Wired Neon Cities - Session 30

14th August 2021

​It's a Saturday night and we're logged into video chat for session 30 of Matakishi's Wired Neon Cities campaign which is also the final session of season 2!

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Location: Neon City

“Bring your guns,” Porter Sladek had said over a message six hours ago. Had to meet him at Goji Tower, ready to go at seven AM.
No time for sleep.

First though, Koko powered the flier back to Hikage through the downpours. I watched wind blasted water beads slide horizontally off the rain hammered viewports as they caught the glint of the looming arrays of a million city lights that rolled by. Soon she put the flier down on a roof and we were out and went our own ways.
Briefly under the deluge then through the roof access, half jumping down flights of dull concrete steps that echoed distinctly while I descended the mostly empty stairwell until I reached my one-bed.
Rain splattered loudly against the tarp that secured one wall of the apartment against the elements. I ignored it, instead hitting up all my supplies.

Double checked the loadout for my .45 ACPs and took a full reload too.
Also packed a Konseye K4 backup. The stub nosed SMG wouldn’t hinder me, folded the stock and slung it in the small poly-nylon weaved holdall that held my Nonohiki. Grabbed all the stims I had at hand, ingests, drinks, dermals - whatever and dumped them in the holdall.
Finally as I left, I jammed a multipack of Savka sticks into the pockets on my Verskeit.

Caught up with the others on the rooftop again, curt nods all around meant we were ready for business. Nothing else to say.

---

​Short flight over to Rokkaku Expo Stadium, even so, it never deterred Neon City from piling it on.

Urus Konicek had pinged us. The Wilderness scavenger had news from The Enclave: Numerous fliers tagged with PGDF transponders had been detected overnight. Tracking data indicated activity was concentrated over the neck of the woods where we had previously found the old lab.
Urus wasn’t sure what was going down but he sent Neidzwiedz to investigate and would ping us again when something turned up.

---

​Coords provided by Porter Sladek led to the exclusive roof pad of a pricey penthouse on some local highrise east of the adjacent Goji Tower.
Rain had thinned; a slender band of burnt orange stretched across the silhouetted eastern skyline was driving night away. Through the retreating precipitous haze the enormous structure had been reduced to a vague behemothic shape outlined black against the diminishing night sky.
Dawn was not far.

Rooftop access led directly to the penthouse. A replica oak facsimile covered the ferro-carbon reinforced door auto-granted us access into a goldenly lit hallway decorated in cream and rose coloured fixtures. Our boots sank into the thick carpeting as we strode in to the sounds of voices.

Porter Sladek could be found standing in an exceptionally well appointed reception room at the balcony. Along with his customary denim slacks and Breach black turtleneck he also wore a Korean replica Keolmo branded icy white ten-gallon cowboy hat. Wasn’t hard to guess how he felt about his situation.
He may have had the ten-gallon on backwards?
Gripping a slim pair of obsidian black with silver trim Chanjueb binoculars, Porter Sladek was scoping out the Goji Tower, glancing only briefly at us as we entered.
“We need to get into the tower and kill Goji Rokkaku,” he told us matter-of-factly, turning back to the Chanjuebs. “He sent his zero beasts to try and rub me out last night. Would’ve worked, except for Dominic.”
Dominic 6-14, Porter Sladek’s personal robotic bodyguard was accompanying him. Servos buzzed almost imperceptibly as the robot turned to face us, I imagined his sensor arrays twitch, no doubt running a mandatory threat assessment protocol.

Porter Sladek wasn’t alone.
He was flanked by Oni Tokugawa, Michael Leander’s lean, cool-eyed, Uchike katana wielding master strategist and Oni’s own emotionless homicidal apprentice - Gemini Benedict.
There was serious political beef between Micheal Leander and Barnabas Heywood who were on opposing, warring factions on the Glitterband.
Goji Rokkaku had in some way aligned with Heywood and it had put Rokkaku squarely in Leander’s sights.
Made sense that Leander would send his top samurai against Goji. The enemy of my enemy.

Finally, there was someone who introduced herself as Seryy with an unsettling voice while staring intently at Koko with bottomless eyes.
Clothed in sandals, a red-and-white patterned trapeze dress and an obvious wig. Seryy had a strangely ashen complexion. Her large-headed frame and oversized coal-black, seemingly pupiless irises lent her a peculiar child-like but somewhat inhuman quality.
We’d seen her or perhaps someone like her before. Was she in some way an ally of Porter Sladek or just another enemy of Goji Rokakku?
Didn’t matter, took whatever we could get.
Porter Sladek’s binoculars were pushing a vid-feed to a local slate grey Karfseakk desk-slab propped up on a faux cherry wood side table. It was a fuzzy visual; range, distant rain and night did not help. Despite this, we could clearly see a number of four-metre high steel reinforced concrete barriers had been circled around the tower’s base.
It would make an already risky frontal assault much harder.

“We need to initiate a full-on frontal assault!” Porter Sladek informed us.

Before our approach could be discussed, a door swung open and there was Binary Johnny, the chin straps on his trademark goggles and imitation flying cap dancing merrily as he strode in carrying a grey stiffened card tray stacked with Tandredo Sinatti branded paper coffee cups. Bitter, pungent aromas floated across the room as Johnny handed out steaming drinks.

Was likely the Goji Tower would have some kind of serious anti-air defensive measures that could be quickly deployed. An approach on an aircraft, even the flier with its stealth tech was not viable.
No way of getting over the concrete coated barriers either: Earlier, looking for a way to scale the barriers, Oni Tokugawa had hit them with caltrops and pitons. The feed was showing they had melted into glinting ferrous silvery smears across the barrier’s surface. Sure sign that a localised but massively concentrated electrical field had been extended over the barriers.

Seryy seemed to have an idea on a way in though. She turned to Koko, explaining it might be dangerous and then held out a slender, weirdly overlong fingered hand.
Koko did not hesitate and took it.
The air surrounding the pair inexplicably wavered acutely like Neon City’s distant blue-white sky on a hot noon. The contortion continued, intensifying, eventually collapsing in on itself. Then, Koko and Seryy were gone - as was the distortion.

Immediately, over comms, Koko could be heard puking.
“We’re up in the Goji Tower,” came Koko’s voice after gathering her composure. “I’m not sure Seryy can do that again,” Koko added.
“I can maybe teleport one more,” explained Seryy.
“Send me,” I replied.

The suite squirmed into impossible shapes around me, light radiated through the room like an old overexposed photo while it simultaneously receded into an endless darkness, detail fading.
Realty then, untangled itself, normal light levels were restored.
Not dissimilar to lurching out of the GLOWNET, I was forced to shake off disorientation and nausea.
A cubicle surrounded me, white ceiling punctuated by a humming panel light hung above ash grey carpeting and perimetering it all were cream walls. Adjacent to a door was a frosted window while flush to one wall was an unused beige topped, laminated chipwood desk.
Koko and Seryy were also here, crouching

Koko pressed a finger to her lips, gesturing downwards and I dropped. For a second we were motionless, a distorted apparition passed the frosted glass, the indistinct figure obliviously walking along the outside corridor.

Time to get to work, grabbed a handful of carpet tuft in the corner and yanked hard. It rolled back to uncover various lines of cabling which ran along the wall including a networking cable.
Rummaging around the poly-nylon holdall I pulled a Maiulava microtool from a side pocket. It buzzed slightly as it cut through the cable’s vinyl insulation, exposing optics.
After that I daisy-chained a hard wire through my Nonohiki into the local network, through a jury-rigged port I’d spliced to it.

Jacking into the Nonohiki data-slab, the dull cubicle evaporated into nothingness while the Rokkaku private corporate network compiled about me.
Absent were the familiar colourful neonic constructs which public GLOWNET users would be accustomed to interacting with, instead replaced with a workmanlike monochrome networked file map encompassed by void.
Interfacing locally meant that the data-vault’s primary security measures had been already bypassed. Observing the stack on my Nonohiki showed an autonomous ICE presence in the network though.
It was passive but would become active if it detected non-typical code movement in the data-vault..
Had to move fast to deal with it and get it right the first time.

Quickly punched in a local recurring, mathematically expressed exponentially increasing query, then pushed it at the climate control diagnostic management protocol.
The protocol would respond by questioning the query which would - in turn respond with a new more complex query snaring the protocol in a loop.
It would take the ICE a few seconds to detect the unallotted increase in cycle usage and a few more seconds to kill the query. Enough time to relocate into the personnel files, stacks of data rolled by, found an offline high level user, cloned their network credentials over the bio-image data file on the Nonhiki, then switched to a wireless connection.
Worked, I was a ghost.

Even so, the clock was now ticking.
Once the query was shut down, the ICE would ping its changelog to a security user who would then follow the standard operating procedure for security users and personally come online to inspect the incident.
While I was invisible, the user I was piggybacking was not, they could be tracked.
Quickly I hit up the defence directory in the security partition. Activated a system update cycle for the anti-air measures, then pinged instructions to the others to get here.

The anti-air system would be out of reboot fairly quickly but it was enough time to allow Koko to remotely bring the others over in the flier and put down on a nearly featureless asphalt grey ancillary helipad at ground level while we rushed to meet them.
Got off the pad as quick as possible, the flier was out range for the defences here but was still an unauthorised vehicle, it might get flagged once the reboot had concluded.
Now, had to move fast.

Checked the network’s stack. Looked like the rogue query had been dealt with.
The ICE was now prowling the registry archive and looking for historical data inconsistencies, was also certain a security user had an online presence somewhere on the local network with a masked bio-image.

Found ourselves in a hallway decorated with polished granite tiling that glimmered in the diffused wall lighting. No one was about at this hour, no security either. So far, so good.

Encountered a row of silvery elevator doors set in the granite. Each one had a crystalline looking‘ call elevator’ stud that winked crimson when pressed.
Before we rode it, I spoofed an instruction line into the elevator management protocol to throw off any security response. Protocol would think we were going to floor forty. Real destination would be top of the tower; one-sixty.
The elevator interior with its white and silver decor and beige carpeting was typically pristine for a Rokkaku facility. An oblong console embedded in one elevator wall was populated by an elaborate looking grid of octagonally shaped faux crystal studs with numbers that ran one through to one-sixty. Punched the stud for one-sixty and sent the code for forty, doors slid shut and for a few seconds there was a tug on my guts as the elevator accelerated upwards in express mode.
Then, everything went wrong.

The crimson glint that had been hopping from stud to stud reached sixty and a sharp retort abruptly came from outside the car, followed by the harsh shriek of distorn metal, then, the car slowed, then, it stopped and then, we were in freefall.

Catastrophic failure on this magnitude just didn’t occur spontaneously; a deathtrap built into the elevator sounded just like Goji Rokkaku’s style.
As I felt my insides shift during downward acceleration, I watched the crimson glint backtrack at immense speed, the thought occurred to me that whatever security user was on the network had been good enough to had somehow made us.

During the plummet, Roderick and Dominc took a second to react. At impossible speed, each robot took an opposite wall in the elevator, braced against their chosen side and punched at it. The ferro-poly composite folded inwards under the immense blows, shunting panels from their housing. Almost immediately, both of them had gotten through the elevator walls and were driving their toughened steel fingers into the wall of the exterior shaft.

With a monstrous grinding roar, the elevator came to a halt enveloped in a shower of dust that had thinly streamed through the holes. On the panel, intermittent flickering came from the studs for floors twenty and twenty one.

Unused to these situations, Porter Sladek had panicked, pacing the car and protesting loudly, ironically fearing the noise of the drop would bring Rokkaku security.
“Take this, it’ll take the edge off,” Trigger offered, waving an adrenaline injector at him. Didn’t help, he then handed Porter Sladek a small tub from his personal stash of White Lotus liniment.
Before Porter Sladek responded, he was abruptly struck by Dominic with a free appendage, the robot impassively watched the billionaire senselessly flop to the elevator floor.
At least the yelling had stopped.
Needed a way out - quick!
Roderick and Dominic could only hold the car for so long. The rest of us worked at the elevator doors, prising them apart with effort.
What was on the other side surprised us.

The panel indicated the car had come to a stop between two floors. Instead of exposing the elevator shaft walls, the doors opened partway into a hidden floor between twenty and twenty-one.
How many secrets did the Goji Tower have?

Dragging the unconscious Porter Sladek with us, we clambered on to the hidden floor, followed by the two robots who simultaneously leapt out, allowing the elevator car to plunge into darkness below, impacting a few seconds later with a boom that reverbed throughout the shaft.

The hidden floor was workmanlike. Dangling strips of humming, flickering fluorescents inadequately lit small rooms and corridors of exposed grey concrete floors and ceiling that sandwiched long strips of some kind of large wall panels while being underpinned by unpainted steel jointing.
Footsteps echoed distinctly as we advanced through this sparse environment.
Threads of thick black rubbery cabling loosely pinned to undecorated cornices on each panel ran seemingly along the entire floor.
The cabling connected to square mechanisms that were attached to alternating panels and consisted of strengthened polyferro plating, power cells and hydraulic pumps linked to articulated piston actuators which were bolted between wall panels.
Johnny seemed to think that pistons were there to move the panelling. It was something that had been encountered during our last interdiction into the Goji Tower - moving walls. Only now we were looking at the guts of the system.
Further along we also came across regularly placed red coloured cylindrical tanks screwed to the ceiling, topped with nozzles and were labelled ‘fire suppressant’.
Otherwise the floor was empty.

Soon we came across another elevator, some kind of maintenance elevator this time that lacked the well appointed veneer of the previous one. The plain grey doors opened into an interior of more unpainted steel and panelling, along with a console of plain buttons. From those buttons it had become apparent that there was a hidden floor between every floor in the Goji Tower, this elevator only stopped at those hidden floors and went as high as the hidden floor between one-fifty-six and one-fifty-seven.
This time we got to the top without problem.

Continued exploring, same as the other floor, filled with moving wall panels, more fire suppression systems, another maintenance elevator.
It only led to more hidden floors. They would be the same. Needed to get back on to the normal floors.

Binary Johnny took his own microtool and wrenched apart the panel that housed the call elevator button, revealing a dense mess of connections behind it. He observed the cabling for a moment before plucking one free from its input.
He then rummaged around a pocket in his replica flight jacket and produced a connector that would remotely daisy-chain his data-slab into the exposed input port. Seconds later he had direct control of the elevator.

On Johnny’s instructions, the rest of us heaved the elevator doors open to an empty shaft. Johnny had made the elevator car stop just before our current floor with its roof almost flush with our floor.
Following Johnny’s lead we hopped on the roof and he instructed the car to slide up a few meters which took us to one-fifty-seven.
Without any doors here, Roderick and Dominic would have to break through the interior divide.

The pair of robots were reaching for the wall panel when Koto unexpectedly flared in my cerebrum, colour, sound, all exploding behind my eyes. During a liminal instance that manifested between photonic beats the sentient dubstep song increased in intensity. I knew Koto was warning me; danger!
No hesitation, no confusion, I ate the top of the elevator roof as a widening swathe of bullet holes blossomed across the wall, flinging chips of plaster over us.
Taken unawares, Johnny caught a round and went down soundlessly.

Weapon pods on Roderick and Dominic’s limb’s flicked opened, armaments popping out as they immediately returned fire, advanced threat detection able to extrapolate targets from bullet hole patterning.
“Drones,” Roderick’s harsh metallic voice warned us between bursts.
Koko brought our own drones; Felix and Sylvester online, the pair of Suayo gun-drones networked with tactical telemetry feeds from the robots and opened fire. Combined, focussed  firepower from the four soon did for the other drones. Smell of cordite hung in the air as silence and dust descended.
No more threats detected, the robots proceeded to knock down what remained of the partition while Koko got Tonakatsu to stabilise Johnny with nanite loaded dermal sealants, hit him with some hardcore stims and he was up.

Stepping out of the elevator shaft we were surprised to find ourselves in what seemed to be a hotel grand lobby.
A soft orange-gold glow radiated from buzzing replica filament lighting units fixed to walls painted apricot and lit an expansive, unoccupied area. Our boots squeaked distinctly on a polished floor of grey-marbling threaded with silvery veins while we inched forward. A number of well upholstered tangerine wingbacks were clustered around low, circular coffee tables in one corner, while in the opposite was an unmanned reception desk topped in a darkly stained cherry desk top. Adjacent was an equally empty hotel bar.

“There’s something ‘above’ us,” Noodles offered, ears twitching. There was more, Noodles seemed to think that ‘whoever’ was above were Seryy they were hunting.
Seryy seemed to shrug, admitting it was possible. Much of her memory prior to the orbital attack on The Bay was missing. Serry recalled being restrained in a container that had busted open during the attack. Escaping into the bay, she had nearly drowned before the Hop Sing gang had rescued and sheltered her from her pursuers.

Roderick confirmed there were no immediate threats on this floor, searching got nothing. The decision was made to take the stairs for the last three floors.
Got to the door which led to the square stairwell, concrete steps wound their course through an undecorated steel-reinforced shaft.

Got to one-fifty-eight. Stairwell opened into a silent corridor carpeted in thick crimson shag with rows of subdued spot lighting along apricot walls that led to numerous intersections. Lines of doors ran along both the corridors. One-fifty-eight also looked unoccupied. Zero threats detected.
Tried a door; led to an unlit room, lights auto-flicked on. A guestroom; fresh multi-blended egg-shell cotton sheets were smoothly draped over a double bed, obviously unused.
Adjacent was an equally unused steel and glass sideboard and opposite was a large dormant wall-slab.
Along one wall, fully drawn floor-to-ceiling vertical blinds masked the city beyond, thin slats of gold the only evidence of the dawn outside.
An adjoining door led to a replica porcelain and gold fitted ensuite.
Next to the door, on the interior, a small wall-slab embedded into the wall was waiting for some sort of check in code.
Returned to the corridor.
Another door, another guest room. Was time to move on.

One-fifty-nine was next.
The stairwell opened on to an open plan room stretching out ahead. Stark, overbright square light panels set in the ceiling above shone over a white with grey speckled epoxy-resin floor sparsely populated with minimalist steel workbenches littered with an array of scientific apparatus. Centrifuges, magnifiers, rows of glassware, medically branded desk-slabs and more.
Temperature was definitely a couple of degrees lower and a sharp chloric smell intruded into my nostrils from this seemingly empty laboratory.

I saw Roderick go weapons-hot; threat detected. The robot opened up, tabletop equipment buckled and spun off workbenches, shards of shattered glassware showered us as deafening gunfire raked across the room. Something was hit, but what? Nothing we could see as we dived for cover.
Return fire erupted from the far side of the room a moment later.  Behind a workbench, I flinched as it shuddered under sustained fire.Dominic joined the fight, as did Seryy in her own way.

Felt like altitude had suddenly changed during the fight; a rapid increase in pressure on my ears occurred, so intense my vision dimmed. The air somehow seemed to whip me as I felt something extrude from Seryy.
Whatever it was, it had been directed at the opposite end of the room luckily.
Furniture was sent crashing against the far wall, workbenches crumpled under some force, everything else was flattened.
Seryy keeled over, breathing was laboured, whatever she had done, wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
Whatever had been over there attacking us had stopped, apart from the buzzling of broken electricals, a silence descended.

Roderick bounded across the room. Driven by his robotic legs, he leapt on something that wasn’t visible to me and brought his polyferro booted foot down with distinct thud.
A spray of blood seemed to emerge from nowhere, splattering across the speckled floor. The air then wavered and something appeared under his boot.
With a thin-limbed frame and oversized head, was some sort of smallish man lifelessly sprawled out, his pallid ashen complexion and bottomless eyes resembled Seryy. Were these extraterrestrials from the old lab we found in the wilderness?
Had to press on, no time to speculate. Took stock, No serious injury sustained and Seryy was able to walk, gathered our wits and moved on.

Finally! We had hit one-sixty.
Stairs opened into a typically drab but also empty office. Grey carpeting, beige walls, panel ceiling lights, we’d seen it on the lower floors. A row of desk-filled glass walled cubicles ringed a central open area containing a labyrinth of grey office dividers that delineated between dozens of more desks, an active unmanned corporate Ravine branded data-slab on each one.
Along one side was a massive embedded Senonable wall-slab that took up most of that space.
“No threats detected,” came an announcement from Roderick.

Despite being unused, screens on the desk-slabs showed a variety of endlessly updating data on the desk-slabs. Rows of numerical values on readout arrays were constantly recalculating, stacks were rocketing off screen on some displays while others showed some kind of orbital profile solutions tracking numerous satellites..

Before Johnny or I could check out the desk-slabs, the Senonable winked into life.
Larger than life, Goji Rokkkau appeared on the enormous display against a featureless hazy background that contrasted with his almost silhouetted Gaongha carbon black suit and cream coloured scarf. Middle-aged with a firm square face and completely bald, his eyes glittered while a thin smile cracked his greying goatee, revealing a row of perfect teeth.
Looks like he’s been tracking us all along.
Set to full volume, the speakers crackled sharply, 
“I welcome you to join me in an adventure,” blared a voice through the speakers, then the Senonable went dead.

Without warning, the office began to tremble, the whole building shook.
Displays on the jittering desk-slabs had changed. Many were showing a countdown that was seconds from reaching zero. Others showed outside vid feeds of Goji Tower.
Feeds showed parts of the external cladding were shed, tumbling down in heaps while the tower continued to vibrate. As the countdown hit zero, a blinding yellow-white glare burst from the base of the tower followed by a violent eruption of flame and billowing smoke.
The concrete barriers erected earlier contained the flame, redirecting it along a previously hidden channel to the Neon City bay at a tremendous speed. Other displays showed the bay’s waters boiling.

I felt upward movement as the base of the tower detached itself from the ground, rising and  leaving a gout of fire in its wake.
It was a rocket, Goji Tower was a rocket, launching something into space?
Upward acceleration continued, immense weight pinned me to the floor, barely able to look, I could the others also slumped to the floor.
The pressure grew too much, struggling to breathe, I watched the ceiling panel lights seem to dim, oblivion crawled into the edges of my vision and the lights failed altogether.

Later, the others would tell me that the Goji Tower rocket had continued its trajectory. The sprawl of Neon City’s conurbation had fallen away, contracting into a single diminutive speck on the landscape that rolled towards an horizon which eventually revealed the curvature of the Earth backlit by a solar nimbus while spreading night seeped into the blue-white day.
The rocket then banked, adjusting to a new heading and through a viewport they saw the Earth rotate while a colossal orbital structure also slid into sight, almost filling the viewport.
Our destination; The Glitterband.

End of Season Two