The light, dimmed by the smog of the city, gently woke Sam from his sleep among the garbage of the new Berlin city center. Sam was a 24-year-old outcast whose family moved to the city nearly half a century ago after founding the tech corp 'NovaByte' in their native Nicaragua. Sam lived the life of a scion of the highest socioeconomic level until his parents were involved in a hover car accident and Sam was left without access to the family's finances after his uncle quickly seized the family's property. Sam knew he would have to live like a slave under his uncle and decided to seek his fortune on the streets. Better to be free and poor than a slave. For 4 years and 3 months he had been living on his own. He wasn't as poor off as most homeless people, because of the Augs he got on his 18th birthday. His eyes helped him navigate the city without accidentally bumping into gears, his artificial lungs allowed him to run away from the police without being caught, and the massive changes to his brain allowed him to hack into cameras and security systems, as well as manipulate unprotected eyes. Of course, Sam could easily lead a good life with his skills, but he was sure that he would be found by his uncle if he lived openly in the city, even under a false name. Sam didn't want to live in constant fear and had become very accustomed to his life in the streets of the mega city. There was something liberating about knowing that you didn't have to follow a single rule in the world. Sam got up from his favorite place, hidden between 2 large mountains of metal scrap, stretched and enjoyed the smell of the city. It was located in the EEI district, which was run solely by Mega Corp. East European Industries and had been trying for years to become a separate city within New Berlin.
The district hardly differed from the other corpo-related districts, gigantic mega buildings for the workers, beautiful houses for the high-ranking employees and huge streets designed to get as many goods as possible out into the world. Sam was in the western part of the city, where mainly the production facilities of EEI were located, which meant that there were many places with hardly any people, as the time of human production work was long gone. Only a few supervisors and mechanics could be found here regularly. But that's exactly why this place was so popular with underground groups who needed space for their business. Nothing is better than a warehouse abandoned for decades surrounded by even more warehouses that have been abandoned for decades if you want to carry out your activities undisturbed. Sam was drawn south, deep into the former industrial area. He wasn't sure in which of the warehouses he would find his next.... Business partner, but sooner or later he would meet a group of rising cyberpunks who would make a good platform to test his latest daemons. As soon as the experiments are all successfully completed, Sam will be able to sell the programs for good money on the black market. What was done with the programs afterwards was not his problem. If he were to worry about it, his conscience would be so burdened that it would have the mass of one of the huge garbage dumps outside the city. Sam was well aware of what was being done to daemons that could eat deep into people's cyberware to perform various pre-programmed actions. Such as stopping the nerve connections between the brain and any external influences, such as seeing, hearing, feeling and the like. If the victim had cyberware that had access to these senses, understandably. After passing 8 warehouses and still not finding a hidden operation, Sam slowly became impatient and annoyed. He had never had much patience, but since he had improved his body with cyberware and cybermancing equipment, it had gotten even worse. He could do many digital tasks at the same time and in just a few seconds, he had gotten used to that by now and when reality was forever in coming, it felt like an infinity of doing nothing to Sam. After another 3 buildings, he got tired of wandering around and decided to approach the matter in a different way. Usually, this method would take longer than simply searching for occupied buildings, but since he had no luck with the former, Sam hoped for more success here.
Sam retreated to a secluded corner, not visible from the street, behind a garbage container and crouched down. He switched his eyes from improved vision to scan, looking around for data tubes that ran all over the city and were the spine of the city network. It didn't take long to find one, as a main datatube ran directly below the road. That surprised Sam a little. Why wasn't this tube diverted after no one needed access in this area of the city? Only the city's surveillance cameras would need a data connection, but a smaller tube would be enough for that. But Sam pushed these considerations into the background and instead concentrated on reading the access data of this Datatube connection by means of the hacking device that was built into his brain stem in order to then hack into the administrative network. It was much better secured than expected and again the questions arose why such a datatube was used here. After barely 13 minutes, Sam had finally made it and was now looking for all forms of surveillance, hoping to detect suspicious activity. At that moment, Sam realized why this datatube was being used and why it was so well secured. It wasn't a New Berlin Tube, not even an officially existing one. The subnet used for this was that of the notorious Aizutachi Organization, a mafia-like group that had apparently set up a new headquarters here in EEI. Sam saw countless simultaneous trials and hundreds of illegal cameras. Even before he could log out of the subnet to disappear, an alarm was triggered. The hole in the defense that Sam had exploited to gain access had apparently only been a trap. Before he disconnected, his HUD was flooded with information about himself, appearance, location, cyberware, everything to identify him was just uploaded and sent to all the people and machines connected to the Net. Sam cut the connection and began to walk. He had to get out of here as soon as possible. The Aizutachi were a splinter group of the Japanese yakuza who came to Europe almost 20 years ago to extend the power of the yakuza to Europe. Sam had never had anything to do with the Yakuza so far and he was damn happy about it. According to the stories, these were usually not pleasant meetings. Sam, however, was on foot and accordingly not very fast in his escape. While he was still deep in the former industrial area, he heard vehicles behind him, according to the sound of 4 to 5 motorcycles and 2 cars. He turned into an alley between two buildings to at least get rid of the cars. According to the sound, it seemed to work, leaving him only with the problem of the motorcycles. He heard that they were approaching quickly, so he turned around and switched his eyes to Scan, so he could see the connections that were displayed as Wireless Connections on the motherboard in the brain of the driver in front. In a split second, he hacked the relatively weak defenses and installed one of his daemons. The rider collapsed on his motorcycle and crashed, while the back of his head burst into flames after his cyberware was brought to a massive overload. However, that didn't stop the other three riders from simply driving past their fallen comrade and continuing towards Sam. He didn't have the time to hack all three, so he hacked the first one, loaded up a smaller daemon that blocked his view and threw himself to the side into a pile of discarded metal parts. His left side burned with pain as a sharp part drilled between his ribs. But Sam tried to ignore the pain.
He pulled his Hamatachi SP45 Tech pistol out of his waistband and fired two bullets at the rearmost of the riders. The pistol spat out two very small metal parts, which were brought to a very high speed by electromagnetism. Similar to a railgun only many times weaker. The metal lumps drilled into the back of the rearmost rider and caused him to fall. The blind driver at the front end of the group lost control of his machine and rammed a garbage container in the alley at full speed and was thrown many meters forward. So only the middle driver was left. Sam stood up slowly and agonized, the metal part in his side turned out to be a bent piece of aluminum that protruded twisted from his ribs. Sam tried to ignore it and take the last opponent to the finish, but it was incredibly difficult for him to forget this tremendous pain. He failed to aim in time and saw the rider jump off his bike and sprint straight towards him. The driver had pulled out a short, flashing knife and was only about 7 meters away from Sam. He concentrated and, instead of trying with the pistol, with which he probably wouldn't be fast enough, Sam hacked his opponent. He broke through his defense just as the knife was in Sam's face in the most direct way. At the very last moment, he uploaded a small but very effective daemon. The knife slid towards Sam's eyes and at the last moment the motorcyclist's arm cramped and he only caught Sam's ear. At the same moment, Sam threw himself to the ground and kicked his attacker's leg, but Sam only felt pain in his foot when it hit the presumably Cybernetic legs. Landing with his back and panting in pain, Sam raised his hamatachi and fired. But his counterpart was faster than expected. He spun while he was still stabbing the target, and with a smooth movement threw a small knife in Sam's direction. The knife and the shot from the pistol hit at the same time. Sam felt the pain in his chest, but it was only a fraction of the pain in his ribs, so he ignored it and kept shooting. After five more hits, his opponent finally went to the ground. Sam looked at the knife stuck in him and realized what it was. A neurotoxin knife. Even as Sam cursed, he felt the poison spreading through his body and prayed it would be deadly to avoid being interrogated by the Aizutachi in torture. After a few seconds, Sam lost consciousness.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
A stabbing headache woke Sam. Glistening light burned in his eyes and he tried to change his optics, but his cyberware did not react. He looked around and found himself tied to a chair surrounded by several people. Most of them equipped with weapons such as baseball bats and metal pipes and presumably performance-enhancing cyberware. Directly in front of him was a Japanese woman with excessively large eyes, each with three pupils. "Good morning," she purred. The pain in Sam's head got worse. She had probably hacked into his system and presumably uploaded daemons to cause him pain and disconnect him from his own cyberware. "Well, Samuel Alvarez. Why did you tamper with our tech? What was your goal, who are your clients and how did you know about our system here?" The woman's voice was cold and intimidating. It was in stark comparison to her small figure and the innocent appearance that the large eyes gave her. Sam tried to collect himself. The headache was pounding in his ears, the pain from his chest, ribs and foot didn't help too much and he was still dazed from the toxin.
He began with "I didn't know anything about you-" but he was interrupted directly by the woman: ". Why are you here, who is your client and how did you find out about our system?" "I DON'T KNOW! OK?" Sam shouted, "I was just looking for a few insignificant punks to try out a new daemon." The woman raised an eyebrow and Sam hurried to continue, "I wanted to access the city's datatube to get into the CCTV network and thus speed up my search. I didn't know that the Datatube belonged to you and when I realized it, the alarm had already gone off and I cut the connection directly." The woman looked over at a man standing in the shadows in a complete Cybermancer suit, who seemed to check something for a moment and then nodded. "Hm, seems like at least part of your story is true. Do you know who we are?" Sam looked around for a moment before he answered, "Those meat blocks there are probably just goons that you use for your dirty work, but you and that one over there belong to Aizutachi, right?" The woman had to suppress a smile at his words and answered: "Right. Then you probably know what happens to people who step on our toes. Right?" Sam swallowed and nodded. She withdrew from him and studied him as he sat completely helpless, tied to the chair. After his head had cleared, Sam had spent the entire time of the conversation analyzing his system and finding vulnerabilities in the grip on his cyberware. He tried to break the daemon with all the strength of his will and the fear he felt. He made it at least partially and had access to his hacking device and his eye scans again. While the woman looked at him, he looked at the goons and with the last remaining strength he loaded up a paralysis daemon for each of them. They all collapsed and Sam looked at the woman. "I know what you're doing with your victims. But I'm not a victim. And if you don't give me the opportunity to talk to you normally, I guess I'll have to get that opportunity by force," Sam exclaimed. He bet everything on the fact that his counterpart was so impressed and intimidated by the loosening of his grip on his cyberware and the elimination of the musclemen that his threat sounded really dangerous. Although at the moment he couldn't upload even the smallest of his daemons without frying his own brain. The woman merely raised an eyebrow and continued to look at him. Sam held her gaze and tried to appear as intimidating as possible. He didn't know if it worked. After 20 seconds, the little Japanese woman spoke: "You can't do anything to me, your cyberware is completely overheated. But I'm still impressed. You can consider yourself lucky, you will not be tortured to madness or to death to set an example to other low lifes. I'll give you the chance to talk to one of our recruiters. Maybe you'll still be useful to us." With these words, she left the room without even giving the paralyzed men a glance. The man in the shadows, however, remained, and after a little more than a quarter of an hour, a tall, gaunt figure entered the room. Sam had almost thought he would get into one of the torture programs after all, but when the shackles were taken off him and every daemon was pulled out of his head, he dared to hope.
Sam introduced himself to the gaunt figure by the name Kazuto Auburo, he was the recruiter of the Aizutachi splinter cell here in New Berlin. The woman who had interrogated him earlier turned out to be Sara, codename, MoRa. Commander of the Security Department.
"So," came from Auburo, "we are quite capable of recognizing talent, even if it works against us at the beginning. Sara sent me a detailed report and I have to say, I am impressed. Not only did you hack into our datatube, triggering a trap in the process, but you almost managed to get away from our squad afterwards. That sounds to me very much like an asset that needs to be used. I now give you the choice. Become an Enforcer under Sara, or face your end. I don't have time to play games with insignificant cyberpunks, so decide quickly." Sam didn't have to think long and agreed: "Ok, I'll work for you, but first I want to know what exactly that means for me", Auburo looked Sam in the eyes: "You'll get a very special daemon that gets stuck in your system. If you work against us or run the risk of spilling our secrets, this daemon will flatline you. But in return, you get state-of-the-art hardware from us. What exactly is up to Sara. Just like your tasks." Sam had to think. A daemon that sits so deep is almost impossible to remove without the one who developed it. But not impossible. In addition, a possible death in the future was a more pleasant thought than an imminent death in one of the torture chambers here with the Aizutachi. "Ok," he heard himself say, "I agree." Auburo smiled, stood up and whispered something to Sara. Sara looked down at Sam and focused on him with her unnaturally large eyes with the three pupils. "Well then, let's go, we'll take you to the doc so that he can tamper with you and I can insert the daemon for you. But before that, give me a complete list of your Augs. Your defense system is good and I'm not quite sure I've grasped everything." Sam stood up and rubbed his aching chest: "Thanks, I developed the system myself and my parts are a hacking device, neural accelerators, Samatoro eyes with scan function, reflex amplifier and a level 2 neural module to control my programs." Sara's eyes got even bigger for a little moment, "Level 2, huh? You're going to be really useful to me, little one" With these words, she led Sam in the direction of a doctor to take care of him, use a more modern hacking device and install a vulnerability for Sara's daemon.
