14th July 2021

It's a Wednesday evening and we're round Simon's in Woking for the first session of Romance of the Perilous Land run by Matt.

Overview
Romance of the Perilous Land (RotPL) is a traditional pen 'n' paper tabletop roleplaying game that shares DNA with OSR-adjacent The Black Hack RPG.

Like The Black Hack, RotPL is a level based roll-under-attribute d20 system. However, whereas The Black Hack is a generic D&D styled rules-light game, RotPL adds some meat to those minimalist bones in the form of backgrounds, talents and a binary skill system which plugs into the attribute rolls.
Gone also are the 4 bare-bones D&D-like character classes, replaced with 6 new classes which each also include unique class related features and are more appropriate to RotPL's setting.

Speaking of which, RotPL's setting blends together various elements of British folklore which include Arthurian mythology and Robin Hood legend into a sort of timeless prototypical Britain for the heroes to go adventuring in.
In a way it reminds me a little of the classic British RPG; Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP), which puts it in good company in my opinion.
Both games present a pseudo-historical setting with a hidden strata of danger that runs beneath which the heroes must face, for WFRP it's chaos and for RotPL, it's the fae or supernatural for lack of a better word.

RotPL dilutes some of the rules-light purity of The Black but the payoff is that it provides a set of rules more closely aligned with an interesting setting which takes up much of the book's 250 or so pages.
Personally, I think RotPL does a good job of balancing it all. The additional rules don't feel like they add much more in the way of extra complexity (At least from the perspective of a player.) but do add some flavour to the world of Albion.

If a heroic RPG in a fantasy world that has a slightly supernaturally sinister edge to it sounds like your thing, RotPL is a worth a look.

Characters
Trefor op Llewelyn - played by Simon. This is Simon's first time playing a RPG.
This knight and former priest is allied with The Order of The Fisher King and is evasive about his ecumenical past.
Titus the Munchkin - played by Josh.
This diminutive thief and outlaw considers himself numbered among Robin Hood's merry men of Sherwood.
Colan the barbarian - played by Colin. This is also Colin's first time playing an RPG.
Hailing from an aristocratic family, this barbarian eschewed his former life to swear fealty to the Iron Hawks.
Hobard Roolf - played by yours truly.
With his previous life left in ruins, this former farmer chose to follow the codes of The Knights of The Round Table while taking to the wilderness in the vocation of a ranger.

​Location: Ascalon - The Summerland.

On glittering shores sat bustling Hykaria city, it was, with lively streets and trader-filled marketplaces Ascalon’s seat of power and home to its young King Vortimer.
Situated on a natural harbour, Hykaria’s expansive port boasted numerous sturdy jetties and docks that spanned out into the Great Sea to welcome distant seafarers from all quarters. Many a journeyer and merchant had passed through the waterfront and seagate into the busy city, their influx painting the city a multitude of cosmopolitan colours.

​Word of a practitioner of the esoteric arts in closeby Millet Town with a talent for healing had reached knightly Trefor on his travels and thus brought him into the vibrant city.
‘Such a healer might provide aid unto the Fisher King’, the knight had surmised before setting out for Millet Town.

For a while now, the roguish diminutive Titus had resided in Hykaria, stationed by The Merry Men in a house fashioned after a tree somewhat. They had learned that some innocent individual was being tried for black magic by a landowner in Millet Town.
Landowners were known throughout Albion for their dishonesty and corruption, Titus had thus been instructed by The Merry Men to investigate this landowner.

The Iron Hawks maintained a faction house in Hykaria which is where Colan The Barbarian could be found. Rumours of disappearances and an evil witch residing in local Millet Town had found its way to the faction house.
Colan was to learn the truth of this witch.

Finally, Hobard had received tell of a hanging to be executed in Millet Town from a traveller, along with stories of curses and disappearances. Hobard tasked himself with looking into the situation. 

​A single road ran the walk to Millet Town from Hykaria and it was at the limits of the city walls on a crisp, grey dawn of October seventh that four travellers found themselves treading the same path through the east gate. 
Roads could be a dangerous place in Albion and there was strength in numbers, the four agreed to accompany each other to their destination.

Morning chill faded as day wore on, autumnal sky brightening to a pale blue streaked with wispy cloud. The road - more of a well trodden track than anything else meandered along the uninhabited coastline. Foam edged and sun-sparkled waters of the Great Ocean sighed and crashed rhythmically against rocky bluffs or abandoned beaches.
On occasion, the company caught sight of the gloomy sprawling perimeter of the Ragged Woods as the road took them closer to Millet Town.

By day’s end a light rain was falling and the company had encountered a small walled hamlet of timber and stone homes nestled close to the road.
The residents were friendly enough and content to exchange news for a night’s board. Rumours had reached the hamlet that folk from Millet Town had gone missing and the company learned that the chief landowner was Squire Rulf. The company also discovered that Millet Town had a notable blacksmith named Dimia.
By dawn, the rain had spent itself and a mist enveloped morning emerged. In these quiet hours the company pressed on. The already faint road - now partially obscured by a thin carpet of fallen, slick, browning leaves - had guided the company through a subdued stretch of forest and eventually by midday opened up at a small stone bridge that marked the western outskirts of Millet Town.

The unmistakable odour of manure assailed the company as they crossed. Ahead they passed a small cluster of buildings; a house, a  shed or two perhaps, bounded by a low, dry stone wall, Chickens strutted and clucked inside the perimeter and further within was a pig sty  and a variety of other farm animals.
Soon the company found themselves on the edge of a village green densely ringed by a variety of half-timber homes, situated throughout them was a smattering of houses employed as shopfronts, including a homely looking inn.
The few townsfolk they saw gave them brief questioning sidelong glances before hurrying on their way.

​Trefor and Titus sought out the blacksmith.
Dimia was a quietly spoken woman who was happy to take a moment away from her anvil to talk to the pair. Dimia told them that someone had indeed gone missing from the town, Martin Morden was the missing boy’s name.
Dimia did not know much about Martin, he was a farmhand on Gregory’s holding and was friends with Madeline, daughter of the innkeeper.
Under the ruse of commissioning a helmet, Titus asked about the trial he’d been dispatched to investigate and Dimia confirmed that Everdene, a local woman with ‘the craft’ had been arrested by the squire for using dark magics to curse Millet Town, supposedly causing the disappearance of Martin. Everdene was set to be hanged on the morrow.
Dimia admitted that she knew little of Everdene, keeping a distance from such matters but she had heard talk rife in Millet Town that stated Everdene utilised imps to do her bidding and a few nights ago a villager was said to have seen an imp carrying a chicken, no doubt one of Gregory’s.

​Hobard meanwhile, had taken the opportunity to visit the inn. Positioned between homes, it was a smallish establishment, a weather-worn sign with faded and peeling colours depicting a pair of crossed gates hung from the old wooden frontage. Upon entering, he found it to be a cramped, gloomy affair.
Light from a spluttering fireside lit the interior in orange hues between looming shadows cast by patrons gathered about the flame’s warmth. A pall of dismal smoke clung to the low, white-painted wattle ceiling it had stained yellow over years.
Ignoring quizzical looks, Hobard handed over a few coins. took his pint to a quiet corner and while nursing it; observed.

Low murmurous chatter thrummed across the common room, Hobart caught gossip of Everdene; she had been spotted walking close to Gregory’s farm at midnight before his cattle had gone missing. A few minutes later, a one-eyed man sporting a snow coloured beard drew Hobard’s attention.
“It was fairies,” One-eye declared emphatically! Perhaps talking of the missing person.
“It’s always fairies!” Came a rebuff, rousing laughter from his companions much to One-eye’s ire.
All the while a serving girl zipped to and from customers with youthful quickness. An obvious uncomfortable restlessness across her face, Hobard noted.

​Colan, Titus and Trefor regrouped meanwhile and headed to Gregory’s farm and made for the barn.
‘A good place to hide something,’ they reasoned.
Before they got far, a dishevelled man in drab and somewhat soiled clothing burst from the doorway of the farmhouse; Gregory the farmer.
“Get off my land,” he roared, black-ringed, wild eyes darting left and right as he erratically brandished a dagger in the direction of our heroes.

The company halted and Trefor stepped forward, he spoke with a quiet yet firm demeanour, a confidence that sprang from the years of his ecumenical background and told the man that the company was no threat.
Gregory’s laboured breathing lessened, he seemed to calm, dropping the tip of his dagger to point at the ground.
While the farmer was coming to his senses, Trefor spied a line of iron filings sprinkled across the doorway’s threshold.
Once he was settled, Gregory was happy to tell the company what he knew. 
A week ago, Gregory’s chickens began to go missing, he initially believed this was down to foxes and went to Dimia. He bought traps, placing them near the forest that backed on to the edge of the farmland.
The following night, two of his sheep had gone, Gregory checked the traps, they were untriggered. He had no idea what was causing it.
Rumours of fairies, imps and witches began to circulate once word had gotten out about the vanishing farm animals.
Then, Martin had gone missing. Furtive whispers spread through Millet Town and grew to become talk of Everdene the healer and dark magics, finally ending with open accusations aimed at her by Squire Rulf, who took her prisoner.
Everdene was to be hanged on the noon, tomorrow, Gregory was unsure of her guilt,
He admitted to placing the iron fillings across his door to ward malignant spirits.

​At The Inn of the Crossed Gates, Hobard had learned the proprietor’s name was Lucy and found a moment to speak with her.
Everdene was a friend of Lucy’s; the innkeeper said that she had done much good for Millet Town and did not believe she was the cause of Martin’s disappearance. Quietly she told Hobard there had been a flourishing relationship of sorts between the two which had turned sour and Rulf was left bitter by it. Lucy said Rulf’s motives could not be trusted.
Lucy did not know much about Martin, only that he had been a friend of her daughter. Madeline.

The serving girl who Hobard had seen busily working through the common room was in fact Madeline. She confirmed her friendship with Martin and had no idea why he would have vanished. Madeline also knew Everdene who she considered to be a nice woman.
When asked if she had seen anything suspicious, Madeline told Hobard that a week ago, she had seen a ‘little’ man making for Gregory’s in the small hours of night, although Madeline added, her mother had not believed her.

Everdene had been imprisoned in a small brick roundhouse with a conical slate roof. 
‘A secure place to gaol the accused’, Hobard noted as he approached, he had decided it was time to talk to the healer, having left the inn.
Alongside the door was Dain the guard who was a few summers shy from suitably filling his role and sported a steel tipped spear and ill-fitting armour.
Dain refused to grant Hobard access to Everdene but did not prevent him from speaking to the healer woman through the door.
Everdene’s voice was hoarse, thick and quiet when she spoke; Hobart imagined she was not in a particularly comfortable situation. She explained that she had lived in Millet Town for three years now and provided healing and aid to the townsfolk, Everdene was adamant that she knew nothing about any cursing or dark magic.
Everdene also freely admitted to wandering the grounds near to Gregory’s farm late at night in search of moonberries when she had seen three small strange creatures scuttling about in the night’s dim light. She did not recognise them.
Finally Hobard asked about Rulf, Everdene stated there was no relationship between the two despite Rulf’s intentions.

​It was a short walk to the darkly stained timber-reinforced wattle and daub barn on the periphery of Gregory’s holding.
Colan, Titus and Trefor were intent on inspecting it but Gregor had shaken his head, refusing to join them and returned to the confines of his house.

Motes, disturbed by the entry of the three, swirled lazily in shafts of dim light that streamed from a colourless sky. A sickly sweet aroma greeted them when they passed into the barn’s shade, it was a familiar smell; rot and decay.
For the most part, rows of hay bales, some stacked high, filled the barn while a thin carpet of wayward straw littered the floor. Some searching revealed signs of rot coming from a handful of bales along a wall. Something had been disturbed, the spot had been cleared of straw.

As Colan, Titus and Trefor approached, a noisy rustle came from some of the hay. Before they had time to consider it, a handful of large rat-like things erupted forth, regarding the company with glittering black eyes and without hesitation, lunged at them.
Fortunately, the three were not wrongfooted, brandishing weapons before being set upon. A fight ensued and the creatures were quickly dispatched.

Pausing for breath and to wipe ichorous substances from their blades, the three of them spied something close to the rotted bales, something on the floor.
Titus picked it up, turned it over in his hand and regarded it, some kind of string necklace?
The three continued searching and after pushing aside some of the rotted bales discovered a trapdoor.

​From the circular building, Hobard headed out to Squire Rulf’s home. A brisk walk that had taken him beyond the town limits and in sight of a largish house - certainly larger than any in Millet Town.
He found himself at a thickset wooden door decorated with an ornate brass knocker fashioned after a dragon motif.
After rapping on the door, a middle aged woman dressed in servant’s livery answered, opening the door a crack. She explained to Hobard that Squire Rulf was too busy to entertain visitors for the day. Telling him to come back another time.
This did not sit well with Hobard who pressed his point, telling the woman this was urgent business. She hesitated but nodded and opened the door.

The interior was well appointed - if plain and with an abundance of unremarkable fittings, furniture and decoration. Winifred - the servant woman led Hobard to a reception room and sat him down in a solid wooden chair.
Some minutes later, Squire Rulf swept into the room, a heavy set man whose somewhat fine clothing was slightly mis-sized, he flaunted a well waxed, pompously long moustache.
Welcoming Hobard with an insincere grin, he asked what business had brought Hobard here?
Hobard explained that Everdene’s predicament had caught the attention Knights of the Round Table, warranting further investigation.
Rulf’s face darkened at the mention of the healer and he took a moment considering his answer. He informed Hobard that Everdene was actually a servant of Morgana Le Fay and that he had no tolerance for users of the dark magics. The disappearance of Martin Morden was proof of her intentions and she would eventually curse the entire town.
It was not particularly convincing and Hobard pressed him for more information but Rulf was not forthcoming.
Hobard did not see any value in continuing with Rulf and took his leave.

​The Morden household could be found in Millet Town and the walk back was uneventful. Typical for a settlement such as this, the household was a small, timber framed home sat among a row of identical houses.
Hobard knocked and the door was answered by a youngish woman, whose age was belied by the lines that creased a worried, uneasy face while eyes sat in darkened sockets. It was Joan, Martin Morden’s mother.
They spoke of Martin, Joan stated that she had last seen him heading in the direction of the inn, perhaps to find Madeline.

It was then that Titus appeared, he bore the string necklace found in the bard and had come to see if Joan recognised it. She did, it had belonged to Martin.
They did not know what this meant but Titus and Hobard hastily returned to the barn.

The company had regrouped at the trapdoor in the now gloomy barn, day was dimming, soon night would be upon the town and soon after that noon tomorrow would come. It was not the time to hesitate.
The trapdoor opened easily enough, man-made steps descended into impenetrable inky blackness below, distinct but somehow distorted sounds of running water rose from the darkness below.
Trefor cast a petty spell that produced light, the company exchanged glances before wordlessly marching down the steps.


​To be continued.

3rd July 2021

It's a Saturday evening and we're all logged into video chat for episode 27 of Matakishi's Wired Neon Cities campaign.

Location: Neon City

An hour ago, Electric Nights of Our Lives; Neon City’s longest running trashy vid-opera had been playing on the wall-slab while I had been slumped on the futon cradling a bottle of Dindanha.
Ridiculous plots played out as bad overacting was writ large. Images of impossibly beautiful actresses with sculpted proportions and smoothed, ageless skin swam seemingly larger-than-life across the wall-slab’s razor thin screen, accompanied by buffed up actors with bio-chiseled muscle implants and enhanced square jaws. Flirting eyes fluttered at each other with ice-blue replacement irises while pearl-white ceramic grins split perfect faces that delivered repetitive, cliched dialogue.

All of this was interrupted by Captain Ocano; the fiery Shinjuku precinct cop had pinged us a gig.
Sixty rumbling minutes clattered by riding the underserviced elevated tram network, rush hour had gone but it was still standing room only in grime caked, overfilled carriages as vacant dead-enders day-tripped while the lucky few consumers drifted from mall to complex, cred-slab in hand. The sprawling grey-white Shinjuku Station had rolled into view, it sat in the hub spiral of the municipal transit web that fed commuters all across the city districts, prefectures and beyond.
The reinforced, ferroconcrete bunker which was the Shinjuku precinct would be found further south.

Like every regular Neon City rentacop precinct, Shinjuku was under-resourced by its corporate backer. A noisy, undersized beige-decorated work space too small for its staff, filled with thin, glass-walled cubicles and neutral grey office dividers.
The constant murmur of busy chatter that usually re-verbed throughout the room stopped for a moment when we strode in. Sidelong glances told us something was up.
Across the bustling room we could see Ocano, the captain, in his usual awkwardly mis-sized chocolate coloured polyblend Kuabha two-piece suit was sitting on a bench outside his office. Despite the overcrowding, there was clean air around Ocano, looked like everyone was avoiding him? He was, in his usual loud voiced manner berating some old woman, telling her to sit down.

He noticed us as we began walking over, instantly ignoring the woman and beckoning with a sharp gesture. Crossing the room I couldn’t help but notice there was clean air around us too.
Ocano pulled us into one of the glass walled offices, the babbling murmur outside was cut off as the door closed.
“Too many ears out there,” he remarked.
Gesticulating wildly and punching the air in front of us rhythmically as he shouted, Ocano explained the situation.

Police Commissioner Jareth Sabine had paid Ocano a not-so-friendly visit a couple of days ago and had given him a real off-the-books directive.
Told Ocano to put heat on a mark called Doctor Gwen Armiger, wanted her scapegoated for handling narcotics by planting evidence in her apartment.
But Ocano was a rare thing in Neon City, a rentacop too straight-laced to frame some working stiff, so he’d done some digging.

Doctor Armiger was a typical corp-financed med-specialist, no outstandings, no irregularities, nothing noteworthy, Ocano kept digging. Then something came up.
City justice records showed that a week ago Armiger had taken a restraining order out against Jareth Sabine. Records showed he’d made multiple advances on the doctor and had been rejected every time, until she’d gotten sick of it and took action.
It wasn’t a good optics for the commissioner, looked like he’d taken it badly, wanted some payback and was leaning on Ocano for it.

Ocano went on, he didn’t know how to play it, wasn’t going to frame anyone but Sabine had a lot of juice to go against and couldn’t trust his associates beyond these office walls.
Needed outsiders to deal with it.
Finally, he told us that the raid was only a few hours away, had to move quick.

Hunkering down on a beige upholstered chair in a corner, I jacked into the GLOWNET.
Glass landscape, beige decorations and background office droning receded. 
Angular lines settled into polygonal shapes, a familiar geometrical architecture emerged; Neon City’s endlessly evolving chromatic info-vista
I was already zeroed at the precinct’s utilitarian concrete-coloured data-image, rentacop’s encryption algorithms had been cracked months ago and security protocols provided no barrier to immediately getting to the data-vault.

Had to be careful, rentacop directories in the vault could be busy, especially on a active operation. Launched an adaptive chameleon algorithm that would intermittently clone and reclone the bio-image of a random local vault user, then skin it over my Nonohiki’s activity transponder. Good enough to spoof them for a while.
Ran a hunter/searcher keyed to Gwen Armiger on the directories, got two hits behind a locked wall. Couldn’t risk using the normal rentacop key-string, might hit unique encryption and risked getting flagged if it didn’t match. Needed to run an entire cracking protocol, luckily corporate underinvestment for internal security meant that I got through quick.

It was a blatant frame-up job, no one cared to provide oversight on rentacaop, made them lazy, slack. Which meant it was clear what they were up to.
Rentacop were scheduled to pay Armiger’s address a visit soon and a warrant to search the same address was scheduled to be approved two hours later.
First visit was the stitch-up and the second, the bust.
Finding Jareth Sabine’s home address on rentacop’s own vault was easy. After that, I just updated both entries to that address.

Jacked out and lurched back into material reality while fighting the urge to vomit. Disorientation cleared after a few seconds and I was back in a glass walled, beige coloured world.
Soon rentacop would be planting the evidence in Jareth Sabine’s residence, then they’d be hitting the address with a warrant.
Pinged D4VID, gave the botcaster a tip on the ‘case’ and waited.

A few hours and D4VID’s exclusive started piping down the newsvines. Rentacop had hit Jareth Sabine’s home, storming the residence and finding forty seven Ks of the chem-engineered benzoylecgonine derivative. The vid showed his wife being dragged out to a Korazna sky-wagon  while handcuffed with a hood over her head. They flew off in the Korazna with the sirens wailing just for effect!
A later report would state that the commissioner had been picked up at the Sky Tree Golf Club.

​Didn’t get far on the ride back to Hikage; media-slabs pinged again.

Katsuko Nakamura was a corporate wage-monkey, a low-level exec on the Chou-Nata public relations payroll. We’d been involved with him a while back, looked like something else was about to drop in our laps.
Plain in his voice that something had Nakamura nervous, was talking about strange occurrences, going on about ‘manifestations’? Wanted us to check it out at his home.
Didn’t take much effort to divert.

Rokkaku Dai Heights was primarily a residential district, wasn’t quite the low-rate social housing neighbourhood that was Hikage Street and targeted the city’s wage-monkeys, the kind of place Katsuko Nakamura fitted right in.
Like Hikage though, the district contained small clusters and strips of retail units that served the residents but was mostly given over to highrises that looked just a little cleaner and more upmarket in The Heights.
Afternoon heat was beating down as we arrived at Nakamura’s alabaster white housing block and headed up.

The door to Nakamura’s apartment opened, both stress and relief were apparent across his clammy face, the heavy set man wore a salmon coloured Duuner polo shirt and a pair of Breach branded beige slacks; classic corporate exec casual wear.
We were immediately ushered in and sat down in a moderately sized but blandly decorated living room filled with Euro-styled faux-mahogany Talordu furniture, one cream coloured wall was dominated by a swathe of family photo-slabs. Dozens of semi-familiar faces grinned inanely at us from behind poly-digital displays.
Nakamura came balancing some imitation Benson Easterbridge crockery on a tray and fed us cups of tea from a gently steaming teapot. Explained that weird events were manifesting in his apartment on an almost routine basis. His wife had left because of the ‘disturbances’, he also explained his work and meetings were also being disrupted by these regular occurrences. We couldn’t make sense of what he was telling us, he told us to wait and that’s all we could do…

Thirty minutes passed, then it happened.
Inexplicably, a green-blue light engulfed the room.
Translucent, incandescent and also green-blue; a figure, a person - somehow a ghost materialised.
“You killed all of us,” accused the figure before vanishing.

Took us a moment, couldn’t be a ghost, had to be something else.

Got to searching. Didn’t take too long. Found a couple of Luoithan branded nano-emitters that could pump out holo-vids embedded in the skirting board, they were all wired into a hidden tiny junction box, someone had put some serious effort into getting at Nakamura.
The box had a compatible port so I wired my Nokohiki into it. The Data-slab’s display filled with code that showed the junction box contained some kind of A.I. protocol manager which controlled the projection of the holograph’s image, it also controlled all outgoing and incoming instructions, there were even some logs on the directory. Ran them through a decrypter and got a point of origin from the metal.
It was listed as a Chou-Nata server-vault.

Asked Nakamura about it, why would Chou-Nata want to target one of their own with this?
It was beyond Nakamura, he could only shrug, although he did say that he’d heard other Cou-Nata employees complain of encountering ghosts and had put it down to hallucinations, that or substance abuse.

Wasn’t much to go on with, one of Koko’s drones had taken a clear recording of our own encounter with the hologram and pushed the data to my slab. Something about the apparition’s face was off? Ran it through facial recognition; zero hits.
Ran an analytical algorithm on the remainder of the hologram with unexpected results..
Proportions across the body, the clothing were too mathematically predictable, meaning they’d been created by another algorithm to simulate a person. It was artificial, a 3D model, kind of explained why the recog had got nothing, it was a face that belonged to no one - a ghost - of sorts?

Material reality dimmed while primary coloured neon polystruts grew in luminosity as I jacked into the GLOWNET. Angular structures coalesced into the city’s info-vista, churning info-motes settled into surging, endlessly morphing data-flows.
Now we knew that the figure had been a 3D model, there was something to go on, I coded the model parameters into a hunter/searcher protocol and let it loose. It quickly came back with a solid hit. The model had come from a game called Vonheim.

Vonheim was a massively multiplayer online game that pulled countless Neon City residents into its virtual skinner box, detaching them from the daily inanity they mostly lived in.
This kind of thing was not our forte, meant it was time to contact Mister Peepers.

Mister Peepers was an uplifted chimpanzee, the result of illicit experimentation in a black-book Sensoji med-facility. Escaping his captors, he’d become a GLOWNET mirage, living under-the-grid, becoming a champion gamer and streaming celeb, it made him serious bank.

Pinged him the info on Vonheim models and he got back to us, they were part of the most recent update, listed as ’Indian peasant’ skins and available for purchase in-game. Standard cosmetic add-ons purchasable by any players Mister Peepers told us.

Not much to go on, Vonheim’s data-image was some kind of focus-group driven bombastic corporate logo. It had an extensive security protocol, whoever was bankrolling this outfit had put the dollar into it.
I launched a cracking algorithm but it got nowhere, looked like some kind of self-writing subroutine kept changing the encryption strings quicker than I could keep up. No way in.
Instead I probed the data-image.
A commercial GLOWNET presence meant it had to have multiple directory layers; the public facing directory would be the most vulnerable. Found a submission node for users to put in GLOWNET addresses into their mailing list.
The cracking algorithm got me into the mailing directory, wasn’t a lot to find there though. Ran a search of the mailing list and realised someone on the project had got lazy and merged its user list with its mailing list, gave me a list of all the players; not much but something to go on.
Dropped an image of the list into the Nonohiki’s storage and pinged it to Mister Peepers and waited. He might be able to get something out of the list.
Illegal augmentations that’d been wired into Mister Peepers meant his enhanced skills extended beyond gaming and streaming, allowed him to interact with data in ways I couldn’t even comprehend, providing him the skills to get ahold of the information we were looking for.
Didn’t take long for Mister Peepers to ping us.

Boyd Blackwood was an alias Mister Peepers messages informed us, a Vonheim in game tag; no surprise there.
Put it through the mailing list and got a real name; Monty Jangles.
The follow up was easy, used my backdoor into Neon City’s civic records to pull data on him.

Monty Jangles; sixteen years old, listed as living in the Mejiro Housing Complex with his parents. They in turn, ran what ostensibly was a family business called ‘Dangle Jangles’, that provided an exotic genital piercing service.
‘Put some ding in your swing’ was their motto.

Didn’t look like there was any link between what seemed like a teenage gaming-monkey and Chou-Nata, so I launched a hunter/seeker algorithm onto the GLOWNET with some specific criteria for deep dives and got some strange hits.

Out-of-town newsvine streams reported mass layoffs at Chou-Nata, seemed confined to mid-level execs from Japanese divisions, other subsidiaries were unaffected.

Got some hits for Monty Jangles too.
Bank accounts showed a lot of activity, he’d been busy buying Pohaden Xyrrig sneakers, a lot of them, Jovistock gaming hardware too - pricey stuff. The list went on, Segtendo consoles, Senonable FunDepot gaming slabs and so on.
There was more though.
Cash had been transferred into his account, routing code showed it had come from Mumbai, no further details though.

While the lurch from exiting the GLOWNET was always familiar, it never stopped the jolt of nausea from rippling through my body.
Back in Katsuko Nakamura’s apartment, I fought the urge to vomit.
Time to pay Monty Jangles a visit.

Getting to Mejiro was a mission, central tram network didn’t reach that far out, got us as far as Sunshine City.
Needed to transfer to the Neon City’s exclusive upmarket corporate monorail into Ikebukuro using our access cards and from there, a final ride on the local transit to Mejiro.
It was cramped, standing room only on the Toshima-cho prefecture tram network as we’d hit the late rush hour getting into the housing complex.
Fused out, dead-eyed wage-monkeys with their cheap two-pieces and Vijeso suitcases dominated all the available space as under-specced aircon struggled to keep the internal temperature to a barely manageable level.
Once the tram had grinded to a halt at the Mejiro station, doors slid open and a tidal wave of humanity drained out, dragging us in its wake.

The Mejiro Housing Complex that stretched out around us was primarily a residential district and clusters of tower blocks clad in neutral shades of concrete dominated the region while smatterings of small retail units were sporadically dotted throughout.

Day had turned to night during the trip, the sun receding behind a rolling eastern skyline. While we watched dusk’s reddening sky darken to black, rows of streetlamps dutifully winked into life as grids of urban building lights followed suit. Blustery winds, brought on by acute air pressure changes preceded the routine downpours.
The rush hour fallout has left Mejiro’s streets a busy place; returning wage-monkeys, undeterred as ever by the nightly rains, were heading home or out for a good time and filled the already packed streets.

A side alley on the edge of a housing block was where we located Dangle Jangles despite having to navigate the clamorous, broiling crowds, it was easy to find.
We found ourselves eyeing a half-and-half retailer space, a three storey affair that mixed a residential unit with a retail ground floor. Numerous examples genetal implants and attachments were arranged in a window display while a garishly coloured, neon-lit shop frontage stated its presence through glimmering precipitation.
‘Dangle Jangles - Put some ding into your swing’ blinked a buzzing red fluorescent sign. 
Trigger ran a thermal sweep, got a strange indecipherable heat source from below ground floor but zero hits elsewhere, looked empty otherwise; wasn’t unusual for a mom’n’pop to be closed after dark.
The lock did not hinder Koko, we were in without a hitch. A red fluorescent glow intermittently bathed the interior but looked a pretty normal set up inside for a low spec body augmenting chop shop.

Trigger told us that the heat source was likely someone in a basement, didn’t take long to find the way down
A muffled voice was projecting somewhere from beyond the bottom of the faux wooden steps, a soft, pencil-thin line of light was emanating from out of view.

We crept down, the landing opened into a largish, mostly undecorated basement, exposed floor and bare walls were lit starkly by a fluorescent strip hanging from the ceiling.
Unopened boxes of trainers were piled up brickwork-style along two of those walls.
A HSS QLQ255 wall-slab had been screwed into another wall, hooked up beneath was the latest Segtendo gaming slab, along with four custom hand-rigs.
Finally against the last wall, a Senonable ‘FunDepot’ gaming slab was sitting on a bespoke gaming table.
The slab was hooked up to a high-end Jovistock custom VR rig; a suspended full body harness specced with the latest omni-pressure, multi-haptic feedback servos and topped off with a top of the line glossy white Kuaijing Youdeji headset.

Suited up in the harness was a skinny, pallid teenage boy wearing nothing but dull, faded and slightly soiled Henry Champ branded underwear. Dried Kaia cola drip stains mingled with streaked fingerprints of cheesy flavoured Huanp chip flavouring to create work of modern art on his once-white vest.
Had to be Monty Jangles.
The headset meant he was oblivious to us, game data readout on the FunDepot told us he was playing Vonheim.
“More dots,” he said into his mic. “More dots, more dots, LESS DOTS”!
We weren’t going to wait around for this.

Trigger hefted him out of the harness and yanked the headset off. Monty Jangles blinked at us confusedly while sprawled on the concrete floor, struggled to prop himself up while his slightly podgy faced gawped from one to another of us.
He assumed we were here to shake him down, didn’t blame him to be honest.
“My parent’s stuff is upstairs,” he immediately blurted.
“We’re here for you,” admonished Koko.
Monty gave a yelp and flinched when he realised Koko was a girl!

Monty was belligerent when we told him to explain why he had scraped 3D data from a game and how it ended up in a holo-projector in Katsuko Nakamura’s apartment and refused to answer anything.
A threat to report his Boyd Blackwood account for irregular behaviour got him to change his tune. Told us that a GLOWNET phantom account had pinged him, offered to drop two hundred large for a full scrape of the new Indian peasant 3D models from Vonheim, textures, anims, skeletons, the works.
Monty admitted that he had the skills to get the files.
The phantom told him to edit the textures and make them look like Indian call-centre workers from Mumbai.
The phantom had also provided him with some server-vault’s GLOWNET geo-node coordinates to push the 3D models out to.

It was a lead but it would go nowhere. No GLOWNET operator worth their weight would leave such blatant footprints to a server-vault unless they meant to burn it. Didn’t need to go there to figure that one out.
We left Monty Jangles to his game went back out into the rain-swelled streets of Mejiro

​It was late when we dragged Katsuko Nakamura out of bed after we’d gotten back to his apartment. With a dishevelled red-wine coloured Eilbon robe half pulled over his crumpled pyjamas bottoms and T-shirt, he yawned and scratched his unkempt head as he logged on to his Chou-Nata terminal with bio-credentials..
The terminal was a custom piece of made-to-order Chou-Nata technology, a sturdily manufactured dumb-slab, hard-wired, geo-logged and tagged to Katsuko Nakamura personally, provided near undecryptable direct and exclusive access to the hive of Chou-Nata secured servers via proprietary isolated, non-indexed comms protocols under the GLOWNET.
Hit the Chou-Nata primary databases, ran a search for a Mumbai call centre, got nothing. No facilities in Mumbai or offices, staff or assets, nothing.
No other way of checking the databases, hacking the terminal wasn’t going to work, its functionality only operated in direct, live connection to a checksum driven security algorithm somewhere in the Chou-Nata data-vault hub which would pick up any anomalies within seconds.
Trying to get into Chou-Nata through the GLOWNET data-flows would also be practically impossible, its corporate network was essentially invisible, couldn’t clone or crack what couldn’t be seen.
Nakamura didn’t know of another way of getting Chou-Nata records.
Needed to go sideways. Put a bunch of keywords related to Mumbai through a GLOWNET hunter/seeker algorithm and ran a search, got some hits.

One hit caught our attention. Two years ago, some out-of-date newsvines suggested that what looked like a cholera outbreak in Mumbai had been reported in the local press but info was scant.

A GLOWNET dive was needed: Newsvines were vast, radiant poly-nodal constructs of intertwined spiralling threads of current affairs, finance, gossip, entertainment and more that created algorithmically procedural connections between noteworthy events.
They recorded colossal amounts of news reports, journalistic stories, videos and so on as well as related data movements. To avoid going out of control due to the enormous quantities logged data, old and under-accessed vines were auto-archived by compression protocols.
No way two year old data would not be archived.

Data stored in those archives was immense in size and searching required a focussed algorithm to prevent too much coming through. Scripted some custom instructions and programmed them into a hunter/seeker and let it loose. It got some hits that lead nowhere?

Had to take a look.
The algorithm had taken me to several newsvines but I didn’t see any data or reports on Mumbai, something was wrong. Choosing a vine, I went to the metal, something was missing without being missing?
Gaps existed in the vine’s nodal timestamps, something from those specific dates was gone? Segments of numerous vines did not seem to exist. It shouldn't be possible.
Deleting newsvine data was not something that was easily done, links between nodes would also be deleted and that had a high risk of corrupting related data and more; that hadn’t happened here, no corruption. The data had to be somewhere. Realising what had happened meant I had to go even deeper.

Indexing on the affected nodes had been removed, consequently, it would simply not appear on the GLOWNET. The data we wanted hadn’t been deleted, it was inaccessible by usual avenues without its indexing. Just to find a way to get to it.

Each vine had massive numbers of data-holding nodes, each node also had a timestamp which used unique encrypted identifier codes - incredibly long text scripts which were generated using an encryption key. Copying a code, I ran a cracking algorithm on it, reverse engineered it to get the key.
Now it was theoretically possible to predict what other identifier codes would look like.

The key was punched into another hunter/seeker algorithm that would auto generate potential codes and search for them and their related timestamps.The algorithm would then ping me positive returns.
It was throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck - but it worked.
A stack of positive node codes started crawling up my data-slab’s external display; these missing newsvine data nodes could now be directly accessed.

They had archived records of numerous reports from local Indian press about Mumbai. Ran the hidden records through a translator and got some good results.

Several reports mentioned a burgeoning ‘controlled’ slum that had appeared in an un-regenerated brownfield site on the outskirts of Mumbai several years ago and consisted of high density cheap prefab housing with minimal amenities and office blocks for the slum’s sole commercial enterprise - a Chou-Nata call centre. The reports continued, postulating that the slum was a creation of Chou-Nata and was populated by thousands of essentially indentured servants employed in the call centre to work off corporate debt.

There was more; two years ago a cholera epidemic had swept through the slum, a biological conflagration that had ravaged the population. Reports suggested that residents, perhaps out of anger or desperation had resorted to violence and rioting had broken out, hampering emergency medical response services and leading to further casualties.
Reports stated that, in the end zero survivors had been found by the time the medical responders got into the slum.
It didn’t sit right with us, continued digging.

Despite the reports, there were no official municipal, city or government records relating to a slum, call centre or Chou-Nata operations in Mumbai.
The only evidence encountered was a photo that purported to show the medical responders entering the devastated slum following the aftermath of the outbreak.
The responders shown in the photo were packing Konseye K4 9mm short barrelled SMGs or Bariah Arms Talfiq K684 12 gauge room-sweepers that were gripped tightly in their hands. The military grade urban grey coloured Verskeit Haanut smart armour they were specced out in displayed a little ‘star of life’ icon which had been hastily sprayed on the armour unconvincingly, we knew a mil-spec murder-squad when we saw one.

Jacking out the GLOWNET, I showed the photo to Nakamura, told him that it was from Mumbai and a brief flicker of recognition crossed his corpulent face, he seemed to go pale. Nakamura shifted over to his terminal, punched in some instructions and the slab returned a fairly anonymous looking text document. Under a Chou-Nata header was what it described as a strategic risk assessment. 
The text discussed what it called the ‘Foreign Worker Order’, reading on it discussed the strategic viability of eliminating indentured employees in case of a security incident..

Nakamura told us he had received documentation by accident; a mistyped address on it by his brother who worked in Chou-Nata’s internal Security office meant that Nakamura had received it.
Nakamura also admitted that he hadn’t known what to do with the document.
Even acknowledging that he had seen it would make him a security risk to Chou-Nata, so he kept all evidence of it secret.
Nakamura said he’d look into it now that there was a connection between the document and Mumbai.

Before leaving, Koko and I reconfigured Nakamura’s personal home systems, dropped in some enhanced reactive security protocols and countermeasures and disconnected the holo-projector. Whoever was actually launching these attacks wouldn’t be able to get to Nakamura so easily anymore.

​Rain was still splattering noisily against the polymer tarp in my one-bed by the time I got back to Hikagi. Across the city’s angular eastern skyline a barely perceptible band of rosy light was growing upwards. Soon, hot night would give way to even hotter day.
Before that though, I threw my Harbief boots in a corner and without changing clothes slumped on the futon. Sleep seemed to fitfully and reluctantly eventually come.

Later, Hikage had somehow become quiet. Hazy city night lights shone along the walls creating long indistinct shadows and casting a faint yellow hue on the pallid, smooth and grey coloured hairless craniums of large headed creatures who had materialised out of miasmic dimness to loomed over me
I was held unmoving in a soporific state, my wrist was pinned by a hard-edged grip while a biting sting flared from my arm. Unable to move my head, I could barely see in the unfocused peripheral of my vision some apparatus attached. I could do nothing.
A harsh shrieking yowl erupted into the silence and Captain Noodles was here, hackles up, snarling and springing at the creatures. With a sudden panicked spasm of movement they were then gone.
Only Captain Noodles remained; who sat on my chest and stared at me.

Morning came, black clouds receded, rain thinned away, rhythmic drumming replaced by an increasingly insistent droning as Neon City’s population roused itself, heat began to rise as a baleful sun climbed into the blue-white sky.
There was no sign of Captain Noodles and any evidence of the blood and skin samples taken from my arms had vanished.
My memories of the event had begun to fade away, grabbing my media-slab, I launched a dictation protocol and verbally recorded what I remembered, not knowing what else to do.

Morning went and I stayed on my futon, trying to keep cool and ignore the clamour outside, slipping in and out of lucidity until my media-slab chirped sharply. 
DJ Doctor A, master of ceremonies for Get Set Radio and conspiracy theory true-believer was pinging us. Told us a buyer for the autopsy footage had emerged, someone called Georgina Eveski was interested.
Contact details were provided and a meet was arranged at her home in Jorenji Temple, she wanted to personally meet us.

​Located in the Itabashi-cho prefecture, Jorenji Temple was situated at the furthest north of the city, one stop over on the crammed, overheated tram network and a ride on the climate controlled corporate monorail got us there. We walked the rest of the way.

Georgina Eveski’s apartment could be found in a small residential quarter on the periphery of the district, in sight of the vast city wall that separated the megalopolis from the wilderness beyond. With not so much thoroughfare, the neighbourhood suffered a little less of Neon City’s crushing population density, lending it an almost calm quality. Arriving at the door, we knocked and waited.
It was answered by Georgina Eveski; a middle-aged and overweight woman who tried to hide it by wearing a voluminous and flowing Fassus dress patterned with a green, red and yellow floral print. A wide, equally flowery yellow hair band held back shoulder length wavy hair. She also wore an excessive amount of Poratier, Emant, Vaisny jewellery and more. She was decorated with layers of glinting necklaces, bracelets and bulbous rings; her arms chinked when waved and fingers clicked when waggled.

She was pleased to see us, our auras were positive, she declared dramatically while expansively waving a jangling arm over us and said our chakras were open. 
Georgina went on, saying she loved the footage, it would confirm what she already was aware of, that extraterrestrials were amongst us.
The Golden Tibetan Temple of Transdimensional Travellers was her organisation for making contact and Georgina urged us to join it - for a small fee.
Captain Noodles had meanwhile subtly scrutinised her and quietly told us she had never been close to an alien.

Regardless of this, Georgina offered us forty large for the footage plus access to the GTTTT membership client database. They were, she told us, like minded individuals, who had seen or encountered aliens.
The price was good enough and significantly, gave us access to her database and those who claimed to have had extraterrestrial interactions.

Turned out Georgina Eveski’s organisation only had fifteen people; scanning the list we saw two immediate candidates for interview.
Tohi Mari was born on Ganymede and was a crew member aboard the ‘Lost Wisdom of the Ancients’ the ill-fated shuttle that suffered catastrophic failure enroute between The Moon and Earth. The shuttle’s fate was recorded with ‘all hands lost’, Tohi Mari must’ve been from an earlier crew rotation?
Wyatt Vanlith was a registered ‘space-pilot’.

First though, we decided to contact Nursery Bob and Jacky Boxes, the pair of Neon City transients who both had served with the Planetary Guardian Defence Force and claimed to have had alien contact.
Usually they could be found protesting outside the Rokkau Tower, we headed over to Rokkaku Expo Stadium.

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.

​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

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.