Friday Night Firefight: A Cyberpunk Isekai

"Hacking is some bullshit," I muttered as I closed the lid to my laptop and stood from my desk.

I stretched, my body feeling an almost visceral need to get far from the work my laptop represented, and wandered over to my bed where I slumped over. I stared up at the ceiling and cursed the lack of furniture in my tiny apartment.

It had been a month and a half since I had sold the Arasaka Tower arcade cabinet to Yoko and got a new identity and some cyberware in exchange. Almost immediately after leaving Vik's place I went to an apartment building near Lizzie's and rented a one-bedroom. What money I had left after the surgery and the clothes went towards rent and food, so I wasn't able to stock my place with a ton of furniture. All I had was a desk and a bed, and most of my days were spent wandering between the two, relentlessly studying programming and hacking. And all that time in my apartment, staring at a computer screen and trying to decipher this world's version of hacking, had led me to one unassailable conclusion.

Hacking was some bullshit.

And not the good kind of bullshit. In the game, V could stroll into a warzone, do a quick scan of everyone, and then 20 seconds later people would be shocked into unconsciousness. That was the good kind of bullshit. That was the kind of OP skils I had hoped for when I had traded Yoko for the cyberdeck.

I wanted an advantage that could make me ridiculous amounts of money in short periods of time or turn me into a murder machine whose very gaze struck fear into the hearts of my enemies. When I got the cyberdeck, visions of me becoming a virtual god, striding through meatspace like a netrunning giant, snapping off overheats and short circuits and stealing valuable information danced through my mind. But hacking didn’t work like that in the real world.

It was similar, in many ways, to the boring type of hacking that I had been studying in my past life. Except worse because in this world there was no Youtube full of videos of kindly Indian dudes explaining why my code was garbage. Instead, I was forced to spend countless hours staring at a laptop screen, wondering why I was bothering with netrunning at all.

One of the first things I had learned about hacking in the 2077 world was that quickhacks weren’t all that powerful. In the game, V could rock up to a room filled with Scavs, drop a cyberpsychosis quickhack, and then sit back and watch as the problem took care of itself. That wasn’t possible in the real world. Most everyone in the city had some form of ICE – intrusion countermeasures – packed onto their neuroports that were meant to stop netrunners from just waltzing into a room and wiping out everyone with quickhacks. People’s ICE ranged from ‘barely there’ to ‘holy hell, it would easier to just put a bullet in this dude.’ And once you finally broke through that ICE, quickhacks relied almost entirely on a person’s cyberware to be effective.

They weren’t spells that you could just fling around willy nilly. You had to specifically attack a person’s cyberware before a quickhack would be useful. You want to use a reboot optics to temporarily blind someone? Better hope that your target is rocking optics and not just their normal boring eyes. Short circuit forced a person’s cyberware to release the power of its internal battery in a static discharge. But what if your target only had subdermal armor or titanium bones – two very common cyberware upgrades that didn’t have internal batteries? How about weapon glitch? It was only useful for messing with fancy smart weapons or tech guns that most people didn’t bother with. You couldn’t hack a Lexington or a Unity. Those were boring normal weapons. Even ping, one of the most inobtrusive quickhacks in a netrunner’s arsenal, wasn’t all that useful.

As a program, it could map out all the ports connected to the same network. That was undoubtedly useful. Until it wasn’t. A bunch of guards walking the perimeter of a secured warehouse might all be connected to the same security network. In which case, Ping gave you a bevy of information in the form of telling you how screwed you were if you tried to sneak into the place. But what about random gang members hanging out in their own home base? It was doubtful that they were connected to some security server which meant that Ping was next to useless.

All of this is to say that quickhacks weren’t the instant ‘I win’ button that the game made them out to be.

While studying hacking and programming over the past month and a half, I had also come to the realization that I had hamstrung myself by spending all my money on a cyberdeck OS rather than buying an actual cyberdeck. There were basically three different levels of netrunner in Night City: script kiddies like V, professionals like T-Bug, and the elite like Songbird.

V, like me, had a cyberdeck OS: a small chip that was installed into a neuroport and allowed a netrunner to wirelessly connect to nearby access points and systems. It was kind of like using a cell phone to hack nearby systems. Sure, it let you do some neat tricks, and you didn’t look like a normal netrunner, and you didn’t have to lug around a whole bunch of equipment everywhere you went. But there were severe limitations. You couldn’t do a deep dive with a cyberdeck OS because it would quickly overheat and fry your brain. It was much more useful as a force multiplier for solos; something that let them have an extra tool with which to fight enemies while on a gig.

Serious netrunners, like T-Bug and Kiwi from the anime, had portable cyberdecks they often built themselves. They were around the size of a clunky cell phone and had connection cords that could jack into a netrunner’s neuroport. It was like carrying a laptop around with you when you hacked. It was somewhat mobile, gave more power and tools than a cell phone, and let you attack the NET architecture – or NETArch – of a building in ways that a mere cyberdeck OS couldn’t handle.

And then there were the netrunners like Songbird or that one Netwatch dude. They were the elites who plugged into a chair and had their own server farms. Or they had all that stuff along with cooling units and extra RAM, all stuffed inside their bodies, turning themselves into large walking cyberdecks. Those were the kinds of people who did deep dives of the NET, who could nab encrypted information from corporations, and could tear apart the NETArch of an entire city block. They’d probably take one look at my silly little cyberdeck OS, pat me on the head, give me a patronizing smile, and then kick me to the door.

I got up out of my bed and made my way back to the cheap laptop I had purchased from Yoko. I knew that I needed to keep studying, but staying cooped up in the apartment was slowly driving me insane. I pinballed between my desk and bed, not wanting to either work or relax, until finally I just threw my hands in the air and started pulling on my shoes to go outside for a couple hours.

Shortly after I had rented my apartment, I closed the doors and turned into a shut-in. I devoted all my time to studying META, the programming language of the 2077 world. Honestly, learning an entire coding language in only a month and a half was an impressive feat. Or at least, it would have been if META didn’t share numerous similarities to a bunch of other programming languages I already knew.

I slipped into pants and a fresh shirt, tugged on my old worn Wraith boots, and left my apartment. When I got to the lobby I waved to Marcus, one of the first people I had met when I moved into my new apartment, and made my way towards the door.

Marcus ran a ‘Dime a Duzz’ franchise in the lobby of the building, one of the many pawnshops of Watson. Our first conversation saw him dropping numerous hints about how he never checked the provenance of any of the items he sold, and that he was always interested in buying things that people found in their daily travels. I guess I gave off the air of someone who’d steal anything not nailed down and he was quick to try and strike up a conversation whenever I left the building.

I stopped by the Ru Lai shop on my way outside, tossing the guy working behind the counter five eddies, and grabbed one of the meat buns he’d been working on. They were delicious and one of the few extravagances that I allowed myself.

Once out on the street I glanced over towards Lizzie’s and flirted with the idea of stopping in at the alcove. It was only a fleeting thought though. One that I quickly banished before putting my head down, picking a direction, and walking.

Since I had rented my apartment, my interactions with Fred, Mor and Deng had become…odd. They looked at me with pride whenever I spoke with them. Like I had ‘made it’ or something. I’d left the streets behind and had a warm place to sleep, and that seemed to make them believe I was destined for greatness. Or at least, as close to greatness that a former homeless dude who had been mugged twice by the same guy could achieve.

The first time I visited the alcove after renting my apartment, it felt almost as if I were intruding. The people hanging around Lizzie’s no longer saw me as one of their own. Fred and Mor didn’t really know how to talk with me, and I didn’t know what to say to them. I was spending all my time trying to survive and I wasn’t there for a lot of the inside jokes they’d made over the past month and a half. How could they talk to me about programming? How could I talk to them about the gossip making its way through the Roundabout?

I got the impression that they were keeping me at arm’s length, as if just by being near them I’d catch the homeless bug or something. Part of me understood why they were doing it. They were proud of me and were living vicariously through me. No. It was more like I was their protégé or something. If I stayed off the streets and got a good corpo job and made a boatload of money, then it showed that they had achieved something through me.

I kept walking north, passing the Med Center on my left before eventually reaching Megabuilding 11. There were a few vending machines out front, and I quickly checked my mental map of the area to make sure I hadn’t hit them lately. I breached the security on one of the machines and slipped a small program into its OS. It was easy enough. Companies often didn’t bother putting tough ICE on vending machines.

The only thing my program did was change the selling price of the items in the vending machine. Instead of costing five eddies, everything only cost one. I slipped an eddie into the slot, pushed the tab marked NiCola, deleted my program from the machine, and then cleared the access logs. Easy peasy.

Sure, I could have grabbed all the drinks in the machine for free and then sold them off piecemeal to local stores for pennies on the dollar (ennies on the eddie?) but that would have caused some heat. I was trying to keep my head down while I worked on my hacking. Getting caught by the NCPD for the minor crime of vending machine hacking wasn’t what I wanted. As long as I stole four or five eddies from a vending machine and didn’t keep hitting the same ones, I was pretty sure nobody would look twice at me. It was an easy way to supplement my meagre diet. NiCola and XXL Burritos. Only an eddie a piece. Not the healthiest of meals but it was cheap and filling.

My legs ate up the pavement while I was deep in thought. How was I going to make rent next month? I only had around 280 eddies left and no clue on how to get more. In less than two weeks, if nothing changed, I’d be back on the streets. If that happened, I knew I wouldn’t be staying in Watson. Sure, Fred and Mor would take me in again and they wouldn’t say anything. But I’d still feel like I was a burden or that I had let them down.

A short while later I snapped out of my thoughts and looked around, a chill racing up my spine as I noticed a Maelstrom gang tag on the wall of a building across the street. That wasn’t good.

My aimless wandering had led me further north than I had ever been before. Fred and Mor had beat it into me to never head north into the industrial district. North Watson was Maelstrom territory, and they had a nasty habit of grabbing the homeless and stuffing them full of faulty cyberware just to watch them go cyberpsycho.

“Don’t stop here kid. Keep walking.”

I nearly jumped out of my skin at the anger-filled voice that assaulted me. The guard had been summoned to my side, standing behind a metal fence surrounding a warehouse, and I took notice of the scowl etched across his face. The fence blocked off a sizeable lot filled with shipping containers and blue vans with dull gold letters stenciled on the side. RCS. Revere Courier Service. My eyes traced a line from the vans towards the guard and I noticed his hand creep towards his side to the gun holstered there.

Thinking fast, I patted my pockets and said “I’m sorry, I think I left my cigarettes back at my apartment. You wouldn’t happen to have one I could bum, would you?”

That seemed to have caught him off guard, both my request as well as the politeness in my voice, because he just stared at me, bewildered, before letting out a stream of invectives that sent me running.

I crossed the street and slipped into an alleyway across from the warehouse. No one was around so I crept to the corner and peered out at the warehouse and guard without being noticed. All thoughts of the dangers of northern Watson fled with my first glimpse of the warehouse.

It had twigged a memory as I stood there, staring at the area, willing my brain to try and remember where I had seen the place before. A barbed wire topped fence stretched across the perimeter of the warehouse. Numerous shipping containers were stacked on top of each other and cluttered the area around the warehouse. Workers were loading and unloading blue vans that sported an RCS logo stenciled on the side.

Why was this place giving off ‘remember me’ vibes? It had to be connected to a gig from the game, right? This was Watson, which meant that it was probably Regina who had given out the gig. Did I steal one of these vans in the game? Did I clear out the area of gang members? The mystery deepened when I caught a glimpse of a couple Tyger Claws walking through the warehouse.

It was normal to see Tyger Claws in the Chinatown district of Watson, or down by the Kabuki Roundabout. Their territory stretched from Westbrook to Watson, and I had grown used to seeing their tattooed forms and Kusanagi bikes in the neighborhoods I frequented. It was easy to tell when you wandered into Claw territory. They graffiti marked entire sides of buildings with dragon or tiger stencils, and the idling sounds of the motorcycles were an easy identifier that they were in the neighborhood.

But there weren’t any Tyger Claw markings on the RCS warehouse. Their Kusanagi’s and Shion’s weren’t parked in the warehouse lot, and none of the workers were covered in garish glowing tattoos.

I found a nearby building that was worn down and only had a cheap door lock as security. I quickly jimmied the lock, climbed a couple sets of stairs to get to the top floor, and snuck into an abandoned apartment with a clear view of the RCS warehouse. Then I settled down to watch.

Blue jumpsuit clad workers saturated the warehouse floor, loading and unloading the vans. I counted 12 workers and guards who patrolled the perimeter. A few hours passed while I watched the workers do their jobs. At around 630 pm I watched two RCS vans pull into the warehouse loading bays and a few Tyger Claws came out from deeper inside the warehouse to start loading up the vans. That made no sense whatsoever. Tyger Claws operating in Maelstrom territory, a bunch of blue vans that were valuable targets, cargo containers and a warehouse filled with goods.

And then it hit me.

I remembered the mission. I had to steal an RCS van and drive it out of the warehouse, and a couple blocks away there were a bunch of Maelstrom members who cut off the road with the burning wreckage of multiple cars. I had to plow through them, park the van in one of Regina’s garages, and then leave the area.

As soon as all that information flowed into my mind I settled back and started forming a plan. I needed to pay rent in a couple weeks, and here was the perfect opportunity to make some cash.