Faction Node on (Darkwire and all Corpo + Criminal Scum)

[Enigma Iuda]

cd ~/.

That's what it would look like on their screen, a simple command that shows I have moved into my home directory, or at least, what I have
made my home directory. It's not much in there, a couple of logs I have kept detailing how long I have been here, what I have noticed and
how they find me.

Here in Node on. however, it looked pretty different.

For the first month? year? maybe even only an hour? I'd been certain I was just back home, zapped back into my office in Denon with almost exactly the same amount of empty caff and stimm drinks rolling around. It wasn't until I caught a speeder that I saw the typo, and at first I thought it was just some terrible grafitti. Node on. Where was Node off?

Giggling to himself in a small attempt to stay chipper, the sound of footsteps into the office was almost too quiet for Enigma to notice, and he was forced to tuck and roll without any of the usual accompanied banter that typically followed when he was exposed to danger.

The sound of blaster fire scorching the space he had occupied milliseconds ago. It had taken the Corpo audit a few hours to find him, and each time the programs ran, they were become more and more efficient at locating him. It was a risk coming here, but the building was one of the few directories in the system that had an actual flow of data from Node on to the real physical Denon that existed within meatspace.

It had taken an exhaustive amount of research, surveillance and espionage to find a possible open port to the system, small enough for a brief message to get out. Dropping the commlink, a small light began to flash in a variety of colours and patterns, the binary message encrypting itself even as it was created, a digital signal that all his hope hinged upon.

Rumors of the Corpo's creating an actual subsystem that rendered as realtime images using the slicers own neural system to procedurally generate the world had been cycled around for decades, but it was only ever that. A whisper of data spiraling through the holonet.

Until now.

Two years I've been here I think, although who knows how long it's been in meatspace he thought, ducking as one of the Corpo goons turned into the hallway and opened fire, shattering the window at the end of the hallway and exposing the Node Oneon streets 23 stories below, the sound of the blasters intermingling with the discordant music from the night clubs far below.

Head down, Enigma increased his pace before he leapt out the window, turning to watch the rage on the Corpo faces as he sailed across the street, travelling an impossible distance and clearing the 120 metre gap with ease, smashing through the window of the adjacent building's 15th story.

Who thought just jumping to a new file could be so dramatic. cd ~/ thats all it was.

While he would have liked to have thought he could have come up with a way to do it, the physical act of leaping from a skycraper and smashing down into a nearby one was probably outside his repertoire within his real shell, but here in Node on, it all came down to the script, commands and code.

Changing a directory? Hope you're ready to jump into a new building. What's that, shell dropping into root from a less command? Get ready to spring from a sewer up into a Corpo office. The physical act's here informed the code that the system interpreted as opposed to the code informing the act. It was ingenious in it's own way, the idea of a Corpo team taking him on at slicing was laughable, but in a world where every bullet that was fired carried with it a system approved deletion, it suddenly wasn't such a humorous situation.

Ignoring the yells from the Corpo team behind, no doubt busy trying to locate exactly what directory his new location represented, Enigma grabbed his back and sprinted out, disappearing into the dataflow that was the street traffic below.

At least they got the smell right he thought to himself a few hours later, sitting at one of the many food vendors that filled the lower parts of the city, where the destitute and forgotten sat and awaited deletion or the potential to be accessed again. Node on was an almost exact duplicate of Denon, the cityscape, the inhabitants, even the crappy food he thought.

I can only hope the message gets picked up this time, he mused as a downpour that he knew most certainly wasn't real began to pummel the streets of a universe that didn't even exist.

 

[Lance of Dreams]

cd ~/.

"How curious." Lance of Dreams recalled the memories with fascination. Two-meter-long cables ejected themselves from the base of the other person's skull.

The cyborg had believed that his troubles with the Corporations on Denon had been resolved. Darkwire erased and destroyed the control station in the Loronar System for the Brightband Project; that should have been the end of it. It wasn't enough that they tried to bastardize his technology into a cheap entertainment system on Parcellus Minor or misuse its capabilities for poorly conceived doppelgangers.

Now it was denying the very sanctity of life.

Lance of Dreams turned to face the comatose individual in his operation table. He mused over his own hypocrisy, completely self-aware that his own intentions were never so esoteric and unfathomable. Thousands of individuals had contributed to his database of life in this way, yet his awareness of what constituted unsanctionable never surfaced. It was a curious thing, his technology was infallible, yet this thing still eluded him whenever he awoke from the dream of living other people's lives. Apparently, certain qualities of a person were not transferable through data alone.

Yet perhaps...

Lance of Dreams closed his eyes again and entered the private shared space Darkwire had come to colloquially call "the Tatt-Chat."

"Hello, Frankie." The cyborg offered a wave towards his very alive but entirely digital acquaintance.

"Don't you 'Hello, Frankie' me. You never call or appear unless you need something. Cut the kark and get to it."

"Astute, very charming."

Frankie crossed her arms, just digital bytes for her now. Her avatar was all she had left to show off her displeasure to Lance, so she used it to full effect. "You could have designed some AI personality if you wanted charm."

"I've uploaded a pertinent memory file regarding a matter that may interest you. I have detected another intellectual property violation perpetrated by the Corporate Authorities of Denon, and it may pose a security risk to Darkwire."

"Well, now we're talking! This chit's what I live for. Lived for. Whatever." The digital woman had no more fists to hit with, not like that would stop her. She'd use every weapon in her arsenal against an enemy of Darkwire. "I don't see your karking...here it is. What am I s'posed to be looking at, Lance?"

"Someone witnessing the upload of someone's mind. In essence, they are repeating the experiment they started with you. En masse."

"Karking bishwag Corpo bastards! I don't got enough curses in me for this. Or enough booze. You gonna get off your plastoid ass and program me some real liquor someday, Lance?" Frankie mutters some more under her breath, reluctantly queuing up the file Lance set in her memory banks. The digital woman's avatar shifted and jittered while she watched. When she was done, she slammed a closed fist down on the table that appeared underneath just for that purpose. "By the spider-karking Abyss! Of course this is a karking security threat, I thought my spunky little runners took care of this chit already!"

"It seems the netrunner responsible is rather resilient, one project ends, a new one begins. Send the word out to Darkwire, I have physical coordinates to assault and a digital entrance to program."

With that, Lance of Dreams dismissed his digital visage and got to work creating an entrance into:

The Enigma Matrix.

​

OBJECTIVES:
- Bend the Crowbar, Neo: Enter through Lance of Dreams network portal to rescue Enigma Iuda from his matrix

OR

- Know Kung Fu: Physically assault the coordinates where a confirmed upload was completed

 

[Skeevi Merrill]

Though Skeevi hadn't been around for the Official Darkwire Tattoo Thing, a ratty futon and an improvised headset did the job just fine. Courtesy of Lance of Dreams — a terrifying entity but one with Access — Skeevi closed their eyes and left their cluttered little bolthole behind.

A new universe crashed in on them and normalized in seconds. Partially because this artificial reality looked and smelled like a rough part of town, recreated in loving detail. Skeevi put up their hood against a greasy rainfall. They whistled low and resonant, trying to hit certain harmonics that could Let People Know Someone Was Here.

Enigma Iuda

 

[Lilash "Jade" Covegra]

The female Jenet stared at the headset as she toyed with it, looking at how exactly one wore the device. "This? This is your plan? Chi'rrk are you trying to get me killed?" Her eyes then lifted towards the fellow Jenet.

The pair had been on the run for the past half-year, foolishly having crossed one of the many influential Corpo's on Denon and now having to go underground and limit contact with many on the planet. It was a job that went wrong from the very beginning, after being far too proud of the Xopsaloff job, she had decided her new target would be another member of the board for blackmail. What she didn't take into account though, was how small a fish she really was in this big, big pond. Her contact within the offices of the DirectX member talked himself up far too much, and the information that they decided to use turned out to lead them face to face with the barrel of a gun.

Unfortunately, Corpo incompetence led them to believe she was an agent of a rival DirectX board member and it had taken a silver tongue and a few blaster bolts in order to secure their escape. Sadly the security cameras would catch them in the end, as they had found that there were agents that had begun to seek to eliminate them. The Corpo agents made sure if they didn't want to find themselves six feet under, they'd need to hide even further underground where they didn't care to look.

Now, they had a plan. If the Corpo's wanted to see them dead, that is exactly what they would do. The only issue was having to find out a backdoor to their records, and word about a program the Corpo's were seeking to take advantage of would be just what they might desire. All it will take is a single favour, and they might just be able to be a confirmed kill on the records of the fools that had tried to hunt them down. Then maybe she might just be able to move freely again, without having to look over her shoulder every half second.

Her photographic memory tucked away her image into the back of her mind, before finally sliding on the headset.

 

[Ivory Stroud]

The torrential downpour was unlike anything Ivory had experienced in recent memory.

The downpour had started slow - first, a tangy, chemical smell in the air. She'd sniffed it as she'd left her apartment but thought nothing of it; assuming, unfortunately, that it was just another strange smell to add to the litany of strange smells she'd already cataloged during her time on the ecumenopolis. Her second error was paying little mind to the population as they seemed all-too eager to get off the streets: vehicles, shops, homes, and even the homeless seemed in a particular hurry to make themselves scarce. If she'd been paying closer attention, she might have delayed what was now inevitable.

Her third error, and perhaps her most grevious, had been not bringing an umbrella.

Not that it might have mattered, anyway.

Instead, as a warm wind had whipped up, she'd simply assumed it would be anther windy evening on the streets of Denon, and continued walking down what were now nearly-empty streets. When the first bits of rain fell, she'd even smiled up at the sky.

Until a droplet hit her square in the eye.

And it started to burn.

At that moment, she knew she'd made a terrible mistake.

Acid Rain

When the downpour began, she'd barely made it under cover in-time to avoid at best, a rash, and at worse, actual damage to her skin.

Now, she waited underneath a metal awning for a ride-share to arrive (at significant cost to her), sullen and irritated at her swollen eyeball and the state of the world only a few feet beyond. The air stank like copper; the smell of old dried blood, and trash. Wet trash. Thankfully, the watery acid falling from the sky didn't seem as strong as she'd immediately feared, but it was still of concern to residents; she hadn't glimpsed a single soul in almost an hour. They were probably all staring out their windows laughing at her. Calling her a "stupid tourist".

Feth it.

When her ride finally showed up, she covered her head with her coat, darted into the downpour, and practically dove into the enclosed speeder. The driver, a wise-cracking Weequay, chuckled at her misfortune and demanded payment up front. She gave him the agreed-upon amount, and a little extra to keep his trap shut for the remainder of the trip.

When she finally arrived at her destination, the storm had abated - somewhat. But the air still stank and had become too humid for comfort. It reminded her of similar circumstances back on Coruscant; life in the Undercity had been similar, but she'd all-but forgotten the dangers associated with high pollution and shoddy weather control. It served her right.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The tattoo parlor was one that had been recommended to her by Daiya ; a friendly face and a member of Darkwire. Someone she could trust to do the job she needed. Someone who had the tools and know-how to provide a particular service. The woman grinned at her through a cloud of tabac smoke. Ivory's eye still stung and the smoke served to irritate it further.

"Got yourself caught in the rain, huh, girl?" The artist quipped. Ivory scowled at her. "If that's what you call rain, I'm Marlene Starlight."

The woman gave a harsh laugh. "Well, if that's the case, we don't serve your kind here, Miss."

A credit chit thudded onto the desk between them. "How about now?"

The artist grinned and jerked a tatted thumb at one of the chairs in the smoky parlor. At least the place was clean, Ivory thought. "Have a seat. Wanna look at the catalogue?" Ivory shook her head in response as she walked deeper in, sliding into the offered chair and adjusting herself further back. "Nah. I already know what I want." She indicated the inside of her right forearm - a space which had, up until now, been mostly bare. Her artist nodded and began the process of setting up for the work ahead. It would take some time...

But Ivory had all night.

The dull hum and steady, nagging pain wove a song deep enough to fall within a sort of trance. She allowed her mind to grow quiet... silencing the nagging voice in the back of her mind, allowing herself to forget the dull ache in her eyeball. She let the woman work and closed herself off to the world - relaxing her breathing and stretching out her senses.

When she was sufficiently relaxed, she allowed herself to reach into the Living Force... past the hum of the tattoo needle... beyond the flickering lights... past the walls of the tattoo shop... and further. She focused some of her energy on visualizing a white healing light shining behind both of her eyes, which made her eyelids twitch and grow warm. While the healing intention did its' work, she drifted off.

A voice, then a sudden tap-tap-tap on her foot, woke her from her trance some time later.

When she opened her eyes, the big woman who'd performed the tattoo was standing over her, holding a glass of water and smirking down at her.

"You dozed off for a while there. You're done."

As Ivory reached for the glass of water, she blinked... and felt no pain. She took it, drank it down, then handed the glass back with a smile - now in a better mood. She felt rejuvenated. "Thanks..." She croaked, clearing her voice. The recycled air in the tattoo parlor had dried out her throat some, but the water helped.

Ivory looked down at her right forearm, and saw the completed tattoo. It was modeled similarly to the Darkwire Eye, but with her own flair. What looked like a Devaronian tail curled around her wrist, and the entire piece had a pointed, jagged, aggressive look to it. She couldn't help but smile, turning her wrist & forearm from side to side, admiring how the ink seemed to glitter in the neon lights from outside; almost like it were made of living metal. She hoped that Daiya would be proud.

Ivory swung her legs off the chair and stood, stretching her entire body, then turning her attention back to the tattoo artist. The woman regarded her with a friendly, but sarcastic grin.

"Say... Didn't you have a swollen eye when you came in here?" She asked, her expression turning suspicious.

Ivory gave her a shrug in answer, reached into a pocket of her coat, and produced another credit chit. From a distance, she tossed it to the woman, who caught it out of the air deftly. "Nope. I guess not." The woman nodded... inspecting the chit before setting it down on the desk beside the first.

"Yeah. I guess not."

Ivory was already retrieving her coat and shrugging it on. With a wave, she bade the Darkwire Artist a goodbye and tentatively exited the shop... Finding the storm had passed, and the smell of old blood and wet trash had lessened considerably.

Ivory took a breath, shrugged her shoulders, produced a cigara, and put it to her lips.

She had one more stop to go...

Then, she would join her companions for a journey into Cyberspace.

Enigma Iuda Lance of Dreams

Joining Objective 1: Bend The Crowbar, Neo

 

[Cassus Akovin]

Cassus considered himself to be a rational person.

The sort of person that believed in a thorough evaluation of evidence and discounted unexplainable phenomenon as nothing more than natural circumstances that were poorly researched or improperly understood by anyone except an expert in the field.

However.

Ghosts were very real. This much he could be certain of. For months, he had been chasing the face of his dead mother on the streets of Denon, and then deep in the literal recesses of hell itself. He saw someone that looked like Hacks on Altier and saved someone with all her original hardware after following a lead as ephemeral as a brief online status on a CryptNet forum. Once again, he found himself contemplating how to resuscitate the long and dead. Cassus sat in his bed, on a lonely ship, haunted by memories of family.

Lance of Dreams was undoubtedly a creep, but the cyborg was nearly unrivaled in his information access and technical ability. He had little reason to doubt that on Denon, the dead were stirring in cyberspace once again. Gripping his mother's Lightfoil, The Relentless Blade, he vowed to avenge these imprisoned spirits.

Closing his eyes, he fell inward into the black mourning tear on his face.

Opening them again, he still held his blade and felt his consciousness tugged through Lance of Dreams and his portal to the Matrix. Suddenly, it felt like he was on Denon again. It felt strange and familiar, like a mirror that was bent but not enough to majorly distort your image. Mirrors made Cassus unreasonably angry every since seeing himself kill his mother. In distaste, he spat on the concrete.

To his surprise, the concrete seemed to give way, as if melting under potent acid rain.

Not long after, he could hear a melodic hum in his ear. Like hunting a mark, Cassus followed it. The distant ping led him closer to the hops nearest to the source. The process felt faster than was naturally possible, but his mind filled in the blanks. In what felt simultaneously like a reasonable and an unreasonably short time, he found himself with someone unfamiliar to him covered in yellow.

"Hey, I heard your humming. I have a plan, you game?" He asked Skeevi Merrill

Enigma Iuda Lilash "Jade" Covegra Ivory Stroud

 

[Skeevi Merrill]

The process felt faster than was naturally possible, but his mind filled in the blanks. In what felt simultaneously like a reasonable and an unreasonably short time, he found himself with someone unfamiliar to him covered in yellow.

"Hey, I heard your humming. I have a plan, you game?" He asked Skeevi Merrill Skeevi Merrill

Digital rain stuttered upward and down again as an unfamiliar man approached, more lag-hopping than walking. Skeevi wrapped their digital coat a little tighter and tentatively held their digital ground.

No, wait, he did look a little familiar.

"You hang out at the Blue Flame, right?" they said, ducking into a digital transit shelter. "I'm Skeevi, Skeevi Merrill. Only plan I had was 'find someone friendly,' so yeah, I'll go with yours. What's actually going on?"

 

[Enigma Iuda]

Objective one: Bend the crowbar Neo


It had taken Enigma roughly three weeks to map out the entirety of the cityspace and commit it to a combination of physical memory and digital uploads-

He stopped abruptly, the rain still pouring down from whatever program ensured that the weather here was just as inconvenient as the real Denon, and leant against a nearby railing, giggling to himself for a moment as began to light up a smoke and watch the traffic below continue to flow, some never actually having a destination and just continually looping throughout the streets.

Physical memory? How is it physical here, maybe digiphys? What does that make the uploads, doubledig? Quick, upload to the system and hit the weights, I wanna get digiphys shredded for festival and see if it speeds up the doubledig uploads I get.

I like it!

The street he was in offered a phenomenal view into the lower layers of Node on, the scavengers running back and forth, desperate programs that had long since run their time to live out, now seeking for a piece of scrapcode that will enable them to rejoin the flow of traffic, integrate into the system or potentially be reborn as something new, whether one of the infinite speeders below, or one of the agents of the Corpos that even now were hunting through their subdirectories in search of his information.

I never could find my way back here at home...


The street was one that back on the actual Denon, Enigma always had difficulty finding his way back to, but whether by incidental design or some quirk or bug, the system here moulded to what he wanted, reflecting the Denon he remembered as opposed to the Denon that was and as such, he never really needed to try and remember how to get back here, he just had to focus on it and begin moving and poof, here he was.

It was one of the few things he had to his advantage, a prisoner that wasn't aware they were in a prison was much easier to handle than one forced into compliance, and the system here was oh so desperate to ensure that those trapped weren't able to tell the difference between this and the meatspace they actually occupied. But they only had his memory to use, all the prejudice and bias with it and so, while it was much closer to Denon than even he would be able to render into a program, it was only a facsimile of the Denon he remembered, not the planet himself.

Flicking his smoke out, Enigma turned to walk back down the alleyway and smashed right into the alley wall that was now immediately behind him.

"What the fe-"

Readjusting his mask, even as he looked the alleyway began to shift and alter, the briefest glimpse of binary appearing within the walls and graffiti as they shifted and flowed like oil on water, adjusting and changing into a new geographic puzzle, right before his very eyes.

What is this?

Even as considered the bizarre phenomenon, blinding lights from above, like those described in many species holy texts, flowed down and into the street, and even as he watched, figures began to descend from the heaven, the whole city flowing and adjusting, their own memories of how Denon looked being factored into the calculations and as such, Node On changed.

But he was too busy to notice that, Enigma was dancing and whooping, punching his fists into the air at the sight.

The Darkwire were finally connecting.

Skeevi Merrill Cassus Akovin Ivory Stroud Lilash "Jade" Covegra

 

[Hacks]

Few Friends . . .

The sun was setting on this side of Denon. Twilight was approaching, the last rays of sun, its warm embrace, suddenly extinguished by the horizon. In a way, Hacks too felt the same about Darkwire. Darkness was coming for the shadowrunners, threatening to extinguish them all. She had to prevent it the only way she knew how, but friends were so few these days. Where were the shadowrunners of the old days? She wondered, pulling up her datapad to see the last messages she had shared with Enigma before his line had gone dark.​

​

"Mhm," Hacks mumbled in thought, "I don't usually like to invade my friends privacy. . ." she drifted off with the thought as her actions began to take over. Twenty fingers dancing across the datapads virtual keyboard, code streaming across the screen as lines were formulated. She plucked out data from secure servers over the HoloNet, as easy for the slicer as picking berries from a tree. It was the company for whom Enigmas number had once been assigned, a black book corporation that dealt in shady deals for the underworld, providing private networks away from prying eyes. Usually it would be far more troublesome to burst through their firewalls, and never so quickly, but then again most slicers weren't Hacks.​

​

Information ballooned across her augmented reality glasses, galactic standard times, dates and pinpoint coordinates of signal transmits and receives. It was a timeframe of Enigmas last activities dated... her eyes squinted, brow furrowed, "Bloody drek." If this information was correct, Enigma went dark over two years ago. She couldn't believe it, was he dead? her brain was racing. She knew Enigma had vanished, but so do many in this line of work. She had figured he liked his paycheck and jumped world. Maybe gone to ground. She ran a hand through her hair.​

​

"Or he's tossed the datapad too," Hacks said to herself, however unlikely. Slicers got attached to their gear, like addicts. Fingers sliding across the keys, she brought up the last known coordinates transmitted from his datapad. It was a cold lead, ice cold, but at least it was something. She switched her frames to show a global map of Denon and input the longitude and latitude values. The image loaded and spread out before her, a virtual 3-dimensional layout of the coordinates. A skycutter. It was Corporate. "A job gone wrong?" she asked herself, mulling over the thought. She shut down the map, toned back her display and slid her datapad back into the inner pocket of her jacket.​

​

Then she stood, eyes surveying the city. Hacks was going to find Enigma.​

​

 

[Hacks]

Some time later . . .

Hacks verified her location was the same as the coordinates she had received when she tapped into the black book corp. It was a skycutter, its uppermost floors disappearing into the distant cloud cover above. It was a dizzying height that brought on a sense of vertigo. She didn't recognise the company logo at the building entrance. Guards at the door blocked the way. She walked towards the door, as she moved her eyes sliced with precise movements, registering as commands on her augmented glasses. She pulled the identification tags of the closest security officer and using his I.D as a base she fabricated her own pass.

At the door they gave her a wary look, and although they seemed to squirm in their suits they didn't ask her to remove her weapons. She had been quite explicit in allowing her arms in her corporate pass. The lobby floor was grossly opulent, given the streets outside were overflowing with garbage and human waste. A nauseating change of pace. Okay Hacks, keep a cool head, she reminded herself as she walked with purpose. She looked nothing the part of a corpo, but it was likely security had assumed she was hired help for whichever suit owned this building.

Eyes flickering and dancing about, her glasses responded and slashed their way through finely-tuned corporate firewalls. Complex webs of code were gently brushed aside as she gained access into a vertiginous matrix of information. She sent out coded probes that wormed through oceans of data, looking for what she needed. Enigma was here last, what happened to him. Then a ping, and another. Suddenly her vision was flooded with holocaptures and biosigns. It was Enigma. His body was below the tower, labelled and stored. What the hell were they doing to him.

Hacks pulled her mind away and looked around, finding the nearest elevator and beelining for it. Keeping her head low and averting her gaze from the wandering eyes of suits. She thumbed the control and the doors slid open with a hydraulic hiss. She entered, closed the door and checked her data, confirming the sublevel. She altered her corporate pass with increased security clearance, swiped it at the panel and hit the floor number, sublevel twenty-three.

Her stomach jumped as the elevator descended with surprising pace. Her gut was twisting and pulling, anxiety taking hold. She may not have spoken to Enigma in years, and their friendship was founded on business, but she still liked the man. There weren't enough slicers on Denon with his sense of style. She slipped her firearms out from the inner folds of her jacket, flicked the safeties on them and waited for the doors to open, weapons leveled.

 

[Enigma Iuda]

Almost skipping his way down the streets, Enigma tried to keep his excitement under wraps, but it was extremely difficult. I always used to think that chilling inside a computer network would be the dream, but it's like that time I added unpasteurised caff to the synth-drinks, it's not as good as you imagined. At least here my stomach isn't destroyed, damn.

The chances of the Corpo's not noticing the intrusion was almost zero and no doubt they were scrambling even now, some of them attempting to stem the flow, the ports that had been torn open or the firewall that was burning down around them. Additionally, others would be hunting for those who had already made it into here, but these were no mere script-kiddies launching some payload they bought on an illegal holo.

This was the DarkWire and any one of the individuals were capable of scorching a corpo network to nothing but a meme filled scrapcode that served no purpose but an example to those who chose to screw with them. Or they chose to screw with.

Skipping along to the dischordant beats, Enigma stopped abruptly as he recognized the tune. It was subtle, a viscous mix of apathy, rebellion and anger that brough to mind a burning holoscreen with popping candy exploding out of it, a feeling that made you want to get up and dance but also burn the buildings down around you.

Hacks .

She wasn't here, not that here was really here either, but he recognised her signature straight away. Each slicer had their favourite exploits and while it took a fellow connoisseur to recognise them, like an expert sommelier a fellow slicer could pick up the tones, the underlying flavours and even the themes attached. While Enigma favoured gifs of graffiti plastered over corpo signs or even self made videos that always seemed to end in expletives and screaming, Hacks always seemed to radiate pure rebellion.

How to get her attention though....

Turning to one of the street signs nearby, Enigma took some spraypaint out and began to blotch out the streetname before grabbing another can and deftly rewriting 'Corpo's taint: No suits allowed'. With luck, Hacks would notice the filename change in the system.

Although, I don't know if I want the Corpos to notice or not....

 

[Hacks]

The elevator doors opened in a hailstorm of slugs. The sound akin to the deafening, mind-bending speed of a grindcore drummer. Duracrete, plastisteel and cloth shredded, shrapnel and tattered clothes filled the room. Lab techs and security officers who had been standing about the room, minding their own business, had quickly had their lives cut short without notice. Blood splattered the walls like a macabre holoflick. A growing pool of blood stained the marble floor.

The four-armed cyborg walked through the massacre she had inflicted mindlessly on these corpos. Her boots becoming sticky with blood, viscera squished underfoot. Bodies riddled with countless slugs, they had no time to defend themselves. The ones who had tried to run never had a chance, the submachine guns were high-tech, smart-fired rounds tracked heat signatures. Hacks only had to pull the trigger and the gun did the rest.

She looked around for a terminal, something she could jack into and asses where they were keeping Enigma. She began to pilfer through a blood-soaked lab coat, still worn by the man who had just seconds ago died. Hacks tugged at a datapad in his pocket and sat it in her lower hands. She wrote a quick intrusion program, bypassing the security code required to unlock the pad. Once in she gently prodded around.

Strangely, as she lazily scrolled directories, she noticed a file name change. She purged her loose files and rapidly locked down her own internal connections. Her personal hardware secure from outside intruders, her four hands began to type on the stolen screen. Twenty fingers working with inhuman speed. A crude trojan was piggybacked on a debilitating worm protocol, it would infect the local systems and quickly begin to clone itself, generating dozens of worms that while easy to destroy, would eat through unsecured files. Without complete focus on the worm, it could be deadly for a corporation, that is how her trojan would slip in unnoticed, while the corps rushed to expunge the growing threat of the worm virus.

Monitoring local feeds via the trojan, her program came back empty handed, at least for what she was trying to find. The source of the file edit came from within the corporate network. What type of corpo does a file name change like that? she thought. It was the type of thing a slicer or shadowrunner would do for fun. Hacks changed the file that had been overwritten. Who are you, what do you want.

Hacks kept the trojan active in the systems, transferred control from the datapad to her augmented glasses and dropped the datapad. She lifted a mechanical leg and slammed her cybernetic foot onto the screen, shattering the device. She would monitor the file on her glasses and track progress from there. Her eyes darted around the room. Alarms were bound to go off soon. No doubt whichever guard was sleeping on duty would soon wake up and see the blood on the security cams.

 

[Enigma Iuda]

Standing in the rain, Enigma felt his pulse begin to quicken. It was strange how it occurred, did stress here translate into his physical body? Was his heartrate spiking in meatspace? Or was it potentially the inverse, where something was causing his real heart to spike and it was transferring to himself here? If the Corpos were able to read his biometrics and he was feeding them, they could potentially race that signal to his location-

No, time to focus.

Breathing slowly, he watched as the sign shifted, Hacks message flowing across in bright ink to replace his paint. With a deft shake and rattle, he sprayed over and replaced the data, resisting the urge to write his thanks, his appreciation or even that he missed his colleague after all this time. I can't just write ENIGMA, pretty sure thats like labelling your file ILLEGAL_CONTENT or sending a fund transfer labelled NOT DRUGS.

Instead he sprayed across MASKED MAN MCCOOL YOUR DRINKING BUDDY. I NEED TO GET OUT.

Would she get it? Probably, although again, he had no idea how much time had passed. out there. For all he knew, Hacks was an elderly woman, her chrome rusting in her skin. But he had to have faith. Unaware of the firefight occuring above him in realspace, he settled down and awaited a return message.

 

[Hacks]

The smoke from her barrels had now set off the fire alert system. A low droning siren filled the room and hallways beyond. Fire suppression systems activated, sprinklers raining down over her. The water and blood began to mix, spreading into a wide puddle that soon consumed the length of the room. Her heavy boots splashed a path through the inner laboratory. Red lights overhead set a grim visage.

Rows of tables spread out before her. Bodies laid out, intubated and wrapped in plastic. Dozens of wires snaked into cranial implants. She walked down the aisles, looking around. Who the hell was she looking for? she thought with frustration, a growing horror slowly seeping in. She never really saw Enigma without his mask, maybe she had once or twice, but it had been so long she had forgotten. It wasn't like she kept photos.

Then the file directory changed. "Holy fuck," Hacks whispered. It confirmed it, Enigma was alive and he was inside their system. "Where are you?" she wrote back, not yet dawning on her that he was one of the bodies hooked into this corporate mind-net. Behind her the elevator doors crashed open, "Oi, what the hell!?" a distant voice roared. Hacks glanced over her shoulder and saw armed security checking the dead for any survivors, blasters at the ready. "Quickly," she added, dropping to a crouch and pulling herself behind a table, "I'm getting you out of here!"

Enigma Iuda