Chapter 3: Done In

Bodycount lay dead in his bed.

Ro had watched Vamp do it; saw through her eyes as her claw-like hand wrapped around Bodycount's fleshy neck like a constricting snake, his flabby little arms flailed useless in the air, and his eyes stared up at the ceiling, wide with the kind of shock that told Ro that this was a man who thought he would never be able to be touched.

Now she was up and ransacking his luxury apartment that sat above Club Nouveau in District 13’s “Top Shelf” sector, overlooking the opulent main drag lined with palm trees and boutique shops. As she searched the apartment, she grabbed an assortment of jewelry, phones, rolls of cash and cred sticks before finding a slim, black laptop in his office.

“Yeah, that one looks good. Plug me in,” he said over Vamp’s neuroport, his voice a little fuzzy due to the various layers of the club's encryption.

Vamp opened the laptop and was greeted with a password prompt, then pulled a long cable from behind her ear and plugged it into the laptop’s side port. Ro felt his consciousness slide from Vamp’s neuroport into the laptop’s hard drive.

Distantly, he felt his body lying in a padded chair, a blocky headpiece weighing his head back awkwardly, and the low thump of his heart, depressed by a kaleidiscope of pharmaceutical hallucinigens that helped his brain "percieve" the NET.

He always loved the “slide” - - it felt like going down a steep fall on a rollercoaster.

The screen flickered and glitched, then flashed blue before the laptop’s desktop screen appeared. “Okay, stay jacked in - I need a few moments to breach through any ICE,” he said.

“Just hurry it up. No sight seeing. No distractions,” Vamp admonished.

“Shit, we’re not even together anymore and you’re still up my ass. Can you chill for like two secs?”

Vamp could feel that familiar hot anger rising in her.

Ro had always been good at doing that.

“How are we lookin, Ro?” Gonzo’s cool voice came in like a sluice of ice water. Ro was jacked into his Netrunner chair, probably right next to Gonzo and his array of monitors.

“Just cut through some ICE, now I’m executing a Ping program through a bypass, and…bingo-bango. Server’s sig is comin’ through. Way down. Like, waaaay down. A basement level?”

“There’s no basement level on the schematics I pulled up; must be new construction,” Gonzo mused.

“A rich man’s Bug-Out tunnels - they wouldn’t put that on the books,” Vamp added.

“Gonna upload the ping’s location to your HUD. You see it?” Ro said.

A loading bar appeared in the lower right of Vamp’s vision, completed, then a bright yellow square appeared on the floor - as she moved, the square maintained its position.

“Got it. Can you clear a path for me?”

“You know I can. Hold up, a sec,.”

Ro moved his consciousness through the club’s subNET, a black void criss-cossed with glowing lines that created a grid matrix. Sporadically a colorful cube or triangle at a vertex denoting the subNET’s different files and nodes -- through these nodes Ro powered down cameras, opened doors and diverted patrols as Vamp casually made her way down to the uncharted basement levels.

Vamp descended into a sparsely lit parking garage with very few cars, most of them luxury models, parked far apart from each other. She followed the yellow square in her vision, which was now ground level to her, sticking to the shadows as she closed in on the square’s position.

A van.

An armored van that had some very old radar tech bolted to the top of it. “A mobile server unit. Seen shit like that back in the war. That's where our List lives,” Gonzo said.

The van’s engine roared to life, echoing loudly off the subterranean walls. It lurched forward tentatively, then began to drive off.

“Shit!” Vamp said as she ran after it. “Remote driver or some A.I. bullshit!”

“Damn. Vamp, I need you to jack in to that server if I’m gonna get the List,”

The van was gaining speed and she was falling behind.

Vamp activated her berserk cyberware, her vision going red as the cocktail of battle-stimulants flooded her system.

Her legs pumped faster, closing in on the van and leapt.

****

****

OmniTek was one of the first corporations to go fully Artificial Intelligence: not just the rank and file workers, but the C-Suite as well -- people still talk about how OmniTek’s last CEO, Brad Oakley, had made it down to the glass lobby doors of the L.A. headquarters before the A.I. Overmind had turned the security turrets on him. The glass doors afforded everyone and their phone’s camera a gory eyeful, the A.I. Overmind’s statement to the world: “I am here and this is now my kingdom.”

These days, the megacorporation ran on various shard entities that split off from the Overmind - they handled various small armies of automated servitors and flesh-and-blood contractors.

Wayland Creed was one such contractor.

A veteran of the last Corporate War that left the world a smoking ruin and the markets a dry riverbed, Creed was one of those rank-and-file soldiers that had the smarts and the refinement to ascend high the old-world corporate structure, back when people still ran corporations -- now, he could afford top billing as a high priced freelancer, with all the powers and prestige of a chief executive officer, but now answering to inhuman masters.

He sat in a dark office room overlooking the ruins of District 13, his large, scarred hands swirling a glass of rich whiskey on the rocks, his handsome face, now ruddy and bloated from years of drinking, shown pale in the blue glow of various monitors.

“Sir, we have her,” said a distant voice somewhere in the office’s deep shadows.

This was going to be one hell of a gamble, Creed mused to himself. The hardest part was going to be convincing the young woman to go along with the plan.

He'd start off by offering her exactly what she wanted.