toxic expanse that stretched out beyond the suffocating borders of the city caused my mind to instantly drift to Maya. It had been exactly two years. Two years since I had stood in the dusty porch of my house and watched her and her grandparents pack their meager belongings into that rusted station wagon. Two years since Jax had died.

Two years since the last of my first chooms delta'd out of Night City, probably driving past that exact same sign. I wondered where she was right now. I wondered if they had made it to whatever safe haven they were searching for in Atlanta, or if the unforgiving expanse of the Badlands had claimed them. A bitter sense of contrast washed over me. Maya had escaped to keep her innocence relatively intact, as far as Night City goes.

And here I was, two years later, sixteen years old, carrying an iron in my pocket, my brain wired with what could be considered mil-spec infiltration protocols, driving into an abandoned industrial zone to buy a rusted car frame with money I had stolen. I had survived, yes. My mother was safe, our bills were paid, and I commanded a level of power in the Net that could make me uncontrollable in the Net.

But the boy who had played in the dirt with Maya was dead, buried somewhere under the fifteen terabytes of data humming in my skull and the memory of the Solo's brain matter splattered across that server room wall.

"We're here, kid," the driver's voice crackled over the intercom, pulling me out of my memories.

"End of the line. I ain't driving up that driveway. Looks like a total shitshow." I blinked, refocusing my eyes on the present. The cab had pulled over to the side of the cracked service road. About fifty yards away, sitting at the end of a long, weed-choked concrete driveway, was a corrugated metal warehouse. I transferred the fare, plus a hefty tip to keep the driver quiet, to his dashboard terminal. I pulled the collar of my jacket up against the rain and stepped out of the armored cab.

The moment the door closed, the cab threw itself into reverse, pulled a sloppy three-point turn, and tore back down the service road toward the safety of the city, leaving me alone in the freezing downpour. I stood at the edge of the road, the rain soaking into my clothes, and took a long and slow look at the environment, only to feel my paranoia instantly flare. The scrapper had said the warehouse was abandoned, and that the previous owner zeroed a week ago.

But the scene in front of me told a wildly different story. I began to walk up the driveway, my right hand instinctively slipping into my pocket, my fingers wrapping tightly around the grip of the Overture, my thumb resting on the hammer, ready to pull it in a fraction of a second. As I approached the perimeter of the warehouse, the first warning sign became glaringly obvious. The fences that surrounded the property were completely fucked. And I didn't mean they were rusted or falling apart from age.

They had been breached. Sections of the thick metal grating were peeled back like tin foil, the support posts bent at unnatural angles. The massive rolling gate that should have secured the entrance was missing, seemingly ripped off its tracks and discarded in the tall weeds nearby. The overwhelming scent of ozone, burning synthetic rubber, and raw, spilled CHOOH2 hit the back of my throat as I stepped cautiously through the ruined entrance.

I squinted to adjust to the low light and the driving rain, while I used my Neural Link to actively ping the immediate area for any active personal links or hostile subnets. The courtyard in front of the closed warehouse doors was an absolute war zone. Parked haphazardly near the center of the lot was a high-end Alvarado V4F 570, its sleek, gold-plated chassis gleaming in the rain, looking completely out of place in the industrial area. Its driver-side door was hanging wide open.

About twenty feet to the left of the Alvarado was a Thorton Galena G240, looking almost identical to the rustbucket sitting in my garage back home, except this one was currently engulfed in roaring flames. The fire crackled and hissed as the rain beat down on it, and thick black smoke billowed up into the night sky. And parked defensively near the warehouse doors, its engine still ticking as it cooled down, was a heavily armored, matte-grey Maelstrom Thrax, the hood covered in jagged spikes.

I kept my breathing slow and shallow, blinking the rain out of my eyes as they darted across the courtyard, analyzing the chaos of the scene illuminated by the burning car. And then, I registered the bodies. Lying face-up on the wet concrete, just a few feet from the open door of the gold Alvarado, was the corpse of a Corpo. He was wearing a bespoke suit that was now ruined by the massive exit wound in the center of his chest.

His expensive, chrome-plated briefcase lay spilled open next to him, though whatever had been inside was long gone. I moved a few steps to the right, using the burning Galena for cover. Sprawled near the rear bumper of the burning car was a chromed security guard, his tactical vest shredded, and his internal cyberware sparking in the rain, a clear indication of a localized short-circuit. He had been fried from the inside out before he even had a chance to draw his weapon.

And then there were the Maelstromers scattered across the courtyard, surrounding the Thrax and the warehouse doors. There were four dead "stromers." Even in the dim, flickering firelight, their heavily modified cybernetics were unmistakable. One was missing the entire top half of his skull, the complex, multi-optic cluster that replaced his face, completely blown out by high-caliber fire.

Another was pinned against the brick wall of the warehouse, a massive, jagged piece of rebar driven straight through his chrome-plated chest, pinning him there like a grotesque butterfly. The other two were simply piled near the entrance, their bodies riddled with enough lead to scrap a small tank. I stood still in the freezing rain. The courtyard was silent except for the crackle of the fire and the drumming of the downpour.

I ran a deep ping through my Paraline, searching for any active hardware or bio-monitors, but found nothing. The local network was just a graveyard of flatlined signals and dead chrome. Whoever had done this, whoever had orchestrated this violent, chaotic bloodbath, was already gone. I slowly pulled my hand out of my pocket, leaving the Malorian holstered, and stared at the butchered Corpo, the fried guard, and the slaughtered Maelstrom gangers.

Throwing this up as a simple scrapyard deal gone wrong would be downright gonked. This was a massacre. I looked up at the closed doors of the warehouse, where the rotting frame of the 1970 Mustang Boss 429 was supposedly waiting for me.

"What the fuck went down here?"