2023 was a slight improvement on 2022.
The Saturday group had a fair number of sessions, Kevin ran Pulp Hack and concluded his 12 session run. Matakishi ran short campaigns of The Dee Sanction and Edgespace. However, the Sunday group is still not participating in any RPGs. The Friday group which planned to play a session a month quickly faded away at the start of the year after a couple of sessions. On the upside though, I've started running a Saturday afternoon game which should occir every 3 weeks or so, In 2023 I managed to run 5 sessions. RPGs played: Different RPGS:4. New RPGs: 4. Sessions I ran: 5 Total sessions: 25 Breakdown is as follows: RPGs played: Vaesen: 3 sessions. Pulp Hack: 9 sessions. The Dee Sanction: 4 sessions Space Hack/Edgespace: 4 sessions. Total 20 sessions. RPGs run: The Evils of Illmire: 5 sessions.
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2022 turned out to be a quiet year for RPGs.
My Saturday group slowed down it's rate of play significantly due to a number obstacles and we only played 6 sessions. I concluded my Beach Patrol game and Kevin kicked of his Pulp Hack campaign. My Sunday group had been non-existent for the entirety of 2022 and played nothing. Meanwhile, Matt managed to complete his last adventure for Romance of the Perilous Lands, then we managed to sort out a regular once-monthly Friday RPG which was Vaesen. Different RPGs: 4 New RPGs: 2 Sessions I ran: 3 Total sessions: 10 These numbers are much lower than 2021. This breaks down as follows: The Pulp Hack: 3 Beach Patrol (Ran.): 3 Romance of the Perilous Lands: 2 Vaesen: 3 Let's hope 2023 is better! Covid-19 continued to be an issue in 2021 and significantly affected some of the roleplaying I took part in.
The Saturday RPG group, which is now played over video-chat was easily the most prolific, most of this was Matakishi running nearly 2 entire 'seasons' of his Wired Neon Cities campaign in the earlier part of the year. Different RPGs: 4 Sessions I ran: 9 Total sessions: 41 During 2021 I participated in 41 RPG sessions over 4 different RPGs, of those I ran 9 sessions. This is mostly down on 2020, where I participated in 74 sessions over 10 different RPGs, however, I only ran 1 session in 2020. The break down is as follows. Wired Neon Cities: 25 Beach Patrol (Ran): 9 Romance of the Perilous Lands: 5 Those Dark Places: 2 I'm also seriously running late with my blogging, being over 6 months behind and will add links when I'm able to. 26th June 2021 It's another Saturday evening logged into video chat and time for the next chapter in Matakishi's Wired Neon Cities campaign. Location: Neon City It was a regular Hikage Street day: Mid-morning and an unrepentant sun was dumping waves of heat over the City of Electric Dreams, driving up the temperature of Neon City’s already unstable population. Neighbours argued or played music too loud or seemingly dragged enormous pieces of furniture across the floors above my one-bed. No-hoper malcontents stomped the length of the high-tower corridors and laid the hurt down on each other while urine-hued sunlight blazed through the translucent polymer tarp that gave it the semblance of having four walls. Against the pee-coloured municipal angular skyline of my one-bed’s missing breached wall, sky-drones buzzed along, their programming put them into an intricate and colossal city-wide robotic dance, unerringly navigating each other and the aerial congestion without ever compromising top speed. The torpor of last night’s excesses was beginning to recede and material reality was impinging itself on the periphery of my vision when my media-slab pinged like it always did. Binary Johnny was calling, his voice was quiet and the call was audio only, something was off. Jonny was tapping us all up - had also put the call out to the others, told us he’s taken a gig that was going south, needed an assist. He sounded nervous, whispering, like he was hiding. They were fighting, whoever they were, he told us the building was coming down. Something about the call niggled, some kind of background noise was distracting. Without thinking I ran the waveform through an algorithm. It got a hit; water, rhythmic movement of a large body of water. Minutes later, we were airborne in the flier, on viewscreens, concrete habitats that populated the local residential districts rolled past as we powered on eastwards while Johnny kept feeding us information. Some sort of builder’s association or union was fighting the local triads on the waterfront. Soon the sprawl opened up, giving way to the western limits of Neon City’s artificial bay which lapped lazily up against the deep ferroconcrete reinforced docks that ran parallel to the burgeoning warehouse quarter which occupied the waterfront. Koko reduced speed and began bringing us down. Before we got eyeballs on the situation, tactical started logging data, I’d set the facial recog algorithm to clandestinely mainline into rentacop servers for data sourcing and the recog was getting hits on the triads. They were a street gang local to the warehouse district called the Hop Sing, most recent rentacop records stated the Hop Sing were led by an individual identified only as Shrimp Boy. Tactical also got a hit on a robot fighting alongside the triads. It was Call-Me-Cuthbert, the massive Nasuran Industries Visojar model industrial general purpose construction bot that had, a while ago, been on the cusp of revolting against the city’s biological population. They were fighting some gang of building contractors which tactical wasn’t getting any hits on? A bunch of regular nobodies? The warehouse quarter had caught collateral from the orbital strikes which had targeted Porter Sladek a while back, wrecking most of the region. Contractors were here to enact rebuilding and repair. Why then would the Hop Sing have beef with them? Tactical’s data kept coming in. It had picked up that Call-Me-Cuthbert was manning some industrial sized hose that his enormously powerful limb servos could handle alone, it tracked the hose to Maiulava Electricals Paatuj series grey, ferro-plated pumping block that was tapping the bay for water. Call-Me-Cuthbert was in the process of hosing down some indentikit warehouse - which was as a result, collapsing. Wherever Call-Me-Cuthbert played the spray, the walls were turning into slate grey sludge that was splattered across sidewalks and other structures. Tactical’s analysis showed that whatever was coming out of that house wasn’t anything other than saltwater. This was something else. We’d heard stories of corporate science divisions working on constructions with short lifespans, looks like one of them had figured it out because here they were; easily dismantled water-soluble buildings Johnny must’ve been in there somewhere in one of those melting warehouses. The flier’s engine-pitch altered to a familiar tone, Koko was circling, getting ready to park. Trigger wasn’t up for waiting though. Cranking open a lower access way that buffeted the interior cabin with turbulence, he leapt out. From this far up, even his augmented Shiaosha leg muscles wouldn’t allow him to make that drop unhurt but he’d been itching for an excuse to try out his new limited flight capacity. Subdermal sensors detected the velocity of Trigger’s descent and the Ashirada Suniru glider activated, gossamer-thin mnemonic polydermal sheets unfolded from housing cavities in his body-frame and arranged themselves into a pre-programmed wing configuration. Trigger cut through the air at a dramatically angled pitch while gripping his Wanametosu, at that pace he shrank away on the viewscreen to become a dot. A second later he was at ground level, retracting the glider at the final five metres and bringing his sword down to cut the hose in a single landing move. The contractors didn’t have the stomach for a serious throwdown and vanished into the district’s warren of back alleys as we disembarked from the flier, The Hop Sing though, were a different story, used to violence, they wouldn’t be a pushover and were getting ready to square off against us. Call-Me-Cuthbert was amongst them and I saw something different about him. There was a badge that wasn’t there before. ‘Reformed Rebel. Fight for Heroes’. What would have made Call-Me-Cuthbert side with the Hop Sing? We got an answer soon enough. The dull expansive roar of jet turbines filled the air, It wasn’t our flier though. A Oshin Amalgamated branded Feanch class Qiuonriji troop carrier circled into view on a descent vector, no doubt carrying their corporate ashigaru. Toughened polycords unravelled from hardpoints on the Feanch and moments later the ashigaru, specced in Setihci armour parascended to ground level. There was no hesitation, they all knew the score, the Hop Sing and Oshin ashigaru immediately went for each other. It was fast, brutal fighting. Pushing through the triad lines got easy while they were distracted, we found an unharmed Binary Johnny who was desperately holed up in one of the structure's few remaining unmelted shadowy corners. By the time we got him out, the fighting was done. The Hop Sing couldn’t hope to go toe-to-toe with corporate backed mercs for long and had followed the contractors into the maze of warehouses. It wasn’t hard to find out that these new water soluble warehouses, surrounding buildings and residential blocks had been an Oshin Amalgamated ‘investment’. They’d gotten the contract to rebuild the parts of the neighbourhood off the back of the destruction caused in the orbital attack. Built-in obsolescence of the water soluble buildings meant that residents and business owners would have to re-buy new buildings from Oshin on a regular basis. The Hop Sing, along with all the other residents who lived in the area had not been happy, protests had gone on all week and culminated in the fighting. With the Oshin ashigaru sifting through piled debris left in the aftermath, it looked like despite the ‘best efforts’ of Oshin, the neighbourhood was as decimated as it had been after the attack. No one in the district was going to let Oshin Amalgamated get away with this, their investment was going to end up being a big loss for them. Binary Johnny, the skinny, legendary hackervist was in his customary faux-leather flight helmet and goggles was agitated and twitchy, something had him riled and he got straight into shop talk. Goji Rokkaku was planning to make a move against Barnabus Haywood and The Messenger habitat aboard the Glitterband at midnight, his attack was hours away. Porter Sladek had dropped some dollar on Johnny to hack some Rokkaku servers, an internal memo containing the schedule had landed in Johnny’s lap and he’d thought of us. We were going to have to make a play ourselves and move against Goji Rokkaku. It would be a risk considering the amount of juice that pumped through his corporate veins but before we could even think of that, our media-slabs pinged. Neon City had a way of piling it on and today was no different. It was the Russians, one of Yennav Rybasei’s Armenian street shinobi. We’d gotten the Armenians to keep an eye on Hika Taki, they hadn’t done a good job. The fashion guru had gotten kidnapped from Ikebukuro in a sky-van. I imagined his nasally voice going up an octave at the indignation of it all as he was carried off. The Armenians had tailed the kidnappers until they got to the outskirts of The Roppongi Hills and the sky-van had passed through security. That was enough for the Armenians, who went no further. I didn’t blame them. The Roppongi Hills were some sort of seriously secured, ultra-gated up market residential district in the Shinjuku-Cho prefecture that was walled off from the rest of Neon City. The personal pet project of an off-the-grid anonymous development tycoon with enough juice to keep the city’s easily corrupted authorities’ noses out of their business. Whatever went on in the hills, stayed in the hills. Going in hard would be loud and risky, needed to find a soft way in; I jacked into the GLOWNET. The angular constructs that populated Neon City’s incandescent info-vista reverberated under the endless movements of enormous data-flows and blurred past me as I node-navied to the Roppongi Hills data-scape. It didn’t look like a typical data-scape. The base node was inaccessible, isolated by some kind of non-indexed, dimly glowing, featureless security-wall? As secure here as Roppongi Hills was in material reality. I put a cracking algorithm on it which got nowhere, something was resetting the protocol before it could decipher any data? I ran a decompiler algorithm on it and took a look at the metal, got something strange, something I’d not seen before. The code in the security-wall kept changing, something in it was somehow making it rewrite itself without any external inputs. Doing it fast too! The algorithm on my Nonohiki couldn’t keep pace and kept getting kicked back. Needed to script a predictive adaptive protocol to try and get ahead of the curve. It worked; the algorithm began logging the encryption string, something else was coming down though, more non-indexed data that I couldn’t recognise. Soon the hacking algorithm had the entire string and I was past the security-wall. Roppongi’s data-scape structure was now listed and available. A sparse underlit environment, no data-flows moved here and only a small number of data-vaults were displayed, faint colours coolly radiated from the plain right-angled constructs which hung in a void; looked like info repositories. Barely begun diving the directories when my data-slab picked up another non-indexed code dump on to its memory pool. Dialling back, I ran a scan on all the partitions on the Nonohiki and saw what was there. Black ICE, sophisticated too, with algorithms driven by deep A.I. protocols. Stygian fractal silhouettes simultaneously expanded and folded in on themselves in rhythmic convulsions. Inertialess movement allowed them to flit between drives and nodes at an inconceivable rate, at least inconceivable at the pace of human perception - even on the GLOWNET. Countermeasures came online, my Nonohiki had defences of its own, provided they were deployed quick enough. I got a break - or so it seemed. The ICE froze for an instant, then that autonomous self-writing code came online again. I watched as the ICE began reconfiguring itself. The ICE’s minimalist almost textureless bio-image contorted and twisted. Red and black hues flowed out from the ICE and began settling into a grid of squares. It was a chessboard, decorated in red and black, red playing pieces extracted themselves from the morphing construct. It could only be the Red King, he’d been stalking Koko a while, now he was mocking us. Even so, there was no way of knowing what would happen if the ICE tagged my bio-image and there were multiple iterations vectoring in. Time to bug out, flipped a protocol that crashed the system to diagnostics and put my bio-image into a safe partition. I immediately jacked out. Everything lurched and tumbled, nausea jolted through my convulsing body in that slim liminal existence between the GLOWNET and material reality. Found myself back in the flier’s cabin, slumped in a seat and bathed in its blue light, hearing and feeling its engine rumble while readouts and viewscreens pumped out data. Nausea didn’t last long, slugging a shot of Shiaikan from a bottle I’d stashed away helped. System reboot on the Nonohiki cleared out any risk of ICE residue. Ran a quick review of the data I did manage to scrape. Most of it was indecipherable or mundane fin-data logs. A search got something at least. The fin-data had records of someone within Roppongi Hills hiring a sky-van, went by the name Mister Bishop. Another chess reference, how was the Red King linked to Roppongi Hills? On cue, Koko’s media-slab pinged. A message from the Red King, back to mocking us once we’d evaded his black ICE. Bishop takes Queen pawn. Check (Move five.) Continued digging, looking for more answers. Mister Bishop had hired the sky-van from one of the big rental players who had tagged the invoice with an asset resource code. From there it was easy to get the ID of the sky-van that had been used. All Hochall sky-vans were specced with autonomous piloting systems that could be accessed remotely. Security concerns meant that these systems were well protected by networked encryption algorithms that would be tricky to corrupt. Luckily for us, the GPS handler routines were not included in the stack of protected systems. A quick crack into the GPS databank revealed a list of locations visited by the sky-van and associated timestamps. Included a spot in Mejiro close to Avril Van Laere’s apartment, McChef’s Tower restaurant and finally Roppongi Hills. The Red King would have to wait. Time was tight. Goji Rokkaku was getting ready to make his play against Barnabas Haywood so we had to move against him. It would have to be a big move too, Rokkaku had serious juice in Neon City and that required some serious players watching our backs. Binary Johnny could be counted on but we needed more GLOWNET muscle. Johnny’s good standing in the hacker community got RAM Rat, Steel Witch and Case Mod onboard. Michael Leander was next, the Glitterband resident had a hardwire to Barnabas Haywood and we had a hardwire to him, pinged him an encrypted warning, he could be trusted to get it to Haywood. Finally, our last play for allies took us out to the surface level congestion of Highway Zero and on to Great Prophet Wei’s turf. Wei had a disliking of the corporate hegemony that Goji Rokkaku wielded with impunity, perhaps it was something we could leverage. We’d also never gotten a handle on him though, not quite a friend and not quite the enemy we expected. His relationship with Trigger was certainly complicated… Wei had never made it hard for us to contact him and it didn’t take much to get him onboard. Wei pulled the strings on a couple of the gangs who ran the streets on Highway Zero. It was muscle that we could use. Just as Goji Rokakku had a two-pronged attack plan, so did we. We’d hit the railgun hidden among the garishly decorated park attractions of Sky Dinosaurian Square with a bomb, something big. At the same time, Wei’s muscle would hit Kibogaoka Hill and encroach on the neighbourhood close to where we knew the multistage missile was situated. If it went well the gangs would control the area. Meanwhile, the hackers would run an interference game on the GLOWNET, putting the hurt on Rokkaku chat-streams, denying them general comms. Hopefully keeping them blind long enough for us to do what we needed to do. Hours later, day was darkening as we were on route through surrounding unoccupied airspace to Sky Dinosaurian Square while carrying a small payload that consisted of a potent cocktail of unstable chemical incendiaries and accelerants provided by Great Prophet Wei. There was no chatter, the engine hum filled the silence, all of us; the hackers, the gangs, everybody, all knew what they were doing. Not long till it all kicked off. An automated proximity transponder alarm sounded on Koko’s console as we drew closer, violently intruding on the moment of quiet with alarms. Ignoring the radiation warnings that had flashed up in front of Koko, we closed in. Previously, Sky Dinosaurian Square had got caught up in a fracas between rival greens bowling supporters. It had resulted in a series of micro-nuke detonations, annihilating the bowling park and saturating it in radiation. A robotic clean up crew could be seen busily running scrubbing protocols on the black, flattened greens bowling park. Located on the far side of the district, The rollercoaster ride park had escaped the devastation unscathed and so presumably, had the railgun which was housed in the the colossal ride’s substructure. Even so, it was still closed to the public - which suited us fine. Latticework poly-ferrous grids and arrays of struts and support joints expanded to fill the forward viewscreens as Koko put us down as close to the ride as possible. In and out; payload delivered with a two-minute countdown without delay, no one around to stop or even notice us. Back in the cabin, we strapped in as Koko punched it. Shuddering turbines shook the flier as they span up to their maximum operating envelope. A hemisphere of turbulence plucked all the detritus surrounding us into the air and whirled it into a crap filled hurricane as the flier VTOL’ed out of there. I felt the lingering tug of gravity when we surged upwards and forwards. Sky Dinosaurian Square shrank away in the rear viewscreens for nearly two minutes until for a split-second, it filled with light. Blossoms of yellow-orange flame followed, ballooning out to engulf the collapsing rollercoaster in a fiery embrace while the substructure collapsed, buckled and folded in on itself. A second later, black clouds billowed out, obscuring everything and a second after that, a fast travelling shockwave rocked the flier, forcing Koko to struggle to keep us in level flight while we sped out of the blast radius. Koko kept pouring it on, clock was running and right now, Rokkaku operators stationed in Sky Dinosaurian Square would be frantically pinging reports out on the destruction of the railgun. In the GLOWNET, Binary Johnny and the others would be attacking Rokkaku data-vaults and chat-streams, hard locking media-slabs and shutting those messages down, it couldn’t last but it might buy us some time until Goji Rokkaku realised someone was making a move on him. At the same time, Great Prophet Wei’s muscle; gangers from Noise Tank and Shaolin Rippers would be taking the fight to the secondary target in Kibogaoka Hill. The nightly downpours hammering on the flier’s hull meant the onset of darkness across the City of Electric Dreams was well underway. Kibogaoka Hill was pretty much on the other side of Neon City from us, it would be minutes before we got there. The most direct flight path took us across almost the entirety of The Bay. Its waters had become impenetrably black while the bordering cityscape had been reduced to clustered dots of distant light lining the horizon. Eventually though, as we left The Bay behind, those patterns expanded and coalesced recognisably into the city’s nocturnal landscape. Soon after, we were approaching our destination. During that time, sporadic reports from the gangers told us fighting had broken out between them and a local gang called The Immortals. Styled after Egyptian mummies, The Immortals dressed in bandage themed one-eyed face masks and sandy coloured clothing and fedoras adorned with replica gold jewellery shaped into ancient-world icons and hieroglyphs. The Immortals hadn’t expected a pair of Highway Zero gangs to come rolling in this heavy. They’d put up a good fight until they realised something big was going down and had bugged out. After the delay, Noise Tank and Shaolin Rippers had begun closing in on the multistage missile launch site. Famously known for the expansive, undocumented and unregulated shanty town that had unstoppably advanced over the region and almost swallowed the district decades ago. Kibogaoka Hill was actually a commercial district situated on the crown of the titular hill, a tired and neglected mixture of retail strips, industrial units and residential blocks. Some time back, one of the abandoned residential high-rises had spiked one of our radiation monitors while we were in the area: That’s where we’d find the multistage rocket. Passing over the shanty town, our way was lit by irregular and erratic night lighting which only served to reinforce the shanty town’s haphazard mismatched appearance. The flier dropped us in the closest open space that could be found before disappearing up into an automated holding pattern in the stormy cloud filled skies above. Marching through rainswept darkness and brimming wayward puddles, we regrouped with Wei’s gangers on the perimeter of the high-rise and took shelter from the rain in some unused and dilapidated apartment block. The tall structure was lit like a Christmas tree, internal lights blazed and it was obvious that the interior had been stripped out to create the space to house the missile. Alarms blasted and high powered spotlights played across the drab concrete exterior walls, a small ground crew were busily going through pre-flight checks while Rokkaku Suayo gun-drones darted to and fro like particularly malignant patrolling wasps. It wasn’t hard to see that it was four hours to blast-off. The closest surrounding buildings were fairly low, typical Neon City cut price housing, their few residents stared out of windows, equally suspicious and slaw-jacked at what they could see. It was likely that when the rocket took off, its engine wash would incinerate them all. Acceptable loses by Goji Rokkaku’s standards no doubt. What followed was a brief conflab with the gangers, a simple plan was discussed, the kakarichou nodded in agreement. The gangers would attack from the east and we’d come up from the south. Minutes later we were all in place, standing and waiting in the deluge. Then it came, a ping was sent out to all our media-slabs and weapons hot, we went in. Koko sent her gun-drones in ahead of us, to our right we heard the violent stacacao of small calibre automatic fire and the booming ugly retort of pistol shots. The ground crew fled at the first signs of trouble but the Rokkaku drones were not easy targets, we knew they wouldn’t be. Gunfire was exchanged for several minutes but we started making headway and the drones were going down. Then above and towards the eastern sky we heard the whine of VTOL turbines as four rain-lit and glittering beams sweeping in a search pattern burst through the precipitous curtain of night. Each one attached to the corner of a silhouette profiled against black storm-clouded sky, a barely perceivable air vehicle otherwise. Looked like Binary Johnny and the other hackers had run out of time. Losing altitude, the vehicle sunk into the diameter of the launch site searchlights. A Rokkaku branded Gakosamarat troop carrier was coming down on the east side. Typical rapid response team. Rokkaku knew something was up. Waves of detritus and dust were whipped up as the carrier put down heavily. Panels opened into ramps on the Gakosamarat as Rokkaku assets in anonymous, faceless matte black top-of-the-line Tzedesp reactive combat armour marched out brandishing smartwired 7.62 Kirzaks. We’d seen their type before - shocktroopers; they meant business. Koko’s drones were left to autonomously handle their opposite numbers while we sprinted towards the intensifying gunfire to the north east. Wei’s muscle were pretty violent thugs, but they weren’t up to dealing with shocktroops. No amount of thuggery could match the bio-augmented and top-specced soldiers. By the time we came on to the scene, most of the fighting was over. No Noise Tank or Shaolin rippers were standing and the remaining Rokkaku soldiers were sweeping the area, putting bullets into any wounded gangers they encountered. They obviously hadn’t expected a counter-attack from us so quick. Even with their tactical and situational software, we hit them unawares. They never got to put up much of a fight, we were too well armed and Trigger was too fast. Koko’s drones were now tracking zero hostiles. Fighting was over but the situation was far from it. Hurrying towards the launch site and closing in, it became apparent just how massive the multi-stage rocket was. Wispy streams of white smoke curled out of thin supplementary exhaust pipes while the rocket’s nose soared almost out of sight, the rocket filled almost every part of the hollowed out high rise that it was hidden in. Numerous polyvinyl coated lines ran out of the apparatus here and there. Looked like an old-school hardline, impossible to hack. I guess Rokkaku were pretty paranoid about getting hacked and the lines had to lead somewhere. A vast array of scaffolding and gantries stretched above us, wrapping the rocket in a criss-crossed, gridded steel and aluminium embrace. It looked like a long climb. We hustled up the walkways with boots clinking and made sure to disconnect any cabling we encountered. Koko was also wrenching open any random polyferrous panels she’d spotted that looked like service hatches, gutting the wiring and systems insides, readouts full of diodes would flash from green to red. It was having an effect. We also caught the smell of vomit: Zero beasts, nothing else it could be, meant the genetically constructed, stealth enhanced monsters must be close by. Gripping our weapons, we continued onwards. A little further and we got pinged. Johnny and RAM Rat had managed to get a ghost line into the Rokkaku launch control centre, they couldn’t get to the rocket systems from there or shut it down but they could monitor it. Told us that we’d been detected and to expect company. Pressing on, there were some reinforced viewports ahead. Roderick reconned ahead, looking through the ports, inside was not the typical, classic flight module expected from this method of orbital deployment. He saw a much larger, grey cabin that receded back much further into the rocket’s inner structure and was lacking any life support. What was inside didn’t need it. Zero beasts, rows of them, all unmoving and strapped into rudimentary seating. Had to be sedated? Johnny got back to us again, control systems were reporting multiple critical launch failures. The job was only half done, we realised. The rocket was going nowhere but those zero beasts were still around, each one a biochemically programmed relentless stone killer. Let loose, they’d be a nightmare for Neon City. Back in the hands of Goji Rokkaku, they might be much worse. Something big was needed to utterly destroy the rocket, more firepower than we packed. This needed something that could inflict serious damage. Time to pull some strings. Lady Zero was a trucker who mostly operated out of Highway Zero, had hauled anything that could be hauled throughout the city. Bill pinged her, got a result. Told us that she source a Nasuran Joudne excavator and bring it her trailer, the kind of excavator that could demolish buildings. Didn’t take long for her sky-truck to reach us, quicker than Rokkaku anyway. Jacked the excavator and got it to work. Launching the Joudne’s autonomous protocols, we stood well back as the excavator’s power plant powerfully growled into life, even this far back its vibrations could be felt through the ground. The juggernaut crawled forward on thick tracks and crumpled the lower walls of the highrise, bringing it down in a thunderous billowing cloud, crushing the rocket within and leaving nothing but a rubble-topped pile. The silhouetted, thick steel skinned excavator came rumbling out, seemingly unharmed Once it was over and the construction robot had powered down, a rain-punctuated quietness settled on the site. It was done. Watching from the distance, we saw lazily billowing dust clouds settle in layers of discoloured sedimentary film across the rain soaked ground. No time to bask in the glory though, Johnny was still busy with one last task. Later he would tell me that he introduced an algorithmic worm into the launch control systems that would eradicate all the data in all the directories, even the backups would be fried. Now that Goji Rokkkau’s plans had been as crushed as the zero beasts in the remains of the rocket amongst the masonry and rubble of the highrise, Neon City was safe. Time to bug out. Rokkaku response teams would hit us with wrathful retribution if they caught us. As we took the flier out, the call was put into Porter Sladek. His corporate endeavours and his health had withered under the assault of Goji Rokkaku and like most of us, Sladek was no friend of the man. He was pleased with the outcome and was happy to foot expenses incurred and run media interference for us. Pockets were still deep and he still had enough grunt to keep Rokkaku in the dark. The remainder of the night passed in an intoxicant and stimulant driven fuge, a half-remembered stupor of distorted noises, blurred movements and shapes while we hit up bars and drinking dens across Hoppi Street and Ninety-ninth.
Reality only began to resemble Neon City the next day. Morning was gone and shadows were short by the time I slouched out of the futon, the sharp cheerful chirp of my media-slab slicing mercilessly through the haze. The others; they wanted to hit up Roppongi Hills today. Harder than it sounded, was common knowledge that the high levels of security would halt an attack by anything less than a fully kitted paramilitary outfit. We needed to get in sideways. It was decided after some discussion to contact Urus Konicek. Despite being a massive uplifted outlander from the Wilderness, he could come and go through Neon City unseen, a ghost who knew secrets that she did not like to easily give up. He didn’t disappoint. It was well known that back in the day that Neon City had been earmarked an extensive subway infrastructure which was meant to be the primary municipal public transit network. However, a cocktail of government corruption and incompetence as well as corporate malfeasance had, while draining vast quantities of funding from the project, also driven the subway network into a city sized coffin. What wasn’t well known was that an abandoned subway hub under the Kabiki-cho prefecture branched out under Roppongi Hills. Likely forgotten about before Roppongi Hills had received its first set of security gates. Urus told us there were ways in from Golden Gai or Metropolitan Building District and directed us to an unused and narrow back alley behind a neglected block in Golden Gai, to an unremarkable and unlabelled access panel. Took the tram to Shibuya Terminal, from there, our passes got us on the corporate monorail. Neon City had never been designed with personal transport in mind, an outdated mode of travel, a relic of a mistaken past to be rectified in the forward looking City of Electric Dreams. Even main streets and avenues were narrow and mostly pedestrianised as a result. Other than in Highway Zero, only the thinest of vehicles could navigate these roads and even then, only in single file. Other methods had emerged of travelling the city though, one of these were small electric rides. Single seater, two, three or four wheelers specced out with a power cell that would give a modest range of several kilometres - at a price of course. On the way to Golden Gai we detoured to some bland rental franchise on a small retail strip that loaned out lightweight Huaneyhe XCQ rides and took one each. Small and manoeuvrable, and other than the power cell, were also fairly carryable. Urus’ directions took us to an out-of-the-way neighbourhood, dotted with unoccupied offices and shops, failed remains of commercial ventures populated with deceased ambitions. To an angular alleyway that ran through the narrowest gaps between two unused blocks and what we were looking for. With no obvious way to open and caked with rust, the access panel was entirely flush against the concrete wall. Didn’t take much effort from Trigger to wrench the panel open, screaming its metallic protest to no avail while internal hinges buckled under the pressure. It was not surprising to find the plain, undecorated grey corridor beyond the panel unlit. Darkness receded, revealing scant dust motes to swirl laconically in roving flashlight beams, even the detritus had forgotten this place. The corridor took us to a stairwell thinly coated in dust that descended into the lightless abyss. Footsteps reverbed peculiarly, amplified across the bare concrete as we lugged our XCQs on what felt like an endless circling journey downwards. The stairs eventually opened into an open space. A featureless void that under our lights revealed the evidence of a disused platform. Much of the station must have been built. Paved flooring glinted in the light which also played across brickwork walling. Stairs and corridors led to what might have meant to be office spaces, while never-used benching dotted the platforms. Even signage had been put into place, we looked and found what we were searching for; a sign for Roppongi Hills bolted to the wall alongside the platform and adjacent to a tunnel that disappeared into blackness. It was a small drop off the platform and on to the tunnel floor. Fortunately, most of the work had been done here too, the ground had been flattened but the sleepers had never gotten put down. Smooth enough for the pitiful telescopic suspension on our XCQs to handle. It made the going easy. The XCQ headlights would have been abysmal in most circumstances but in the absolute darkness here, they seemed to fill the way ahead with sunlight. Before long we arrived at what was signed as Roppongi Hill. Dismounting, we clambered on to the platform and began looking for a way up. The Roppongi Hills subway was as derelict as Golden Gai had been and probably less finished. Tunnels and corridors twisted and turned, ultimately reaching deadends or closed off doorways that led nowhere. We explored deeper, getting into the empty maintenance tunnels beyond what would have been backroom administration offices. One set of stops led promisingly up to a rusted manhole lid in the ceiling. Unlike the panel in Golden Gai, the polyferrous manhole was silent as Trigger dragged it across the ground above. Overbright afternoon sunlight blazed relentlessly through the opening, refracting across the grey tunnel surfaces, saturating it in a silvery haze. Trigger was the first out and found himself surrounded by eerily silent, immaculately maintained greenery. The city’s unending chatter had receded into an indistinguishable background murmur while golden hues from a lowering sun played out over stretches of grass and well cultivated bushes. It was impossible to tell if they were replicas or not. To the south was a traditional Japanese garden accompanied even, by a delicate looking pond and close by was a sign. ‘Ancestral home of the Mori Clan’. The garden was bordered by a large mansion; the kind of extensive and elaborate ornamentally decorated brickwork and slate roofed structure that would never be found in Neon City and we’d only ever seen in photos or historically-themed vids, the kind that would have belonged to old-world wealth. Again, it was impossible to tell if it was a replica or not. Further out, looming above the calm, rustic surroundings were four towers, their rooftops starkly outlined against the city’s hazy blue-white sky. It had been said that they had a mix of residential and retailer uses. Shops could be found there as well as offices, cinemas, TV studios and more. Some kind of sprawling silhouetted array was interconnecting the four towers to each other across multiple levels in a chaotic seeming mesh shape, essentially creating a single central super complex. Enhanced optics showed us that it was in fact a series of suspended pedestrian walkways spanning the gaps between towers. Below the lower walkways, we could easily spot the infestation of spiders’ webs. It took a moment to register that these were web shapes of enormous proportion. Only our imaginations could fathom what this meant and instinctively, my eyes shifted, scanning the nearby approaches. Nothing. Beyond the complex, looming even higher was the Mega Mori Tower; a five hundred and forty storey monstrosity said to be home to Roppongi Hills’ phantom backer. The Mori tower was dark, rows of unlit windows seemed featureless and somehow empty. Against the dimming sky though, we saw a distinct red light streaming out from The glass walled penthouse suite. Could only be the Red King. Did he know we were here, was it a taunt? There was a slim paved path that meandered in the direction of the towers. I kept a hand on one of my .45 ACPs during the ten minute walk through the cultivated gardens and landscapes which were completely empty to the megacomplex’s ground level entrance. Distant branches and bushes swaying in an almost imperceptible breeze; the only movement we encountered. As the distance to the complex dwindled, it grew to fill my vision and as we neared, there was a humming, a low bassy noise that was rising in volume. Above us, the webbing had begun to thrum as we realised it had been constructed of thin strands of high-tensile nylofero cabling to resemble webbing. That did not lessen the shock we felt when we saw it. It’s body was black, massive and seemingly utterly colourless, a small head bristling with an array of red-gleaming sensor banks which sat upon a cephalothorax connected to a curiously cylindrical abdomen while eight weirdly asymmetrical, erratically curving limbs extended outwards. A mechanical spider so large a family sized sky-cab could easily fit within the span of its legs was bearing down on us. We ran. The spider followed while skittering across the complex’s outer walls, it combined the unsettling and wavering limb movements of a spider with the unnatural precise machine-movement of a robot into something, somehow even worse than both. With its enormous size, it was visibly making ground on us. Ahead, along the base of the closest tower were a pair of brushed aluminium edged glass doors that dutifully slid open as we approached. The spider couldn’t be outrun, getting into the complex was our only chance to escape it. The doors led into an immaculately maintained foyer. Soft, off-white interior lights glimmered off the empty, polished faux cream and sandstone coloured marble floor while an unused beige reception desk stood against one wall. A row of equally unused, elliptically styled crimson, upholstered seats ran along the wall opposite. It was deserted, boots squeaked on the pristine floor as we charged through. Behind us I heard the mix of shattering glass and snapping aluminium struts as the spider smashed the doors aside entering the foyer doors, must’ve been quicker than they could open. I didn’t stop to check. A moment later, as the spider drew closer, I felt an intense wave of terror wash over me, even stronger than the fear the spider-robot elicited from me. An internal ping from my Nafalm rebreather told me that it had detected an unknown chemical too fine to filter entering my limbic system, I didn’t know what it meant, I just kept running. Whatever it was, Trigger had been the hardest hit by it. He gave an animalistic howl, must’ve activated his Shiaosha leg pak and sped off at maximum pace. Past the reception were several sets of elevators, Trigger had reached one and I could see was jamming his finger on one of the interior buttons. With a ding, the doors slid shut and he was gone. The rest of us lunged into another elevator, blindly mashing whatever buttons we could. It took a couple of seconds for the doors to close: Long enough for us to turn and see the monstrous outline of the mechanical spider skittering across the foyer. Spindly legs waving in a rhythmic pattern as it seemed to stumble, traversal algorithms were taking a moment to adapt to the smooth floor. The way into the elevator closed as the spider crashed into the outer doors, shaking the cabin, we began accelerating upwards. Wasn’t over though, from below we heard the grind of elevator doors being muscled open, it was in the shaft now. If it reached us, there was no way we could fight it in this enclosed space, had to get out, jabbed the button for the nearest floor. The doors opened at the tenth floor into some multi levelled shopping mall that overlooked a vast central atrium. Looking down into the open space, we saw the spider had gotten through the shaft and with legs pumping furiously, was rapidly climbing the atrium wall. We turned and ran, it wasn’t fast enough though, as the mechanical beast reached our floors safety railings, it hit Koko with some sort of attack, coating her in a heavily viscous hardening fluid that trapped her to the spot. However, despite being immobilised, Koko hadn’t been left helpless, she had enough freedom to access her drone control-slab. While the spider was breaking through the safety rails, she launched Nermal and unloaded the drone’s focused EMP strike on the robot. The effect was immediate, it stopped moving, we saw the sensor arrays shut down as servo-motor powered limbs folded in on themselves. The spider had lost its balance and incrementally fell backwards, finally toppling off the railing. With a thunderous crack, it struck the floor thirty metres below. Taking a moment to assess the situation, we saw that the giant mechanical spider had become a mangled mess of distorted and bent limbs, while the torso had collapsed, buckling inwards from the impact. Freeing Koko from the synthetic webbing took some effort. We realised Trigger’s elevator had taken him elsewhere, he was nowhere to be seen. We got on comms, Trigger had reached the Mori Tower. I would later learn that Trigger had ridden the elevator until he got to the roof access, an open area crisscrossed with aircon piping and extraction units, numerous satellite dishes and antenna. He caught sight of the Mori Tower across the other side of the complex in the darkening day. At that altitude, the brisk breeze and open air had allowed him to calm down and regain his wits. Trigger had clambered to the highest point he could navigate and leapt off the rooftop. There was still enough heat in the air to create thermals, it did not prove too tricky for Trigger to glide on his Suniru implant to the vast tower. His Ashirada climbing implants allowed him to gain a handhold on the otherwise smooth glass-front wall and the windows did not provide much trouble for someone like him to smash through. With the spider gone, it seemed safe to get back into the garden, it didn’t stop us gripping our weapons as we hustled past the complex, the wind was picking up as we went on, reaching the base of the Mori Tower just as the first splattering raindrops came hammering down. None of the ways in were locked, we were expected. The interior was as empty and as scrupulously well maintained as the complex. The afternoon’s failing light shone weakly through the semi-tinted toughened windows and automatic lights roused themselves in our presence. A quick glance revealed nothing in the sparse and neutrally decorated room but the plainest furniture, while moving on, footsteps thundered in the utter silence. Ahead were another row of elevators. Regrouping with Trigger on the eightieth floor, told us that everywhere he’d gone was equally unoccupied. The Mori Tower had room for thousands of residents, as did The Complex, why would it all be left empty? Returning to the elevators, the highest positioned button was labelled ‘Observation Deck’. Had to be where we’d find the Red King. The elevator briskly accelerated upwards after the button was pressed. When the elevator stopped, the doors slid apart with a ping, the Observation Deck was not what we were expecting. It opened into a single vast room that ranged across the entire floor, diffused red lighting gave the room a hellish hue. Ahead was a giant sized red-and-white chess board composed of ceramic tiles and at the centre was a elaborately detailed red throne, on it was an emancipated man with sunken cheeks and pallid complexion, clothed in red, he was laconically slumped on the seat while a strange looking crown sat on his head: The Red King. All of us felt it; a strange pressure behind our eyes, a wriggle in our cerebral cortexes, some weird presence when we looked at him. Behind The Red King, at the far corners of the chess board was a massive red rook in each corner and lastly, to our right, in the final corner was another rook, only white this time. It took us a moment to realise that the elevator had risen up into and opened out of the final rook. The Red King’s face possessed a vacant almost unconscious expression but that changed when Koko stepped on to the chess board. The lifelessness left his face, replaced by an expression of dark intent. “Queen sacrifice, check,” came a low guttural voice from the Red King. As the words were spoken, his crown abruptly glowed a bright scarlet while small orbs detached from it and began orbiting his head in elliptical trajectories. Simultaneously, the deck’s red hue intensified, several red pawns and a red knight materialised on the chequered floor seemingly out of thin air. The fight was on! The giant red chess pieces began sliding forward, targeting all of us except for Koko; the Red King’s ultimate target, his bride. It meant The Red King had left himself exposed tactically. Koko lunged forward without hesitation. Reaching the throne and landing a hook across his face!. He was unbalanced for a moment and Koko took that moment to wrench the crown off his head. “Queen takes King bitch,” Koko was triumphant. As she gripped the crown, the victorious look drained from her face, in it’s place appeared a neutral, bland expression as she turned her head towards the crown. Clearly, Koko was contemplating putting the crown on. Mired in indecision, her arm trembled and her jaw muscles visibly clenched. But then, Trigger was there, once Koko had grabbed the crown the robots had become motionless. He leapt forward and a swing of his Wanametosu shattered the crown, relieving Koko of the dangerous choice. The effect was instant, with the crown now clattering across the floor in pieces, the chess robots vanished into whatever ether that they had spawned from and the diffused red lighting winked off. The Red King meanwhile, gave a small quiet groan and slumped back into the throne, a look of utter confusion spreading over his depleted face. The pressure we’d all felt in our heads also vanished, the weight lifted. We spoke with The Red King. He had no understanding of his current location, or even the date? His last stable memory was of entering a chess tournament in Russia six years ago, playing chess matches, competitive puzzles and three dimensional challenges against an AI called ‘Alpha12’. After that was an unending fluidic stream of nightmarish, half lucid imagery engulfing his consciousness. He was extremely thankful we had woken him from that nightmare. Looked like whatever The Red King had been, the threat was gone. It didn’t take us long to realise that the three other rooks also contain concealed doors. After some exploration, there were several revelations. McChef was here, under the watchful mechanical eye of robotic guards, he had until a few minutes ago been preparing wedding catering for a thousand guests. With robots reduced to crumpled junk, he was looking for a way out and was pleased to see us. Once it had been explained he was free to go he was so happy, he gave free food for life at his restaurant, well, when it was built anyway. Going deeper into the Mori Tower labyrinth, we found the ‘wedding room’. Heaped in every corner were sacks and piles of slowly decaying peonies. Hika Taki was also there, the fashion guru was hunched over an old-style sewing machine and had been tasked under duress by The Red King with creating several wedding dresses. So consumed by the work at hand, the deactivation of his guards had passed him by. He did not seem to care that we were here but did give a high pitched grunt of satisfaction when he realised he was free and proceeded to complain about The Red King’s awful sense of taste and how his own fashion lines were unattended. Koko decided to take one of the wedding dresses as a souvenir, I guess every girl wants hee special day… Continued exploring and next we found Runa Golova, she was being kept prisoner in a makeshift jail cell, converted from one of the tower’s many suites. It was easy to bust her out, she was very pleased. Later we would discover that Yennav Rybasei was doubly pleased to see her freed, along with the chess-player who we discovered was his long lost brother-in-law. Deeper still and we found a central comms room, it was sparse save for a row of beige coloured, plastic coated, plain desks even seats were missing. A high end Monaqozko Technologies desk-slab sat on each worktop, daisy chained through a series of hardwired connections, looked like they’d been set up to process vast quantities of data in parallel. Each slab’s screen was lit dimly by a small amount of flashing red text in a low-rez font on a black screen, the usual interface skin was gone, they must’ve all crashed down and auto-recovered to the instruction line. ‘Error’ flashed the text. It took a few simple instructions of my own to get the core protocols running, didn’t even need to jack in to do it. Quickly after that, I was able to access the memory cores. Alpha12 had been more than a chess algorithm, it had been The Red king. Some kind of AI from an indeterminate origin, even looking at code in the metal didn’t give me any data on its origins. Self-determing algorithms meant it had managed to relocate itself to Neon City, creating the clandestine personality that would, through easily manipulated financial market protocols, fund the building of the Roppongi Hills housing estate, the complex and the Mori tower. Was Alpha12 linked to this Mori clan? It wasn’t enough, historical storage showed it had wanted to inhabit a human, wanted to marry… I pinged an authorisation string to the flier and Koko remotely brought it to us. We also gave the lowdown to D4VID who would, over the coming days publish a series of exclusives on The Red King, Roppongi Hills and mysterious Mori Tower. Further searching revealed that Alpha12 had installed itself into every system in Roppongi Hills, every security camera and defence system, environmental management, banking protocols, everything. Its critical algorithms had resided in the crown Trigger had destroyed. The AI that had terrorised the city obliterated by a sword stroke. No one would miss it; The Red King had been a massive cunt. 19th June 2021 It's a Saturday evening and we're logged into video chat for some online TTRPG goodness with episode 25 of Matakishi's Wired Neon Cities campaign. Neon City’s morning heat had risen to stifling levels, an underpowered Metoma branded wall-con unit strained to cope with the cruel climate. Slouched on my futon with a can of Huntudi self-cooling beer hanging from one hand, I was watching a rerun of last night’s Nina Chinova’s Vigilante Chat and Cake Show on my wall-slab, audio was maxed and the slab trembled almost imperceptibly on its bracket; a futile attempt to smother the high-rises’ thousand railing, disillusioned voices outside my door. The wall-slab displayed Nina interviewing Brenda Callahan on a cheap studio set of plain Mayari branded furniture against an equally cheap digital background. Brenda had become an overnight sensation. We’d encountered her before, snatched by corporate black-baggers and indoctrinated into Protobase Global’s illicit enforced combat cyborg program. A process that used flesh as the anchor for an array of combat modifications, enhancements and weapons, she’d become one of their mindless killers - or so it had seemed. The procedure that trashed a victim’s memories hadn’t quite taken hold on Brenda and her mind clung to neurochemical pathways of her modified brain and so she persisted but she was on borrowed time. We’d given her as much help as we could but eventually necrosis, the side effect of the cyborg conversion would decay her remaining fleshly components. Brenda had needed a solution and it looked like she’d gone on the Vigilante Chat and Cake show to make an appeal. It had worked. Something about her story had resonated with more than just Neon City viewers, the inevitable decline of the personality, the individual subsumed by the anonymous, unfeeling corporation was something viewers connected with. Newsvines reported that the effect had been immediate with profound consequences. Hours after the first transmission, mobs from across the planet had materialised at Protobase Global offices and facilities. Loaded with bricks, stones and whatever heavy detritus they could grab, they loudly let their anger be known. Millions of Protobase Global windows were shattered, buildings were stormed and wrecked, fires gutted a number of locations while employees found themselves nervously sprinting to or from their places of work, praying they avoided the ire of protestors. Some in the crowds had even made the effort to create banners demanding ‘Justice for Brenda’. This was serious! Unsurprisingly, Protobase Global’s stock had dived, billions wiped off their market value in an instant and then, like the patient, silent predator it was, The Rokkaku Group had pounced!, Quickly acquiring a sizable amount of Protobase Global stock. Goji Rokkaku was consolidating his power, taking no chances with Protobase Global and getting ready to move. We knew something of his plans, it was going to get ugly. An hour later and Koko got pinged a message. Knight sacrifice - check. The Red King again. Another chess term; searching the newsvines for horses or knights got us a result. Shinjuku Station had gotten hit hard, some kind of horse-headed robot, specced out with serious ordinance had rocked in at rush hour and lit the station up. The station would have been heaving with bustling commuters, an undulating carpet of humanity striding across the faux marble station halls concerned only with getting places on time. In other words a target-rich environment for a spree killer. Situation became too big to ignore, Rentacop had to turn up and a firefight broke out between them and the horse-head robot. Eventually they had taken down the robot, hailing it a victory for law and order, and it was - provided you didn’t look too hard at the swathe of bodies littering Shinjuku station. Something was off though, the horse-headed robot was obviously one of The Red King’s knights but what was The Red King pulingl here, what had he achieved, what was his agenda? Turned out the answer was in his clue. The Red King hadn’t lost the robot, he’d sacrificed it. In chess sacrificing meant giving up a piece to get an advantage somewhere else. The knight had just been a distraction for something else. We hit up the newsvines again, results got nothing we could nail to The Red King. Some parameters needed to be added to the search so I generated an algorithm targeting the pawn styled robots that The Red King seemed to favour. The criteria was also narrowed down to exclusively search the Shinjuku district; maximum disruption would be most effective closest to the distraction. After running the targeted search, we got a hit. A rando had pushed feeds from some street cams to the newsvines. A pair of cylindrical red robots were shown rapidly descending from a nondescript sky-van on to some backstreet on the periphery of the Shinjuku Station massacre, snatching up a flailing woman with their machine efficiency and bugging out in the sky-van. Gone in seconds. Trying to follow up the sky-van would go nowhere, The Red King was too good at covering his footprints. Luckily we got a good screengrab of the woman’s face; the recog algorithm ID’d her as Runa Golova and a quick data-search revealed Runa Golova was a photojournalist who worked out of Shinjuku. Later we would discover she had gone to Shinjuku Station to document the killings and rentacop would find The Red King’s business card. On the back it said “Knight sacrifice. Check.” Runa Golova’s reports about women getting chess related messages had gotten a lot of traction lately, getting her high circulation. Looks like she’d also attracted the wrong kind of attention. Without a lead, we’d have to wait for The Red King’s next move. Later, our media-slabs pinged. “Hello my droogs,” crackled the familiar thick Armenian voice out of my J6 media-slab’s speaker. Yennav Rybasei had been a mid level operator for the Russian mob until Protobase Global had moved against them, their brief bloody street war had ended in a stalemate but even so, the mob had been weakened, losing its grip in Neon City and Yennav slipped between the cracks, dropping off the grid. There had been radio silence until today, now Yennav was looking to arrange a face-to-face. The Orpust Hotel was somewhere we’d never heard of. A search on the GLOWNET came back with zero hits. Had to dig deeper, took me into the shady reaches of the unregistered, unlisted reflection of the GLOWNET. On the surface, the DARKGLOW didn’t look too dissimilar, the same incandescent, pulsating, polygonal struts compiling across the angular, silhouetted horizon bleeding into gradient coloured skies. Looking closer though, the info-flows were disjointed, neon clusters carrying information could not easily move through node boundaries and search algorithms were next to worthless here. Bio-images were obscured and often hidden, their users probably loaded with blackware. I knew I was. Interactions were kept at a minimum, Cred was everything and no rep got you nothing from anyone. I was tight with several hack-monkeys who prowled the shadow contract market for dollar, I hit one up and they set me up into some referral-only chat-vault. I scrolled the directories, scoping whatever bio-images I could track. Few people knew and even fewer voiced it, but these kinds of non-indexed server-nodes were usually bankrolled by one corporation or another while their code-ninjas silently ran logging software. A way to get dirt on dumb loudmouths who never realised they were only off-the-grid and not actually off-the off-the-grid! Treading carefully, I ran a low-cycle hack protocol. Had to be quick, didn't want anyone thinking I was zeroing in on them and didn’t want any ninja on overwatch to eyeball me. I pulled the chat-logs quick as I could then jacked out. With the DARKGLOW flushed out of my cerebrum, the lurching mundanity of material reality clumsily expanded to fill the vacuum. Searching the logs was easy. The Orpust Hotel was an upmarket off-the-books getaway favoured by wealthy execs or successful mobsters and was located on The Beach. Early in the building of Neon City, the vast seawall had been constructed, radically altering the extent of the conurbation’s natural bay and vastly increasing its size. One of the old-world corporations had seen an opportunity to earn a wad of profit by creating some real estate. It had led to the manufacturing of The Beach, an artificial island located out in the bay, close to Diver City Island, a couple of kilometres from the seawall perimeter and well away from the city proper. At its centre sat the The Orpust hotel, an edifice of concrete and glass to the exclusive clientele it attracted. Only one legitimate way existed to get to The Beach - a discrete branch from the corporate monorail. Otherwise, the Beach was shielded by a comprehensive array of defence systems that made approach by air or sea without authorisation a dicey proposition and they never gave out that authorisation. It was no problem for us though, some months back Yennav Rybasei had provided us with access to the monorail. The tram from Hikage Street to Highway Zero heaved with commuters, seating was nonexistent as late-running cheap-suited wage-monkeys vacantly stood elbow-to-elbow with rucksack wearing consumers, no-hopers and tagged-up gangers, all strangely swaying in unison as we clattered along the neglected, warped and uneven old rails. Failing climate control circulated hot fetid air throughout the grimy, aged interior, exacerbating the mid-morning heat. From the tram it was a short street level walk to the ferry terminal and our boat ride to Diver City Island. Urban heights gave way to unfettered overbright sky and the lapping sea at the bay’s edge. The smell of saltwater mingled with the engine odours of Highway Zero’s road traffic against a thumping background soundtrack of a million rushing autos. Boarding, we found ourselves among tourists and daytrippers who’d packed out the old ferry’s short trip, leaning on railings as the ferry powered out of its mooring and filming Neon City’s profile dwindle away on their media-slabs. At Diver City Island we transferred to the Corporate Monorail, a far cry from the tram. Our urban wear got us a lot of side-eye from execs and those wealthy enough to not even worry about the pretence of having to work as they powered along in the latest Shaguaifu, Gaongha or Hika Taki fashion lines. We swiped through the station’s security gates and strode over the highly polished replica marble floor into the high ceilinged hall. A perimeter of boutique booths and outlets ringed the area and served the affluent travellers who enjoyed the luxury transit system. Swiping through a second set of security turnstiles and boarding the gleaming, waxed missile-like monorail, we found ourselves in a spotless, subtly decorated interior and took our seats. Upholstered in faux Alasijaqi cream leather, they were so soft and deep, there was a danger we would be swallowed, each seat also came with ample leg room and individualised aircon. On the dot, the monorail effortlessly glided out of the station, soundproofing lowered any noise to less than a whisper while the multi-photochromic toughened acrylic windows reduced the baleful glare of Neon City’s harsh blue-white sky to a comfortable hue. Diver City Island slid away smoothly into the blue and while we journeyed onward, a dot emerged out of the hazy east and grew to fill our view. Ringed by an expansive beach of real sand imported at great expense, The Orpust Hotel commanded attention and the eye was irresistibly drawn to the dominating semi-circular pastel yellow and white structure. Swathes of glinting balcony windows caught the sun as we drew closer. The monorail terminated at The Beach, disembarking, a palpable wave of heat washed our us as we made brief trip to the Orpust Hotel Despite our invitation, no reservation had been for us. Jacking into the GLOWNET, I found the hotel’s data-image, a stratospherically tall hotel tower constructed in brilliant golden yellow and white set in the centre stylised beach of glorious golden sand that dominated a tiny island set in a sky blue ocean. Miniature animated seagull models squawked, wheeled and arced around the tower while cheerful dolphins circled the island porpoising in and out of the elaborately undulating waves. Didn’t take the cracker algorithm long to get me into the hotel systems. Moments later, after Bill’s polite prompting, the receptionist was puzzled to find we did actually have reservations for a premium suite along with ancillary rooms. Minutes after we had settled into our rooms, the landline in Bill’s suite pinged. Yennav was letting us know he was ready to meet and instructed us to come to one of the hotel’s myriad high-rise balconies. Numerous Alasijaqi branded white sunlounger chairs, tables and colourful parasols dotted a deserted balcony; only Yennav was there to take advantage of them. Probably something he’d arranged. Yennav Rybasei was a stocky, thick-limbed, squared-faced man with thinning hair, wide jaw and perennial five o’clock shadow. Gone was the customary inoffensive slate grey two piece suit, replaced by beige coloured Duuner canvas shorts that hung a little too high above the knee and an unbuttoned, gaudy, orange and yellow tropically themed polyester Simaz & Jaccno shirt which revealed a chest, burly and matted that extended to a firm rotund belly. A man like Yennav could easily have afforded reductive surgery and biopolymer sculpted ab implants but there was too much of the old-school Armenian gangster about him to ever make that happen. A pair of fancy Poviat sunglasses sat on a stubby nose under dense eyebrows while Dialso branded flip flops dangled off chunky toes. The look was finished by the customary heavy Agrapla gold chain wrapped around a bull neck. A toothy grin split Yennav Rybasei’s face as he waved us over with one cocktail brandishing hand from the shade of a pink parasol with tassels that danced lazily in the pleasantly cooling sea breeze. We walked over. From the balcony’s vantage point, the waters in the bay stretched away impossibly, seemingly distant and still. Only glittering swathes of sunlight rushing along the undulating surface betrayed rhythmic oceanic movement. The sea wall was visible here, a shimmering pencil-thin solid line in the east that emerged into the midday onslaught and spanned the entire horizon, while to the west, the receding boundary of Neon City’s reaching skyline was nothing more than a smear of shapeless dull colour behind layers of clinging smog. Yennav waved a finger as we sat and unobtrusive staff made themselves apparent, soon we found ourselves clutching cheerfully fluorescent coloured drinks, which judging from the aroma, were laced with his favourite Ugteyr vodka. Small talk didn’t last long, Yennav quickly got down to shop talk and it soon moved on to The Red King and Runa Golova. Turned out the kidnapped photographer was the cousin of his girlfriend, Berta. “One of my girlfriends anyway,” he said, winking at me and adding. “We are dva sapaga para da?” He handed us a hardcopy photo of Runa Golova, one of his crew had been following her closely. “Unfortunately, not close enough to stop the abduction.” He added, turning to look out at the beach below. Two of his goons with their signature polyester Sport Lyafibya tracksuits and Agrapla gold chains were walking away from a jetty having just dumped something heavy into the water and looking pleased with themselves. A chef, a florist, a photographer and Koko had been targeted. When asked if he knew any connection between The Red King’ and them, Yennav could not provide an answer. “Perhaps The Red King is planning a wedding,” he remarked off the cuff. We agreed to find and return Runa Golova. I dived the GLOWNET during the return to Diver City Island, something about Yennav’s quip had got us thinking: What The Red King didn’t have was a wedding dress. Hika Taki was a prominent fashion designer and leading trendsetter in Neon City, couldn’t think of anyone in a better position to give us help. I pinged him a call. The answer was brief, his voice registered an octave higher than normal, usually that meant he was stressed about something; probably work related. In my mind’s eye I could see the skinny designer hopping from foot to foot and flapping his arms as he screamed his reply through gritted teeth. Told us he was too busy to talk and was on the cusp of releasing his new product line themed on wedding gowns. I guess we actually got the answer. Day wasn’t over and it hadn’t let up. Back at Hikage, The Ikebukuro Muscle Gurlz had pinged us. They were in trouble, Vanilla Goth told us as much while coughing and sneezing over the call. They needed us to get over to Akihabara pronto. The address that got pinged to us led to a grimy neon-lit narrow hotel in a canyon-like sunless, dingy backstreet. Vanilla Goth was in a bad way, letting us into their cramped hotel rooms with pained movements. Under her black Fassus cami top, boils and sores were apparent on pallid and waxy skin stretched over shifting muscle implants which had been grafted on to her arms and shoulders. The Gurlz had been working a gig for some client called Substrate Fairy which involved sourcing spent 3D printing recyclables, they had gone trash diving in some abandoned district in a corner of Akihabara, one of Neon City’s many null spots. Searching one building, they’d found twined ropes of rubberised electrical cabling snaking along the squalid floor. Following, The Gurlz encountered a basement, down the stairs they saw soft light originating from a side room play across the corridor’s bare concrete wall. Vanilla Goth paused, then she told us they’d gone in and found something. While telling her story, Vanilla Goth led us into the bathroom. It stank and streaks of faeces scarred the walls. Pixie Skull was there, looking just as rough. She was staring at a sheet covered box. Before we had time to even process this, the box shook violently and an inhuman shriek blasted out of it? Pixie Skull pulled the sheet back, inside was a chimpanzee! He was struggling against his restraints and wore an extremely baggy pair of Khitts denim cargo shorts, a palm tree and sunset patterned Avorukhclu Hawaiian shirt with a red and white name tag that read Mister Peepers and a black beanie hat. He gave off a gamer vibe - because he was a gamer: Mister Peepers was a name I recognised,, a famous top ranked player on Legion of Luminaries who anonymously ghost streamed his matches. Millions watched but no one knew anything about Mister Peepers, until now anyway. The Muscle Gurlz had stumbled across Mister Peepers in that basement, bathed in an ever colour shifting digital glow was a room full of tech junk. Networking cables, power cords, wired keyboards and more dangled vine-like from the ceiling, old exposed and stripped data-slabs along with discarded screens piled up haphazardly in corners, while in the centre, surrounded by a cutting-edge GLOWNET setup was the chimpanzee! When he spotted them, his reaction had been immediate. Launching himself out of his seat, anything in his reach became a projectile hurled at The Gurlz who found themselves peppered with everything from peripherals and old circuit boards to cups, food containers, fruit rind and even faeces. The Gurlz had panicked and attacked in response, Mister Peepers was agile but space was tight in the junk filled room and The Gurlz’ augmented strength and numbers gave them the advantage, they managed to put a beatdown on him, then they’d shoved him into one of their beige coloured salvage bins. Not knowing what to do next, they’d booked a room in this hotel to get a read on the situation, then they’d started falling ill and pinged us. Mister Peepers had to be uplifted, no other way about it, after some effort and reasoning, we’d managed to calm him down. Told us that a while back, he’d been kept captive in some corporate bankrolled, windowless, experimental underground med-facility in Sensoji, an off-the-books deniable asset, something he’d heard while playing dumb and listening. He’d also learnt that during the uplift, even more of his genetics had gotten edited and he carried a designer communicable disease which he was apparently immune to. We now knew what had hit The Muscle Gurlz and we’d be next if we didn’t take precautions. Lulling his captors into a false sense of security, Mister Peepers had managed to escape the facility and had been on the run ever since. He used the dollar he got from sponsorships to live off-the-grid and play the games he loved. Mister Peepers was certain the corporation still had spooks and street ashigaru hitting the sidealks, hunting for him. Then, when The Muscle Gurlz had compromised his hideout, he’d expected the worst and reacted accordingly. All of this had gotten The Muscle Gurlz and Mister Peepers where they are now. Sensoji was known as the temple district, it was also home to three warring Triad gangs who were busy rubbing each other out in a long term low level street war. Finding some clandestine biotech stronghold wouldn’t be an easy task. Needed to move sideways on this instead. The Muscle Gurlz needed treatment, Mister Peepers needed a new safe house, along with power, GLOWNET access, water, fruit: The works. Dctor Pepper had some juice with a medtech response outfit he knew, pinged them. told them to get to Akkihabara on the down low. An hour and the responders inconspicuously rolled in, their fluorescent tabards removed and med-tech bagged up. Doctor Pepper drew some blood from Mister Peepers while Koko powered up a med-drone then fed the sample to it with instructions to run a full diagnostic algorithm on the blood. Didn’t take long for the results to ping on our media-slabs, Pepper checked them out. He told us the results showed that some kind of altered cell that mimicked a nerve toxin was abundant in Mister Peepers blood cells, replicating itself into various excreta, it was transmissible to humans. Doctor Pepper went on to tell us that it would bind itself to the victim’s blood cells, he estimated that it would be fatal within seventy-two hours of initial exposure. There was more, Pepper had found an undocumented aberration in Mister Peepers cell receptors which prevented the disease from attaching: a result of the genetic rewrite. With the available data Pepper quickly managed to formulate a synthetic substitute. Minutes later and the med-drone’s onboard pharma processor had manufactured serum, which it popped out in vials with a ding. Minutes after that, we were all inoculated and The Muscle Gurlz on the road to recovery. Mister Peepers was a different situation though, not something Pepper could deal with. Instead he brought in Cheeky Bob, a grungy, possibly unlicensed veterinarian we’d encountered, and pinged him the data. Bob got back to us, a complete blood replacement procedure would flush the toxin out of the chimpanzee. The procedure had a three-to-four day timescale and Bob would have to discreetly source enough of the right kind of plasma. Mister Peepers needed to get out of the hotel and lay low with a place to do it, somewhere secure enough for the transfusion and his streaming. There was some discussion about who was best placed to set this up. Thaddeus Rackham, cross-dressing vaudevillian street performer, sex worker and assassin was our best bet. As an asset, he was a loose cannon, unpredictable and murderous but his network of murky underworld contacts were solid. He had the ins with who could get us what we needed quick but there would be a price. Luckily, Mister Peepers had filthily lucrative sponsorship and the dollar to spare. It was starting to come together, Thaddeus hooked us up with a delisted apartment somewhere on his turf in Sky Dinosaurian Square. Power got piggybacked off the park’s mainline and water was quietly reconnected by maintenance staff with flexible payment options. Same with the GLOWNET Cheeky Bob and his gear got transported to the apartment, the procedure got underway and we left them to it. Later, was about to hit the Huntudi beer again when I got pinged by newsvines. Algorithms had been busy, updating themselves after our digging into the PGDF and Martian incidents while back, now more data and content was being piped to my media-slab. Most of it was trash, nutjob rants and conspiracy theories but there was one thing I hadn’t seen before: Get Set Radio. Get Set Radio was a pirate Glowcast station that streamed music and content out of a hidden venue in Akihabara. A small delinquent of a channel that managed to operate under the radar and evaded shutdown, pumping a frenetic and eclectic mixes of chill-hop-acid-beat jams and fringe news-items to whoever would listen. Finding the station was no problem, accessing its data-vault triggered a batch of bombastic preroll jingles alongside a montage of orange, yellow and green branding and images. “Keep your feet on the street and your eye on the sky.” “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million-to-one, but still they come.” “They’re on their way, they’ll be here any day.” Heavily filtered, streams from the station’s feed showed it was fronted by someone who went by the handle DJ Doctor A. Self-titled as “A Doctor of Criticality”, “A Professor of the Profound” and “A Graduate of the University of Futility”. A couple of the topical stories caught our attention. “The Holden Crater station located near the dig site has gone dark. Authorities say micrometeorites striking the comms satellite are the cause but sources close to the PGDF alerted us that the troopship “‘Flavour of the Dawn’ was diverted to Mars on full burn immediately after the links went dead.” “Unusual traffic of unidentified craft near the Moon today. Yueyliang Base reports a ‘swarm’ of small vehicles unresponsive to hails that dropped below radar height on the dark side. After they failed to reappear search drones were dispatched but failed to locate the intruders. Experts are speculating the craft may have entered the tunnels in the ‘right eye’ of Leibnitz crater that remain unexplored since the unexplained loss of the Von Hoff expedition in ‘63.” Was any of it true, was there some kind of inside knowledge? It had slipped our notice but Captain Noodles had been away. Now returned, he told us that he’d spoken with the Armenian footsoldier that was trailing us, - no doubt one of Yennav’s - and then produced a package, handing out some tiny Ngumatadi Electronics Maeodoho branded GPS trackers and Insisting we take them,. He was evasive about why, something had him rattled and he refused to say. We took the trackers. Hika Taki was still too busy to take a call. Pinged him, got nothing but answermail. Considered getting Yennav to put some eyes on him, definitely a target for The Red King. We passed in the end. DJ Doctor A dropped another one of his alien-rants on Get Set Radio. “Several dogs have been stolen from homes in the Hoppi Street District. Their owners report they were taken at night by naked children with big heads. Camera feeds from the area seem to corroborate this but the thieves are hard to make out clearly since they blend into the greyness of the surrounding buildings. One owner, Lincoln Voight, claims to have grabbed one of the thieves but was he was overpowered and remained unconscious until morning.” Managing to miss the late rush hour, we rode the tram into Hoppi Street. Back in the day, the district had become a focal point of nightlife in early Neon City, the titular street taking its name from hops used in brewing and was still known as The Street of a Thousand bars. A name well earned. As we came to a straining, noisy halt at our stop, day had been reduced to a thinning band of red light along the western skyline. The first sporadic drops of the oncoming rain streaking dirty tram windows through which we watched a multitude of neon decorated bar fronts and gaudy glittering signs flickering to life in the gloaming. The dull, grey miasma of asphalt and concrete transformed into a silvery twinkling vein that threaded into the vanishing point before our eyes, contrasted by an amorphous shadowy mass that ran along it and consisted of the undulating silhouettes of countless revellers hitting the street. The nightly deluge was in full force as the tram pulled out of our stop, drumming incessantly on the thin aluminium roofing. Lashed by the glimmering streetlight lit downpour, we exited into the darkening night; Lincoln Voight our target. Easy to get details on Lincoln Voight, most citizens never gave their GLOWNET bio-vault a second thought. He lived in some identikit looking apartment in an unremarkable block in the district’s outlying residential quarter where the spirituous volume of Hoppi Street had faded. A middle-aged, somewhat out of shape Lincoln Voight answered our knocking, a white headband decorated with a black dragon was tied around his head and he wore a yellow and black polyester Osolilitki tracksuit. He didn’t look too pleased to see us but Bill managed to assuage his concerns and we were invited inside. He took us to a studio apartment furnished blandly with old worn and drab Mayari branded furniture, covered with a vinyl cloth was a tiny dining table situated close to a window shuttered by roller blinds while on the adjoining off-white wall a small integrated Ajuarat kitchen unit had been installed. In front of a Sulgeon wall-slab was a square armed faux-leather upholstered two-seater couch along with a couple of matching one seaters. Lincoln went to the kitchen unit and powered up the Heseoc branded tea-maker, with a razor like hiss, steam vented almost immediately from the superheating element as it instantly prepared tea, vibrating and bubbling cheerfully while it did so. Returning with an aromatically laden tray Lincoln took a seat and insisted we join him. Captain Noodles immediately curled up on the remaining one-seater so the rest of us squeezed ourselves into the couch awkwardly. He then handed out some plastic cups styled to imitate delicate china pouring into them what he called ‘Chinese tea,’. Spanning the remaining wall hung a collection of ‘exotic’ weapons, knock-off tanto, cheap nunchucks, low quality sai and more, poor grade replicas available from any bogus GLOWNET seller. Trigger gave them a cursory contemptuous glance, I’m sure it was an affront to his swordsman’s sensibilities. Lincoln picked up on Trigger’s glance. “I’m a martial arts master, I’ve completed the Black Dragon Remote Learning ‘Become a killer in three easy steps and learn to defend yourself against cyber bullies’ course,” he boasted enthusiastically, plucking a framed certificate from the wall and brandishing it at us. It stated; ‘Confirmed master of secret fighting arts handed down from antiquity’. Lincoln sat down and we got him to tell us his story. Yesterday, he’d been out walking Barabus, his dog when they had attacked. He described them as child-sized, perhaps naked and with large heads. “I tried to fight them off but they were masters of jiu-jitsu,” he claimed excitedly. Jumping to his feet energetically, he unsteadily took a crane stance, adding. “I know my stuff, but that little guy stopped me dead with a single touch. Probably scrambled my ganglia, jiu-jitsu masters can do that, I read about it.” Unmoving, Captain Noodles had been watching the exchange through one almost imperceptibly open eye. Rousing himself and uncurling, he dropped off the seat effortlessly and gave Lincoln Voight a sniff. The result was instantaneous. Despite being uplifted, Captain Noodles’ response was pure animal instinct, his hackles raised, back arched and tail puffed out. “We got to get out of here,” Noodles said. “Now!” With that, he immediately left the apartment. What had Noodles detected? Was it the Martian link he refused to talk about? My eyes darted from corner to corner and at the window. We all shifted uncomfortably, no sign of immediate threat though, we continued. It took some cajoling but Lincoln was convinced to come out and show us where the attack occurred. Grumbling under his breath a little, he pulled the zipper on his tracksuit jacket right up to his ill defined chin and stepped out into the rainy night with us. The attack took place a brief walk from Lincoln’s apartment block where a typically poorly lit narrow back alley that ran between two tightly packed blocks intersected the main thoroughfare. Barely visible behind wavering sheets of rain I could make out the glimmering red light-diode of a security camera bolted high up and across the street. Its feed would stream directly into the GLOWNET, it would have what was needed. Lincoln went on his way after we’d thanked him. Incandescent blurs left disjointed afterimages in my cerebrum as I flurried through data. Grown accustomed to cracking street-feeds with their cheap security contractor provided under-resourced anti-intrusion protocols and measures meant I could autopilot through the GLOWNET routine and was barely conscious as the archived, time-stamped data appeared on my Nonohiki. The footage matched what DJ Doctor A was saying. It was poor quality, low res and washed out but it showed Lincoln walking past the alley with his dog before swaying and collapsing. An individual, somehow colourless and hazily indistinct, inexplicably emerged into sight, they looked small but it was hard to tell with certainty, their movements looked confident, swift and in a second, Barabus was gone. Wasn’t much else to get out of the footage. Time to pay DJ Doctor A a visit, had to be a reason he was so on-the-ball. Started with a dive on him. Back into the GLOWNET, immersing myself in Neon City’s parametrically shifting info-vistas, dropped a hunter/searcher algorithm into the nearest data-flow, watched the nebulously shaped silhouette bound away and let it get to work. Didn’t take long to get a hit, results were unexpected. For all of Get Set Radio’s anti-establishment posturing and DJ Doctor A’s rhetoric, the channel was fully licensed by the relevant municipal authorities. The data gathered by the algorithm also included contact details. Pinged a message to DJ Doctor A, told him we had solid evidence on aliens, sent him a taster, told him we wanted a face-to-face. Text message came back quick enough, he was onboard and gave us an Akihabara address. The meet was tonight. Midnight in Akihabara; rain wasn’t letting up, never did. Strips of retail units fiercely lit streets with multicoloured storefronts that welcomed our arrival. Rows of exterior Senonable wall-slabs flashed painfully bright, ever changing product commercials at us with a near hypnotic cadence through the glittering filter of light bending raindrops. The small hours had thinned out the crowds and shoppers somewhat but enough people doggedly braved the precipitous night, bustling over colour smeared reflective pools which had accumulated on the sidewalks to keep the heart of the city’s consumer electronics centre beating. The address took us to a litter-strewn rain-soaked slender side alley that divided two soaring retail city blocks and was lined with a jumble of canopy-covered street sellers hawking data slugs for ageing game-slabs and vending machines selling various flavours of Kaia Cola. To an easily missed dive bar with a narrow door beneath a stuttering neon bar sign that read Udon Drizzle. Into a crimson tinged noisy front bar decorated with old posters of forgotten sports and a wall of older empty, branded liquor bottles. Past slouching and sideways glancing patrons, through a black unlabelled backdoor, up uncomfortably tight and creaking exposed woodwork steps and into a small converted back room office and finally, to DJ Doctor A. Lit by the buzzing filament of an old yellowing bulb, tendrils of lingering smoke sluggishly curled beneath a nicotine stained ceiling. On a desk hidden under the weight of countless box folders and precariously stacked hardcopy documents leant a man. Tall, lean but shredded with wayward chunky dreads framing a long face while blue-tinted Jaserasu branded rectangular, plastic rimmed shades hung on a nose decorated with a gold ring. Doctor A wore a distinctive white retro-reflective Duuner tee that glittered an opulent shade of gold in the light and was badged with a lightning bolt logo. DJ Doctor A had a distinct west coast accent, an incandescent subdermal implant shaped into a stylised ‘A was embedded in one cheek ’ and gleamed with a strange intensity whenever he spoke. Our conversation didn’t last too long. Doctor A told us by his account that the dognapping was a recent occurrence, something he’s only confirmed in the last twenty-four hours. He didn’t think the incidents went back far. He didn’t have any leads on more missing dogs but he did drop some info about a contact of his; one Irelyn Koerner. Irelyn Koemer was a certified psychiatrist and social worker who practised out of Hoppi Street, she’d told Doctor A one of her cases was a transient who been in the PGDF, now a street zero who haunted the district that she hadn’t seen for a few days and was concerned about his well being. Did the dognappings and this weird Martian menace have anything to do with the PGDF? Might have been a stretch but it was a lead - of a sort. As promised, we pinged a copy of the autopsy footage to DJ Doctor A, told us he’d pass it on to his contacts who’d try and pull something from it. Hours to dawn and with time to burn, we left Doctor A’s office and hit up the Udon Drizzle bar below hard. Huntudi, Dindanha and Baishan chasers followed neat Shiaikan shots as we slumped into an intoxicated fugue while the clamour of energetic voices and an overstrained and distorted jukebox playing old tunes washed over us as we relaxed in an unhygienic and neglected plastic and vinyl furnished booth. The rain dried up before we did. A sliver of reddish light was colouring the eastern horizon blue while the downpours began to subside and the heat rose. Taking our cue, we exited the bar which was still in full swing and headed for the tram, hoping to preempt the morning rush hour. Luckily, finding Irelyn Koemer’s address was easy, as a municipal employee her details were stored on their underprotected data vault which was an open door to me. Irelyn lived close to her work community in Hoppi Street. The lustrous multicoloured excess of light and noise from last night seemed muted against the now cloudless blue-white sky. Wage-monkeys were still pulling on their cheap, neutral slate-grey two-piece Kuabha suits by the time we rode back into Hoppi Street. Only the night workers and dedicated nihilists were slouching along the sidewalks here. The address took us into one of Neon City’s many anonymous low-rent apartment blocks in the residential quarter and an equally anonymous, windowless door in a partially lit corridor of anonymous, windowless doors. We buzzed and waited. After the minute it took the occupant to check us out on their security feed, It was answered by a middle-aged woman; average height, average weight, she had tight curling whitish hair in a short cut style. Initially, Irelyn Koemer was suspicious but Bill’s practised, measured tone combined with the name-dropping of Doctor A alleyed her concerns and she provided us with some information on her missing client. Known only as Nursery Bob, formerly of the PGDF who lived on the sidewalks and doorways of Hoppi Street was known for making elaborate and theatrical old-school toys which he gave to the neighbourhood kids. He had an almost pathological need to see children happy and used what seemed like a gift for the mechanical to do this. Irelyn had noticed Bob was becoming furtive and unsettled, something was making him worried, fearful even and then, five days ago he vanished. Irelyn pinged us a photo of Bob, middle-aged with grey-streaked dark hair, brawny shoulders as well as the bulky forearms and hands of a grafter, he didn’t have the tattered, misfitting, mish-mashed and patchwork-repaired clothing that would typically mark him out as a sidestreet obake. Irelyn added that she was certain that he had money somehow, perhaps he sold some of his toys? He wasn’t homeless because of poverty and as far as Irelyn could discern, he just refused to go indoors, preferring to live outside? It was a short walk to where Bob slept, Irelyn had visited him there several times and took us to an unfrequented narrow alley that slipped away from the bustle of the main thoroughfare and branched into a narrower, perpetually shaded cul-de-sac that finally led us to a high-walled corner spot adjacent to padlocked and clearly disused maintenance access panel. A pile of flattened cardboard boxes sat next to some scavenged plastic panelling and woodworking tools. A quick search showed nothing significant here or evidence Bob had been back recently. The location was put into a positioning algorithm on my data-slab, it executed a series of locationally relative arguments and came back with some potential correlations, one seemed pertinent; Bob’s makeshift shelter was half between the apartments of Irelyn Koemer and Lincoln Voight. It meant that Bob might have been close to Lincoln when Barabus was taken. Bob needed to be found. Thanking Irelyn for her help, we made our way back to Hikage Street. Back at the one-bed, I kicked off my Harbiefs and Hiaki, dialled up the audio on the wall-slab, crashed on the futon and pulled a blanket over my face. An hour later and I was washing down some stim pills with a self-heated pot of Niaiwo. Time to dive on Nursery Bob. The merging movements of data-flow patterns exploded with primary colours as they compiled into unpredictably emergent constructs that populated the data-scape while I jacked into the GLOWNET. Usage was high, Bio-images filled my view, as I navigated the info-vista. Best to start with the PGDF. Their data-image was public knowledge and easy to find. The shell on the image was a brief animated sequence displaying a carefully balanced multicultural blend of the brave young men and women of the force with their flaxen hair, cerulean eyes and brown uniforms. It would take minutes to get into the PGDF directories and I wasn’t looking to generate any autonomous location logs for the bio-image I was using, even a low-cycle hack would be risky here. Instead I kept a half a dozen server nodes away and launched a normal cracking algorithm, inputted some protocols into it to remotely approach the bio-image and let go on its way. A little progress bar began ticking up on the info-vista. While I was waiting I launched a hunter/searcher algorithm to look for anything else on Nursery Bob, it got zero hits, he had no GLOWNET presence. Eventually, the progress bar filled and I was in the PGDF data-vault and their directories. Without Bob’s full name, too many people in the PGDF, searching would get too much data,too many hits. I needed a data point I could filter. The photo! Irelyn Koemer had given us a photo of Bob.The PGDF system would have security profiles on all staff. I put the photo through facial recog and pulled the data it generated, then used it as the search criteria. It worked, I got a hit. Robert Silverford: An orphan who’d signed up to the PGDF at the earliest opportunity out of Neon City’s brutally underfunded social care system. During induction he scored in the top percentile for mechanical aptitude and was recruited into the engineering corps where he had a successful if unremarkable career up until six years ago whereupon he was abruptly pensioned off? I kept scanning the file: There was no record of disciplinary actions against Silverford, I kept diving. Then, towards the end of Silverford’s military record, there was some: During routine shuttle transport between Earth and the Moon, Robert Silverford had been involved in a catastrophic accident. The event had killed everybody aboard except for Silverford According to the incident report, the salvage crew tasked with recovering the wreckage had not expected to find any survivors from the explosion and were surprised to encounter Silverford who had managed to secure himself, an EVA suit and some compressed oxygen tanks inside a reinforced storage locker where, somehow he had managed to survive three days before the unexpected rescue. Just before his records were closed, it stated he was discharged with full disability pension. The report didn’t say much, felt evasive, so I tried accessing the incident report source file. Wherever the link went, it was restricted, I got denied, slammed and kicked out the directory. I scoped the nearby data-vista, there was no response; no alarm or counter-intrusion measures had been triggered. I captured some data and ran it through a logger, didn’t look like internal security was so hot, whoever had coded the vault had expected the outer security to do the heavy work. I launched another cracker algorithm targeting the report’s node, it pulled the encryption string which bypassed the internal security, granting full access to the report. Turned out the initial report was a half-fabrication and cover for the actual report. The report determined there was no accident, Robert Silverford had been aboard a shuttle called Lost Wisdom of the Ancients which had been destroyed. The report listed the shuttle as: ‘Destroyed by alien interference, all hands lost.’ Following the rescue, Silverford had been given a debriefing and psych-eval. Silverford had no recollection of events leading directly up to the incident and no understanding of how or why the shuttle had been destroyed. The evaluation recorded several examples of Silverford suffering post stress traumatic disorder, including: Claustrophobia, nyctophobia and pedophobia - particularly fear of angry children. The evaluation also cited Silverford as stating that he had intense recurring nightmares of being hunted by angry children. Finally, it had recommended that Robert Silverford be discharged with full pension. The report wasn’t done, there was more, so I kept reading. Three days after Silverford had been discovered, six days after the incident, a second survivor had been found. This time though, it was not in space. Jacqueline Boxer had been found outside the boundaries of Neon City wandering in a dazed through a forested region in the bordering wilderness. She was suffering short term memory loss and similarly to Silverford had no recollection of events that led to the attack or how she had arrived at the forest. Boxer had been suffering from several injuries and contusions while also displaying early signs of malnutrition. Boxer had been extremely agitated and was given a med-eval for her injuries under sedation, it was discovered that she had signs of having given birth recently. The report stated there were no records of Boxer ever having been pregnant, in PGDF archives or anywhere else. Boxer had no memory of this either. Boxer was also evaluated as suffering several disorders, including nyctophobia, iatrophobia, tomophobia and pedophobia. Boxer's evaluation also recommended that she be pensioned off. There was something about the shuttle incident that was wriggling through my brain, something more vaguely half-remembered from six years ago. It took a quick GLOWNET to make it click. About the time of the shuttle accident, the PGDF had gotten a massive boost to their funding. Jacqueline Boxer was a new lead, I ran her through the GLOWNET on the hunter/searcher algorithm and got a partial hit. Jacky Boxes was a registered employee at a warehousing business located on Highway Zero’s waterfront. Ran them through a business profiler algorithm on my Nonohiki, there were no flags, looked like a typical run-of-the-mill commercial enterprise. Met up with the others, took a ride out to Highway Zero, headed to the waterfront. Warehouses here were pretty much identikit poly-ferrous prefabricated grey structures that were clustered into small anonymous business parks that ran alongside the docks, servicing sea traffic that came into the city. Bill took the lead here, approaching the warehouse front office and speaking to staff at the warehouse. He was disarming and they were happy to speak with him. Jacky Boxes was a supply manager and well liked. A couple of weeks ago, staff began to notice she was becoming erratic, agitated and fearful. About five days ago, Jacky vanished, the staff are now concerned for her safety. The management were unable to provide us with an address for Jacky, telling us that they believed she had no fixed abode and Neon City’s lax labour laws meant they were not required to have a home address. They did however, provide us with an up to date photo. Boxer was in her early-to-mid thirties with an oval-shaped face, high forehead and shoulder length mousy-blonde hair she wore straight. Something was definitely going down with Silverford and Boxer, especially since both had gone missing about the same time. According to the PGDF report, both had potentially encountered aliens, did this tie in with Lincoln Voight’s encounter? If extraterrestrials were prowling Neon City, we had to find a way of tracking them. Captain Noodles had implied he could sense them but he’d gone off-the-grid. There was one option that could be pursued. Bill contacted Xylona Adler and offered to take her dog for a walk. Wasn’t as left-field as it sounded. Like Noodles, Toby was an alpha-class uplift with full cognitive and communicative functions, his senses would be as acute. Potentially, Toby could lead us to the aliens. Xylona looked at us through the distorted lenses of her archaic thick-framed spectacles, her oversized eyes blinked curiously as we took Toby off her hands for a few hours. Trigger got some sideways glances during the packed out tram ride to Hoppi Street. Pets were a rare sight on Neon City’s public transit system. Toby wisely decided to keep quiet during the trip. Soon the sun would be at its zenith, shadows would shrink and there’d be no way to escape the day’s full heat unrelentingly beating down with almost pain inducing intensity on the city. Trigger was hoping that Toby would pick something up before then as they navigated the endless parade of revellers, hard-drinkers and tourists that thrummed past the rows of bars and pubs Hoppi Street was known for. After some walking and random sniffing, Toby picked up something, he stopped and could not conceal an instinctive momentary bearing of his teeth. Toby then turned to Trigger and explained how he wanted to leave, he did not want to be in the crowds. Toby had gotten as spooked as Noodles and as tight lipped, he refused to say why he was so nervous. Although he did let slip that he’s encountered the smell before when serving as captain aboard ‘The Ganymede’? It must have been a reference to the PGDF? Alpha class uplifts were routinely created to serve and crew aboard adapted spacecraft. It was a dead end, Toby wasn’t going to get us any further information, Trigger took him for some walkies before returning Toby to Xylona. After some discussion, it was decided to try the plan again and we took a ride to Kibogaoka Hill. There was a dog sanctuary that Trigger knew about. Charities were far and few between in the City of Electric Dreams. Most of the municipal authorities were deeply in the pocket of the corporations and clandestinely dedicated to forwarding those agendas, either that or they looked the other way. Charities weren’t high on corporate priorities. But if anywhere in Neon City would have a dog sanctuary, it would be Kibgaoka Hill. The district was dominated by the shanty town with its undocumented population and uncontrolled growth over the titular hill. The establishment regarded it a leach on their society The shanty town was home and refuge to no-hopers, transients, last-chancers, fugitives, the unwaged and more who struggled everyday to survive and in return viewed the establishment with equal vehemence. A dog sanctuary was just an extension of Kibogaoka Hill’s rebel spirit. On a corner in the erratic,unpredictable twisting backstreets was the dog sanctuary where there was some scant space given over to a yard outside the usual stacked, shabbily constructed cubic homes. Trigger soon emerged with Rex, a frisky German Shepherd rescue who was eager to explore the world beyond as Trigger took to the streets of The Hill. Rex sniffed and rummaged seemingly everywhere but it was clear that the dog was not knowingly tracking any extraterrestrial activity or scents. Trigger didn’t return Rex to the sanctuary, deciding to adopt the dog instead. While Trigger was busy I put Jacqueline Boxer’s latest photo through facial recog and ran the data through a hunter/searcher algorithm, it got a hit from some rando’s MyFaceSpace page. The rando had captured a photo of someone being arrested at Rokkaku Expo Stadium, that someone was Jacqueline Boxer. It put an idea in my head, I jacked into the GLOWNET and sank into the local info-vista. Neon City’s rentacop data-images and secured data-vaults were all essentially identical, created by the same GLOW-designer contractors who’d no doubt tended the contract as cheapest bidders. All the security provisions and protocols for all the rentacop precincts had been written under one umbrella by the same code-monkeys. The precinct at Rokkaku Expo Stadium was no different. It meant they all had the same vulnerabilities. It meant that once I had the means to crack any one precinct, I had the means to crack them all. Soon I was inside their directories, sifting through their arrest records. Using the facial recog data I soon got matches. Both Robert Silverford and Jacqueline Boxer had been arrested multiple times in the last five days while loitering and protesting outside of the Rokkaku Tower. Pushing the flier as hard as it could go span the turbines up to their operational maximums and they hummed with a disapprovingly high pitch while Koko took us to Rokkaku Expo Stadium. Sky-congestion didn’t hinder her and I watched aerial traffic flicker past the viewports in erratic blurs while behind it, the high-rise dominated cityscape slowly rolled past, lurched with every bobbing course correction.
From a dot on the skyline, the Rokkaku Tower inevitably expanded to its massive proportions, growing to fill the front facing screens. Koko put the flier down on the lowest roofpad close by and we raced the rest of the way on foot. Luck was with us, after reaching the perimeter of the tower plaza we spotted the pair of them. Rentacop hadn’t moved them on yet. After finally reaching Bob and Jacky, they gave us their stories. Both of them had been inexplicably drawn here five days ago without ever having contacted each other, compelled by something they couldn’t comprehend or resist. They were convinced that aliens were inside the Rokkaku Tower, both spoke of hearing the alien voices in their heads. By this time, Rentacop had made us aware of their presence, a number of suited-up uniforms were slowly trying to surround us while failing to inconspicuously reach for side arms or puke-prodders. They had probably been expecting Bob and Jacky but not us. We preempted their strategy, Bill convinced Bob and Jacky to leave with us - at least for now. Renatcop stood down and watched as we walked out the plaza. Bob and Jack knew where they wanted to go, wasn't too far to the PGDF Vets Association. When they got there, they were provided with some warm food and drink. As they ate, they told us the rest of their stories, their versions of events matched each other and the classified PGDF incident report. During this, Bill and Koko had spotted something; we were under observation. The watcher was stood at the corner of a nearby back alley. We got the briefest of glances at her, dark skinned with blue hair and a noticeably oversized head, she looked young, it was impossible to determine any more about her age other than ‘young’. Somehow, she’d realised that we’d made her and retreated out of sight into the alley. Trigger dashed across the street, into the alleyway and found nothing, no evidence of her ever being there, running further in, there was also nothing. She had disappeared. 5th June 2021 It's a Saturday night and we're logged into video chat for some Saturday RPG action and it's time for the next part of Matakishi's Wired Neon Cities campaign Location: Neon City. The grinding clamour of the City of Electric Dreams had mingled into an expansive dulling background static, a numbing, urban white noise that scrambled the brain. The day’s heat unrelentingly rose to intolerable levels before the sun had even half-finished its march into Neon City’s bleached blue-white sky as shafts of morning light blazed through the tarp that protected the blasted wall of my one-bed while lighting it up the colour of urine. I coped by mixing Kaia Cola with Shiaikan whiskey; light on the Kaia and heavy on the Shiaikan did the trick; morning receded into a distant undefinable haze. It couldn’t last and didn’t; the ping from my media-slab cut through the blur like a precision sword stroke, killing my euphoria and flooding my senses with material reality. Neon City’s unluckiest man, Yaroh Uron was online and it wasn’t about to get better for him: His voice was laboured, erratic, I could almost see the furtive look and sheen of sweat on his face. It wasn’t enough that he’d been wrongly convicted for murder, now he told us he was on the run and rentacop were after him for another! We couldn’t leave him twisting in the wind and had to get to Rokkaku Dai Heights. Koko had the flier prepped and airborne in minutes, remotely bringing it down on one of Hikage Street’s highrise pads while we hustled up to meet it in a shroud of jetwash. Gravity pawed at me during lift off, I watched the grey tower that housed my one-bed fall away, swallowed by Neon City’s sprawling concrete maw while the urine coloured polymer tarp that marked out my destroyed wall shrank into an indistinguishable dot on the flier’s screens. A tiny tremble vibrated out of the turbines, transmitted through the toughened poly-blended gum soles of my Habiefs while I scoped the newsvines. The sharp abrupt tugs on my guts told me Koko was pushing the flier hard as she sliced through Neon City’s sky traffic. The news on Yaroh Uron was plentiful, so was the footage. A few days ago, while locked up, Tohi, his wife, had been killed in a freak accident involving a delivery droid. Inexplicably, its powercell had somehow crashed all safety protocols, catastrophically overloading. Unusually, The Black Dolphin gulag had granted Yaroh compassionate leave to attend Tohi’s funeral. That was the start of his troubles. Footage on the vines from the outskirts of the funeral had shown an armed band of masked individuals decked in form-fitting black Steutz armour and riding a grimy, white, angular and square bodied Benlato Hochall sky-van descend on the ceremony and pounce: With practised precision, they’d netted a hood over Yaroh’s head while firing indiscriminately into the mourners, dragged him into the Hochall and bugged out. In and out in seconds; the work of professional black-baggers. Further footage, grainy, badly lit and half out of focus, showed Yaroh Uron and the black-baggers hitting the tram network after dumping the Hochall. I watched the security feed of commuters awkwardly shrinking away while the black-baggers boarded and peeled the hood off of Yaroh’s head, moments later they induced him to vomit with a puke-prodder! A newsvine would later explain that they were flushing a tracker out Yaroh’s system that he’d been made to swallow by the screws at the Black Dolphin. I continued to watch while between stations, the black-baggers punched the tram’s emergency stop. They dragged Yaroh with them as they evacuated the tram, disappearing out of shot. Finally, an unconnected piece of footage showed Yaroh Uron killing Avery Kiani, emptying a full magazine at full auto from a grey-steel Koudeila submachine pistol into the corrupt rentacop’s chest, muzzle flash lighting up a furiously contorted, murderous visage while Kiani convulsed and collapsed into a bloody, dying heap. Following that, the newsvines announced that Yaroh had been abandoned by his black-bagging so called ‘accomplices’. I wasn’t so sure they were accomplices, the black-baggers had pretty forcibly pushed him around during his escape while he struggled and stumbled. Tohi Uron was dead. Avery Kiani was dead. Averi kiani had been about as corrupt as rentacop got in Neon City, which is to say; very corrupt, deep in Benedict Twistom’s pocket. Our dives into his past had pulled no dirt, instead, we’d pushed his button as hard as we could. Which meant hitting him in the bank balance; zeroing the bankroll delivered from Benedict Twistom’s slush fund then siccing D4VID on him, hoping the botcaster would score some usable leverage on the rentacop as he reacted to losing all his dollar. Somehow he’d given D4VID the slip, soon after that, Annabel Twistom - Benedict’s wife had come up dead; victim of a bloody street execution. Looked likely we’d pushed Kiani pretty hard. Annabel Twistom, Tohi Uron and now, Avery Kiani, was there a commonality, a thread that ran between all of them, linked one to another? I kept replaying the clues, looking for anything in the footage that I’d missed. When I went back through the tram feed as the black-baggers and Yaroh fled, I saw something, there, in the background, unidentified and strange? Scrubbing back and rewatching several times, I saw what seemed like a pair of red cylindrical robots? They were dragging some unidentifiable individual through some neglected, disused old brownfield the perimetered Zoshigaya Park, searching the GLOWNET told me the only notable feature close to the brownfield was ‘The Tower’, an exclusive ‘celebrity’ restaurant owned by McChef, real name Halifax Machesky. Didn’t get the chance to dive deeper, Koko had piped up, The Heights had come into view. Densely clustered in one neighbourhood of Rokkakau Dai Heights, the alabaster white residential high-rises reached into the overbright sky, looming above the urbanised horizon, welcoming our closing flier. Yaroh Uron was there, he’d told us as much, somewhere among the undocumented population who inhabited the sprawling makeshift shanty town precariously anchored to the aerial arrays, sat-dishes, transmission antennae and water towers that dotted the off-white rooftops and were connected by a web of haphazardly swaying makeshift bridges and skywalks. Circling the high-rises, we saw the large number of rentacop swarming the sidewalks on street level, trying to cordon off the entire neighbourhood while on the rooftop settlement, more uniforms brandishing their cheap Rekhang 9mm Ngaohun sidearms cautiously prowled the walkways. It would take them a while to flush out Yaroh, neither the locals nor the squatters here had any love for rentacop and would have them chasing shadows. Beyond the edge of the housing district we spotted a column of black smoke billowing out of another high-rise, the lower plumes intermittently underlit orange by licking flames that extruded from a gouged, bloody wound of an opening in the side of the tower. That kind of shape was recognisable, something explosive had hit the high-rise hard. Koko found an alley wide enough to rapidly put our feet on the ground somewhere inside the cordon, we managed to slip into one of the towers before rentacop could get eyes on us. Apartments in The Heights were slightly more upmarket than the one-and-two-beds that we were used to on Hikage Street, even so, they were tightly packed and stacked on each floor. Rumours and news spread through these kinds of crammed communities faster than newsvines, someone would know something. Bill took the lead here, he was in his element, a winning smile and silky patter got numerous residents talking and soon we had a good idea where Yaroh Uron was holed up. The rooftop shantytown’s population was always transient and untrackable, it meant that a few of the makeshift shacks were always unoccupied. It was in one of these that Yaroh Uron had - at least so far, hidden from rentacop. Moving cautiously, we headed for the roof, the info led to a smallish squat; a clinging corner building, held up by misshaped wooden props and walled by a mixture of corrugated plastic sheeting and pallets wrapped in tarp, topped a thin, dented alloy sheet roof. Trigger ran thermals and got a single hit, an individual male heat profile was inside, pacing the small room in short, swift movements, a firearm grasped in one hand. Yaroh would be on edge, it needed a measured approach. Koko bought Pippy online, the custom Suayo MKVI drone had been outfitted with a voice function and could deliver Yaroh a message. Trigger approached one of the shack walls that faced towards the roof with Pippy quietly buzzing in tow and gave the wall a kick! His Shiaosha leg implants activated, lending his strike extra momentum and the flimsy wall split in two, Pippy’s buzzing servos noticeably increased in pitch as the drone accelerated through the gap. From our position we just about saw Yaroh level his pistol at Pippy and pull the trigger. Pippy was met with a spent magazine’s audible click, if Yaroh did have a reload, we got in the shack and had him calmed down before he had any chance to think about it. The wall, now in two pieces was hastily propped up, rentacop were nowhere to be found right now. Turning to Yaroh Uron, we got his story out of him. He’d never known the black-baggers who’d snatched him from the funeral, after exiting the tram, they dragged him aboard another sky van and made good their escape. Eventually they’d ended up at one of the many failed or abandoned urban renewal projects that littered Neon City’s sprawl, this particular example was a half finished high-rise and they were on one of the skeletal higher levels. Benedict Twistom had been waiting, materialising out of an unlit corner with an offer. Kill Avery Kiani and in return, Twistom would furnish him with a new identity and a way to evade rentacop. Yaroh had nothing left in The City of Electric Dreams now, so he took the offer, Twistom even provided the gun and sent the black-baggers to help. In hindsight though, Yaroh admitted it was obvious that Twistom would betray him and once he’d rubbed out Kiani, the black-baggers had evaporated into the sprawl and Benedict Twistom had ghosted him. Now he was here, waiting for the inevitable. I couldn’t help but try to put the dots together. Avery Kiani had likely murdered Annabel Twistom and Benedict had gotten Yaroh to kill Kiani, that was one thread, what was the link between Yaroh and Benedict, the black-baggers had been bankrolled by Twistom, but how did he know to lean on Yaroh. Tohi had been killed in unusual circumstances, it could have been arranged. The wife of an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck, former exec would have been an easy mark for the kind of spooks and street-ninja that someone like Twistom had in his pocket. Avery Kiani had executed Annabel Twistom. Benedict Twistom got Tohi Uron killed. Yaroh Uron murdered Avery Kiani. No solid proof, but the thread that ran from one to another was as clear as a set of bloody footprints. What to do with Yaroh Uron now? We couldn’t leave him to his fate and had two options: Enrol him in the Planetary Global Defence Force or get him out of Neon City. Yaroh Uron chose the former. The closest PGDF recruitment office was located on Ninety Ninth Street. Getting him there would’ve been easy but Rentacop had tightened the noose. Koko tols rentacop had escalated their cordon, now restricting all air-traffic; it meant we couldn’t call in the flier without triggering alarms, same was true of all the city’s sky-cabs, their piloting-systems would automatically divert them away from any airspace limitations introduced by rentacop. Another solution was needed. I jacked into the GLOWNET, the shanty’s patchwork substance of material reality shrank away while polygonal neon veins expanded around me, incandescent growing crystalline settled into Neon City’s wavering and ever changing angular info-vista. Here, even the shanty town had its own data-image; a giant, pulsating, colour-shifting, tangled mess of data movements that loosely resembled some monstrously chaotic spider’s web, as undesigned and unplanned as its material reality counterpart. I could also see rentacop bio-images prowling the vicinity or lingering close by, the expanding cordon had now reached into the GLOWNET, glow-cops launching hunter algorithms on standard issue cheap Muanma slabs. This was my jungle gym though, not theirs; I launched a spoofer that masked my own bio-image and was immediately past them without a hitch. The city’s vista twisted and rotated as I navigated towards the closest rentacop precinct. It was a squat, concrete-grey, flat-coloured cubic data-image, looking as much of a bunker as the real thing. It looked like a lazy design but I knew better, it had been researched, focus grouped and designed to be as uninviting and intimidating as anything could be in the GLOWNET. Not because they wanted to menace the population but because they didn't want to incur the fiscal expense of dealing with the public. Getting through the public-facing data-image would be trickier, security wouldn’t be so lax in this department. I launched a hacking algorithm and watched as it worked through the rentacop’s encryption key, revealing each digit, one-by-one, calculations told me I’d crack it before rentatcop’s counter-hack system tagged a trace on me. Once all the numbers were revealed, it was done, I was past their security and into their core system. It listed several subdirectories, one showed a constant gleaming flow of data to-and-fro between precincts but it didn’t interest me Another subdirectory logged this precinct’s communications between patrols and street units. The records showed only intermittent contact between them, a length of chatter, followed by a length of silence, followed by another length of chatter and so on, this limited comms was another budget consideration and something that could be exploited. I waited for a period of chatter to end and then got to work. I picked a rentacop sky-wagon outside of the cordon but close by and then, on the directory, I flicked it from green to red - the system would flag the unit as ‘in danger’. The closest rentacop units - those around us would have to prioritise the incident, respond and redirect to that location. It was a rough hack and rentacop would figure out it was a phantom threat soon enough but it gave us the window we needed to get through the cordon. It was going to have to be by foot, fast and to a public transit network, the metro would have sharper security, so the tram network it was. Bill had taken the opportunity to give Yaroh a rudimentary disguise, wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny but it would slow facial recog. I’d also sourced some new ID docs for Yaroh, the encryption algorithm utilised by the city to generate social security numbers, tracking numbers, case numbers and more had been cracked years ago, the city defences had been weak and to keep costs down, they relied on a single algorithm to drive everything. From there, generating a new ID for Yaroh Uron had been child’s play. Now we just had to get to Ninety Ninth Street. Even out of rush hour, the crumbling tram infrastructure was unendingly clogged with commuters; wage-monkeys may have come and gone for the morning but It was a tense ride to Ninety Ninth crammed aboard its dirty, declining, unserviced carriages filled with consumers, no-hopers, inebriants, street gangs, and transients who all had places to be. An unknowable time passed before Ninety Ninth Street came into view through dirt stained windows, faded old brakes squealed while they dragged the tram to a stop, then we were off and on our way. Undulating crowds were ahead and had to be navigated, the mixture of onlookers and pachinko players didn’t let up when nows we were back on foot: The Neon Mile, with its long strip of fluorescent tube painted, jingle-playing pachinko rooms, bingo halls, gambling dens and karaoke setups pulled in an immense number of rollers looking to score big or die trying. The pressing crush on the street only exacerbated the sweltering heat as we laboured through the tumultuous crowds and closed in on the PGDF recruitment office. It was a place we knew, having provided them with recruits in the past. From behind came the abrupt, harsh staccato of small calibre automatic gunfire, probably a nine millimetre urbanised holdout spitting the lead. Keeping our heads down and without looking back, we reached the office. Despite their immense budget, the PGDF constantly faced a recruitment crisis. The slim and well turned out uniformed recruiter didn’t spend much time scrutinising Yaroh’s fake ID before they allowed him to fill out an application in the small, street facing office. After that, he was off, recruits were rapidly whisked to a flight into orbit before they could change their minds. We left after saying our goodbyes to Yaroh Uron. It didn’t take long before something came up, never did. Trigger’s slab pinged and Viper Joe was online. The synthesised voice box in his full body replacement frame spouted digitised low half-growls, distorting his words. Joe’s speech was too fast and changing tack too often for it to cope well. Something had him excited. I could see Trigger wince as Joe’s voice changed pitch, dropped fidelity, squawked with feedback and hissed into Trigger’s ear. Joe was ranting about The Red King and a dead woman? For days now, someone called The Red King had been anonymously posting messages on the newsvines and chat-streams. Looked like the boasting of another low rent serial killer who haunted the dimly-lit narrow streets and murky nil-spots of Neon City. Some trash about chess moves and ‘taking pieces’ which was just code for killing people. Truth was; nobody in Neon City cared about chess. However, whatever the situation was, The Red King’s schtick had been good enough to attract the attention of the newsvines which meant rentacop, who had to at least look like they cared, had made a show of offering a reward for information. Joe told us that he’d eyeballed the body of The Red King’s latest victim getting dumped, a woman called Avril Van Laere, a gardener who’d been found dead at the Mejiro Allotments and who lived in the Mejiro Housing Complex. Joe told us he’d gotten a vid of the body being dumped and was going to claim that reward. It showed a pair of red, cylindrical robots unceremoniously hurling her ragdolling body out of a sky-van. Avril Van Laere’s body crumpled to the ground as the sky-van powered skywards. Joe was on the money; had to be the Red King. What kind of game was he playing, well, other than chess? Galvanised, Joe decided to head to the Ikebukuro precinct and pocket his reward. Like a strange answer to my question; Koko’s media-slab pinged, someone was initiating an unlisted connection to her: The Red King was calling; told Koko she was next and quoted some kind of poem. The flier easily allowed us to intercept Viper Joe and give him a ride the rest of the way and escort him into the concrete bunker rentacop called a precinct. Once through the steel and reinforced acrylic doors then past the hardened facade, we arrived at an almost equally protected front desk. Joe told his story to the rentacop behind the toughened glass screen Over a rasping microphone that just compounded his own unnatural voice, he was crestfallen to discover that footage of Avril’s body had already found its way to rentacop. It wasn’t over though, we went our separate way from Viper Joe and decided to keep digging on the Red King. His call to Koko told us he was planning to move against us someway? The Tower was the first lead we decided to follow, we’d seen the footage of his red robots. Zoshigaya Park contained one of the few open and wooded areas that flourished in the conurbation, a blossom of greenery bursting against the city’s asphalt grey, The Tower sat on the very lip of the verdant boundary, set in a grassy band that ringed the forest. The restaurant was figuratively a tower with a faux stone facade that rose several storeys high and was complemented by parapets and blustery flags. It had just come into sight when Koko’s media-slab pinged; a message from the Red King. ‘King takes rook, check.’ We had no time to even process the message: A sudden wave of heat engulfed us as we were lifted off our feet. Almost instantaneously and before we’d even hit the ground, an enveloping roar reached our ears, threatening to overwhelm us as we landed with a crash. For a moment, an expanding yellow-white spherical flare had bloomed from within The Tower, an intense glow visible through gaps in the stone work rendering it a skeletal shape before coalescing into a rippling orange ball of flame as the restaurant was torn apart. Hurled by the explosion, scorched chunks of replica stone work and masonry thudded back to earth in a full quarter-kilometre smoking radius around the devastation, followed by a swarm of flittering, rectangular white shapes that danced and wheeled their way to the ground amongst the ruin. I picked one up and turned it over in my fingers, old-school business cards. It was ivory white, plain on one side with a black and white checkerboard across the other. Over the checkerboard was a single image, an embossed red foil shape of a king’s crown icon The Red king; I took a moment to register that he was up to his trick of using chess gimmicks. Rook had meant castle, the explosion was the Red King’s doing. First responders got to Zoshigaya park quickly but Firestreaker was there quicker and was happily doing his streaming thing while they arrived. Later, the newsvines would report that thirty seven customers and staff had been killed in the blast, including McChef. There wasn’t much left of The Tower amongst the smoking ruin, at least in material reality. Amongst the cooling rubble we spotted the mostly flattened shape of a boxed security camera. The GLOWNET beckoned and who was I to deny it? An incandescent multi-coloured, boiling swirl of data compiled around me, up-rezzing into the recognisable local info-vista after jacking in. Here, The Tower was intact, as unchanged as its gaudy neon-delineated data-image. Somewhere behind it would be a data-vault with links to remote storage that archived security footage. A cracking algorithm quickly had me past The Tower’s lax security and into the vault’s directory, from there I saw several data-lines that went out into the GLOWNET, system records showed one line routinely sent out data to a location I knew belonged to a security provider. I followed the data-line to the gleaming, angular, steel grey image of an actual old style safe, with a hinged door, lock and handle. Someone had a sense of humour at least; shame about their defences, especially considering their line of work. The safe was surrounded by a thin, silvery nimbus and hovered while rotating. I launched the algorithm again, it got me in almost as quickly as The Tower. I had the ID string from the restaurant and quickly isolated its archived footage. Jumping to a close by timestamp, I scrubbed through the footage from all the cams until I got a hit. The restaurant’s faux glass windows were dim, the clientele absent when two red cylindrical robots came into the feed. It was starting to fit together, the robots were under the Red King’s control, either via protocol or remotely. They weren’t just bespoke robots, they were his pawns. Carrying a package as they forcibly opened the restaurant doors and entered. Less than sixty seconds later they exited without the package, now effortlessly carrying a struggling individual, this time the identification was easy; McChef. The pawns had kidnapped the owner, he wasn’t dead. It was a convulsing McChef that we’d seen the pawns dragging through the brownfield adjacent to The Tower in the other footage earlier. Koko sent Kevin up into the air to scan the landscape, I pulled Kevin’s aerial feed into an algorithm and it looked for breaks in the brownfields geo-data and it got a hit, tracks leading away from The Tower. Kevin led and we followed, eventually the trail ended in the remotest part of the brownfield where Neon City’s skyline had shrunk away, distantly looming through a hazy low-level smog over the surrounding greenery and the oppressive, urban background noise had become a almost indistinct hum. The algorithm showed that a standard sized sky-van had landed and taken-off: Dead end. Koko left Kevin buzzing above, patrolling the area in a surveillance pattern and we went on to our next lead. Avril Van Laere’s body had been discovered in the Mejiro garden allotments, a gridded spread of earth and greenery, decorated with an eclectic combination of vegetation, multicoloured flowers and assorted plantlife. Even though Neon City was a behemothic, mostly uncontrolled nightmarish asphalt sprawl, there were still a few who lived in the concrete wilderness that retained a green thumb and an urge to plant and grow. Somehow, in the past, someone had managed to pressure the Mejiro municipal authority to set aside some open ground, exposed to the sky for gardening. Residents could apply for an allotment plot for personal domestic use. Avril’s plot had been taped off in a bright yellow square by rentacop and her remains removed, it was easy to see they’d trampled most of the area, eradicating most evidence. They hadn’t even seen the crushed scenery stretched across several other close-by plots. More sky-van tracks, maybe the same one that had taken McChef had pulled its trick here. There was nothing for us to work with here, maybe Rentacop gotten something? Bill pinged Captain Okano, the Shinjuku precinct captain we were tight with and asked if he could get us anything. I could hear Okano’s overloud response through the microspeaker on Bill’s media-slab. He would call us back. Unexpectedly, Viper Joe came into sight out of a door in the close-by apartment block which ran along one edge of the allotment perimeter and was - by Neon City standards a fairly low residential building.The machine-whine of Joe’s frame’s servo-motors were barely discernible as he strolled over. . Joe explained that Avril Van Laere was local, living close to her allotment and pointed out her apartment for us. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Rentacop weren’t about and everyone out the street was mostly preoccupied with their media-slab, lifting the yellow and black striped tape, we slipped through the door of Avril Van Laere’s apartment unseen. Outside, Avril Van Laere’s home had been pretty plain, external walls were clad in neutral grey, furnished with polymer framed reinforced acrylic windows, indistinguishable from its neighbouring apartments. It was a different story inside and the interior couldn’t contrast more. Avril’s greenthumb was evident everywhere, an assortment of plants sat on every shelf and available horizontal space in every room, filling pots and vases, obscuring wall decorations Without attention, they’d soon be as dead as she was. Even so, stacked cut bunches of peonies dominated the apartment, piled up throughout its few rooms, enveloping them with a strong citrusy scent and splashes of colour that popped against the off-white walls and grey carpeting. Where had the peonies come from? A trashcan check found the answer; a small printed receipt showed a batch of peonies had been sold off cheap - took a moment to realise it had to be excess stock from the Jorenji peony festival. Didn’t explain why she was taking a dirt nap though, we kept searching. A hardcopy printout from a newsvine dedicated to Neon City gardening was found on a little, circular faux pine kitchen table, a column of classified ads dated four days ago, one was circled. Someone had been looking for a gardener, a no questions job that paid bits-in-hand, Avril must’ve bitten. Fianchetto Recruitment Facilitation, some low level job market player we didn’t recognise had posted it. It wasn’t hard getting into Fianchetto’s system; quick joyride through the GLOWNET, blurring through sectors of multichrome constructs and running a hack past the security on their bio-image - a red, orange and white corporate logo and we were in vaut beneath it. A directory record showed someone called Roy Rouge had listed the job, I pulled all the related data and jacked out, nauseously lurching back into material reality. The records confirmed that Avril had accepted Roy Rouge’s job offer; her number was in the records, as was Roy Rouge’s. Both numbers got us nothing and no way to ping their locations either. City records showed at least a dozen Roy Rouges lived throughout the city municipalities. Tracking down all of them would take time, a way of getting through the data quickly was needed. I launched a hunter/seeker algorithm and set its parameters to find anything in the GLOWNET that would link with the term Roy Rouge, didn’t take more than a few seconds to get a hit. The algorithm had generated an association between Roy Rouge and the phrase roi rouge phonetically, in French, roi rouge meant red king. The Red King had killed Avril Van Laere Until there was a solid lead on The Red King, we’d hit a dead end. Captain Noodles had pressed some theatre passes on us, they were to A Song For Neon City, the annual city-wide competitive music contest that dominated the social landscape and obsessed the public for exactly one week a year before immediately slipping into the foggy recesses of obscurity for the remaining fifty-one. Each district had its own representative and Noodles was representing Hikage Street. We decided to attend and provide Noodles with moral support; the others seemed to like this sort of thing while I agreed with the sentiment that it was culturally bankrupt. Like all big ticket events in Neon City, there was some bank to be made from it and in Neon City that meant an inevitably rising body count. I made sure to pack the full complement of ammo for my ACP .45s before we left. Pharoah Park was one of the few usable open air venues in Neon City, having survived the municipal neglect and environmental ravages that had erased much of the city’s spaces. Built to an Egyptian motif it was frequently used to host popular events and drew large crowds from surrounding districts. A sinking sun hung in the lateish afternoon blue-white sky as we arrived, drenching the venue in hazy orange light while throwing out immense shadows across the length of the park. Large automated parasols provided shade from the day’s unflinching sunlight while altering function to become rain shelters when night came and with it, the thundering torrential downpours It wasn’t long before the competition got under way. A massive row of Senonable wall-slab slab had been set up, painting the competitors larger-than-life and giving the audience better views of the acts. First up, representing Highway Zero were the Joi Bois, male street walkers who roamed ground level Neon City region, cruising for trade amongst the constant flow of commuters and traffic. In what would be the first of several cover songs from back in the twentieth, they performed YMCA along with a series of simulated acts and interactions between them. Although the giant screen made it look quite realistic? The Shaolin Rippers were representing Shibuya terminal. We’d had more than one run-in with the violent street gang who were bankrolled by the elusive Prophet Wei and had never realised they had their won.choir. Their short set consisted of Mongolian throat-singing and chiming Tibetian bells. Next was Ninety Ninth Street; represented by Milky’s Girls, a trio of working girls who plied their trade on The Neon Mile. They were joined on stage by their pimp, the albino Milky Smooth himself and performed an acapella cover of Uptown Girl while Milky Smooth accompanied them with obscene rap lyrics, it went down well with the crowd. Delia Lavanchy was someone we knew well having investigated her finances recently. Delia was representing the Fortified Residential Zone. She performed a song called Korobeiniki, it was some kind of old, old Russian song. It was about peddling goods or something, at least that’s what the GLOWNET told me. Delia also sang the song while constructing a wall consisting of brightly coloured acrylic tetriminos blocks. Dogenzaka Hill was being represented by Rooster and the Doomriders, We’d also encountered Rooster before and the band was also named after their biker gang. Dressed in their synth-leathers and denims they performed another song I’d never heard of called La Colère de Ramsès? At last! Captain Noodles came on stage, representing our home district, Hikage Street. Noodles performed his own spoken word interpretation of another song from the Twentieth - Rocketman; he appeared as a black and white image on the giant screen against a backdrop of photos of his time on Mars. Somehow, the vaudevillian street performer, sex worker and assassin - Thaddeus Rackham had gotten himself made the representative of Rokkaku Dai Heights. Thaddeus had chosen what sounded like an old showtune from the twentieth called They All Had a Finger in the Pie. He was decked out in his full vaudevillian getup and sang it while riding a unicycle and juggling flaming clubs. Finally, the last act was Franky & Joey. We only just realised they were Franky Frazackerly and Joey Peshwari; a pair of out-of-shape uniformed cut-rate rentaguard we’d run across and who patrolled the verdant perimeter of the monolithic, Sunshine City shopping mall. Their blue-and-grey faux-cop uniforms had been replaced with washing-powder-white sailor boy outfits and they sang some song the slightly camp compare had announced as A Glass of Champagne while labouredly performing some dance called A Hornpipe. Following this, the lines were opened and voters could ping their scores over the GLOWNET. The winner of a Song for Neon City was always decided by public vote from each district as delivered by some local celebrity. Districts generally voted along some kind of allegiance or other. Hikage Street always got twelve points from Dogenzaka Hill! The massive slabs now showed a pair announcers, vid-celebs, larger-than-life in the latest Hika Taki fashion lines with sculpted features and surgically smoothed and purified skin who displayed rows of ivory-white porcelain as they grinned inanely and repeated text crawl displayed on the cheaply produced scoring graphics overlay. It had started OK but soon, unexpected error stacks were getting thrown up on the slabs and the scoring failed to add up! Nervous looking floor managers, producers and stage crew were heatedly arguing and pointing, occasionally throwing up their arms in exasperation as they skittishly traversed the stage with sweeping eyes, looking for answers. The situation needed a dive, so I jacked in the GLOWNET; the noise and sight of the hollering crush of congregated fans at Pharoah Park melted into the background while Neon City’s colour-shifting, iridescent info-vista materialised in its place. Pharoah Park was busy, thousands of bio-images clashed, creating chaotic, chromic constructs and interactions, resulting in unpredictable reactions and outcomes. The park’s info-image was a stylised and curved rectangular cuboid dominated by a trio of arches. A fat stream of content surged from the info-image along one of the venue’s many fixed data-routes, it would be the event’s media streams pushed out to the various content providers covering the event. There should also have been a vast quantity of data packs sliding into the park but there were virtually zero. I refocused outside the park and waited. Data packs were inexplicably vanishing? I ran an algorithmic code sweep that went to metal, it would log all activity in this corner of the GLOWNET and provide vast reams of data, the result was surprising. Someone had written a code cluster that was completely unregistered, it meant that the GLOWNET’s sensory interpreters would miss its existence, rendering it essentially invisible. This kind of work was bespoke, done by someone with the right skills. Once I knew what I was looking for, it got easier. I instructed my Nonohiki to log unregistered code and then I saw it. A weird black, shapeless form that lacked substance somehow and endlessly folded in on itself while reforming, an infinite cycle and the wraith revealed. It seemingly flitted around Pharoah Park erratically without purpose but there was order in that chaos and It followed an elaborate routine. Data packs tagged with A Song for Neon City were its prey, hunted and deleted by the wraith code without mercy, preventing votes from getting to the show. I grabbed an image of the wraith and got looking. Code was like handwriting or a fingerprint and if I knew them or they were some part of the hacker circles, the code would tell me, and it did. Quantum Brandy was a hacker, an anarcho-pessimist feminist hacker with a colossal chip on her shoulder who liked to let everyone know it. The name had triggered a memory, I’d heard it recently, related to a Song for Neon City? Then, I had it. Flicking back to Pharoah Park’s info-image and scanning through the show’s vid-recordings. it showed that Quantum Brandy had washed out of the quarter finals with her Primal Scream Feminist Diatribe poetry reading. I watched the feed, a bad act and the voters knew it. In response she‘d taken on the typical Neon City attitude; get smacked down and look to score some payback. I dug deeper into her code and there was more. The code that powered the algorithm was logging each data pack that was deleted, the wraith also logged its path from origin. Reversing the code’s directions got me to where it was launched from. Get Smile Amusement, an old-school slug-op arcade which hosted row after row of old style gaming cabinets was in Ikebukuro, that’s where Quantum Brandy was holded up. Neon City’s fluorescent, angular geometry undulated and wavered in multi-coloured blurs as they flew past and I eventually ended up watching Get Smile Amusement arcade’s garish and overbright info-image: A neon-outlined, rotating two-player standup cab with no players, only an ancient colourful looking sprite-driven game flickering across the screen. Data flows pulsed in and out of the info-image, connecting to the data-vault beneath the decorated shell. All normal traffic, or so it seemed. Observing carefully, I saw one of the streams flicker for a couple of frames every few seconds, a small graphical conflict generally caused when two constructs occupied the same space and fought for draw-priority. It was a sign of piggy-backing, a classic hack used to hide data-movements, I looked closer. Inside the data-packs on the stream were other, smaller packs, moving at almost the same time. I sent a hunter/search algorithm to investigate. It showed the extraneous data was delivering something to a hidden node, had to be Quantum Brandy’s de-registered data-slab. Time to do some piggy-backing myself, I waited for the next data pack to leave Get Smile and head towards her slab and cloned its encrypted keycode. Then I ran an algorithmic breaker on the keycode and generated one of my own. It got me inside Brandy’s slab after following the hidden data packs, the security protocols thought I was just another data-pack. I wouldn’t have much time before Brandy figured out there was extra activity running on her system - but I wouldn’t need it. Sifting through her records, I quickly found two points of interest, first; messaging from Prophet Wei, the elusive mob-boss who ran the Shaolin Rippers and the Noise Tank and operated out of Highway Zero. For some reason he was backing Brandy’s attack on A Song for Neon City, something to do with his great prophecy I guess? No time to waste though, I scanned the protocols in her hack, it had trace records of all the voting data that had been deleted, I coded a counter-hack and killed her algorithm, it also re-registered all the missing votes. Then before leaving Brandy’s system, I put it into a repeating diagnostic loop, by the time she straightened it out, the recovered votes would have flooded into Pharoah Park voting system. Last thing I did before jacking out was checking out Brandy's timeline on her MyFaceSpace and she was raging! When all the votes were finally compiled for A Song for Neon City, Franky and Joey emerged as clear winners. I guess it did pay to go last. Rippling swathes of umbrellas sprouted open on Hikage Street, gleaming slickly in silvery-white street lights as the nightly downpours got underway. Back at my one-bed, raindrops splattered against the tarpaulin sheet and a wind driven irregular drumming played out. Half dozing and slouched on my futon, I was roused by my media-slab pinging, an automated message, pushed by the algorithm I’d trojaned on to Falcon Lockley’s personal data-slab with instructions to notify me when it encountered certain keywords.. Lockley and his cohorts were planning another foray into The Wilderness; the vast tract of nature beyond the limits of Neon City. I contacted the others and we contacted Urus at The Enclave who told us that Neidzweidz and himself had encountered Lockley and his retinue, convincing them to give up their hunting ways and not return to the wilderness. Uruas explained that Falcon Lockley would no longer be a problem. Urus then told us he was glad we had contacted him, scavengers from The Enclave had made a strange discovery that was outside their fields of expertise. A little later we were back in the flier, making the trip out to The Enclave, access codes which had been provided by Oni Tokugawa were still recognised and we flew over the fortified city walls and defence grids without hindrance. Very soon, the heavy rain of Neon City’s macroclimate thinned out before dwindling away to nothing altogether and in the flier’s rear screens, a million city lights shrank into a single gleaming dot of light that hued the clouded sky above a dirty crimson shade until it was eventually swallowed by the horizon Koko kept the flier low and night-vision screens displayed an unnaturally coloured grassy landscape that undulated in our turbulence and stretched into the vanishing point. Without the spook-tech night optics though, ahead would only be the unlit and unknowable inky landscape of The Wilderness, an unnerving sight for us without Hikage Street’s familiar and brightly delineated skyline or Ninety Ninth’s cacophonous glittering neon mile. The Enclave seemingly emerged out of the night, the former military installation’s walled perimeter populated with humming, watchful giant spotlights cutting into the night sky. Koko put the flier down on the pad with a blast of displaced air, Urus and some of his scavengers were waiting, their flapping, homespun, earthy coloured overalls and outfits curiously accessorised with hunters hats and other hunting paraphernalia, Urus himself had a large sheathed knife tucked into his belt like some kind of trophy… Once pleasantries were out of the way, Urus led us out of the floodlight lit Enclave and into the night, along the faintest of wilderness paths that only his scavengers and he could ever discern. Dirt and grass felt uneven and unpredictable, seemingly giving way beneath my heavy, thick-soled foot falls as Urus took us halfway up a hill, it’s peak silhouetted against the constellations, a lustrous, starry night that would never be visible through Neon City’s cloud-thickened skies. Sunk deep into the grass, something glinted in our wavering flashlights as Urus called for a halt. An oblong, warped plate of incredibly thick carbon blended steel reflected our trained flashlights and we saw twisted, half-detached, heavy looking hinges along one edge and a row of massive buckled iron rods protruding from the opposite side. It took a moment to register that it was some kind of security door of immense strength and then a further moment to register that some kind of greater force had ripped the door out of its frame. Alongside the door was a lightless void of identical size and shape that led into darkness, our flashlights revealed a cubic tunnel of manufactured origins that ran into the hillside. Our eyes darted from one to another and when our gazes met, an understanding passed between us: We had to go inside. Thin eddies of unsettled motes swirled lazily in our lights as we crept into the unlit, quiet tunnel, across the floor we could see undecipherable dusty markings and maybe footprints. Something had disturbed the detritus recently. Training our flashlights across the reinforced, plated walls revealed numerous button panels, all unlit, jabbing them got nothing, no power. Further in and the tunnel opened up into a squarish room, darkness receding from us into distant corners as we entered, our footsteps reverbing in the silence. Grimy, empty poly-fibre, beige desks, disconnected wall terminals and small, dull steel-topped tables littered the room, while apparatus lined one wall, some of it med-tech, much of it unfamiliar. Except to Pepper Mashup, the doctor recognised the gear which was mostly used during autopsies, as would’ve been the small steel tables. Closer scrutiny of those tables uncovered fragments of a strange metallic alloy and soil coloured an unearthly red - with good reason; soil from Mars! We grabbed samples for later research and continued our investigation. Apart from the odd piece of stationary, the desks and terminals had been mostly cleaned out. Alongside one desk though, we found a small pile of stacked computer systems, ancient, beige coloured old-school towers, screens and manual input devices labelled JCO Corporate Technologies. A brand none of us recognised. Powering on the systems got nowhere, they lacked any onboard power banks and the entire facility had no juice. Instead we hauled it back to The Enclave. The return trip was uneventful and we soon found ourselves within the settlement’s well-lit boundaries. Even there, with the computer-savvy, skilled jury-rigging scavengers gathered around the tech, they couldn’t get the system going. In the end, we’d agreed to take the old tech back with us and find a solution. It was well past midnight by the time we hit Neon City airspace, met by punishing downpours that drummed noisily on the flier’s polycarbonate shell, the change from The Wilderness was palpable. A silhouetted cityscape delineated by countless grids of urban lights grew to fill our rain streaked viewports as narrow, fluorescent-lit, bustling streets teemed with umbrella wielding nocturnals. Koko put the flier down on our secured pad and we went our separate ways for the night. Morning came in seemingly minutes, minutes haunted by incomprehensible dreams, glimpses of daylit Neon City collapsing into bio-images, a twisted skyline morphing into an info-vista, curves straightening into polygons. I woke with a start, temples pulsing, heart racing, vision blurry and breathing heavily. I could count the beats in my ears. Too much Shiaikan whiskey in its fancifully curved, faux-glass, elaborately labelled bottle had been knocked back last night and without undressing I’d stumbled to my futon. Lurching to my feet, my head swayed and my eyes dimmed for a second, thankful I was dressed, I lurched out to meet the others. Our last option for the old tech was Alex Chinsko, mechanic and guerilla technologist from our neighbourhood with a talent for tearing down and rebuilding tech, most of which he sold in his streetlevel shopfront. Bric-a-Brac Shack was an almost old fashioned looking shop, its toughened acrylic shop window display was framed by replica wood and decorated with an assortment of whitebox consumer appliances. A little bell chimed tunefully as we swung the door open, shelves the height of the ceiling that ran the length of the room were stacked precariously with even more appliances, old tech and unrecognisable gear. Flex cables dangling from the stuffed shelves swayed rhythmically as we had no choice but to brush past them in the narrow aisles. Alex Chinsko had a glint in his eye, he was definitely happy to see us, we’d come in with something he rarely got to play with. As he got to grips with the system, he explained that it predated the existence of Neon City and JCO had folded before it had even been in its planning phase. Soon, he had the beige shell stripped off the system, exposing innards of wiring and circuitry. Alex was immediately in there, the thin, cylindrical soldering iron, a scalpel in his hands. The problem, he told us, was the system’s power block; a design incompatible with modern power supplies. He was confident it would work once he’d transplanted a new block in. Once the work was done, the system was hooked into its manual inputs and an old-style screen Alex had lying about. He jabbed the power stud and we waited. There was a short, single tone beep and a tiny dot of green light gleamed on the system’s frame, it hummed into life while the screen clicked on, crackling after decades of disuse. A logo popped on the screen, barely recognisable; an old iteration of the Planetary Global Defence Force badge. Below was a single command line in plain text, cursor winking. The system’s security protocols were beyond primitive, Alex was past its defences and into the file structure without delay. It looked empty, wiped no doubt, but he did a total image copy onto a data-slab and ran an algorithm on the image. Numerous files and documents were recovered. The video files were our first choice, we watched a few badly lit, grainy security feeds and they all showed the same thing: At the facility, which must have been an early PGDF station, PGDF staffers in thin disposable translucent aprons and surgeons masks were craned over autopsy tables, cutting up something on those tables. The forms were somehow adjacent to humanoid but with bloated torsos, seemingly stunted limbs and overdeveloped craniums, in the feeds’ weak light, their skin had a pallid, pasty white-grey complexions. We’d all seen the fakes, was this different? Had someone gone to immense lengths to dupe the scavengers or was it something else? Next were the files, reams of archived data, much of it documenting information about the founding of the PGDF, other files listed technical data, hierarchical structure, roadmaps and budgets listed in old-world dollars. At its founding, the PGDF had been given inordinate funding - at least on paper. Captain Noodles had spent time in the PGDF, we turned to him for answers. The uplifted cat chose that moment to lick his unmentionables clean, conveniently not acknowledging our questions. Alex was intrigued but we decided to leave it alone. For now. It looked like the Yaroh Uron case was over and he was out of the fingers of the city’s malevolent, plutocratic overlords, even though it hadn’t gone down the way we wanted. Juicy J was the Neon City streetwalker who we’d agreed to help get back together with her boyfriend OK Daddy - someone else we’d helped join the PGDF once her part in Yaroh’s case was done and it was shut now. We pinged her enough Dollar to catch a ride to the moon and the PGDF base. Bill’s media-slab pinged later that morning. Porter Sladek wanted us over to his waterfront warehouse. An entire stretch of the district was given over to sprawling clusters of identikit, high-windowed and plain corporate warehouses, which suited Porter Sladek just fine. He’d taken the opportunity to stash his off-the-grid assets here, hidden in plain sight. Porter Sladek was waiting for us. The transplants, nanite dermal-grafts and implants had done their trick and the former exec was back on his feet after barely surviving an explosion in his boardroom. The ever so slightly mis-coloured patchwork of differing surgical work done on his recognisably bald head was only noticeable if you knew what to look for and the rest of him was hidden by his classy old style tailored obsidian black Gaongha suit. Also waiting was Binary Johnny, easily recognised in his fur lined, faux leather flying cap and goggles, a small satisfied grin spread across his thin face. Powered, corrugated warehouse doors opened with a metallic tortious murmur and we were led inside to a small, well protected office space. Footsteps on bare concrete echoed across the unoccupied building while automated fluorescent strips detected our presence and clicked into lifw. Porter Sladek had been busy after we’d dumped a zero beast corpse on him to research; he’d recruited Johnny and they’d got to digging - and had hit paydirt. They gave us the lowdown, something was going down. Something big. Zero beasts were vat-grown by Rokkaku, engineered killing machines genetically programmed to be unswervingly loyal only to Goji Rokkaku himself. Goji’s own DNA had been spliced into their genetic code according to Johnny: His GLOWNET incursions into the Rokkaku data-vaults had revealed several internal memos in which Goji referred to zero beasts as ‘his sons’. They were designed to endure vacuums, to operate and fight in the hostile voids of space and bio-implanted internal thrusters allowed them zero-G manoeuvrability, giving them unopposable advantages in orbital combat. Further memos indicated that Goji Rokkaku was part of something called the Akuni Accord and they were allied with a faction situated on The Glitterband. The accord was planning to destroy the opposing Emptiness habitat on the gigantic station. Their attack plan had two fronts. Firstly, zero beasts would be delivered on to the station via an enormous railgun hidden in a ride in Sky Dinosaurian Square’s roller coaster park. While the zero beasts attacked the habitat, a missile strike launching from a facility in Kibogaoka Hill would hit the Sky Tree, it’s destruction would sever contact between Neon City and The Glitterband, leaving Leander’s Earthbound allies unable to provide him rapid assistance. The Sky Tree was a vast megastructure, a space-elevator which had been hardened against terrorist attacks and conventional assaults, disabling or destroying it would require significant force. The data on Kibogaoka Hill had chimed a bell with us. We’d previously seen a radioactive hotzone originating from one of the high-rises scattered across the slowly crumbling commercial quarter nestled over the district’s titular hill. We’d it left alone, now looked like we were going back. None of the data Johnny had ripped from Rokkaku data-vaults overtly listed a timetable or schedule for this assault. For now, we’d have to sit and wait. Even though the sun had begun its crawl towards the western skyline, the heat never let up in Neon City afternoons as we found ourselves sweltering amongst the overwarm, overly dense, vaguely milling crowds at Sky Dinosaurian Square. Clusters of massive Senonable wall-slabs erected high above the crush throughout the square served the viewers. Lucy and Ashaglaya had dragged us to one of the city’s favourite spectator sports - greens bowling! Like anything media-cast, it attracted corporate sponsorship and had top dollar payouts for the best. Where money went in Neon City, corruption and violence soon followed hand-in-hand. We’d all packed hardware in preparation for the inevitable slide into bloodshed. Sky Dinosaurian Square had won the bid to host the annual city finals and had constructed an artificial grass bowling green for the competition which pulled in people from all across The City of Electric Dreams. Onlookers lucky enough to be closest to the event strained their necks, jostled and almost swayed strangely to get an actual view of the event. D4-VID was here too, the botcaster was getting an on-the-ground report on the competition while the face of popular vid-presenter Nina Chinova loomed large on the wall-slabs as she cheerfully chatted to guests about the day’s matches. We also spotted Thaddeus Rackham; fresh from his appearance on the Song for Neon city contest,the vaudevillian assassin was back in a familiar haunt and had set up his market stall, he was busy hawking merchandise to curious bypassers among a sea of other sellers. The games got off to a brisk start and competition between the Senkawa Aqueduct Aardvarks and the Skyscraper District Skylarks was fierce. Among the Skylarks was Xylona Adler, a programmer we’d encountered, obviously she had a talent for bowling but no so much as her partner. Carrydat U was a Meshakotto class Shiaosha Robotics luggage porter-bot from the International Rail Link Hub, it was obvious he outclassed everyone. At some time, a kind of algorithm must have been introduced into his base code, granting him a profound understanding of greens bowling with skill at handling balls that was unmatched. Soon the game swung in favour of the Skylarks and their victory grew imminent, then we felt more than saw a trembling murmur in the watching crowd, in that liminal moment, a wave of dissatisfaction seemed to wash over them as harsh edged whispers and hard eyed glares became apparent throughout the audience. Quiet accusations became loud threats and escalated into violence. Pro and anti Carrydat U spectators clashed, small arms and melee weapons were brandished as the aggression intensified. Then, things only got worse. Unseen by us while we’d been watching the bowling; a contingent of The Church of The Redeemed Sinner, with their extensive implants, augmentations and body replacement frames who had inserted themselves into the audience, now emerged and having taken umbrage at the anti-robot elements in the crowd, began laying into them. Things had gotten hot on the Neon City streets between The Church of The Redeemed Sinner and their rivals, The Children of Saika for a while now, recently escalating into open warfare, so it was inevitable that when one appeared, so would the other. The clash between them was brutal as they cut through the crush to get at each other. Ignoring their protests, I grabbed Lucy and Ashaglaya by the wrists tightly and pulled them away before they could resist. Looking at the others, they were also shouldering their way through the crowds while Koko was remotely powering up the flier. We knew what was coming. A couple of minutes later and the flier was darting its way through aerial traffic and powering along the city’s sky lanes: Behind us, as the district shrank away, the Redeemed Sinners had begun triggering their final weapon The Children of Saika, series of limited-expansion micro-nukes were detonated across Sky Dinosaurian Square, blossoming balls of orange flame cascaded across the park, levelling a sizable chunk of it in a dead but it has to daid - spectacular light show. Without employing decon protocols, the park would remain a radioactive hotzone for centuries to come. Later that day, the Red King was back on the newsvines.
Another old chess reference to the destruction of The Tower restaurant. King takes castle. Check. 29th May 2021 It's a Saturday night and we're logged into chat for the next part of Matakishi's Wired Neon City campaign. Location: Neon City Like for the last few days, I spent the morning avoiding the newsvines, my media slab was in the corner of my one-bed, where I’d hurled it a while ago, it sat next to the edge of the urine-coloured, flapping polymer tarp which stretched across one demolished wall and all the while intermittently issued cheerful little chirps whenever it synched with some news-server and pulled the latest bulletins. Didn’t matter though, news was all the same, only three stories were running. Someone had made a move against Porter Sladek, it was big news. Somehow his security had been ninja’d and during a board meeting he’d gotten taken out by an explosion. Sources stated that he was alive but in critical condition and wired-in to some exec-level med-facility; he certainly hadn’t shown his face since. For Thetatec, the incapacitation of its totemic chief exec proved a disaster, triggering loss of confidence in the multinational and a run on it’s shares, market value tumbled and Protobase Global swept in like some sharp-eyed scavenger, using its deep pockets to suck those plummeting shares up. Soon, with most of the board rubbed out, Protobase Global had a controlling interest in Thetatec. It was about as bad as it could get. In another story; war had broken out between two Neon City’s numerous bands of religious nutjobs. Open conflict between The Church of Redeemed Sinners and a new player called the Children of Saika was playing out on the wreckage-littered, bloody streets of Senkawa. As gangs of the warring factions clashed, spontaneous explosions would toast them and anyone close by out. Finally; The Magical Girls concert had been announced, turned out they weren’t some new street gang looking to muscle in on existing turf, just another manufactured Chi-synth band. GLOWNET wraith-algorithms infested Neon City’s info-vista, hitting up every verified bio-image they could trace, pumping hype out with targeted sublims and nudgers. It’d worked too, keeping the event fresh on the vine and on people’s lips, it had definitely done a trick on Lucy, having her call me, demanding I take her to the concert tomorrow. I muttered my acquiescence, it was a mistake I’d regret. The day finally kicked off when we got a call from Viper Joe, shady grey-market weapons dealer from the Freak Pit, one of the city’s best known thug-grinders for juiced up fighters. Joe was a known hypochondriac who’d slowly been replacing all his organs with bio-engineered alternatives. He’d done this on a budget though and it had been a bad move, those cheap unendorsed implants had a failure rate far beyond Joe’s original organs. Last time we’d spoken with Joe, he was treading water, burning through all his bank to barely keep his body in a functional state, living from hand-to-implant and, hoping his next score would stave off multi-organ failure. Something must’ve gone south, he wouldn't have contacted us otherwise. Joe was at the Freak Pit when we caught up with him, he’d come up with a drastic solution to his implant dilemma. The old Viper Joe that had bristled with augments and implants was nowhere to be seen, who stood before us was a newly rebuilt man. Joe’s full body replacement began with a smooth and chrome-trimmed Quaozh Kahe torso chassis which contained critical life-support systems, a Shiaosha Robotics leg pak and Ashirada Atbu arm module rounded out the package. The only remaining biological component was Joe’s head and it wasn’t a very happy head. This kind of total body chop job cost a stack and if Joe didn’t have the bank to replace implants, how the hell did he have the bits for this? Joe explained that he’d joined the faithful at the The Church of Redeemed Sinners and they’d settled the balance but he soon found there was still a serious cost to pay. The chassis had been rigged with a bomb: Anytime they wanted to, The Church could spread him over a twenty metre radius as a chunky chrome iridescent and red mist. Joe wanted it dealt with. Koko checked out Joe’s new body-frame, got nothing, couldn’t scope any trace or sign of any bomb, thermals and infrared didn’t help either. Koko turned to us and said that the bomb was probably integrated somewhere directly into the frame, it would require a complete rebuild of the chassis to even find. “It’s a big job,” Koko said, shaking her head and sharply sucking air through her teeth dramatically. We’d tried the hard approach, now it was time for the soft one. A quick search found the chassis’ diagnostic connector, I networked my Nonohiki to it and jacked in, finding myself floating in a static, rudimentary, green and black data-vault isolated from the GLOWNET. System menus were unprotected and open to perusal, so I listed all of them. Protocols managed the chassis’s powercell while subcommands operated additional systems such as the limbs; there were also algorithms that regulated Joe’s vestigial biological functions and requirements. None of it was what I was looking for, I had to get closer to the metal, go deeper, past the blunt function shell. The code had been written by someone who wasn’t ever expecting a hacker. A simple cracking algorithm got me deeper into the system, the shell faded, giving way to a simpler interface prompt, only the dim sparseness of vault’s default environmental lighting remained. There it was; an isolated directory which had a couple of protocols running. The first had an instruction set connected to a soft-timer which launched when the timer hit zero, it pushed a command to some sort of hard-wired micro device. Reading the instruction told me that micro device was listed as ‘bomb’, the’ device would ‘activate when it received it’s input from the instruction set. Detonation protocol, had to be. The second protocol had a pair of instruction sets; the first set connected to a GLOWCHIP, passively waiting for some sort of input from the GLOWNET which it would relay to the second instruction set. That second instruction then linked directly to the timer. Reading this second instruction told me that when it received an input from the first it would operate some sort of decoding algorithm, if the result matched a randomised parameter, it outputted a command to the timer which would be set back to its default time. A sub-command looked like it would set the timer to zero if something tampered with the algorithm. Had to leave it alone, too risky. I opened the timer and watched, when it reached fifty nine seconds, it abruptly reset to six minutes. Viper Joe, it turned out, was now living under a virtual Sword of Damocles thanks to The Church of Redeemed Sinners. That timer on the explosive would never stop counting down, only a reset code pushed out to the GLOWCHIP every five minutes, presumably by The Church was keeping him in one piece. I had a plan though, I accessed the GLOWCHIP and waited, a few minutes later and a reset code downloaded, resetting Joe’s timer, six minutes of breathing time. Immediately, I cloned the code to my data-slab and got to work. The reset code was encrypted, luckily its data-string was short; it needed to be in order to be reliably transmitted to bomb carriers and whoever created it probably weren’t expecting hackers to come in this way. By analysing the encrypted string against the decrypter, I created a new algorithm that would generate strings to match the randomised parameter. Then I dropped the protocol into another part of the hidden directory and connected it to the soft-timer. Finally I added an instruction to generate and push the reset code to the second instruction in the second protocol. It wasn’t elegant but it would do for now. The decryptor wouldn’t differentiate between the real reset code and my spoof code, each one would reset the timer. If the Church of The Redeemed Sinner cut their code now, mine would continue to work. Joe had the time needed to get some to remove the bomb safely. Luckily, despite the clusters of outdated, failing and decrepit bio-tech that inhabited it, The Pit was a good place for Joe to be, its gladiatorial stables were populated with chop-jockeys and shady street docs who plied their trade in body mechanics during fight nights. Neon Suspect was someone that Joe knew, a combat-algorithm programmer and expert on bio-engineering, good choice to permanently shut down all the protocols introduced by The Church. Joe had considered Neon Suspect a love-rival at one time, although that hadn’t panned out the way Joe had expected and instead, it was revealed that Neon Suspect was sweet on Joe. Neon Suspect was, unsurprisingly, happy to work on Joe’s Frame and his Maiulava microtools buzzed quietly as he uncoupled Joe’s outer polycarbonate skin. Then Neon Suspect got to work peeling away a nervous system constructed of uncountable, impossibly fine fibre optic cabling, followed by a circulatory system consisting of power lines connected to all manner of servo and sensor arrays. Eventually, after he’d gotten deep into the frame he gave a grunt of surprise, he’d found something unexpected. Spherical and about the size of a fist, it could only be the bomb. With a surgeon’s precision, Neon Suspect circumvented the anti-tamper system and soon the bomb was extracted from Joe’s frame, Neon Suspect pointed out that there was a small label on the globe that read: Warning - plutonium as he rolled it around in his hands and grabbed a handly geiger-counter, it’s harsh crackle intensified as he swung it towards the bomb. “Well, I can definitely find a use for this,” Neon Suspect gleefully remarked, grinning as he lobbed the bomb from one hand to another before pocketing it. Judge Wyatt Lavanchy was on our menu today, the judge had just sent Yaroh Uron, a down on his luck acquaintance of ours to prison for a murder he hadn’t committed and also denied his appeal. Lavanchy was the target of my deep dive. The dullness of material reality drained away, replaced by compiling polygons of neon and the angular light-struts of the GLOWNET. Streams of data dominated the city’s info-vista and surged between the gleaming horizon of data-nodes, pulsating in slow rhythmic patterns like the leviathan's heartbeat. I launched a hunter/searcher algorithm programmed with a specific instruction set and watched it merge into Neon city’s churning data swarms then waited while it harvested information. Lavanchy looked so clean, he sparkled in sunlight, no inexplicable increases in his bank accounts, no unexplained wealthy assets registered in his name, no change in his spending habits, nothing. I went sideways and targeted Delia, his wife. I got some quick hits, she was a contestant in A Song For Neon City finals a few days away and was representing The Fortified Residential Zone. Some further exploration told us that Captain Noodles was also entering the contest, representing Sunshine City with his rendition of Rocketman. Again nothing that would help. Next, I went further sideways: I put Avery Kiani in my sights, a rentacop from the precinct in The Heights who, along with Delia he’d testified against Yaroh. Didn’t take long to uncover the two hundred large that had been deposited into one of his accounts, it was a sizable chunk of change and no way did some law-and-order chump like this get that much dollar in a single hit. Records showed that the bits were transferred from some small limited company registered in Dogenzaka Hill. I hit up its GLOWNET profile, zero profits, zero losses and zero expenses. A phantom construct, a shell company to hide who was really moving the bits around, probably an exec using corporate funds to bankroll and create the shell company. It had gone midnight by the time I’d finished digging. The climate’s routine transition from searing, overbright day to thunderous, rainy night was lost on me. Deep in the GLOWNET, I’d found the shell had been financed by a ‘former’ Protobase Global employee. The strings were invisible, but Benedict Twistom was definitely pulling them, just needed to connect the dots. Time for us to tug on those strings and see what happened. I logged back into Averi Kiani’s account and disappeared the mystery two hundred kay, when the rentacop realised what had happened, it would provoke a reaction and there had to be eyes on him when he did, so I contacted D4-VID and gave the journo, botcaster droid the exclusive on the Avery Kiani and told him to keep the rentacop under surveillance. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day. Lucy’s pretty face filled my blurry vision like a leering giant while peroxide blonde bunches dangled from her cat’s ears, swaying and brushing my face? Squirming on my futon, Lucy gave me a firm shake while I fumbled for my media-slab. Three AM! Three in the morning! I’d barely slept, in a sunless sky, washed out street lighting barely penetrated the translucent tarp which protected a side of my one-bed from the constant stream of night rain that splattered noisily against the polymer sheet. Lucy practically pulled me into a sitting position. “Come on, come on,” Her voice was laced with urgency. “We’ve got to get to the concert!” The concert? The concert! The Magical Girl concert, that was tomorrow. No, that was wrong, I realised it was now, in fact, tonight. Even so, it was still over twelve hours away, Lucy kept yanking my sleeve, inwardly, I groaned. “We got to go, we got to go,” Lucy insisted. Swivelling out of my futon and standing, I could feel the blood coarse through my temples in one second pulses of agony and drumming in my ears. With as much concentration as I could muster I got dressed and pulled my boots on. Lucy was dressed in an elaborate, frilly, Baisnimi pink maid’s outfit, along with a cat’s ears headpiece and a pair of fluorescent glow sticks. Date nights with Lucy always ended in enormous amounts of carnage, wasn’t expecting anything different at the concert later, checked the kevlar plates in my Verskeit trenchcoat and packed both my .45 ACPs, took full reloads too. Before leaving I stuffed some cans of Kaia cola and Savka choco-sticks in a pocket. Predawn was still a couple of hours away when we set off for Rokkaku Expo Stadium, I watched Neon City’s canyons of gleaming night lights convulse and undulate their way through the streaming rain-splashed water droplets which crawled across the tram’s windows. The carriage’s dismal, inadequate lighting drained the colour from its contingent of commuters: A subdued, strange intersection of last night’s dying dregs of over-inebriated revellers perilously saundering their way back to wherever they lived and this morning’s earliest rising wage-monkeys, decked in their cheap Kuabha suits and slouching their way into whatever corp-owned cubicle filled hellhole they called a workplace. As we walked the final rainy leg to the stadium the muted beat of a distant rhythmic bassline thumped across the ground and electrically vibrated through the air. Neon City’s claustrophobic sprawl thinned out and gave way to the almost open airiness of the expansive steel and concrete oval which marked the perimeter of the stadium. Rokkaku Expo Stadium has been designed with an eye towards a multitude of events and inside, its centre was a multi-blended fabricated flat open space grassy-like green sports pitch. It was ringed by seating which could host hundreds of thousands of visitors. Within it was the dull, shapeless but expansive roar of thousands of urgent voices. Despite the hour, Ashaglaya and Koko were waiting for us among the press of fans at the stadium. Ashaglaya was dressed in matching PVC canary yellow Desullo-styled boob-tube and mini skirt, finished off with her favourite Prantodi whitel stilettos. Like Lucy, she brandished a pair of fluorescent glow sticks. I settled in for the long slog as Lucy, Ashaglaya and Koko got to excitedly chatting about The Magical Girls and all the while, the party atmosphere grew in intensity as did the clamour, more and more people were congregating inside the stadium. Magical Princess Kinky Komi and Milky Angel Creamy Momo were The Magical Girls I learned from the conversation, and their backing dancers were The Punishment Posse. Eventually Bill, Trigger and the others arrived as the stadium was packing out and the concert was beginning to ramp up. Even D4VID had found his way into the concert, An on-the-ground, as-it-happens Magical Girls story was too ripe for him to pass up. He barely paid us any attention, eagerly filming the pre-show activity and hype A little later and a grating rumble filled the stadium as the reinforced polymer retractable panelled roof slid open. Night had melted away and so had the rain, an orange band swam across the eastern skyline, announcing dawn. Soon, it too gave way to the Neon City blue-white skies while the temperature rocketed. One-by-one, support acts materialised on the multi-tiered raised stage in the centre of the pitch, outfitted in garish outfits and gimmicks they blasted out their sets, above them, an enormous Senonable wall-slab mounted on the stage’s superstructure replayed a larger-than-life feed of each act’s performance. Energy was reaching fever pitch, hyping the crowd, raising tension and expectation. Once the final support act had been shuffled off stage, the giant Rotefleck soundsystem blared out The Magical Girls’ signature tune, rows of fireworks inexplicably erupted, suddenly the wall-slabs were displaying slickly produced montages of them performing in various situations. Then, The Punishment Posse decked out in shocking pink onesies came bounding on stage and began their dance routine, the crowd frenzied, hollering for the girls. A deafening roar that shook the ground. Then in a perfectly timed moment of showmanship, The Magical Girls appeared on the stage’s highest tier, briefly silhouetted against a backdrop of dazzling fireworks, posing and gazing down on the crowd from their perch. One of the numerous vid-caster drones had pushed a zoomed in view of girls to the wall-slab, larger than life faces with delicately sculpted features and exquisite make-up filled the screen. Magical Princess Kinky Komi wore a colourfully repainted form-fitting stylised Ulkang armoured combat-shell, these things came equipped with micro-missile launchers and a harness mount minigun as standard. She also wore matching faux-leather knee-high pixie boots and a giant pair of intricately detailed, iridescent butterfly wings. Milky Angel Creamy Momo meanwhile wore a cream-white chiffon Kunoichi outfit trimmed in light-shifting orange and gold LEDs, the layers of flowery clothing couldn’t hide that she also wore Ulkang armours, finally a massive bow of matching colours was attached to her hair. These were all the kind of costumes seen on old style anivids where heroic girls battled transgressing hyperdimensional demons or something. While The Magical Girls belted out some favourite tunes to the delight of the crowd, Trigger had been suspiciously scanning the sky, his thermals found an unrecognisable heat signature lingering above the stadium. Over the din, Koko leaned close to Trigger and explained it was probably The Strawberry Shake Shatter Show; The Magical Girls’ personal attack chopper! It looked like the chopper was the source of the aerial fireworks show. The set continued for twenty minutes or so until the music dropped tempo and switched to instrumental tracks as the vid-montage made a reappearance on the giant slab, The Magical Girls had disappeared; for a costume change Lucy told me. A few seconds later though and they had reappeared. Abruptly, the music ended and the wall-slab went black, a moment later and the number one hundred million had flashed up on screen along with a twenty minute timer. Abruptly, Kinky Komi’s artificially modulated squeaky girlish voice thundered out of the sound system, her announcement informing everyone that they collectively had to pay one hundred million bits into The Magical Girls BitBuddy account in twenty minutes or… everyone dies! The timer began counting down. I knew it! The effect was immediate and profound! The once ecstatic hollering and cheering went up an octave as it morphed into screaming and yelling. Panic churned through the audience that seethed like boiling water as most people began blindly thrashing around, it was followed a few seconds later by a concerted effort to reach the exits but it just made matters worse. The harsh staccato of automatic gunfire cut through the clamour as a swathe of fans crumpled to the ground, injured and dying. The Punishment Posse was now living up to its hyperbolic name and bristled with firearms, indiscriminately cutting down anyone they thought were trying to escape. Direct confrontation had to be avoided, The Posse was too well tooled up and too numerous to have a chance of winning a straight up gunfight, we needed options. The Magical Girls had resumed singing, encouraging their fans to pay the ransom, while the dancers waved their guns at the audience rhythmically, it may have been working, the hundred million figure was dropping. Members of the audience who were packing took potshots of the girls, it did nothing. Transparent polymatic acrylic barriers had risen between the performers and the audience. Meanwhile a pair of massive balloons shaped to represent The Magical Girls in their distinctive outfits floated and swayed their way above the stadium, gigantic and strangely roundish faces staring at the audience. Very soon, the numbers had dropped halfway, then the countdown sped up into blurs of rapidly changing shapes until they instantly stopped when the timer hit zero. The giant wall-slab switched to a feed of the two balloons, green gas was visibly billowing out of the balloons, expanding into voluminous clouds and gently descending on the stadium. Ripples of fear shock-waved their way through the audience as The punishment Posse continued sporadically firing into the crowds. Smoke, screams, flurried panicking, gunfire and more; all of it shrank away. I was trusting the others to protect my material body as I jacked into the GLOWNET; as one reality retreated, another expanded to fill the dataless void left behind and then, I was in. Neon City’s dynamic info-vista, with its haphazard mix of morphically shaped data outputs inundating my senses. Stealth tech made the chopper invisible in material reality, In the GLOWNET it might not be the same story. The iridescently edged, cubic landscape blurred beneath me and I found myself staring at Rokkaku Expo Stadium’s data-image. A fluorescent landscape of seething, everchanging, kaleidoscopic imagery, animation and sound, the nebulous result of so many bio-images unpredictably interacting with each other. A tidal wave of dataflows surged in an out of the stadium as people paid money to The Magical Girls or posted vids of their impending doom on MyFaceSpace None of that interested me, there was a needle in the haystack here and I had to find it. Luckily I had a top-specced heuristic hunter/seeker algorithm at my disposal, one-by-one and at blistering speed it eliminated data-flows outside the parameters I’d given it until it got a hit. A data-flow that led to an anonymous data-image situated in the space above the stadium, whatever was being transferred between the two was heavily encrypted, cracking it would take time. If it was the chopper, it was likely chatter between the crew and whoever they were coordinating with on the ground. It was what I needed, didn’t care about the encrypted data, just needed a ride into the chopper’s systems. Cloning the authenticator, I mingled my bio-image into the flow and found myself staring at a rudimentary set of menus. Flight systems were locked, no easy way in there. Maintenance systems; there were submenus inside, scrolling through the list, I found something that might help. I put the engines into diagnostic mode, that would shut the chopper down, but it wasn’t enough. The chopper’s safety protocol responded, it knew the chopper was in flight and immediately sent a cancel-command to the diagnostic system, but I killed the cancel-command before it got there. The engines died along with the stealth-tech. Lurching through the GLOWNET, I piggy-backed the stadium’s media feed and watched the chopper’s spiralling descent, it plummeted down on to the stage and on to Magical Princess Kinky Komi who was frozen in shock. As it was struck, the multi-tiered structure instantly buckled inwards, collapsing on itself a moment before it was engulfed by a blossoming fireball. Magical Princess Kinky Komi and The Punishment Posse were gone, consumed by the explosion which also licked the front few rows of the audience. Green gas continued to vent out of the balloons and lazily fall on the stadium. The chopper’s systems had vanished, as devastated as the stage the chopper had crashed into and I found myself hanging in the GLOWNET. Beneath was the stadium’s default data-image, a cheerful fluorescent amalgamation of roided up sportsmen and stylised imagery of the venue. Behind it would be the data-vault, quickly I launched a cracking algorithm, it allowed me to peel away the corporate facade. Inside the data-vault, I searched the directories for whatever protocol managed the roof panels. The safety protocols were easy to hack and I executed the roof command string. Out there in material reality, the panels groaned into back life as massive servo motors began extending the retractable roof and soon, the last sliver of overbright sky folded away as it finished closing, automated emergency lighting then activated. The descent into dim twilight had not done much to help the panicking audience. The green gas was now rolling off the stadium roof and settling in the surrounding neighbourhood, it would become diluted but still inflict casualties, but it would be less than what would have occurred to the audience. With a nauseating jolt I was out of the GLOWNET and back in the cage, a few moments passed before I could resync with material reality. Milky Angel Creamy Momo, the remaining Magical Girl had survived the conflagration and was currently exchanging sword-strokes with Trigger, he was too strong for her though and she fell to his unrelenting strikes. Trigger was grimacing after the fight, breathing heavily and slouching while leaning on his sword, his skin was taking on clammy pallorous white quality. They were symptoms we’d seen before; Trigger had been poisoned, Milky Angel Creamy Momo’s weapons must’ve been laced with something. Koko didn’t hesitate, grabbed her control-slab and activated Tonkatsu, instructing the med-drone to diagnose Trigger. It smoothly buzzed up to him and did her work, soon he was stabilised and we were ready to move. Underlit by the orange flames, voluminous black smoke billowed upwards from the burning stage and choked the emergency lighting, throwing a hellish red tint across much of the stadium as we advanced on the closest exit and navigated the panicking crowds. More gunfire broke out, this time coming our way and we were forced to hit the stadium’s synth-turf. Some of The Punishment Posse, surrounded by dead fans had spotted us and were determined to stop us leaving. The exchange of fire didn’t last long, Despite the poison they employed, The Posses’ numbers had been diminished and they couldn’t match us. Before exiting the stadium we saw that beneath their pink onesies, The Punishment Posse wore Poison Jam colours. It started to make sense, The Magical Girls had hired them as muscle. With nothing to hurl an obstacle our way, we joined the fleeing audience and managed to exit the darkened stadium into the safety of the day’s dying light. The girls were unhappy and unimpressed with The Magical Girls concert, Koko called it ‘a disgrace’! However, they were all happy to be alive and took some cheerful selfies against the glowing orange backdrop of the burning Rokkaku Expo Stadium. D4VID went off, explaining that he had to post his story. The rest of us decided to hit up a burger joint. There was almost always a liminal instant that occurred daily in Neon City just as the last blue-white stretches of sky receded into night. A momentary lull when the palpable change in air pressure summoned energetic twilight winds that blustered and whistled through the city’s concrete landscape while a small dip in temperature heralded the oncoming nightly torrential downpour. The rain was seconds away when we’d wandered into a Hazhiwa Burgers fast-food franchise joint and ordered our burgers from a small booth decked out in plastic fittings; decorated in gaudy colours unable to disguise the grime and neglect. What had served as parasols above the outside seating and had sheltered customers from a punishing sun during the day now shielded them from the nightly deluge. I listened to the rhythmic, soporific drumming over my head until our food arrived. Vat-grown syntheef Zhedenzho Brute Burgers always tasted so good, pressed into a vaguely burger-shaped form, the manufactured protein mass was laced with bioengineered flavour enhancers that stimulated all the right brain receptors and was packaged in a bread-substitute which always sloshed with modified spices and sauces. There was barely time to enjoy the meal when our media-slabs pinged. Thaddeus Rackham, vaudevillian transvestite sex worker, assassin and street entertainer was contacting us. He’d been working his usual pitch at Sky Dinosaurian Square and decided to explore the unfinished Rokkaku rollercoaster construction site which had intrigued him. He was exploring the half finished structure when he discovered it stunk of vomit. We sat up when he said that. Thaddeus had continued exploring and spotted a strange grey-skinned creature. Somehow Thaddeus had managed to creep up on the thing and kill it. This somehow tied in with Protobase Global and Rokkaku and the problems Thetatec were having. We knew that Porter Sladek would be interested in the creature. After speaking with Thaddeus we agreed to broker a deal with Sladek. Porter Sladek was convalescing in a secured, private med-facility in the Ohkubo Hospital and there were now several layers of private security between him and us. We recognised the sort; high level corporate ronin, decked-out Gaongha branded black-suited silhouettes with bulging implanted muscle packs and expressionless faces hidden behind Maoshi data-shades, no doubt they also sported other tactical enhancements as well as internal comms. It took some time and effort to get a face-to-face despite personally knowing him. He was fully conscious when we reached him, albeit laid up and wired to a small row of slim med-slabs, an organ-management system and a nanite regenerator, in a undecorated, white and glass walled, faux marble-floored cube smelling of antiseptic. Hardware kept him alive while sinew, bone and skin were being knitted back together. What couldn’t be repaired was replaced, it wouldn’t be too long before even the scars faded. Benefits of being a billionaire. A wall-slab was blaring out the inane content that Neon City was so well known for and he looked visibly relieved when a distraction came walking in - us! After some quick negotiations, ten mill is what he was willing to pay for the creature, a sizable amount but he was smart enough to know that it was from Rokkaku and might prove useful. He told us to deliver the creature to an address in Kibogaoka Hill, a man like Porter Sladek didn’t keep all his eggs in the Thetatec basket, he had to have off-the-grid resources and facilities dotted all over Neon City and this was one of them. Thaddeus squealed with delight when he learned we’d scored him a cool ten mill, we took the flier to Sky Dinosaurian Square to meet him and landed on the far side of the rollercoaster. The creature, with its grey skin and stalks-for-eyes was definitely the same kind of thing we’d encountered roaming the Rokkaku tower. It was wrapped in a semi-opaque polyurethane sheet, didn’t help much though, the gag-inducing stench of vomit lingered. I triggered my internal air recycler, pretty certain the others did the same. We dragged it back to the flier, Koko grumbled all the way, she’d be scrubbing the smell of puke out for hours. The delivery went smoothly, Porter Sladek’s address took us to the edge of downtown Kibogaoka Hill, the shanty town's strings and clusters of myriad lights were faint and distant in the pummelling downpour as they rolled past and we arrived at an anonymous warehouse manufactured of grey corrugated steel plating in an anonymous little industrial park. Koko delicately put down on the unlit roof pad as I watched the downdraft blast the accumulated rainwater into a hazy mist on one of the flier’s screens. The darkness split open into oblong yellow light as a door swung wide while we were unloading the creature, Porter Sladek’s muscle was waiting. Wordlessly they took the creature and hefted it the way they had come without a backward glance, disappearing from sight as the yellow light folded in on itself. We didn’t hang about either and in seconds the flier was powering through the rain. It didn’t take long for our slabs to begin pinging again, before we’d gotten back to Hikage, Pixie Skull and Vanilla Goth, the Muscle Gurlz we’d encountered a couple of times before were in trouble. Now they were laid up after restorative surgery at the Kyukyoko No Hospital. The night wasn’t done with us, Koko banked the flier round and headed over. It was getting late or maybe early when we arrived at Sugamo Jizo Dori Street, there were still hours of rain left and this was as subdued as it got. The district was quieter than most, being the centre of Neon City’s senior citizen housing; fewer people roamed the neon-lit, drenched streets here. The hospital was a maze of weakly lit, mostly deserted beige-walled, linoleum-floored corridors filled with quietly ticking striplights that eventually led us to the small ward occupied by the two Muscle Gurlz, the familiar smell of antiseptic hit as we went in. They were hooked into the med-slabs and were sporting several bandage-packs and dermal sealants each. The last few gigs the pair of Muscle Gurlz had taken had all gone south or fallen through and their bottom line was looking light on the bits. They’d needed bank and so had taken jobs as organ surrogates. The demand for naturally-sourced bio-inventory and organs was always high amongst the rich and powerful and Neon City always found a way to fulfil those kinds of demands. Numerous med-tech facilities had sprung up to cash in on this exclusive market. For a price, organ surrogates allowed cloned bio-data to be attached to spare spaces in their bodies and being thin and muscular, the Muscle Gurlz had plenty of space. Coupled with some sequence code re-writing allowed the data to quickly grow into actual organs. Once they had reached maturity, the organs would be transplanted into the clients. Except, for the Muscle Gurlz; this simple transaction had gone south. They’d been organ mugged, spleens they’d been contracted to grow were gone, they were down a kidney and eye each into the bargain to boot. The Gurlz told us they’d gone for a routine check up with their employer, Doctor Xavier Zephyr, they had no memory of what followed and had then woken up having been organ mugged; now they were in in recovery It got worse; they were liable for the loss of spleens and the fee for defaulting would leave them seriously out of pocket.. It didn’t add up, why would The Gurz get marked in a hospital? I could think of a thousand easier locations in Neon City to organ mug someone. Why had the spleens been targeted? Why had it occurred after their visit to Doctor Zephyr? The hospital’s security systems were second rate, there was little profit in it for the shareholders. It didn’t cover much of the hospital and the Kyukyoko No Hospital’s secured server-vault couldn’t hold out against my cracking algorithms and I quickly found myself sifting through their file-structure until I came across their archived security footage, from there I ran it through my recog protocols and got a hit. Doctor Xavier Zephyr was a tall, slight and sallow faced individual, we tracked him as he exited the hospital, the timestamp told us that he’d left a little after his meeting with the Muscle Gurlz and we watched as he took the Harajuku High Road, heading for the south terminal The Harajuku High Road was a suspension monorail built to accommodate the district’s older citizens and the service primarily ran from the central residential hub on Sugamo Jizo Dori Street to the Kyukyoko No Hospital at the north terminal. Designed to avoid the heavier traffic experienced on the tram network and its crumbling infrastructure, the monorail operated at an even greater altitude than the trams. At this height the grimy, usually crowded and noisy streets shrank away to a safely distant hive of thoroughfares delineated by Neon City’s erratic and dim street-lighting. It was time to follow Zephyr’s route so we rode the Harajuku High Road. Inside it was relatively clean, seating was plusher than expected and mostly free of soiling, the interior was furbished in dull, neutral shades of cream and brown. The monorail moved at a sluggish pace compared to the trams below as it ponderously navigated its way through the array of colossal Senonable wall-slabs that decorated the city’s sky rises and which flashed various types of media, current affairs and product placement. It allowed an increased proportion of targeted adverts to hit the senior citizens. My media-slab began spontaneously singing out jingles while displaying logos and artificially cheerful faces. I watched a couple of them while waiting for the dedicated ad-killer I’d launched to kick in; the ads were all aimed at the elderly demographic. Eventually the train reached the southern terminal, we disembarked into the residential hub, the few people we saw wandering here were the district’s senior citizens, on whatever business drove them or enamoured by the advertising. There was no respite from it here, Fluorescent stalks creeped across building fronts and ad boards, supporting a swathe of advertising wall-slabs and incandescent signs. It was impossible to miss the promotions for the Zephyr Clinic. Tacky ad copy boasted the Zephyr Clinic was a new ultra-modern clinic that serviced the elderly, promising the highest quality replacement organs at cut prices, the address was plastered or transmitted everywhere and led us down twisting, puddle fiddled back streets until we encountered a neon-signed retail corner unit with shimmering signage that announcing the clinic. Someone was working late, yellowish light bled out of frosted windows, caught in the raindrops and undulating in the downpour. Bill sent Roderick to cover the clinic’s back door and we entered, its decor was the familiar bland grey and off-white we’d been seeing all night. Unsurprisingly, even the receptionist was a centenarian. She wore powder blue scrubs and looked at us from behind her eggshell coloured desk, the deep lines and wrinkles on her face shifted while her sparkling, implanted heterochromic eyes closed a touch when she smiled thinly, The colours of those mismatched eyes seemed familiar to us. Behind her were some doors. They were locked, we could see the keycard panels and numberpads attached to the walls next to each one. Asking to see Doctor Zephyr got us nowhere. “He’s in surgery,” she informed us, making a show of consulting her Karfseakk desk-slab. There was nothing to do but wait. Suspicious looking certificates and the doctor’s shady qualifications in cheap frames hung from the otherwise plain walls, as well as photos of who were presented as supposedly satisfied elderly patients, grinning inanely while posed in curiously unauthentic situations. It took a small amount of patience until an opportunity presented itself. The receptionist left the room for a moment and we pounced, she had gone through one door, we went for the other. The numberpad was a standard Noskurit secupad, the cheapest kind of security tech generally available, employed by companies who didn’t care or need to worry about security. I wondered which one Doctor Zephyr was? This was a cakewalk for Koko, the numberpad’s cover was off in seconds, exposing intestinal wiring and circuit boards within, there was a flurry of microtools and the authorisation code-string was made to bypass the security protocol. The magnetic lock disengaged and the door clicked open a centimetre; we were in. Beyond the door was an empty corridor in the familiar grey and off-white colours, the temperature was noticeably lower. Four plain white, windowed doors lined the corridor here, including one that led into a cold storage room which was stacked with shelves of subzero boxes and containers. Opposite were the consultancy and pre-op room, adjacent was the operating theatre. Through the window, in the centre of the starkly lit white room were two masked figures in wrinkled mint-green scrubs. Under intense spotlights, they hunched over an unmoving third in a white robe who was reclined on a surgical table and hooked into a busy looking med-slab and life-support tech, concentrating on the bloody slash in the patient’s abdomen. Leaving them undisturbed, we watched as they worked: Algorithmically-driven prehensile microtools meant surgery was rapidly completed and soon, a crimson drenched fleshy mass was extracted and dropped in a subzero box, it was then soaked in some sort of chemical fluid and rinsed free of blood. While the surgeon who must’ve been Doctor Zephyr got on with inserting a new organ into their patient, the other organ in the subzero box was taken through a side door into the cold storage room and filed away. None of us had med-skills but we knew something off? Waiting for the patient to be wheeled off once the surgery was done, we moved in. With the mask peeled away, Doctor Zephyr, with his sallow features and thin frame was easy to recognise. He was caught flat-footed and immediately cornered; we wanted answers. With some defiance, Doctor Zephyr wasn’t very compliant at first. However, after observing Trigger not-so-subtly run an index finger along the length of his Wanametosu’s textured hilt, he, like many of his patients; had a change of heart. It was a typical Neon City story he told us, sordid and full of corruption, criminality and immoral behaviour. Turns out Zephyr wasn’t giving most of his patients new organs, just cycling through their aged organs time after time. Taking a kidney out of one patient and storing it, then putting it into another, then storing their kidney to put into yet another patient and so on. It was a neat scam, getting bank for nothing and keeping his clientele coming back for more work. It had a flaw though, all these decrepit organs still had expiration dates and could only be recycled so many times before exhibiting total failure. Zephyr occasionally needed to source fresher organs, that’s where the organ surrogacy came in. He’d sucker a couple of easy or desperate marks into being organ surrogates and as part of the suitability and compatibility tests, he had the opportunity to check out the health of their other organs. Then during a routine examination he’d take what he needed, like it was a all-you-could-eat salad bar. Zephyr was smart enough to know the gig was up, his furtive, sweaty glances told us as much. It didn’t take much persuasion to get The Muscle Gurlz organs back and after some screaming from the reception room, Zephyr’s assistant returned all the stolen goods back to us in one of their subzero boxes. On the flight back to the Kyukyoko No Hospital through the rain, we pinged D4-VID and gave him the lowdown. His expose would kill Zephyr’s scam stone cold. The late rain, ephemeral and fading, seemingly evaporated before a band of growing light in the east, even then, Neon City wasn’t cutting us a break, We were practically in sight of Hikage Street when our media-slabs pinged, it may as well have been a million kilometres away. Katsuko Nakamura, a Chou-Nata mid-level suit we knew was calling, Turned out that a buddy of his had bitten the dirt, Katsuko told us that the ‘authorities’ - that would be rentacop were investigating but were ‘stumped’, he wanted our eyes on it. Koko had wheeled the flier round and headed north towards Itabashi-cho and the Jorengi Temple. It was located at the far northern edge of both the district and the city, within sight of the monstrous, towering, polycarbon reinforced concrete city-wall which either kept outsiders out, or kept us in. Pretty sure I knew which was which. Jorengi Temple was a squat, pagoda-roofed and seemingly real-wood structure painted in red and black, ringed by a band of greenery and populated by a giant gold buddha. A tiny pinprick of colour surrounded and dwarfed by anonymous, grey, soaring concrete and glass multi-floored edifices to corporate hegemony, A fleeting moment of calm within the unrelenting background roar of the City of Electric Dreams. Koko circled until we found a roof-pad. Katukso Nakamura had pinged the temple ahead of our arrival; we had immediate access. I'd never have taken a soulless exec for faceless corp having a spiritual side, but his dead friend was the temple’s abbot, Abbot Kannushi Chiro. We were taken to the murder site. A strange smell; sweet, earthy, heady and vaguely familiar waited for us as we arrived at the location of the killing. It was taped off and inattentively patrolled by a couple of rentacops who hardly checked out our credentials before letting us past. The body had been located in one of the gardens, by the looks of it, someone had actually imported swathes of real dirt and deposited it around the temple, then planted real grass on it somehow, This island of greenery in an ocean of asphalt and concrete was lined by a perimeter of varied, colourful flowers, no wonder it had seemed familiar, it was a scent we’d encountered before, but only in the wilderness. It was a strange sensation, grass quietly crumpling underfoot while the earth beneath gave way to our heavy boots as we looked around the garden. There was little to find here, the remains of Abbot Chiro had already been removed and I ended up staring at the bright, flowery petals. Neon City had more than its fair share of cockroaches and bugs, but nothing quite like the bees that unerringly floated and flitted from flower-to-flower. It was something I’d only ever seen on the GLOWNET. The monks at the temple, flapping about in their voluminous, simple, sackcloth coloured robes and plain sandals seemed more agitated than we would have expected, heatedly discussing some thing or other. The death had put some annual event called the Flower Festival that celebrated The Spring Goddess into disarray, without the abbot to preside over the celebration, it could not proceed, this would mean cancelling the Petal Market, a seasonal street market that ran for a limited time and attracted local traders, mom ‘n’ pop stores and other small businesses that hadn’t yet been swallowed up or hegemonized by franchises or corporations. For many of them, it was the highlight of the year, without the Petal Market, many of them risked going bust. The monks explained that electing a new Abbot would take a month, too long for the Petal Market to wait. Bill took the opportunity to chime in, he smoothly recommended that they have candidates anonymously write poems and place them on a wall. Then they should decide on the new abbot by judging the poems. The monks seemed satisfied by this. The rentacops here told us that the Abbot had died from a single blow to the back of the head, to us it sounded like the handiwork of a pro. They’d also spoken with the monks who resided here who had provided little help, they did not know the exact time Abbot Chiro had last been seen, nor could they think of why anyone would do this Finally, they told us that the killer had left a figurative calling card at the scene, the evidence was currently in the possession of Captain Ocano at the Shinjuku precinct. Time to pay him a visit. It was close to mid-morning by the time we landed at the Shinjuku precinct, descending out of the stark blue-white sky and setting down on to one the bunker-like structure’s myriad roof-pads. Security was easy to clear, we were tight with Ocano and it got us through their protocols with no trouble. The precinct was filled with its usual bustle, mostly rentacops hanging out in their beige cubicles and pulling busywork out of their case files, anything to avoid hitting the broiling streets of Neon City - unless it involved personal gain of course. Captain Ocano could be heard before seen, a booming voice transmitted out of his glass-walled corner office which overlooked an intersection of the city’s concrete canyons and into the central office as he roared into his Preaavar desk-slab. He stood as he saw us approach, unconsciously trying to smooth the wrinkles in his mismatched suit while opening the door, the clamour of the precinct faded into a distant burble as it clicked closed behind us. Ocano handed us a small, transparent polyurethane bag which contained the calling card. It showed a stylised red chess piece - a King against a traditional black-and-white chequerboard. Turning it over revealed some text King takes Bishop - check. Bishop must have been a reference to the Abbot at the Jorengi Temple, whoever this was, they were boasting about killing the Abbot. No idea what it meant though? There was nothing to go on right now, the onset of morning marked the end of the day for us and without self-medicating some stims it would be hard to go on. Finally, the city was giving us a chance to hit the sack. Later, we saw on the newsvines that the Jorengi Temple had appointed Shima Kenaoya as their new Abbot by using the time-honoured ancient method of writing poems on The Wall of the Gateless Gate. The Flower Festival and the Petal Market would go ahead as planned. Later still and something else caught our attention appeared on the newsvine feeds, it read:
A pawn promoted to bishop but the Peony pawn has been taken, signalling the endgame. THE RED KING advances on the Queen unhindered. Mate in five. Whatever this was, it wasn’t over. 8th May 2021 Saturday night has rolled around again and I’m logged on to Meet. Time for the next part of Matakishi’s Wired Neon Cities campaign. Location: Neon City. Another Neon City morning; I spent it flopped face-down on my futon from the night before, an acrylic blanket pulled over my head in a futile attempt to shield myself from the world at large. Those few wage-monkeys lucky enough to have gainful employment had long gone for the day, leaving the listless no-hopers, jobless and nihilistic dead-enders still roaming the high-rise. As the day’s punishing heat rose, so did the city’s cacophony; frustrated and yelling neighbours were getting ready to murder each other while thumping distorted basslines pumped out of tortured, underpowered speakers, local gangers and street thugs came and went, stomping along the corridor outside, jostling, jeering and shouting at each other, jostling for a showdown. Behind it all was a low buzzing whine in my head and a handful of dust in my mouth; fallout from last night’s binge. I rolled out of bed at lunch time, pulled on my Harbiefs, grabbed my Verskeit duster and checked my .45s before heading out. The seemingly mindless crowds on Hikage Street somehow navigated each other on auto-pilot, shuffling along and preoccupied by whatever probably meaningless task drained their time. I hit up some no doubt unlicensed steamy street cart food-vendor hawking his wares for a waxy paper carton of indeterminate off-brand ramen, along with a can of self-cooling Kaia when I met with the others. Between monosodium glutamate infused mouthfuls, it took all the effort I could muster to concentrate on Bill’s voice. I listened as he told us that Silai Granskina had abruptly dropped four hundred large into his account. Not so long ago Bill had lent Silai a couple of million bits to repair his hacked-up nose that Bill never expected to see again, but now, he was suspicious how Silai had managed to pay a sizable chunk so quickly? Bill pinged a call to Silai and got voicemail. We decided to dig deeper. I jacked into the GLOWNET and slipped out of the material reality, sensing it shrink away as Neon City’s multicoloured radiant info-vista flew up to engulf me in gleaming angular motes of data that sped through the constantly recycling cubic landscape while seemingly millions of user bio-images flitted from data-image to info-vault to chat-stream on whatever business or diversion concerned them. Undistracted, I launched a hunter/searcher algorithm, watched its sleek polygonal geometry follow my instructions as it accelerated into a nebulous blur that disappeared into the vanishing point, pursued only by its own ephemeral light-trail. Once the algorithm had done its work, it delivered me what I needed; access protocols to Silai Granskina’s financials. The info-vista became a series of undulating colours as moments later, I was in his accounts, quickly I saw that someone called Su Chuai had deposited half-a-mill into Silai’s account. Soon after Silai had forwarded four hundred grand to Bill. Staying in the GLOWNET, I searched for Su Chuai and immediately got a hit; he was some sort of loan shark that operated out of Hikage, he even had his own data-vault on the GLOWNET. Whatever he was, it was probably bad news for Silai Granskina. Bill put in another call to Silai, this time pinging his land line and got a hit, Bina, Silai’s wife answered. She sounded worried, explaining to Bill that thieves had broken in and stolen all their furniture, when asked about Silai, Bina said he wasn’t around but some man was hanging at the apartment, looking for him! Bill carefully steered the conversation towards money, Bina told him that Silai had recently gotten a promotion, his bonus had been delivered in cash and now as a consequence, he was hardly home, working too much, doing too much overtime. It was clear that she had no idea about Silai’s debt. The conversation had raised all the flags, Bill wanted a word with Silai and we agreed. The Grankinas lived in what passed for a better part of Hikage Street, the high-rises were a slightly cleaner shade of drab depressing concrete grey and moping no-hoper street gangers gave you a slightly less threatening sneer when you passed their turf. When we arrived at the apartment, camped outside was a young Chinese man casually leaning on a low wall, wiry framed with spiked, dark hair, he wore a well-cut beige Gaongha two-piece lounge suit complemented by a purple-black Shaguaifu dress shirt and gave us a thin, tight smile as we approached, subtly sizing us up as we went in. The once over-furnished apartment was now bare, carpeting and chintzy decorations were gone, even the patterned wallpaper had been stripped. Our footsteps reverbed distinctly as we strode into the empty rooms. Bina was jittery and obviously nervous, she was also upset that she had no way to serve us tea. She told us the man outside was intercepting anything that was being brought into the apartment. Back outside, we confronted the young man and he seemed unfazed by our questioning. He explained that he worked for the Su Chuai Loan Facility and pulled a badge on us. As per Neon City regulation, he was a legally recognised debt collector and the Su Chuai Loan Facility was a licensed loan shark outfit. We asked him what would happen if Silai Granskina defaulted on his loan. The young man smiled again and told us that Su Chuai’s policy was to not lend someone more money than the worth of the borrower’s internal organs. He didn’t know much more, it was apparent he was street muscle and nothing more; it was time to hit up the source of the problem. Wasn’t far to the Su Chuai Loan Facility, close by on Hikage in fact, predators never wanted to stay too far from their prey. Hikage Street was predominantly a residential district and the loan facility was located on one of the sporadic retailer strips that dotted the neighbourhood and usually took up the ground floor space at the base of the many high-rises. The loan facility’s shop front was adorned in a shaped polymer replica wood frame, an obvious attempt to confer an air of tradition and authority on the premises, when we entered a tinny ringing bell jingle played out of a tiny Senonable speaker screwed to the wall. The faux wooden theme continued inside with reproduction floorboards and imitation fittings and furniture. In one corner was a shabbily dressed youth on a chair and table, slouched over a drawing slab, chewing gum and drawing manga. Eyes flicked up from the slab for milliseconds to register our presence. Our attention was drawn to an older man though, with thin, grey, wispy hair, he sat at a central desk and was dressed in a traditional looking red and gold changshan. A widening smile deepened his wrinkles as he watched us stride up to his desk. We introduced ourselves and asked for the manager, the elder man gave an acknowledging gesture, introduced himself as Su Chuai, reached for a data-slab, smiled and asked if we needed money? Bill explained that we were not here to borrow money but on business and inquired after Silai Granskina’s account. Bill explained that Silai also owed Bill money and this account took priority. Su Chuai scrutinised his slab, sifting through the stored information. He looked at us and coolly informed us that Silai’s account had acquired a significant amount of interest, admin fees and a sizable one million bit late payment fee. He added that he could not defer on the account. Su Chuai and Bill entered into some sort of heated legal discourse that was just jargon to me. From the drawing table, the youth looked up again at them for a moment before returning to his attention to the slab and his gum. The discussion ended in an impasse, Bill couldn’t get Su Chuai to even freeze Silai’s account nevermind defer it. We left without any success. Finally Bill got ahold of Silai Granskina, he told Bill that he was at his office, when Bill pressed him about his debt to the loan shark, he got flustered and quickly said that he’d have his next payment soon, it was the brush off and we knew it. After Silai quit the call, we decided to give him a visit. Silai Granskina worked in the Transport Authority, situated in Neon City’s vast, brutalistic edifice to governmental bureaucracy; the Metropolitan Building. It was an oppressive ride over on the over-warm and stifling tram network, a cruel early afternoon sun hung in the blue-white sky, blazed through the tram windows, overwhelmed the inadequate aircon and multiplied the heat of crammed commuters within to a higher magnitude of discomfort. We exited the transit stop in sight of the looming Metropolitan Building, a gigantic cubic shape distorted by a crown of wavering heat and overbright sun-haze, which might’ve described anywhere in the district and headed over. Bill did the talking after we encountered the reception, we’d been in the Transport Authority’s offices previously and his smooth talking got us past both the reception and the uniformed rentaguard who shuffled along on their sedentary patrols through the slowly decaying, time-stained corridors of dwindling power. The Transport Authority’s office was quiet, employees lingered in cubicles partitioned by two metre high neutral grey, transparent acrylic topped plastic partitions and stewed away at the futility of their efforts. Silai was found lurking in his cubicle, shabbily dressed in a plain off the shelf wrinkled Kuabha suit and peering into a desk-slab, haggard and weary looking, lines ran their course over a tired face drained of colour and vigour as he turned to face us, he’d lost weight since the last time we’d seen him. He didn’t look particularly pleased to see us and we didn’t care, Trigger promptly convinced Silai to join us for lunch; no one in the office cared to look up as he grabbed Silai with a steely grip, dragging him off, even Silai didn’t bother protesting. Out on the busy street we’d found a nearby food vendor with shaded seating and ordered some Ahoumo noodles while an endless flow of lost humanity rolled past. The vendor fished the noodles from a discoloured, steamy aluminium pot and shoved them into cartons. Silai was looking nervous as he stirred the food we’d given him and we explained that we were in no rush to get our cash back, advising him to deal with the loan shark he’d embroiled himself with. He shrugged and told us that we should get our second payment from his wife soon, he told us he preferred that we got the money instead of Su Chuai. There wasn’t any more we could get out of him, he kept tight about how he was getting the money to repay us. “Best you didn’t know,” Silai told us and made his excuses to leave. We weren’t done though, after Silai had slouched back to his office, Koko sent Kevin buzzing up to the windows of theTransport Authority’s office. The little drone sat on the ledge and watched through the grimy and water-spot stained window, pushing out a video feed to Koko’s control tab while we sat waiting and made our noodles last as long as possible. A little time passed and Kevin showed us that Silai had gotten a personal call, it was over too quick for me to hack, but the lipreading algorithm on Koko’s slab had picked up some of Silai’s half of the conversation “Another one will be at the waterfront terminal at eleven forty-five tonight,” he’d said. It was a few hours until eleven forty-five tonight but we didn’t have to wait long for something to turn up. Jordan Tian was a suit at Chou-Nata, over our media-slabs he told us that we’d come recommended and he needed us to get his daughter back and didn’t trust anyone in Chou-Nata. Turned out that corporate security contractors at Chou-Nata had been lax or paid to look the other way while Yasmin Tian had been kidnapped. It’d looked like a pretty standard exec ransoming squeeze-and-grease, the demand came and Jordan had paid, so far, so good. However, Yasmin hadn’t been released, so Jordan had sicced a couple of private detectives on his daughter’s trail, only now they’d gone radio silent. A worried frown creased Jordan Tian’s face, marring the otherwise impeccable, surgically perfected features displayed on our slabs. Naturally he offered us a big payday and we agreed to find Yasmin. Before we left he pinged us details on Yasmin and the address of Suchet & Sea, the agency he’d employed. Suchet & Sea operated out of Shinjuku Station, a small rented corner office located in some drab, anonymous office complex on the fringes of the district. It was fronted by a hardened polymer door which had been painted to resemble an old wooden panel door, Suchet & Sea had been printed across the door’s top half In bold letters that crawled across the surface in a half circle. Lights were off, looked like no one was in, Trigger’s thermals told a different story though, two heat signatures from inside were coming through clear as day. After knocking on the door, we waited and got nothing, we knocked again, this time louder, more insistently, again nothing. Third time; we hammered on the door, rattling it in its frame, that got an answer. The door opened and on the other side we found two nervous looking men in colourful but dishevelled suits, both wiry-framed with long faces, they shared similar features and could almost have been brothers! The pair introduced themselves as Barry Suchet and Paul Sea, they both clearly followed an old, obscure Shinjuku street fashion called Chuckleo-hito that demanded they sport enormous implanted spiked mullets and bushy, bristling moustaches. We told them that we’d been sent by Jordan Tian to pick up the case of his missing daughter. The look of nervousness evaporated from their pale complexions as they realised we weren’t a threat. The smaller one, Barry, gave a wide, enthusiastic grin, explaining that they had deduced that The Flesh Cartel had kidnapped Yasmin. “To me,” said the other, Paul. “To you,” replied Barry. Paul elaborated, went on and told us they’d subcontracted to some female investigators to infiltrate the cartel and locate Yasmin. Now those subcontractors had also gone radio silent. Suchet & Sea had halted their investigation at that point. They didn’t admit it, but it was plain that they were well out of their depth dealing with these gangers and couldn’t hide their relief when we announced we were handling the case. The Flesh Cartel theory was a solid one. They were a known violent criminal outfit who operated out of Kabukicho, a sex trafficking ring and sleaze merchants who peddled in prostitution, drugs and more. They were known to grab girls off the street and addict them to the most potent brain-jacking narcotics street-chems could cook. There was little information that Suchet & Sea could provide us, however, they had managed to hook up a GLOWNET feed from the subcontractor’s optic circuits and showed us the footage they’d archived. Erratic and silent with fluctuating resolution and washed out colour, the feed swayed and bobbed as showed the subcontractors at work, viewpoints darting from one person to another as they interacted with street ashigaru, night-walkers and dealers. Towards the end, the footage briefly flashed across a room, showing Yasmin, obviously being held prisoner, alone and tied up. We grabbed a shot of the image and left. The Flesh Cartel was an unknown factor, something we’d never crossed paths with. There was no easy in with them and there was only a single avenue we could think to follow. Miguel Fernandez was a rentacop out of Shinjuku precinct.. He’s spent time working The Flesh Cartel undercover and had flirted with going native. His captain had paid us to extract him - and after some ups and downs we’d done it! Right now Miguel was flying some desk-slab, filing parking violations or something in a cubicle in the precinct. We pinged him and he was happy to help. It didn’t take him long to give us something. Yasmin was being held in a room that he recognised as part of The Flesh Fountain, one of the Cartel’s illicit holdings in Kabukicho. The Flesh Fountain was an old style tower, constructed in elaborately patterned brown brick, it sported rows of under-lit, high arched, thin-framed, tall windows and had been a hotel with a carpark on its ground floor in the early days of Neon City at a time when personal ground transport had still been considered a thing. One time it might have been a giant, dwarfed now, by steel and glass-fronted neighbours. With glory days that were gone and closed to the public, lower windows were boarded or bricked up and half the external lighting was gone. The gate into the carpark had been replaced by a clumsily indiscrete, steel-grey aluminium shutter-roller. Koko worked the lock and soon had it open. The roller shutter was huge - and heavy, a rasping, rattling, metallic voice screamed its protest as we forced the roller shutter up enough to allow us to squeeze under. Dim, regularly placed lighting dotted the carpark’s ceiling, revealing a windowless, dull, concrete, mostly empty interior to us. Rows of long unused parking bays were uniformly partitioned by fading yellow lines, looking around, there was little to be found in the carpark save some supplies that looked earmarked for the brothel here. Soon we encountered some elevators and a bare utilitarian stairwell. Checking the stairwell, we saw it spiralling its way up and down, but like so much in The City of Electric Dreams, downwards is where we were headed. With caution, we slowly proceeded in silence, the carpark’s surface level receded behind us as we descended, Koko sent Noodles to scout ahead and the diminutive drone darted speedily into the gloom, soon he encountered a landing on the second sub-basement and Koko watched as Noodles navigated the corner and registered two threats ahead. The feed showed two armed guards outside a door; had to be what we were looking for. Dressed casually in Dogenzaka Hill knockoffs, cheap bling and tats, they were packing cheap Rekhang Pophma machine pistols and stood about listlessly, distracted by media-slabs. Koko manoeuvred Noodles to the far side of the door and had the drone make a noise. The guards scrambled to face the distraction, dropping their slabs and putting their backs to us. It was a mistake, Trigger was round the corner in a silent blur and hit one and then the other with a stun-baton, they managed to get a few screams off before flopping helplessly to the ground. In a few hours, they’d regain consciousness, only their biggest headache wouldn’t be the stun-baton side-effects when they realised whatever they were guarding was gone. Neither guard had a keycard to the door, so Koko made short work of the lock. Past the door was a weakly lit, undecorated and unused storage room, a dozen girls dressed in tiny cocktail dresses, mini-skirts and boob-tubes, hot pants and bikini-tops and so on were slouched on mattresses and blankets. Lethargic postures and restless, unfocused gazes betrayed how strung out they were. Yasmin was there, pallid, apathetic, as zoned as the others and to our surprise, Pixie Skull and Vanilla Goth were also among them. The two Ikebukuro Muscle Gurlz told us that they had been put on the case of missing girls by Suchet & Sea, when they’d been wrong-footed and woke up in this cell. Fortunately, their enhanced circulatory systems had rapidly metabolised the drugs they’d been fed, however, they hadn’t managed to find a means of escape. The brief throwdown with the two guards risked bringing reinforcements, wasn’t time to hang around and swap stories. The quick escape didn’t go as hoped though, getting the girls out of the basement was a laborious task as they slowly tottered upstairs on the fifteen centimetre high white stilettos they’d been fitted with. Caught a break though, no more Flesh Cartel thugs came on to the scene. It was darkening by the time we all got topside and a blazing orange sliver was all that remained of a massive setting sun against the western skyline as day began to wane, the rain wouldn’t be far behind. Once they were out from under the weak lighting, most of the girls looked shocked, reeling from the gold-lined gigantic dome of nimbus clouds above. Koko had called the flier, it was cramped with everyone inside and I could hear the turbines spinning to maximum thrust as I felt the tug that came with the defiance of gravity. Once we were up, Koko banked us round and set a bearing to the closest precinct, she switched over to stealth and we hastily put the girls down on the roof pad and were gone before anyone realised. Yasmin Tian, we returned to her father and then before we dropped off the Muscle Gurlz, I gave them my business card, looked them in the eyes and told them to look me up if they ever needed help with anything, anything at all. Later; when Silai Granskina left the Transport Authority’s office at the end of his workday, we were there, in the rain, watching from the blackening sky above. Swallowed by the pressing churn of wage-monkeys.as he strolled out into the busy, drenched streets that ran the perimeter of The Metropolitan Building, Silai might easily have slipped into anonymity hadn’t Koko tagged him in the flier’s spook-tech. The algorithm had no problem tracking him through the intermittently dark streets, gleaming streetlight-lit rain and fidgeting crowds. Silai didn’t head straight home, instead he made for Chou Street and for the newly rebuilt Potato Palace. Switching to thermals on the flier’s external cams, we watched as he went in, watched as he exchanged bits for a bag of some kind and then left. Koko instructed Kevin to trail Silai and the diminutive drone accelerated off with machine efficiency, the rest of us went into Potato Palace. Not so long ago it had been the target of a firebomb attack against the Russian Mob but renovations are swift when municipal code can be ignored. The interior was back to almost looking like an authentic rustic mom-and-pop eatery, filled with plastic replica furniture and decoration. The simple charms belied the deep pockets of Russian mob money behind it. Inside, the staff recognised anyone associated with Yennav Rybasei and they quickly greeted Koko and then the rest of us. They were only too happy to accommodate us when we asked about Silai. They told us that Silai had made use of their landline and made a quick call. Something about a meeting at the waterfront, on schedule, delivery to Russia and a Neon City Train. It was only the one-sided bits and pieces of a conversation but it was starting to come together. Koko’s control-slab pinged unexpectedly, she checked it out and swore. Looking up, she told us that the feed from Kevin had been interrupted and so had the control link. Koko’s control-slab had been archiving Kevin’s feed, so she quickly reviewed the last few seconds the slab had received. Before the cutoff there had been a blur, she reviewed those last seconds again, slowing the feed until it hit single frames frames per second, until the feed became a picture book telling the story of a soaring, engulfing, urban sprawl-scape decorated in the glinting city lights reflected through a million, frozen, shining raindrops. It was blurred and only half in-picture but one of those last frames showed some sort of micro-net small enough to snare a tiny spy-drone like Kevin. Despite the link being lost, Kevin was still pinging out a satellite driven locator signal; Kevin was heading south. Koko called the flier down and quickly, we boarded and strapped in. Lifting off, I felt the slight tempo change in the flier’s hull vibration as we surged skywards, I watched the city rock sideways and drop off as Koko banked south, punching maximum thrust. The flier powered through Rokkaku-Dai Heights, rivulets of rainwater streamed left and right off the front viewports as Koko threaded through the swathe of residential towers that dotted the district. Kevin’s signal kept moving south and Koko kept following. As we made ground on Kevin, she entered the Fortified Residential Zone and so did we. A splattering of red lights flashed over Koko’s console, anti-air defences for the exclusive area had locked on to us. Koko veered, skirting the walled off neighbourhood with its high-end, gardened luxurious homes rolling past as we continued our chase. As we exited the district and entered Asakusa-cho, we had gotten close enough to Kevin to get a zoomed-in visual fix using the fliers front viewers. Somebody had attached a small box to the drone’s underside and she appeared to be following a sky-taxi? We started making ground, the sky-taxi couldn’t hope to match our speed, as we drew closer, the sky-taxi landed on a lower roof and a door swung, a Chinese man leaned out in a cheap two-piece Evoda lounge suit, a pistol gripped in one hand. He emptied it in a blazing staccato of gunfire, seemingly into the air before diving back into the sky taxi which took off in pursuit. I followed his line of sight upwards, through the pouring rain, he’d been aiming for a rider in roller jet blades who was grinding some balconies as she powered along. Almost immediately, a second sky-taxi swooped into view? I took a second to assess the situation, the second sky-taxi was pursuing the first, which in turn was pursuing the jet blader. Kevin was also in pursuit of the first taxi Roller jet blades comprised a pair of tricked out knee-high boots that combined two technologies: A hyper-compressed fuel cell, that when vented, provided enormous amounts of forward thrust and a hybrid kineticizer blade that generated increasingly stronger magnetic grip the faster the blade went. Combined, they allowed riders to traverse large distances, leap wide spans and even scale vertical planes Jet blades were a curious holdover from a couple of decades ago, a forgotten fad that had injured most users and had slipped into obscurity, except with the few riders that had persisted, for them, it had become something else entirely. Experienced jet bladers were capable of gravity-defying manoeuvres, skyscraper walls and archaic power lines became arcing grind-lines, high altitude comms clusters provided launch points and the rooftops became their bounce pads as they roamed the sprawls. Neon City had become a playground to them and rolled past below as they unhesitatingly hurled themselves from building to building. Beyond that though, some had found a way to earn a living; even in Neon City there was still an urge to transport hardcopies or physical items and that’s where jet blade couriers came in; capable of circumventing even aerial traffic, blazing through the tightest spots and easily getting in and out of buildings, they could navigate the city faster than almost any civilian vehicles. That’s who this jet blader was, we could just about make out some artificially cheerful courier branding on her boots. I jacked into the GLOWNET as we followed this aerial procession. The second taxi was an Abco sky-taxi and easy enough to hack. Even as the flier soared after them, I soared further. Material reality tumbled away, rolling into physical oblivion, a void replaced by the garish primary colours of Neon City’s angular info-scape that expanded to meet me. Gleaming orthogonal data-lines flowed into the horizon, criss-crossing from data-vault to data-vault and pulsating with content and information. A quick search found me the Abco cab’s franchise data-image, an exaggerated, cartoonish sky-taxi drenched in oversaturated iridescent yellow light. A nanosecond passed or so it seemed and then I was in its archive structure and before me; a stack of infinitely thin window-panes smeared with radials of statistics waiting to be sifted through. A datafile told me that the sky-cab had picked up a passenger it recorded as Peanut not so long ago; I continued sifting. Next I found myself a partition that housed the sky-cab’s autonomous protocols, looked like the stack of call priorities had been re-coded about the same time that Peanut had got picked up, work of a hacker and they had control of the cab now. Wasn’t the right time to tangle with another code-monkey, so the sky-taxi’s data-image was dumped as I quit the system, my senses were assailed by the info-scape’s vast quantity of data movement which flooded into my slab. Switching focus, I moved my attention over to the other sky-taxi, bypassing the security was as easy as the Abco. It listed a sole passenger as a Chao He-Biao, as the name appeared on my system, it was flagged. Quick search showed me Chao He-Biao was a con, out on parole from The Black Dolphin Gulag today. Didn’t get to go deeper, Koko pinged me in the GLOWNET. We were close to Kevin and she was still getting a diagnostic stream from her, the drone’s power cell was critically low and flight systems were about to go offline. Once she lost flight, the tumble to street level would shatter Kevin into a hundred broken components, Koko wasn’t happy with the situation. Kevin’s data-image was a dot of incandescent code in the swirling storm of flight-algorithms that connected Neon City’s autonomous sky traffic to the municipal travel information hubs through the GLOWNET. Access codes didn’t get me into Kevin’s drives, they’d been changed, the hacker again. I didn’t experience it, but later I was told that out in the mundanity of material reality, Koko had yelped when Kevin’s power cell finally gave out and I didn’t feel the lurch when she put the flier into a steep powered dive, chasing a plummeting Kevin to the narrow street below. Turbines had rattled, pushed beyond their performance envelope, threatening to break their housings as the flier matched altitude with the drone. Then, it had taken Trigger swinging through an open hatch, gripping a line to catch Kevin, following that he’d got yanked hard, almost skimming the street and pulling a few Gs as Koko had levelled the flier before managing to pull himself back into the cabin. In the Abco cab’s command logs, it showed the sky-taxi had landed, I jacked out and the overriding inputs of the GLOWNET evaporated as the reality of the flier’s starkly lit interior began solidifying, filling my awareness. Koko took us up and I lurched to one of the consoles, gripping its sides. As we gained altitude, I punched instructions into the command pad and the screen showed that the chase had taken us to Ninety Ninth Street, the jet blade courier had taken a hit, she was slumped unevenly on a junk-ridden rooftop, surrounded by steamy aircon vents and routing pipes. Chao He-Biao was on the rooftop’s far side out of his sky-taxi and opening up at her, Trigger put a few rounds his way, bullets riddled the sky-taxi as he lunged for cover. A savage blast of air whipped the rain sideways as the second cab came down, billowing in the steaming haze of heated raindrops. A young woman flung the door open as the taxi settled down, dressed in drab olive work overalls, she’d had a full optic replacement by Kuaijing implants, her eyes glittered a soft blue through the raindrops and were Quanngh models, users were given some access to the GLOWNET without exiting material reality. In her hand she gripped a Preaavar Curnuka MQ-6 data-slab, a line ran from it to what must have been a subdermal connector in her neck; the hacker, had to be. “Run Toy Li,” she’d shouted as she began sprinting across the puddle-ridden rooftop. Trigger had meanwhile exited the flier and was also sprinting across the space, powered by his augmentation implants, he was a blur in the downpour as he closed on Chao He-Biao, he tagged the man senseless with a stun-baton and the fight was over, the rest of us went for the jet-blader. For a moment, relative calm settled around us as rain drummed on to the now otherwise still rooftop. Only for a moment though: Toy Li had caught a bullet, checking her over, a Jijuiuan trauma med-patch was applied to the point of the bloody bullet wound, activating a steady, regulated flow of painkillers, stimulants and anti-infectants into her system, triggering its diagnosis protocol which calculated her injury wasn’t critical. A few moments and the blader would regain consciousness, a few moments after that and she’d be able to stand. The hacker introduced herself as Peanut and told us Toy Li was her friend. Peanut explained that she’d gotten pinged by Toy Li, who was being chased by a sky-taxi while she was on a routine delivery. Peanut had then hacked a sky-taxi and started heading for Toy Li, lacking a drone, she’d spotted and then jacked Kevin to track the other taxi, Peanut turned to Koko and apologised. Peanut had no idea why Chao He-Biao why trying to get at Toy Li By now Toy Li was sitting up, a Chinese woman with slender limbs in a two-coloured single-piece lycra outfit, pain was etched across her youngish face, meds had taken the edge, but the pain was still there. Between slow, wincing breaths, Toy Li told us she had no idea why she’d been chased, maybe her package? There was only Chao He-Biao left and Trigger had him, we slapped him back to his senses; he spluttered, blinking and shaking the rainwater off his face. As he was dragged to his feet by Trigger, his pistol slipped out of slack fingers, a single piece Rekhang pressed metal knock-off of a Chinese 9mm Ngaohun fitted with a suppressor that were favoured by Neon City’s triads; a low-cost imitation even by Rekhang standards and that was saying something! At first Chao He-Biao was belligerent, glowering and swearing, refusing to give us any answers and futility trying to break free of Trigger’s grip, a firm shake from Trigger changed all that. He explained that after he’d gotten out of the Black Dolphin Gulag, he’d gone to the Big Circle Boys to join the gang. Being some sort of triad gang, of course the Big Circle Boys had their initiation ceremony; to show his loyalty and worth, Chao He-Biao had to get blood on his hands and enter their conspiracy of guilt, a target was picked for him to kill and that target was Toy Li. That was the Neon City way; it never needed a reason to indiscriminately target someone for death. Chao He-Biao had failed his initiation, he’d never be accepted by the Big Circle Boys and he knew it too. He tried to worm his way into our graces, playing the victim, telling us he’d mend his ways, trying to convince that us that maybe he had some worth to us but it was unconvincing, less than a day back out after his stretch and he was looking to commit murder, we had no use for thuggish gang footsoldiers and left him for the local rentacops. Toy Li was now gingerly back on her feet, with Peanut’s help, the delivery could be completed. Before we left, Koko rushed over to the flier and rummaged through the storage lockers and came back with a couple of her older drones, she handed Hector and Fifi over to a gracious Peanut. We hit midnight as we climbed aboard the flier. Another day in the City of Electric Dreams had come round, all our media-slabs pinged. Yaroh Uron, who had been convicted of murdering Doctor Hsu Rou-Taib was getting his appeal was today. We’d be there in the morning. Whatever was going on with Silai Granskina had happened fifteen minutes ago but still needed investigating and there were still hours of night and rainfall to navigate as we headed back to Hikage Street. Outside the Granskina’s apartment we found another Chinese enforcer loitering close by the front door. The suit was a different cut and colour, but the thin, tight smile and attitude was the same. Bina answered the door and let us in, she told us that Silai had gone to bed after returning with a Potato Palace doggy bag full of Rubles. Somehow, he had slipped the cash past the watcher outside. Was he involved with the Russian mob, it could be bad news? We got Bina to wake her husband and bring him over, Silai came out in his faux silk Eilbon pyjamas and sat on the apartment’s bare floor, there was hesitation in his eyes when he looked at us. We refused to buy what Silai was selling and after some questioning we got him to spill his guts. Turned out that Silai had decided to offload city trams to the Russians for some serious bank, his position at the Transport Authority allowed access to the relevant databases where he could ghost the trams out of their system. Then he would supply overnight storage locations and security codes to the Russians, who in the rainy small hours would quietly get busy disappearing trams. Silai theorised that the trams were being shipped from the waterfront out of Neon City. . It was a solid plan, who in Neon City would have any idea that trams were going missing? Even if they did and got someone to listen, the digital trail had been deleted. Looked like Silai would stay clean. Silai got up from the floor, retrieved his Potato Palace doggy bag and thrust a bundle of rubles into Bill’s hands. Bill looked at the wad of poly-cotton weaved sheets in his hand, a brief look of irritation crossed his face. Sure, it would cover the loan to Silai, but I was pretty sure he had no idea what to do with actual cash money! Then Silai headed outside to the Chinese man. He still had enough bank in the doggy to square with Su Chuai’s enforcer and clear that debt. That night was spent sleeping in my streets, hopefully a dreamless evasion of the city rain pattering against the tarp that shielded one face of the one-bed. Wasn't bothered about changing, especially since I knew the next morning would come soon, rain clouds evaporating while the day’s heat would begin its inevitable march from too hot to intolerable, I had to drag myself out of the futon early, no time for breakfast. Instead I headed for the roof and waited beneath the sickly blue-white morning sky to catch my ride with Koko, watching as the descending flier materialised out of the wavering overbright bloom, battering the rooftop with jet wash. One-by-one we were all collected and headed for the RV and Jinny Stoyer, who we’d stashed there a while ago. Jinny was a key witness in Yaroh’s appeal, she’d skipped the original court case and we weren’t about to let her skip the appeal. She was waiting for us at the rendezvous, dressed respectably as possible, which meant thigh-high faux-leather Oltrantes, a tight pink strip of cloth that passed as Fassus miniskirt, half-unbuttoned, undersized and fairly transparent Dunner white blouse with layers of cheap makeup and displaying all her fruit-themed tattoos. From there it was a quick flight through Neon City’s sky-congestion to the roof pad at the courthouse, our passenger gave us priority landing rights and soon we found ourselves walking through featureless, dully lit corridors to again be in Judge Wyatt Lavanchy’s familiar courtroom with its beige walls, replica wooden panelled fixtures and furniture, all coldly lit by the ceiling-hung globe-lights. D4-VID was already there waiting for us, the diminutive botcaster had evidence of his own to present at the appeal. Yaroh Uron was brought out as the appeal commenced, shackled in his oranges, convicted of murdering Doctor Hsu Rou-Taib, the employee of monstrous multinational corporation Protobase Global, he looked sullen and broken. We knew Hsu Rou-Taib had been rubbed out on the orders of Protobase Global’s head of ethics Benedict Twistom and knew it had been pinned on Yaroh Uron, the dot’s just weren’t connecting though. Again Magistrate Wyatt Lavanchy was presiding over affairs, he’d convicted Yaroh of murdering Hsu Rou-Taibin seventeen minutes during the original case, it didn’t make us feel any better. With good reason too. First, Magistrate Lavanchy allowed Benedict Twistom’s wife, Annabel to give evidence against Yaroh. Then he allowed Avery Kiani, a rentacop on the Protobase Global payroll to do the same. Jinny J’s witness statement got discredited because she was a working girl. Character assassination pure and simple. Following that, D4-VID’s statement was then dismissed as irrelevant. Yaroh Uron’s appeal had collapsed and he was hauled back to jail. He wouldn’t be leaving Black Dolphin for a long time unless we did something else. Had to be a link between Lavanchy and Twistom, we’d dug into Lavanchy and he looked clean, had to be something out of sight, something we’d missed, did Twistom have his foot on Lavanchy’s neck? Time to go deeper. Later I ran automated hunter/seeker protocols on Wyatt Lavanchy with the widest parameters that were manageable and used an algorithm to cross reference all the hits it got. It came back with a single positive that we’d not encountered before and dumped a vid-file on my Nonohiki. Long range security footage from a while ago displayed an open, green space, one of only a few in Neon City, showing Wyatt Lavanchy and Benedict Twistom together, the pair of them in pastel, cream, orange and salmon coloured pants, polo necks and cardigans. An image-match on the sprawling background skyline identified its location as somewhere in the Fortified Residential Zone; a golf course, where they were playing golf together. We’d have to check it out further. That night my media-slab pinged, the little algorithm I’d left squatting on Falcon Lockley’s desk-slab system had just booted itself, woken by keywords I’d instructed it to track, it had pinged me cloned messages of Falcon and his hunting party’s plans to go back out into The Wilderness in a week with the intention of bagging another prize, he was determined to get his stuffed bear.
We made sure that Urus Konicek and Neidzwiedz would be waiting. 1st May 2021 Another Saturday night and I’m logged into Meet on my PC. Time for the next part of Matakishi’s Wired Neon Cities campaign. Location: Neon City. Nursing a hangover, eating Paheheu Pops and watching vintage old-time vid-feeds on the wall-slab was the way to spend a morning. I was ignoring my media-slab while it continually flagged up the newsvines, eventually the little chiming jingle got the better of me and I reached for it, all the down-streams were reporting the same thing. I sat on my futon and crunched on the crisped synthetic rice cereal as I read on; The Snot Robber had been apprehended. The feeds stated that rentacop had finally caught up with The Snot Robber, who was now incarcerated in the Highway Zero precinct. We’d had encounters with some of the victims and had never gotten a handle on The Snot Robber, so that was that, or so I thought. It didn’t take long for our media-slabs to ping. Baking champion Martha Woldt had called, she’d been a competitor on the Rokkaku Dai Heights Bake off when we found someone was trying to stack the competition in favour of one of her rivals. We’d also recovered her son who’d almost become a dish on a cannibal menu. Now she was telling us about her brother? Wilheim Woldt had been arrested under suspicion of being The Snot Robber, Martha believed differently, adamant that he was innocent. We didn’t believe anything, but agreed to look into it. One hot, crammed tram ride took us into Highway Zero, where typically narrow streets gave way to asphalt roads wide enough to accommodate Neon City’s overpass network at street level, the only district in The City of Electric Dreams to do so, resulting in an unending, low, dull, background rumble that saturated the air. Midday was getting dangerously close when we reached the rentacop precinct, a brick-fronted corner unit with a heavy glass and steel door situated in a block of businesse locations. Brutal waves of heat hadn’t deterred the scores of news-vultures from gathering outside, ten deep. The Snot Robber had been just weird enough to catch the public’s imagination and the press knew when they were on to a good story. D4-VID’s diminutive, silver-grey, brushed poly-aluminium frame could be seen in the jostling, hollering mob, so we made ourselves known to him. The bot-caster came over to us and explained that they were expecting rentacop to release a press statement within the hour. We told D4-VId that there might be something else to this arrest and asked if he was in? He agreed instantly, if there was a different angle, he knew a big exclusive could be scored. With some effort we worked our way round the gathered journos until we reached the way in flanked by two jacked-up rentacop uniforms, they regarded us through their standard issue mirrored Poviat shades. Bill stepped up and spun them about us being Wilheim Woldt’s legal counsel, worked and to be fair, was probably as close to the truth that he could get, we pushed through the sturdy door. Inside the precinct, it was quiet, insulated from the heat and noise outside the walls. Ggently humming aircon cooled the reception, while subtle, diffused wall lighting gave it an air of calm, as designed, no doubt by some committee of psychologists. We crossed the polished stone floor to a reception desk, more hardened polymer bunker than anything else, with a sheet of thick reinforced transparent acrylic separating us from the desk sergeant. A stocky man in an ill-fitting rentacop mock uniform, he dragged his eyes away from the slab he was fixated with to watch us close in with a slack jawed, surprised expression. “Legal counsel for Wilheim Woldt,” Bill stated, leaning into the acrylic. The desk sergeant couldn’t conceal a scoff. “That one’s going down,” he replied. “Open and shut, a waste of your time. He was caught with all the noses!”. Bill didn’t skip a beat and leant into the screen again. “Legal counsel for Wilheim Woldt.” A uniform strode deeper into the precinct after being summoned by the out-of-sorts desk sergeant and we followed. Behind the corporate facade of the precinct’s front was a complex of plain and dull grey, workmanlike corridors that interconnected various different rooms and were lit by bleak, white striplights. Wilheim was sitting on a shaped plastic chair, waiting for us in an interview room when we came in. He was a thin-faced man that appeared gaunt under an unflattering spotlight embedded in the ceiling and wore a miserable, almost shocked expression. After the uniform was gone, we got him to give us the low-down while D4-VID filmed. Wilheim actually had a job, working as a landlord managing a number of properties throughout Rokkaku Dai Heights. Yesterday he was in a vacated apartment, prepping it for a new tenant when he came across a package that had recently been delivered and was addressed to the previous tenant. It had split open, spilling its gruesome contents; a handful of bloody noses now scattered across the bare floorboards. Naturally, he had called rentacop, who, when they arrived, promptly arrested and charged him with being The Snot Robber! Kuto Shiko had been the previous tenant, Wilheim told us. The name was somehow familiar to us…. Wilheim went on, explaining that Kuto Shiko had been his tenant for a year before she vacated the apartment about a month ago. It had been about a month ago that The Snot Robber had first struck, two threads were now tying them together. There wasn’t much more that we could get out of Wilheim, and as he was led back to his cell deeper within the precinct, we spoke with the lead investigating officers, they seemed very confident in the strength of their case. As his legal counsel, we had to be given access to the evidence. Another uniform led us into a different part of the precinct and to a chilly, locked viewing room, it’s climate lowered to zero in order to preserve the evidence. The precinct had no morgue facilities. Being residents of Neon City, we weren’t acclimatised to this cold, our breath billowed in steamy clouds ahead of us and we could feel the slight burn of cold air biting on exposed skin. The cold room lacked furniture, save for a table with a box containing the evidence which was being kept in a transparent polythene zipper back. Pulling it out, we examined it. It wasn’t the chilled noses we were interested in, it was the burlywood coloured packaging. Kuto Shiko’s name and the apartment address had been handwritten. “That looks like a woman’s style of handwriting,” piped in D4-VID, staring at the package. It looked like he gave the robotic equivalent of a shrug and continued. “It matches parameters stored in my archives, I’ve seen this sort of thing before,” Other than the handwriting, the packaging contained the post stamp of the delivering courier. Something to work on at least and we were starting to feel the cold, time to leave. Returning the evidence to it’s box, we exited the room back into reasonable temperature and made our way out of the precinct. With the clamour outside the precinct behind us, we got out of the unforgiving sky in a small greasy eatery that was the kind favoured by the transportation workers who rolled into Highway Zero and went about following up our leads. Contacting the courier got us nothing, they had picked up the package from one of the multitude of anonymous self-service postal drop-lockers that dotted Rokkaku Dai Heights. So next, we turned to Kuto Shiko and immediately got something. I’d been scouring her MyFaceSpace account and had gotten a hit. We’d seen the name Kuto Shiko before, encountering it when we’d crossed paths with her ex-girlfriend, Royla Ovalev. A while back we’d found a maniacal Royla and stopped her trying to torture Yaroh Uron to death. “I’ll get her!” Royla had feverishly screamed back then and struggled while Trigger had dragged her off Yaroh. At the time, in that candle lit room, thick with heavy incense, it’d meant nothing. But now, my mind went back to the creepy shrine adorned with a blood splashed photo of a young woman and in that dim, flickering yellow light, I remembered the photo had a name; Kuto Shiko. We’d even seen Kuto Shiko working as a waitress at Pie-in-the-Sky, a restaurant here in Highway Zero How did I remember this? Kuto’s MyFaceSpace account had the answer. I’d been scrolling through her profile’s timeline and seen the last few posts from Royla. There’d been a series of exchanges between the two: Kuto had dumped Royla and Royla had taken it badly, Kuto had mocked her about this and it only intensified Royla’s erratic emotional state. The final two exchanges between them had read: “Seriously Royla you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face,” Kuto had said. “I H8 U!” was Royla’s reply. “Srysly? You go gurl,” “I’ll show you what nose cutting really is,” Too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence, Kuto’s old address must have been getting the noses delivered from Royla, she had to be The Snot Robber. Rolya Ovalev’s apartment was in The Heights, we’d been there before and rushed over on the overcrowded tramline. She had to be stopped before she struck again. The apartment was situated in one of The Height’s social-housing graded, dull grey and under-maintained high-rises, Trigger’s thermal sweep showed no heat signatures inside. No time for subtly, for a second time Trigger kicked the door open. Inside, it was a mess, the apartment was in disarray, refuse had been strewn across the apartment floors, broken crockery was scattered everywhere,as well as utensils, clothes, upturned shelves and more. Long chunks had been repeatedly gouged out of the stud walls and broken furniture, most likely a large knife was the cause. It looked like the knife had been put through a wall-slab as well. In the living room we found a large hardcopy poster-map of Golden Gai draped from a wall, Royla had drawn a pentagram on the map. It consisted of a number of spots that had also been marked on the map; she'd drawn lines between those spots and these lines had formed the shape of the pentagram. Abruptly, we realised that those spots were locations where The Snot Robber - where Royla had struck. Looking closer and crossing data, we realised there was a pattern; according to the dates, attacks were taking place around the pentagram in a clockwise pattern. Not only that, on the map, next to the location where each attack took place, there were two smeared ticks in what looked like dried blood, except one, which had only a single tick. There was a lurch in my gut, the location of Royla’s next attack, that had to be it? Time was tight, but before we left, we searched the rest of Royla’s apartment. There was nothing that would help us find her but amongst the carpet of trash in the kitchen area we found the same burlywood coloured packaging we’d seen back at the Highway Zero precinct, the final nail in the coffin. Royla had to be stopped. It was a quick ride and transfer to and from Shibuya Terminal to the Corporate Monorail, the comfortable, smooth ride into Shinjuku Station belied our uneasiness. The day was wearing on and in a couple of hours Golden Gai would be flooded by the evening crowds, meandering tourists, suited wage-monkeys and run-of-the-mill Neon City revellers, a plentiful hunting ground for The Snot Robber and a nightmare for us, Golden Gai’s topographical maze didn’t help In the east, the cloudless blue-white sky was beginning to fail, inextricably consumed by the hungry rise of a darkening canopy as, on the final leg of our journey, the tram rumbled into Golden Gai. As day acquiesced to night, the temperature would dip modestly and tumultuous soot-coloured rain clouds would gather, soon after the night-long downpours would begin. An abundance of drinking venues populated the particularly narrow and unpredictably branching streets of Golden Gail which convolutedly crossed other thoroughfares like an erratically spun web spread throughout massive concrete canyons. Looking around, we found some vantage points and settled in to observe, Koko grabbed her control-slab and instructed Kevin up high to sweep the area with advanced optics in a slow circular patrol. Time passed, street lights ticked and hummed into flickering life as we watched wasted wage-monkeys mixing with surly street goths, no-hopers and flamboyant fashionistas in the latest Desullo, Shaguaifu and Hysteric Mini Seibu lines. Over comms, Koko told us that Kevin was tracking someone that met the drone’s search parameters, she fed visuals to the rest of us. He was a burly man, decked out all in black; a voluminous high-necked black cape was layered over a black Tremeita Hiaki greatcoat which was in turn layered over a three-piece black Gaongha suit. The look was finished off with some sort of tall top hat and he carried a black walking stick tipped in a faux-silver heel and with a replica ivory handle and a imitation leather Mahakam suitcase fashioned in the style of a old-school doctor’s bag We watched as he flitted somewhat unconvincingly from shadow to shadow? This didn’t look like Royla, was she in some kind of disguise? Before we could assess the situation, Kevin’s motion detector picked up something, it was moving fast. An ephemeral distortion seemingly surrounded Top Hat man as somewhere from above, the featureless profile of a ninja had dropped down, no time to think or even react! With a single swing, the ninja’s Ninjato flashed over Top Hat’s face and he flopped to the sidewalk with a cry, holding his bloodied face. The Snot Robber had struck again. Trigger had left his spot and was running towards Top Hat now, but seemingly The Snot Robber had vanished in the moment it’d took Trigger to get there? Trigger immediately switched to thermals and spotted The Snot Robber slinking away, he lunged and hit out with his gunblade, landing a solid blow, the air rippled and ninja reappeared, a long split in the ninja-yoroi’s silhouetted profile exposed the paper-thin, elaborately complex microcircuitry beneath, stealth-tech - and it’d been compromised! Koko sent in Sylvester and Felix to attack and Roderrick also unloaded the now visible Snot Robber, the explosive flechettes were too much and they went down. Quickly, we checked Top Hat, he’d taken a serious injury the face, but wasn’t in a critical condition and to prove that Neon City never lost its sense of irony, we discovered that Top Hat, who would be The Snot Robber’s final victim, was actually Doctor Grippen, the cosmetic surgeon we’d heard about who’d been making so much bank from the attacks! Next, our attention was turned to the ninja, the mask was peeled away and Royla was revealed, The Snot Robber had been stopped. Rentacop at Highway Zero had announced the capture of The Snot Robber in the morning but hadn’t given the press a name, which was fortunate for Wilheim Woldt. Later, he was quietly released without fuss allowing rentacop to retain the mote of credibility they had before they issued a press statement identifying Royla Ovalev as The Snot Robber. Before we had the chance to call it a day, Bill’s media-slab pinged, caller ID told him it was Mister Blank, which is why Bill was surprised when he found a Mexican woman on the other end. She was unsettled, crying and on the verge of hysteria. Between gasping breaths, she explained with a shaking voice that she had been told to call Bill and he needed help right now? Bill tried to make sense of it, asking the woman to elaborate, but there was only a moment of overloud, distorted clattering as something collided with the media-slab, followed by silence. “No, don’t go,” Bill heard a voice, muffled and distant say. Then, more silence. The line to the other slab was still open. I quickly jacked into the GLOWNET, it’s vividly coloured, angular, pulsating info-scape replacing physical reality before my eyes, I searched the thousands of constantly updating data-flows closest to me, Bill’s media-slab connection was easy to find and I launched a tracing-protocol that allowed me follow his connection to Blank’s slab, got a fix on the location; western Akihabara. The flier powered through the furious downpour and Neon City’s nighttime sky-traffic, Koko navigated high-rise cubic silhouettes, delineated only by grids of window lights and which formed the cityscape. The fix on Blank’s slab had led us to a nondescript and inadequately lit Akihabra back alley, its sparsely placed street lights seemed to weakly illuminate nothing but gleaming raindrops caught in their hazy, semi-spherical light scatter. In a flurry of turbine driven rain and wind, the flier set us down and then, with a deep engine-hum lifted off. The fix got stronger as we went into the thoroughfare, a few small shop fronts and businesses were dotted throughout the alley with customers backlit against the night as they came and went. Following the fix took us to the doorway of a shady looking back street surgery, lights were on but it looked closed for the night and that was unusual? These kinds of unlicensed street docs made most of their bank during the hours of darkness, plying their trade on clients who didn’t appreciate any questions. I couldn’t help but notice that someone had broken and ripped up the corner of a paving stone close to the wall so they could piggy-back off of the city’s juice. A heavy-duty insulated and rubberised cable ran from the exposed junction box and had been squeezed under the surgery’s door, it wasn’t locked and inside was a reception. Empty; nobody was in the meagrely furnished reception, nothing of note either and the desk-slab was cold. The rubberised cable snaked its way out of the room, so we followed. It wound its way down some steps that led down into the basement, at the foot of the stairs there was some dim light. As we crept down, the basement came into view, the steps opened up into what we’d come to recognise as a back street doc’s surgery; an undecorated and grubby out-of-the-way room, equipped with dated Saengdal medtech. Our attention was drawn to the contraption that dominated the centre of the room, suspended in some sort of polythene and gel harness was a skinless man, he was still alive and several tubes had been inserted into various parts of his body, pumping various fluids around. It was then that we realised that he was missing multiple organs and the tubes were keeping him alive! The work of organ jackers. Eyes from an unrecognisable face stared at us through spectacles. “Help me’” came the plea from a lipless mouth.. I felt my gut lurch when we caught on to who it was; Mister Blank! His media-slab was on the floor here, next to an old fashioned mop and bucket, bubbly water still filled it. A call was put into a trauma team, Mister Blank had good credit and it’d only be a few minutes before they got here. Mister Blank’s speech was barely recognisable, but he informed us that he’d failed to win over Olivia, the love of his life and she still didn’t have any feelings for him. He thought it might’ve been his skin condition, so he came here to Doctor Zephyr’s surgery for a skin replacement. Zephyr took his skin off, but instead of supplying new skin, he helped himself to Blank’s organs, hooked him up to this ramshackle life support system and left! When the cleaning lady had arrived, she’d shrieked in shock, Mister Blank had managed to convince her to call Bill before she fled in horror. He seemed regretful of his decision to have a skin transplant. Soon after this, the trauma team arrived and carted Mister Blank off to a med-tech facility. It didn’t take long to get some contact details on one Doctor Xavier Zephyr, time to check him out. Bill pinged him but only got voicemail, looked like Zephyr had already skipped town on the bank for Blank’s organs and hadn’t given a return date, probably never. Just in case though, Bill left a message saying he was looking for inexpensive organ upgrades. It had gotten late into the night and in the thundering downpour, we headed home. A new day brought old problems because the City of Electric Dreams never did know when to quit it. Bad news was the pulsating lifeblood of Neon City and the newsvines obligingly pumped it out and circulated it through every sprawling prefecture and crowded district. Bigfoot had been spotted in the streets of Akihabara if the vines were to be believed! The story wasn’t what caught our attention though, it was the address: A few days ago, at the behest of Mister Blank, we’d relocated some retro-tech, off-the-grid squatters from his property to that same address. The situation was unclear and we took a ride back out to the address in Akihabara, with the elevator still out of order, headed up to the loft by foot. There was no indication of the music that the squatters liked to blare out loudly so much as we walked up to the loft, other than Neon City’s typical dull, background murmur, it was quiet. Initially the loft, partially lit as it was by hazy, rectangular spots of sunlight that streamed through skylights, seemed empty, unoccupied. Then we saw dried patches of blood, accumulated in puddles on the old dusty carpet or smeared across walls, an unmistakable, pungent odour of wet fur hung in the air. There were no bodies here, they must have been carted off, were there any survivors, it looked unlikely? It was a harsh fate; putting them here had taken them out of Blank’s sights and the reach of any thugs he might hire. But the truth is; when Neon City wants to put you in the dirt, she’s going to put you down. Carefully avoiding the bloodstains, we searched the loft and in the detritus we found torn, brown wrapping paper labelled in Mandarin as traditional Chinese medicine, it looked out of place amongst the personal belongings of the squatters who’d been here? The wrapping paper gave us an address; Doctor Wei Bao-Bi in Akihabara. Looking further, we found the large bloody paw prints throughout the loft that must have belonged to some massive animal; maybe Bigfoot? Almost subconsciously, I lightly brushed my fingertips reassuringly over the textured grip of one of my .45 ACPs. The footprints led close to a wall and up to the loft’s roof access. We clambered out of the loft and under the cloudless, glaring blue-white sky with it’s pummelling heat and scanned the undulating rooftops. In some shade we spotted a bear! It had been sleeping, but as we had gotten up, with a low growl, it had stirred and began rising. Enormous muscles rippled under its fur as it manoeuvred to its feet, bared teeth and swore at us, another uplifted bear! Quickly Bill spoke to it and calmed it down. ‘Old Ben’ was his name, he told us. Ben went on to explain that he was tired, just wanted to sleep and needed to get to a forest. He had no memories of his current predicament, just a vague recollection of being shot? Then Ben had woken in a strangely smelling darkened room with a small man screaming at him, reflexively, he’d struck out at the man, grabbed some of the packaging from the room and fled. He had wandered the streets of Akihabara in a disorientated fugue as the panicking crowds had peeled away from him. In this state of confusion he had gone into the loft and encountered a lot of angry, young people there, his memory wasn’t clear but he’d gone into a rage. Ben didn’t seem a danger right now, leaving him here risked the authorities, or even worse, Rentacop finding him, that would spell trouble for him. We decided to move him to our RV. Koko remotely pulled the flier over and we took Ben and met up with the RV in one of Highway Zero’s vast asphalt parking lots. It worked out well, the RV was currently empty, RAM Rat was nowhere to be found and the Party Favours that we’d stowed here were taking a break from their activities. As we sent the RV off on its automated route, we knew that Ben couldn’t stay there long, he’d told us he needed to sleep and the only forests that could be found in Neon were constructed of concrete and glass. We could only see one course of action and contacted Urus Konicek and Neidźwiedź from the outsider settlement; The Enclave. There would be space enough for Ben in the extended wilderness beyond the walled confines of Neon City. Urus told us that they would collect Ben late tonight. An unforgiving sun had passed its zenith over Neon City and the day’s heat had begun to wane, though it was still at the limits of toleration. Thanks to what Ben had told us, there was a Chinese medicine shop in Akihabara we had an inclination to visit. The Wei Bao-Bi shop had a small and traditionally styled, glass fronted faux-wood facade, the once brightly coloured signage that announced it sold traditional Chinese medicine had now faded, it was also shut and in Neon City, nothing was shut in the day, something was wrong. Lights were off in the shop and nothing could be seen through the windows, Trigger’s thermals also gave him nothing. It was easy for him to jemmy the old lock open and unhesitatingly enter, he became immediately aware of a stink that he associated with the stench of death, the shopfront looked clear and the rest of us entered. The shelves were packed with scores of jars, boxes, drawers and packets, practically from floor to ceiling and all labelled in Mandarin. Behind the glass counter, a door led to the backrooms, we searched a couple of them, a store room and an office before we came across the body of a small Chinese man slumped awkwardly in a pool of his own dried blood with a row of bloody scarlet wounds gouged across his face and throat, clearly the cause of his demise. Laying in the dried blood and clutched in one twisted hand was some sort of pumping apparatus. Old Ben had definitely been here. We looked around, it took us a moment to realise that this room was different to the others, it was mostly empty, no stock or supplies here. Rows of strange tools filled a rack along one wall and beneath it was a functional, plain steel table, along another wall was a small desk and behind the stink of the man’s death was a peculiar pickled smell? The Jinonghua landline on the desk was winking a red LED at us, we went over and jabbed the ansaphone playback stud, a tinny speaker spouted out a crackling audio message from a man who called himself Falcon Lockely; something about going out on another hunting trip? Usually, on the desk was also some actual ‘paper’ paperwork, an invoice from Doctor Wei Bao-Bi for taxidermy service to Falcon Lockley at the Margorba-Golina Global Corporation, for stuffing one bear! Looked like Old Ben had escaped a darker fate. There wasn’t anything else to be found here, so we headed out. Daylight was failing, the diffused globe of red light that was the sun began slipping behind Neon City's soaring western skyline and shadows lengthened as we rolled into Hikage Street. We never got home though as our media-slabs pinged. Neon City wasn’t done with us yet. Captain Ocano was the name given by whoever was on the other side of the line, told us he had a job and to meet him at the Shinjuku Precinct for a briefing. Another day, another precinct, Ocano had to be rentacop. Going to Shinjuku meant going back to Shibuya Terminal and hitting the Corporate Monorail to the Shinjuku-Cho prefecture. The workday had ended, but you’d never have guessed from the monorail; a world away from the crowded, noisy, overheated tramlines. Adaptive climate control kept Neon City’s harsh temperatures at bay and the seats were comfortable and well spaced, even then, it was never more than partially full, only the top percenters and corporate execs had access to the monorail, and of course us, thanks to Porter Sladek. With our ripped denims, suspiciously bulging fatigue jackets or cracked and worn black leather dusters we kicked back and had our combat boots up on the deep, well upholstered seats while the other commuters with their designer Gaongha business suits gave us the sidelong stink-eye and kept their distance. We wouldn’t have it any other way. The nightly downpour was well underway by the time we’d exited the monorail and navigated the narrow, busy footways to the precinct. Outside it was typically a rentacop bunker, the featureless brick-fronted facade had a single steel and glass door that led into a sparse reception. A quick conversation with the desk sergeant behind his screen got us through security and upstairs and into the precinct’s hub. Originally an open plan room with beige walls and worn, stained grey carpeting, it was now populated by acrylic-walled cubicles and dividers, occupied with uniforms, suited rentacops and numerous civilian contractors. Justice didn’t only come here to die, it came for the long doughnut break too. A uniform led us along one beige wall to a row of actual offices, one of which was emblazoned with the title; Captain Ocano. He was a tall, burly and dark-skinned man with short, greying black hair and a moustache so out-of-fashion, it’d come back into fashion and gone out of it again decades ago. He wore a mismatched brown Kuabha jacket and grey Shaguaifu suit trousers, somehow neither of which fit, a creased, undersized eggshell coloured Jala shirt and a particularly drab Ecohio tie? There was an irritated scowl on his face when he rose from his desk to greet us and he spoke in what could only be described as an outside voice. Halfway through explaining to us that we’d been recommended by Juicy J, he interrupted himself and took the opportunity to shout through the glass wall at some random rentacop. Ocano went on to tell us about Miguel Fernandez, a rentacop from the precinct who’d gone undercover to infiltrate the Kibukicho Flesh Cartel. Ocano had sent someone from the precinct to bring in Miguel from the organisation, during the extraction, Miguel had recognised the rentacop and fled, yelling something about rentacop trying to kill him. Ocano was worried that Miguel had gone native during his time undercover and wanted outsiders to bring him in, Miguel wouldn’t see us coming. He then filled us in about the Flesh Cartel. It operated out of Southern Kibukicho and was known for its involvement with pimps, the ‘skin-trade’ and other exploitation. The Flesh Cartel was headed by Usman ‘Emir’ Kasim, a canny leader who styled himself as ‘The King of Pimps’. Ocano also gave us some intel of their turf and hangouts, as well as photos of the gangers - including Miguel Fernandez. We took the flier to Kibukicho, it effortlessly powered through the driving rain and soon we were in stealth-mode, hovering over one of Neon City’s few small open spaces and well known Flesh Cartel haunt Pedestrians and passer-bys streamed through the area and several smallish groups loitered around, Koko flipped the external cameras to infrared and swept the square, almost immediately, the facial recog got a hit, Miguel was down there. Now we needed a strategy to get him out. Jokingly, I told Trigger to use a bungee cord to drop down and grab Miguel. I was in the flier’s washroom for only a couple of minutes but when I came out, the floor access hatch had been slid open and Trigger was in the process of securing a bungee cord he’d sourced from a storage locker around his ankle. Dumbstruck and before I could explain anything, he’d jumped! We stood by helplessly as the coiled and elasticated cord was speedily dragged through the hatch into the night. On the flier’s screens we watched Trigger plummet, then rapidly decelerate as he closed in on the ground and Miguel; for an infinitesimal moment he seemed to have stopped moving altogether and simply hung in the air as the cord had reached its maximum elasticity. Trigger’s arms flailed awkwardly as he completely missed the mark and was yanked skyward by the contracting cord. The Flesh Cartel gangers collectively yelped when they saw Trigger bouncing back up, pulling pistols, they began shooting at him! The bungee reached the top of its upward trajectory and Trigger was now headed back down again, only now through a hail of gunfire, this time he’d get Miguel, but no, it was another flailing miss and Miguel had decided to run for it. Trigger was yelling instructions through the comms and Koko eased the flier in the direction of the fleeing man. “I’ll get him this time!” I heard Trigger doggedly shout over comms optimistically. Now also swaying alarmingly, Trigger came diving back down to try and grab Miguel for a third time - and failed again! The other gangers had continued firing on the moving target that was Trigger and he caught a round. It was all enough for him and he cut the bungee cord, dropped to the ground and chased Miguel on foot. Maybe multiple bungee jumps had left Trigger disorientated or it was the greasy rain-covered terrain, but, despite his augmented speed, he couldn’t keep up with Miguel, losing both his footing and sight of him. The attempt to get Miguel had failed spectacularly, we picked Trigger up and retreated out of sight. For the next few hours we lurked in the black, rainy skies above South Kibukicho, patrolling, watching, waiting. Eventually facial recog caught Miguel Fernandez showing his face again, he was alone and looking skittish. A vulnerable but tricky mark. While we’d been waiting, we’d discussed our next move and had come up with a new strategy. Bill was already down on street level, ready and waiting when we pinged him. Nanite implants and vocal augments allowed him to disguise himself as Usman Kasim and he moved to intercept his mark while Koko landed the flier close as possible. Approaching Miguel, Bill managed to convince him that he was Usman, then he convinced him to come into the flier. Miguel was shocked to see the rest of us there as he came in, I could see he was thinking of running, but with four of us, no chance of getting away and he knew it.. Bill then tried calming him down, told him that Ocano had no bad intentions for him, he said that the Captain just wanted Miguel brought back in. Miguel seemed to relax, but we kept an eye on him. The flight back to the Shinjuku precinct was uneventful and we escorted Miguel back to Captain Ocano. As thanks, Captain Ocano gave us one of his business cards. “Use this if you ever get in trouble with the cops,” he shouted. It was the small hours, rain hadn’t let up, never did; we left Shinjuku and dodged through the graveyard traffic, rushing to pick Old Ben up from the RV in Highway Zero. At night, the sight of the unending flow of three hundred KPH grid-locked congestion blurred into seemingly unbroken gleaming lines of red and silver. From Highway Zero we went to southern Hikage Street, the commercial end of the district was home to the massive steel and concrete pipe system that managed part of Neon City’s infrastructure. A tangle of above-and-below pipes and tunnels that was impenetrable to the unprepared, Urus was a master at moving through them, adept at avoiding any installed security measure. It gave him free access in and out of Neon City. Under the shelter of a large arching pipe we found Urus and Neidźwiedź waiting for us out of the street lights. It turned out that Neidźwiedź and Old Ben knew each other and Ben was happy to go with them. Ben had no memory of what had occurred before waking up in Akihabara. Neidźwiedź explained that it was likely a hunting party composed of pampered execs led by professional huntsmen had come out to the wilderness looking to bag something, Old Ben had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We told them about Falcon Lockley and his intention to come out on another hunt, Neidźwiedź shrugged his massive sloped shoulders and said. “We’ll be waiting this time,”. As a parting gift, Urus and Neidźwiedź gave us a couple of baskets filled with fresh food and took Old Ben into the maze of underground pipes and tunnels, eventually out of Neon City and into the wilderness, hopefully Ben would find what he needed there. Last thing I did that night was to jack into the GLOWNET, finding Margorba-Golina Global’s brightly incandescent data-image, I had to go beyond the public facing and sanitised branding. A cracking algorithm got me through the security protocols, peeling the layer away, I journeyed into their data-vault, from there finding personal information on Falcon Lockley was easy, now I had his personal media-slab contact details and the server-vault they resided on. Margorba-Golina Global fell away, reduced to a point of light as I travelled the pulsating data-flows of Neon City. The server-vault that managed the personal data-vault of Falcon’s media-slab was easier to crack than Margorba-Golina Global, I replicated a small parcel of data into the vault, it would monitor Falcon’s usage and when it got hits for hunt or wilderness, it would temporarily archive the data and ping it to me. The next time he made a call about hunting, we would know. Another day came, bringing with it a blaze or urine-coloured light that shone through my one-bed’s missing wall. I’d crashed on the futon still wearing my street clothes in the early hours and didn’t get up until my media-slab began its merciless pinging after lunch.
We’d gotten a call from The Accountant; the brain-in-a-suitcase we had discovered, then liberated from Yennav Rybasei and who had then assumed both the body and the identity of a cookie-cutter wage-monkey named Hayden Weyer. Last we heard of him, he was in convalescence and being cared for by Ashaglaya. “We have a problem,” he said and pinged us his location; a warehouse in Akihabara. Back to Akihabara, third time in as many days! For a warehouse, it was a fairly nondescript building located in a small, anonymous and underutilized business park that was outside the retail centre of the district. The busy streets, bustle and colour of Akihabara fell away as we entered the drab business park and strode across to the warehouse. The doors were unlocked and inside It was a surprise to find the warehouse was nothing more than a steel skeletal shell with a skin of polycarbonate cladding that lacked any interior features; no reception, visible office or stock, nothing. It was unlit save for a number of indistinct shafts of sunlight which weakly lanced through the stained and unmaintained skylights above onto the bare concrete floor. There was a single person here, Hayden Weyers. Hayden Weyes, The Accountant was sitting on the floor with a despondent expression on his face and gripping a media slab contemplatively in one hand. He watched us approach and explained what was going on when we asked. At lunch time, Hayden had gone out to get a protein shake when someone had approached him. She had the appearance of a ten year old girl and wore an enveloping shiny red vinyl coat and was chain-smoking Huhani cigarettes, it was a popular brand and Hayden had recognised its particular pungent aroma. The girl told him that he had been activated and pressed a tiny screen-slab into his palm before briskly slipping away into the crowds. The readout was displaying a map, it showed the warehouse in Akihabara. So Hayden had come here, found the warehouse unlocked and empty, came inside and found the data-slab. “I don’t believe Hayden Weyer was ever a real person, I think it was a cover for someone else,” he said, looking from one of us to another. “And I think this slab has something to do with it?” It was obvious that the media-slab was a dead-drop burner, a one way street for communication. We didn’t have to wait long for it to ping. Hayden switched the slab to speaker and we all listened to the call. It was a male voice, curt and guttural. “We are coming down now. Meet us at the terminal at sixteen-hundred hours. Don't be late.” The call went dead, that was it. When he had referred to coming down and terminal, it had to mean The Sky Tree, it couldn’t be anywhere else. The City of Electric Dreams was connected to the Glitterband thousands of kilometres above via the engineering superstructure that was The Shinkansen Link, an enormous space-elevator which was anchored to Neon City at The Sky Tree. Whoever this was, he was coming down from the Glitterband. The Sky Tree was located in Asakusa-cho prefecture, not far from Akihabara. Koko called in the flier and we headed over. Constructed of steel, concrete and glass, with smooth, featureless, almost minimalist silver-grey exterior walls and dramatically angular edges, The Sky Tree was a monument to modernism and a colossal edifice, maybe the largest structure in Neon city. Even from kilometres away, it loomed over the horizon menacingly and dominated the skyline, dwarfing its surroundings. The Shinkansen Link itself was a massive cord of thick, poly-carbon alloy, high tensile hexagonal cable that rose directly upwards, seemingly dematerialising into the haze of the blue-white sky and ultimately ending at the Glitterband. Each face of the hexagonal cable was wide enough to house a vertical railtrack which carried traffic and maintenance pods up and down the link. However, the behemothic luxury shuttle which served Neon City’s ultra wealthy citizens curled around the link entirely and was heavy enough to require all six vertical railway tracks to ascend or descend. As Koko navigated the heavy aerial traffic around The Sky Tree, it expanded to fill the forward view ports, Koko circled round until we found a suitable landing pad, from there we took an elevator into arrivals. The interior was also vast, a high vaulted ceiling rose up a score of metres, decorated in the same silver-grey colour as the exterior and janitorial robots smoothly moved around arrivals, diligently maintaining the highly polished porcelain coloured faux marble floor. Natural lighting and climate control lent it a calm, airy ambience. There was only one reason this much bank was ever spent on anything - rich people. The Glitterband was the most exclusive location on or off Earth and The Shinkansen Link served this new aristocracy. Because of this exclusivity, terminals were sparsely used and we watched the wealthy few coming and going, with their elite trend-setting fashions and perfectly bio-sculpted bodies, accompanied by their jacked-up personal security and bodyguards. We also noticed the high level of rentaguard that discreetly patrolled the perimeters. None of this told us who to expect. At sixteen-hundred, on the dot, we were approached by two individuals, a well dressed, olive skinned man with an unreadable face who wore a ultra-tech blended alloy Uchike katana over a Evoda trench coat and was accompanied by a slim young woman with blue hair and almost elfin features, save emotionless, almost unblinking dark eyes. Ignoring the rest of us. the pair made for Hayden Weyer, or so they thought! We’d told Hayden to go home and that we’d handle it, Bill was now disguised as Hayden and would have a better chance of dealing with this, hopefully they wouldn’t be suspicious enough to blow Bill’s cover. The man spoke with the familiar guttural voice from the media-slab. “I am Oni Tokugawa and this is my apprentice, Gemini Benedict,” he informed us. “You must immediately take us to the womb north of Neon City.” Briefly, we all flicked suspicious glances at each other, this was no coincidence. A while back, beyond the northern confines of Neon City and in the green expanse that was the wilderness, we’d encountered a shuttle crash, the survivors were a child in a exowomb and his mother. The woman was Avril Heywood, daughter of Barnabas Haywood and citizen of The Messenger hab on the Glitterband, Avril was adamant that her father had been behind the attack on the shuttle and them. Currently Avril and her son were cloistered away in The Enclave. Oni Tokugawa had to be looking for the exowomb, we asked Oni who we were searching for and he confirmed our suspicions. What did he want with it? If he represented Barnabus Haywood, that would pose a serious risk to the boy and Avril, if not, then why was he looking for them? Asking Oni who he worked for posed too great a risk of breaking Bill’s cover. We brought the pair of them up to our flier, lifted off and set a bearing for the wilderness. Oni provided us coordinates of what he told us was the last place the exowomb’s signal had been detected; which led directly to The Enclave. The flier’s rumbling engine-note changed pitch as Koko took it to full speed and Neon City’s varied cityscape rolled by like undulating waves of architecture. Soon we were approaching the limits of the city and beyond that, the wall. Oni and Gemini rebuffed any attempts we made at chat or conversation as we flew north. An alarm pinged on Koko’s console, she looked at Oni and told him that we had no authorisation to cross the wall and began to slow the flier. The wall’’s aerial defenses were supposedly to prevent intrusion from outside but they didn’t discriminate. “What happened to the vehicle you were provided?” Oni asked, turning to Bill. “In the shop,” Bill replied without hesitation. Oni gave a small exhalation of breath, I saw his eyes rapidly flicker across the components of the co-pilot’s console, barely focussing and processing some internal calculation, something I’d seen before but only rarely and likely the result of an implant that in some way altered or enhanced his behaviour, most likely analytical skills or awareness. He then took the co-pilot’s seat and began punching commands into the console. While Oni was distracted, I took the opportunity to quickly warn Urus that trouble might be coming the Enclave’s way. A few moments later and the alarm on Koko’s console died, she scrutinised her console and saw the flier’s transponder code had altered, a small row of red readouts winked green, access to cross the city wall had been granted and Koko picked up speed. With Neon City in the rear, the Wilderness’ verdant landscape unfolded ahead of us, our previous foray had been at ground level and we couldn’t appreciate its vast richness this vantage point now afforded us. Long rippling grasses extended across the rolling plains, wavering forests spread over hazy, distant and steep hills and in the lowering, afternoon sunlight glimmered off faraway lakes and rivers. As the distance to The Enclave continued to diminish, our screens showed The Enclave’s defences coming online, wall mounted gun turrets swivelling to face us. Oni instructed us to prepare weapons. His attention wasn’t on The Enclave though, he’d angled one of the flier’s external cameras skywards, searching for something else? I saw his gaze go distant for a second, the implant was processing. “They’re here!” He announced, looking up with a hint of finality. Before we could respond, sudden turbulence rocked the flier, we had to brace ourselves to stay in our seats and Koko fought to retain control. There was a tremendous roar as whatever had passed us landed close to The Enclave, throwing up immense quantities of dust and smoke. After training a camera on the object, it was switched through thermal, infrared, night vision and real time image enhancement until we saw what it was; something we’d only ever seen on screens. The massive flat-bottomed teardrop shape was the profile of a Qiuonriji Tihu class dropship, designed to rapidly deploy ground troops from an orbital point of origin. It was a serious piece of military hardware and it hadn’t come from Neon City. A split suddenly appeared in the side of the convex teardrop and a gangway dropped open, slamming into the ground. Immediately; Shock Troopers in Tzedesp combat armour swiftly disembarked out of the dropship in combat formation, streaming directly for The Enclave. It was unlikely that The Enclave had the firepower to repel them, even so, gunfire erupted from both sides. “They’ve come to kill the child, “ Oni said grimly. “Set us down close to their dropship and protect him.” As Koko complied with the instruction, I ran a recog algorithm on a symbol on the dropship and got a hit. The symbol was attributed to The Messenger habitat, Barnabus Haywood had made his move. We didn’t know anything about Oni and Gemini but it was a case of the enemy of my enemy, at least for now. Before the flier had touched down, both Oni and Gemini jumped the final metre to the ground and strode purposely in the direction of the dropship. Fighting was fierce and the Enclave’s walls had been quickly breached and that’s where we headed. Our two pronged attack was effective and the Messenger shock troopers hadn’t expected an attack on their flank from outside the walls. Our assault put them on the back foot and drove rearward as we fought our way into the Enclave’s complex and towards the hospital. Oni and Gemini meanwhile, had struck hard at the rear files of soldiers, their enhanced melee combat abilities allowed them to drive a wedge through the enemy’s formation, causing chaos. All discipline collapsed, the Messenger’s vanguard was forced to retreat into their own troops who were in a state of disarray and communication had broken down. Sensing victory, the Enclave defenders pressed their advantage. The shock troopers then routed, fleeing into the wilderness, abandoning their dropship. A silence settled on the small battle site as the outsiders counted their casualties, fortunately we were unhurt, as were Oni and Gemini. Oni demanded to be taken to the exowomb, so we did. It was of course empty, Avril and her son were safely hidden away from here. Oni looked at us implacably as we explained that the exowomb had already been found and the child had been safely extricated, now both mother and son were somewhere safe. I could see Oni’s eyes unfocus for a moment again, calculating the situation, assessing variables, he knew they were unlikely to find the boy alone, he also realised that we’d interacted with his mother, he was aware of the questions to ask us but had probably also computed the answers. In the end he settled on a direct approach and turned to Bill. “Contact Avril Haywood,” he said. “And tell her that Michael Leander wants to take his family to Emptiness,” After we explained the situation to Avril, she was happy to return to the Glitterband with Oni, Gemini, Avril and the boy. It was probably the safest place for him. We said our goodbyes to the outsiders and returned to Neon City. It was dark when we left and night had draped a starry sky over the wilderness, without the rain clouds, the empyrean was decorated with constellations and nebulae. Meanwhile, the landscape that rushed past below the flier had been consumed by the void, a darkness so encompassing that it would be unimaginable in Neon City with its seemingly endless lines and grids of lights. Red gloaming light pollution rose over the horizon as we neared Neon City, light rain began splattering on the flier’s roof, intensifying as we closed in and by the time we passed the wall, it had become the familiar heavy torrent we knew so well. Must’ve been past midnight by the time we’d reached the landing pads at the Sky Tree. After that we escorted everyone down to departures, it was another vast well maintained high vaulted terminal with a faux marble floor. Before going their way, Avril turned to us and thanked us for what we’d done, then told us that should we ever be up in space, that we should meet up with her. The four of them went through check-in and out of sight. It was well past midnight now, enough time to hit happy hour on the bars at Dogenzaka Hill. 24th April 2021 Saturday has rolled round again, I'm logged on to Meet on PC. Time for the next session in Matakishi's Wired Neon City campaign. Location: Neon City Nosily searching through the accumulated yellow-hued junk in my one-bed after I woke from last night's chemically fuelled excess got me nothing; no food, nothing. Time to hit Hikage Street, pulling on my Harbiefs and trench coat, I pocketed my .45 ACP Blockbusters before heading out. Midmorning and the day was already too hot and it was only going to get worse, the climbing sun rose into a blue-white and cloudless sky, emitting uncaring waves of heat down on to Neon City, only compounded by the dense passing crowds of Hikage Street no-lifers that shuffled along the busy, grey concrete roads. Something was different on the street though, sure, unusual for me to be out this early but that wasn't it, couldn't put my finger on it. Wasn't until I was coming back from the convenience store, having blown the last of this month's universal credit on Niaiwo Noodles, a six-pack of Huntudi Lager and a pocket stuffed full of Savka choco-sticks that I figured it out: The Poison Jam graffiti tags that had been ubiquitously sprayed throughout Hikage Street had been covered by another tag. 'Magical Girl is coming.' Never heard of Magical Girl? Maybe they were another of Neon City's many street gangs I wondered as I sank my teeth into a bio-genetically-flavour-enhanced, endorphin-triggering choco-stick, feeling the chemically-driven slight electric tingle cascading down my spine. Were they planning to move on to Poison Jam street turf or was it something else? Whatever it was, someone had put their foot on Poison Jam's neck, things were going to get hotter still. Last night a message had been dead-dropped into the pocket of Bill's exquisitely crafted Executive Excess coat, looked to be from someone called Viper Joe, told us to meet him at Freak Pit, a well known underground combat venue where augmented fighters fought it out, Freak Pit had big-time streaming viewership and even bigger gambling numbers involved, too big for authorities to shut down. Freak Pit could be found in the Senkawa Aqueduct neighbourhood, it meant riding the crammed, noisy tram into Sunshine City, transferring on to the luxuriously exclusive and well maintained corporate monorail service to the Toshima-cho prefecture, then forgoing it's comfort to transfer again, this time another low grade tram to the Senkawa Aqueduct. Disembarking at our destination, we were greeted by the sight of an expansive red glow from the setting sun silhouetting Toshima-cho's angular western skyline which cast long shadows that inexorably climbed up taller eastern buildings and consumed the day's red-orange dying light. Senkawa Aqueduct was an unwelcoming grey and grotty neighbourhood of anonymous sprawling industrial asphalt, sporadically populated by strips of mostly featureless buildings of unknowable purpose. The view was dominated by the imposing concrete block which constituted the Black Dolphin Gulag, Neon City's supermax correctional facility which supposedly housed the most dangerous individuals in the city or in reality, people who had crossed the paths of the wealthy and powerful. Street lights had begun flickering into buzzing life and shone down on the swathe of bobbing umbrellas raised against the oncoming and unrelenting nightly downpour. The crowds began to thin out and eventually melted away as we turned into a neglected and barely lit road that led to Freak Pit. The fight venue looked to be situated in a dismal and mostly unlit building site, cadaverous remains of an unfinished commercial park, one of many that dotted Neon City, abandoned as a cost-cutting measure by some corporation or other no doubt. Makeshift spotlights ringed Freak Pit, soaking it and the milling, cheering crowd in a glaring blaze of harsh light while music thumped out of a massive sound system, Senonable wall-slabs hung above it all, brightly displaying footage of the combat below. We found Viper Joe somewhere in the crush, he was a large guy and a frequent spectator in the arena fights who favoured dark denim and carried a pair of Prosya Grosto magnum-load revolvers, he shivered and twitched as he greeted us, making a point of not shaking our hands, his nose also ran profusely. Noticing our stares, Viper Joe explained he suspected that his running nose was the result of a recent lung transplant that had gone awry. Pepper checked Joe's implants and ran a diagnostic, shoddy components in the augmentations were causing Joe's problems, it was unavoidable. Pepper also told us that Joe's behaviour suggested he was a hypochondriac. Joe was a middle-man, a street-trader who dabbled in weapons and made dollar by supplying the pit. We got Joe to explain why he had called us. He was pretty blunt about what he wanted, he wanted us to kill someone! He took us to a nearby building, told us to "keep to the shadows," and led us in. It was busy with numerous large open rooms given over to the medical gurneys, bio-slabs, med-techs and of course, jacked-up fighters "Neon Suspect is his name," Joe explained, pointing into one room, at skinny man working at a desk who wore beige slacks, grey coat with a round face and a buzzcut, he was arched over a Preaavar Muanma model data-slab he was fiddling with. "He's a hacker who works for Doctor Ishimura and codes the combat algorithms for her fighters," Joe went on. "He's my rival for her attentions and is trying to worm his way into her affections!". Viper joe twitched as we looked at him. "I've not told her how I feel," he abruptly blurted, almost apologetically! He went on to explain that Neon Suspect was an expert at bio-interfacing software, coding algorithms that interacted with both higher and lower brain functions, managing behaviour and even conferring the recipient various skills. Joe was convinced that he was doing this illegally? Despite the life we'd immersed ourselves in, we weren't the habit of just blindly rubbing out people for money, we agreed to look into it. Dr Ishimura owned a stable of Freak Fighters that operated out the pit, she had a background in the med-industry and used old insider contacts to provide her fighters with augmentations required to stay competitive, she also supplied Joe with his replacement organs. Word was that the fighters' implants were as equally cheap as Joe's. She was also known for her garish fashion sense, germaphobia and chain-smoking. Ishimura's fighters had suffered a long streak of losses recently and her rep was currently trash. Joe suspected that Neon Suspect was sabotaging her fighters in order to get close to her. We decided to speak with her. Middle-aged, stocky and easily identifiable by the fluorescent canary yellow poly-blended leisure suit she wore. Dr Ishimura had just ended a conversation with Neon Suspect as we approached and was lighting up a Diria branded Mahawd. Bio-engineering had made it possible to reverse the addictive changes that nicotine made to brain chemistry, but people just kept smoking regardless, living for the buzz and hoping that somehow they'd have the bank to fix or replace the damaged organs later. Dr Ishimura's eyes flicked our way and she didn't seem particularly pleased to see us when we introduced ourselves, one of her fighters had just lost another fight and she wasn't taking it well or maybe it was just her general demeanour? With a cigarette hanging from her mouth, she pulled a small, nanite, antibacterial gel applicator from a leisure suit pocket and dowsed her hands with it. We told her that Viper Joe suspected that someone was sabotaging her fighters as she took a long draw and listened. Once we finished explaining the situation, she exhaled and no amount of cleanliness could disguise the stink of tobacco, she rolled the cigarette between yellowed fingers as she considered her response. After moment she agreed to grant us access to her gym. It was a dismal sight; the sour, stale stench of body odour hung in a weakly lit room littered with substandard, decade-old and failing med-tech. Several morose fighters sat slouching on benches, bristling with combat augmentations and implanted muscle packs that glistened in the underpowered strip lighting. Dr Ishimura took the opportunity to shout insults at them, voice thick with unconcealed venomous contempt. Neon Suspect gave us a lengthy sidelong glance from the desk as we walked over to one of Dr Ishimura's sullen fighters while she was lighting her next smoke and applying more gel. Only way I'd be sure if he was the saboteur was in the scripting of his combat software, he'd know I knew too. If it all went south, it could kick off. I checked the fighter over, there had to be a connector of some kind? Found it! A tiny, discrete Xideti dermal implant under a small fold of grafted skin that was equipped with a networking port. Connecting my Nonohiki; I jacked in. Swirling vectors of gleaming data points seemingly orbited me before coalescing into a stable, constant shape, a basic workman-like, almost default cubic data-image. Beyond it, on the glowing info-vista, a pale, distant horizon pulsated rhythmically, was it some kind of non-indexed vault being updated? A check showed it was simply the fighter's biometrics being fed into a data-vault. There was a directory on the data-image's vault that pointed at a implanted micro-slab and listed the series of algorithms housed on it which interacted with the subject's brain. After navigating over to the slab's data-vault, going through Neon Suspect's algorithms, I launched an algorithm of my own, a search algorithm and began sifting through the stacks of data that rolled past. Pain suppressors, reflex enhancers, situational assessment, threat prioritization and more, they were sophisticated algorithm's and all functioned nominally, no erroneous code in any of them. If Neon Suspect was the saboteur, he was sticking the knife in another way. The info-vista faded as it spiralled away, taking the data-image with it and seemingly imploding as I jacked out, experiencing the usual infinite-moment of disorientation. Koko and Pepper checked out the fighter's combat upgrades and weapon implants, they quickly discovered that not only were they the cheapest, lowest grade Rekhang knock-off weapons available, they'd been sabotaged! Weapons were Viper Joe's responsibility, was someone targeting the weapons to get at Joe, or was it something else? Neon Suspect strode over as we were discussing our next move, which was convenient because we wanted to talk to him. Pointing, the hacker explained that the fighter we'd examined was up next in the pit, he shuffled past and made for him. We watched as he networked the Muanma into the fighter's firmware, no doubt making adjustments and checks. Moments later, we saw the fighter's countenance change, his expression hardened and his back straightened, Neon Suspect's work was having its effect. When Neon Suspect was done, we asked him about the weapons and he shrugged, telling us that they weren't his department and they should've already been fully functional. It was nothing Koko couldn't handle though, soon she had them online and working, working as well as they could at least. As the fighter headed off to the pit, Neon Suspect gave him a slap on his bio-sculpted butt cheek. Neon Suspect turned back to us and explained that from now, no one would touch the fighter until just prior to the match, then the competitors would be scanned to ensure they didn't have any unsanctioned enhancements, it was all out of his hands now he added. We had more questions and asked him about the nature of his relationship with Dr Ishimura, he looked at us quizzically and from his answer it was apparent that he had little interest in women. He did take a shine to Bill though and made a point of calling him William, Bill showed no interest in reciprocation. Trigger then stated that he had an interest into entering a match in the pit. "I look forward to working with you," Neon Suspect purred coolly, sizing Trigger up. Beyond the confines of the building we could hear the thundering clamour of the crowd at the pit, the collective gasping, shouting and baying for blood. It continued for a while, then there was a moment of silence followed a prolonged roar; the match was over. A minute later, with blood and sweat, Dr Ishimura's fighter, slick with sweat, blood and numerous wounds came back victorious. Taking the opportunity, I jacked back into his firmware, the algorithms used to alter his personality had increased aggression, spatial awareness, reflexes and so on, Neon Suspect had done his job well. No evidence that he was sabotaging fighters. Only one variable could had changed between this fight and the previous ones; weapons, Joe was responsible for weapons. Had someone been targeting Joe? Was it someone else? Or maybe it was Joe? What would be his motive? The Freak Pit proper was an actual pit, harsh, unremitting white light form spots above flooded the rectangular, earthy and concrete depression which was supported by a perimeter of steel reinforcement struts leftover from the abandoned construction here and bounded by a rim of barbed wire fence which was lined with hollering spectators, we went out to join them and watch the next fight. It was Viper Joe we needed to talk to now and he was out there in the crowd watching the next match. No-hopers mingled with wage-monkeys, corporate execs and the occasional vid-celeb. Neon Suspect had also joined us, we noticed that he was staring intently at Joe with a faraway look, pretty sure now that he was actually more interested in Joe than Ishimura. Time to check Viper Joe out. I jacked in and the mindless roar of the crowd evaporated as the GLOWNET enveloped my consciousness, almost threatening to overload my awareness. To the uninformed observer, the localised info-vista and ensuing traffic would look normal for Neon City, but for me, the cascading flow of passing data-clusters couldn't mask the irregularity surrounding the Freak Pit's bogus data-image which seemingly led nowhere but to a dead construction company. However, beneath the dead company was something, the fight organisers had hidden data-vault of their own, those in-the-know could use it to access the fight's stream and bet on the outcomes. Hacking the data-vault was straight forward and sifting through it's data logs, I found a record for Viper Joe. I could use it to trace and hack his credit activity. From there I saw frequent movements of bits in and out of the account, looked like payments for Joe's repeated cheap organ replacements, but nothing sizable enough to be something like a bribe. Viper Joe was having a nose bleed and suspected he was on the verge of experiencing a major organ failure when Bill had shuffled through jostling spectators to reach him. Bill went and told him what we'd found, told him how Neon Suspect's combat scripting was fine, how weapon's had been Dr Ishimura's problem and how we knew that he was involved. Only thing we didn't know was why? Joe paused for a second before dabbing at his nose and taking a deep breath, he then admitted to sabotaging the weapons, he was hoping to discredit Neon Suspect to get him sacked and get closer to Ishimura. Then Bill told him how it had all been unnecessary and how Neon Suspect was more interested in him that Ishimura! Joe's obsession had blinded him. Joe told Bill that the sabotaging would now stop and the matter could be considered closed. Bill wished him good luck with managing his implants and left. After greasing some wheels with the organisers, we managed to get Trigger a match despite being an unknown fighter. Bookies were running long odds against Trigger, we bet heavily on him. The Pit thrummed and we felt it through our feet, the distorted, raspy blaring of an old Iksaarp sound system announced Trigger's entry as he jumped into the Pit brandishing his gunblade. His opponent came in from the other side, a bare-chested giant of a man dropped into the far side of the pit, bio-sculpted muscles squirmed beneath grafted and repeatedly reconstructed skin as he flexed, striding forward. Gone were the weaknesses of flesh, bone and muscle, replaced by the resilience of reinforced carbonate. Grimy and unclean, dull coloured metallic flails sprouted from the giant's wrists. He glared at Trigger with an unhinged, drug-fuelled expression! "Ultimate Hobo," blasted the speakers and the giant raised his augmented arms, the crowd responded with a bellow. The clamour reached a crescendo once the announcer started the fight. For a moment, Trigger and Ultimate Hobo weighted each other up, slowly circulating one another; then the fight began. Ultimate Hobo was strong but Trigger was fast. Blows were exchanged and Trigger got the better of his opponent, one of Ultimate Hobo's augmented arms flopped to the dusty floor, the giant wasn't slowed, a mixture of bloodlust and pain management software kept him going, Trigger could see coagulants injected into his blood by an implant were already stemming the flow of blood. With a howl that almost drowned out the screaming crowd, Ultimate Hobo pressed his attack with a series of wold swings, but Trigger saw it coming, easily sidestepping the telegraphed swipe and counterattacking. Ultimate Hobo's other arm flopped to the floor, after that, Trigger easily cut him down and was victorious. Spectators roared their approval as Trigger glowered defiantly at them. Senonable wall-slabs above the arena repeatedly replayed the killing blow, from a variety of angles and in slow-motion. Ultimate Hobo's corpse was carted off, he was dead for now, the technology to revive him existed, it was the matter of dealing with brain damage would be an obstacle and for Ultimate Hobo that wasn't really an issue, he might well soon be back in The Pit! But otherwise, some use would be found for his remains no doubt. Trigger meanwhile, was hailed as victor when he exited The Pit, he was then gifted a aluminium badge that said: 'I beat U.H.!'. The rest of us had made serious bank on his win. The nightly deluge was waiting for us as we exited Freak Pit, nosily pattering on to the asphalt around us as we went into the gloomy rain, collars turned up against the downpour and the black sky above. We had hardly begun the return journey when Pepper's media-slab pinged; he checked the message, illuminated by it's soft glow, his face showed surprise? "It's a Yokai trainer!, he exclaimed, turning to us. A script running on his media-slab had detected another trainer's media-slab and they'd communicated, setting up match. Pepper said he'd catch up with us and went off to find his opponent. Later that night, he would come back, telling us that he had won the match and captured a new yokai called Megura! On the way back to Hikage Street, another call pinged in, this time for Koko. The modulated, disguised voice of Yennav Rybasei was on the other end. "Hello my droogs,"! A Russian mob owned distillery, The Glass Face Vodka Distillery on Hoppi Street had gone dark and Yennav wanted us to check it out. It was getting late by the time the rumbling old tram had dropped us off in the centre of Hoppi Street and happy hour was in full swing! Or so it seemed, as every hour in Hoppi Street might have been happy hour. Located within the Asakusa-cho prefecture, Hoppi Street crawled with the neon-lit bars and themed pubs, smoky watering holes and shady drinking dens it was known for. Its sidewalks teemed with unending dense, lively crowds; tourists, serious drinkers, wage-monkeys and down-and-outers, all drawn by lure of dozens of drinking establishments. Navigating the staggering and sodden revellers, we arrived at The Glass Face Vodka Distillery. We had smelt it before we saw it, that was a bad sign; an acrid and bitter odour that hung in the air, recognisable for what it was, not simply the smell of smoke, but the smell of a burnt building. By the looks of it, an explosion had reduced the distillery to a heap of still heated slag that smouldered in the hammering rain, vapour mixing with smoke. Orange embers cheerfully twinkled in the ruinous piles of charred debris and small patches of spluttering, tenacious fire continued consuming whatever was left of the building. Numerous blackened and contorted bodies littered the site. Drunken passerbys gawped incomprehensively at the wreckage as they shuffled past, too inebriated or too hardened to life in The City of Electric Dreams to care. In true Neon City fashion, the municipal first-responders had taped off the collapsed building and done nothing else. After climbing through the yellow and black tape to examine the rubble, I could feel that heat seeping up through the soles of my Harbief boots as we trod on the remains of the distillery and the acrid smell, now at its most intense, filled my nostrils. I was tempted to activate my internal rebreather. Then, over the drumming rainfall we heard something, quiet, an indistinct voice, but still something. Following the voice led us to a shocking discovery. Among the corpses was a Protobase Global zombie cyborg! Constituted of an assortment of cybernetic components and weapons held together by a cage of flesh that was once human and networked by their nervous system, it was designed with only one purpose: to mindlessly, unrelentingly kill. Protobase Global routinely and clandestinely kidnapped those on the fringes of society or in the underclass; the poor, the dispossessed, the transient and then hollowed the humanity out of them until only a biological chassis for their polymer, steel and chromed up cyberware and weaponry remained. Twice we'd encountered their secretive production facilities and twice we'd shut them down. This cyborg though, seemed different, it twitched unpredictably, sparked violently in the rain and spoke? Zombie cyborgs never spoke, we'd encounter them several times and without fail, they were utterly silent. Cautiously, we moved in. Koko checked it over, there were clear signs of severe trauma to its head module. Zombie cyborgs could soak an enormous amount of punishment and only damage to its brain stem could put one down immediately and reliably. This one should have been dead, but somehow it clung to life by the thinnest of slivers. Looking even closer, Koko noticed that the sparks were actually tiny but intensely bright and powerful arcs of crackling electricity jumping between capacitors and circuits. Damage that should have done for the zombie cyborg was being repaired and the biological components were being preserved. The short-circuiting firmware had bypassed the disconnected brain stem in some unpredictable manner and triggered an autonomous repair protocol. When the zombie cyborg spoke, it was a faraway whisper. "Brenda Callahan," she said her name was Brenda Callahan and she was asking about her family? Did the zombie cyborgs retain their memories? Personality? It didn't bear thinking about. We asked Brenda what her last memory was? She told us that she had gone into Den's Den of Domestic Helpers, looking for a washing machine. Den's Den had been located in Kibogaoka Hill, it had been a front for the second production facility. It didn't take any stretch of the imagination to figure out what had happened. A quick search revealed that Brenda Callahan of Kibogaoka Hill was married to a Phillip, we tried pinging him but got nothing. A further search revealed that Phillip and Brenda Callahan and their four children had been reported as missing by their neighbour in the Kibogaoka Hill shanty town. Rentacop would never have made any effort to investigate the report. Wasn't any point in looking further into this, grimly, we had to accept that they had met the same fate as Brenda. Softly, in an almost trance-like way, Brenda kept asking about her family and where she was? We all looked at each other, her state was precarious, telling her might make matters worse. Thanks to our experiences with RAM Rat, we also knew that eventually her biological components would begin to decay, Protobase Global zombie cyborgs weren't build to last. We had to try and find a solution to her predicament, but first, she had to be moved out of here. None of us knew of anywhere that might off-the-books have the kind of facility needed to treat Brenda, none of us at least, until Pepper spoke up. "I know a guy," Pepper piped in. "His name is Cheeky Bob and well, he's veterinarian! But he might be able to help.". Nobody had any better alternative. Pepper pinged a call to Bob, they seemed pleased to see each other, at least it was promising. Once the situation was explained, Bob agreed to see Pepper's unregistered patient. Cheeky Bob's practice operated out of Rokkaku Dai Heights, Koko remotely bought in the flier and Brenda was carefully loaded in and ferried over, he instructed us to bring Brenda through the tradesmen entrance and was waiting for us as we slowly lowered her to street level. Cheeky Bob was an unshaven, corpulent man with messy hair in a tatty and worn lab coat smeared with grease stains and other fluids, he looked surprised to see his patient was a giant cyborg. I could see from his expression that he was about to complain, but looking at us, thought the better of it. Brenda was moved into one of the practice's examination rooms and put under a bright spot light, all the while asking about her family. Bob checked her over, humming as he did so. He hit her with a sedative and she slipped into voiceless sleep. He turned to us and explained that he could give Brenda a cocktail of injections that would inhibit necrosis, she would be stable for about six months, but after that, loss of biomass would be inevitable and irreversible. Six months to solve the problem, better than the alternative. We agreed and Cheeky Bob did his work, he also gave us a stash of sedatives to help Brenda cope with her situation. Brenda needed a chance to recuperate and had to be stashed somewhere safe. It was easy to find an anonymous, small no-questions-asked lockup on Hikage Street that was paid for through one of our ghost accounts. It was the dead of night in the crashing rain when we moved Brenda again and Neon City was as quiet as it ever got. Ensuring that no one had eyes on us we took her through the downpour to a puddle-ridden side street at the edge of the residential quarter where the lockup could be found. The aluminium roller door opened with a metallic rattle, revealing a bare and undecorated concrete and corrugated steel cube; basic, but it would do, it would have to! Brenda was made as comfortable and secure as possible before we left, the roller door came back down with another metallic rattle and clunked shut as the auto-lock engaged. With our heads bent low against the relentless precipitation, we began the return to our apartments, The City of Electric Dreams had other ideas though and didn't let us go so easily. Our media-slabs started pinging, Roboy was on the line. Roboy was a trusted contact and robotic owner of a courier service staffed entirely by robots which confidentially boasted that their couriers could deliver almost anything, anywhere; a resource we'd made use of more than once. Unsurprisingly, Roboy had a problem that needed dealing with. Recently, several of Roboy's smaller employees had been targeted by unknown thieves in the Senkawa Aqueduct area, so he'd hired a couple of Muscle Gurlz to investigate and resolve the situation. Now they'd gone missing too and Roboy needed us to investigate and resolve the new issue! Find the thieves, find the gurlz. Ikebukuro Muscle Gurlz; a name we recognised, it belonged to some sort of bodybuilder's bar that we'd never visited. Roboy's description of the two Muscle Gurlz was of pair of cybered up, martial arts, bodybuilding, goth chicks. It was into the small hours of night when we returned to Senkawa Aqueduct, a subdued time, gone were the drinkers and fun-seekers, only the lost, disparate and night-workers now rode Neon City's public transit network, I wondered which we were? Driving rain slammed against the elevated tram as it noisily laboured its way onwards while we watched the panoply of passing city lights become distorted, rippling smears of multicoloured light sprawled across rain-splashed windows. The search to find one of the missing delivery drones was straightforward, Roboy had provided us with a code to trace it's tracker on our media-slabs, it was so straightforward, it made us wonder what the Muscle Gurlz had encountered? It led us to some narrow, detritus littered, half-lit alleyway and a dented, scarred dumpster. Inside was the drone, the tracer on my Jaunkeu confirmed it. It had suffered serious damage, I watched as exposed actuators and servos twitched and buzzed, the drone hadn't given up trying to recover. Once the drone was out of the dumpster, Koko checked it over, the source of the damage was undiscernible. Behind a panel was connector, I used it to network the drone with my data-slab and downloaded it's entire recent telemetry data. First thing I did was to pull down and review its archived camera feed. We watched the footage. At first it showed the drone navigating its way through Neon City's sky-lanes, then abruptly, it's view lurched sideways, the world rotating as the ground raced up to meet it. The drone bounced and skittered several times before skidding to a halt at an uneven angle, almost instantly, the seemingly frenzied, half silhouetted figure of woman with baleful, glowing red eyes lunged for the drone, leaving crimson trails of light on the footage as she moved! The video feed ended. I tried to run facial recog on the silhouette, but the image was too blurred, too badly lit for the search algorithm to get a hit. I was about to try another tack when Roderick interrupted me, the robotic bodyguard informed us that he was receiving some kind of transmission? It was a message and Roderick described it as an artificial but kindly woman's voice and repeated the message to us. “New meat, my children, Mother is deciding when to serve it.” The message went on further. “Keep your eyes peeled my children, search the skies, one of the drones is carrying our prize.” Our hackles were up, we took sidelong glances into the poorly lit alleyway as it stretched away, swallowed by distant night. Somehow the message related to the drones and maybe the Muscle Gurlz? Who was Mother and who were the children? Did this represent a danger for us? We soon got an answer. “More enemies are here my children, watch for them, kill them.” "Another message," Roderick told us that a video feed was also being transmitted on a different channel, which he then relayed to my data-slab. All of us watched it; it was grainy, slightly out of focus footage from a higher angle and poorly lit, but undeniably, it was us in the feed, standing there in the alleyway. Somebody waved an arm, a second later the arm waved onscreen; live footage from a street cam somewhere close to the alley. Trouble was coming. Out of the rainy haze materialised the attackers, ten of them frenziedly running at us and all ten had the same baleful glowing red eyes. In seconds the red-eyes would be on us, the odds had to be evened. The eyes had to be some sort of implant. Koko frantically punched at her control-slab and Nermal sprang to life, servos hummed into action, rotors span, the drone rose into the air with a robotic purr. Koko instructed Nermal to trigger its targeted EMP pulse, if the attackers were wired up, it might give us an edge. About of half their number stumbled to a halt, gawked about blinking and stumbled off. Looked like they were being controlled? The others though, kept coming, screaming and charging in with flailing arms. We were hesitant to fight them, were they innocent victims of some kind of brain-jacking? It was enough to make us hold back. They attacked with ferocious, unhinged strength, hitting hard. Koko jabbed one with her puke-prodder; no effect. Trigger landed a telling blow on one; no effect. None of it was working, there was no choice but to use whatever force we could bring to bear. Even so, the fight was a hard one and we were left nursing our injuries, they unflinchingly soaked up massive injuries before they went down. Quickly, Kevin scanned one. Results showed they had some kind of interconnected implants in their brain, spinal column and nervous system, it didn't reveal any enhancements or augmentations to physical performance or endurance, nothing to explain their strength. No time to speculate either. Roderick interrupted us again, matter-of-factly informing us that more enemies were vectoring in on our position. We looked a each other, none of us wanted to continue this. Koko remotely called in the flier. No way to take one alive, nothing to be gained from fighting more of them. So time to bug out, we just had to wait for our ride to get here. Thirty seconds is a long time when you know an unrelentingly, seemingly psychotic mob is closing in on you. The flier's turbines whipped the falling rain into a localised stinging hurricane as it dropped into a hover at street level. We dragged a body aboard for further investigation as we made good our escape, we weren't done with this. I was flooded with relief as the flier pulled away, for once, the sensation of gravity tugging at my guts was a comfort as I watched the streets fall away. It wasn't over though. Roderick told us that he'd gotten another transmission. “Our meat is escaping the larder my children, hurry now and recapture it.” Did it mean us? Tactical showed nothing in the vicinity of the flier. Using external cameras, Koko swept the streets below, infrared picked up scores, maybe hundreds of the red-eyes storming through Senkawa Aqueduct like an swelling flood of bodies. Ahead of them; their prey, two sprinting individuals, straining to keep just ahead of the baying mob, the two ducked into an apartment block, the red-eyes close behind. As we watched, even more red-eyes appeared from seemingly everywhere, converging on the apartment block and in streaming in like so much water emptying down the drain. Koko circled with the flier and waited; the two individuals burst on to the rooftop. The horde would be seconds behind. We dropped a line down to them, without any delay, the two of them leapt for it and we pulled them to safety as the red-eyes came spilling on to the rooftop. Once they were reeled in, they introduced themselves as Pixie Skull and Vanilla Goth. The pair of them were scantily dressed in almost matching black outfits, admirably showing off the low-percentage of their body fat and well defined, possibly surgically improved muscle definition. They also both possessed smooth porcelain skin, the result of either applying a lot of skin toner or some dermal, melanin alteration treatment, heavy and dark make-up completed the goth aesthetic. Muscle Gurlz, had to be, they confirmed it. We told them that we had been sent by Roboy to investigate their disappearance, in reply, they explained that had been tracking the missing courier drones when they were attacked and forced to flee into an abandoned office block, to hide amongst the discarded trash that had been left behind and littered the interior. For a time, they had avoided detection and carefully observed the red-eyes who wandered the rainy streets listlessly. Then abruptly, the red-eyes had all run off in the same direction, attention drawn to something else, probably us! The pair then took the opportunity to make a break for it. It didn't work out and more red-eyes appeared! So they made for the apartment block and the roof. They thanked us for our timely intervention and provided us with some cards that gave us free drinks at the Ikebukuro Muscle Gurlz bar. Once the Muscle Gurlz were dropped off well away from Senkawa Aqueduct, we contacted Roby, explained the situation to him and how it was too dangerous, even for hardened street samurai to wander the district. It was apparent even over the voice call that Roboy's synthetic voice couldn't disguise his unhappiness. He would have to suspend deliveries into Senkawa Aqueduct for the time being. For us, what was left of the night was over, time to hit Hikage Street and home. Later, Koko and Pepper would thoroughly pore over the red-eye body that we'd brought back, their findings were not quite what we expected.
For the most part, the implants were designed to receive carrier waves, trans-process the data into sensory inputs and relay the results into neural pathways to the brain. None of the implants were wired into higher brain functions at all. It was likely that the transmissions which Roderick had intercepted were instructions meant for the red-eyes. Furthermore, it was clear that they hadn't been brain-jacked at all and were willingly following these instructions. Further examination revealed the red-eye's blood contained an extraordinarily highly concentrated blend of performance enhancing designer poly-amphetamines, which explained their behaviour. Judging by the concentrations, Pepper estimated that these amphetamines were administered to the red-eyes on a daily basis. Meanwhile, I'd been scouring the GLOWNET info-vista, even the most remote data-vaults for any information or chatter on the sinister activities in Senkawa Aqueduct and constantly running search-algorithms. Every time a name a came up, it was always one name. Mother Saika. The name was associated with a nebulous cult that went by the name Children of Saika that had seen an increase of activity recently. The cult itself was linked with an equally nebulous organisation known as The Church of Redeemed Sinners. It wasn't much to go on, but it was something we'd keep an eye on. |
AuthorReading, writing, playing and painting are the things that I do. Archives
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