Wired Neon Cities - Session 26

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.

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​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.