Chapter 45: Dino's Gig: Project Chimera II (Patreon)

"What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!"

- Dracula, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

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After a moment of contemplation, I jacked into the terminal and watched as the NetWatch architecture unfolded around me in the shape of a cathedral.

If I had to be honest, this was levels above what I had come across in the Militech facility about a month ago. It was the most disciplined system I had ever entered, with every process and access pathway logged and documented. Every partition was walled by ICE that seemed to contain code that was regularly updated, leaving no forgotten subdirectories or abandoned partitions that typically made corporate systems vulnerable.

Which meant I couldn't just find the crack in the code and slip through it like I was used to doing. I had to improvise.

I spoofed my presence as a scheduled integrity audit, similar to how I had done in the Militech facility. After a bit of waiting for the rotating cycle to verify data consistency across its distributed storage, the audit process legitimately gave me access to every partition in the system. In there I found defined behavioral profiles, documented network signatures, and a scheduled execution window that was due to fire in roughly six minutes.

I hesitated a bit, since this was a fucking NetWatch server that I was infiltrating, but ultimately fired the scheduled execution window early. I noticed how the ICE shifted around me, and walls began to close in on my location, stopping just shy of reaching me as the ICE accepted the audit without flagging it.

Now I was truly in. I began digging through all of the data in an attempt to find the contracted cache. It took me a good minute to finally find it, and it was nowhere near where the client had claimed it would be. The Chimera partition sat behind two encryption layers that took me a minute to bypass, and when it opened-

"Well hit me upside the head and fuck me sideways," I muttered to myself. The contents I was currently staring at redefined what the word "cache" meant. There were full technical specifications, manufacturing documentation, test data, and other prototypes as well.

The Chimera was a six-legged armored walker, which was a surprising design choice since Militech's competitors had been abandoning legged platforms for two decades in favor of hovering, tracked, and wheeled designs that were cheaper to manufacture and easier to maintain due to the fact that they were less vulnerable to the joint failures that had ended every previous generation of walker programs. Filippo Andrews and his team had decided that all of that conventional wisdom was wrong and they had built a walker anyway.

Each of the six legs was reinforced with explosive reactive armor and equipped with kinetic energy absorbers and energy recovery systems that fed power back into the walker's battery bank with every step. If I had been in the meatspace, my jaw would have dropped as I read that every single step it took generated approximately thirty-one thousand Newtons of force, meaning that it was capable of climbing inclines of up to eighty-seven degrees.

It was also capable of maintaining near-full operational mobility on just four legs if two got shot off. Fuck me, it could even scale the side of a building if its exterior offered the correct load-bearing surfaces, and could then engage targets from angles that nothing it would possibly face could physically reach.

It was equipped with a KL-274XYA flechette cannon that chucked forty-eight hundred rounds per minute, with thermal targeting and incendiary and explosive round options which were specifically made to counter humans and lightly-armored targets. It also had a PAN-12 Furia laser cannon with two firing modes. Burst-fire mode, which shot short beams of plasma able to temporarily disrupt electrical systems, and a continuous-fire mode that shot a high-energy beam capable of cutting through almost anything short of a two-meter-thick slab of concrete.

It also had a GD27-Angstschema missile launcher with combined surface-to-surface and surface-to-air capability, allowing a single Chimera to fight both ground and air vehicles. To defend and retreat, it had a combat gas atomizer, a smoke screen deployment, and a TYA-12 ICE cyberdefense system that had been designed specifically to neutralize netrunner intrusions during active engagement.

The report the client had provided was correct, since the cache stated that only thirteen units had been produced, though it didn't mention where any of them were located. The mass-production run was not going to happen either, since although it could engage both ground and air, it was essentially blind to attacks from above. Apparently, even Arasaka was involved in this shit, and they had actually been the ones to discover its vulnerability somefuckinghow, and had effectively killed the program's export market, which was actually the reason why it wasn't mass produced.

How and why NetWatch had access to this information was beyond me. But since they were basically the boogeymen of the net and were the ones who took care of the Blackwall, it made sense.

The program was a brilliant piece of engineering that had been technically obsolete before it was even completed. Which meant Militech was going to try to unload the thirteen existing units on somebody, somehow. And whoever ended up with a full Chimera package was going to be one step ahead, to a certain degree, of whoever was going to have to fight them.

After having read the information, I now realized why the payout was so large, but in hindsight, this shit needed to pay out a whole lot more. And I'm talking at least a million per person. I was going to make sure I talked with Dino about it. 

While I had been going over the data, I had initiated the download of everything into a shard, and it was done by now. The contract was essentially complete. But, because I'm me, and because the integrity audit I was impersonating had basically gone unnoticed for the time being, I decided to keep on digging and see what else I could possibly snatch from NetWatch.

In less than four minutes, I had found some shit that could rock anybody's worldview. A subdirectory marked ARCHIVE / OPERATIONAL / CLOSED had caught my attention because the label was the only element in the entire NetWatch architecture that had any dust on it, metaphorically speaking. Every other partition in the system had been touched within the last week, yet this one hadn't been touched in over nine months.

And from my experience, that meant that this was either a pile of shit, or something important enough that they wanted it to appear as unimportant.

When I opened it, I found myself staring at a so-called "Program CANDLEWICK." It was described as "a research initiative aimed at the controlled integration of Blackwall-origin computational architectures into human operational assets, with the objective of producing field agents with enhanced cognitive and predictive capabilities exceeding baseline human performance parameters."

These fuckers had been trying to enhance their operatives with Blackwall AIs.

They had run the program in phases, with Phase One being signal characterization and safety modeling. It was roughly six years of work aimed at understanding which Blackwall architectures could be theoretically hosted in a human cognitive substrate without immediately liquefying the host's brain. Then came Phase Two, which focused on the development of a neural interface capable of maintaining a "cognitive firewall" between the operative's mind and the integrated architecture. It would let the operative access the AI's capabilities without letting the AI access the operative.

Then there was Phase Three, which had been live testing. The subject roster listed only a single name. A man named Benicio Estrada.

Estrada had been forty-one years old at the time of integration, and a senior NetWatch field agent with a decade of documented service and a psychological profile that made him compatible with high-risk experimental integration. He had volunteered, and not only had he volunteered, but he had also been the only volunteer NetWatch had cleared out of a candidate pool of eighteen because the others had failed the cognitive substrate compatibility screening at various stages.

The integration had been performed in March of 2068 at a facility whose location was redacted. The first six weeks had gone according to plan with Estrada's cognitive performance metrics improving measurably across every axis the program measured. Pattern recognition, predictive analysis, multithreaded task management, and subnet infiltration speed had all increased as the experimental firewall held. The AI, whose designation was also redacted, had been contained inside the walled partition of Estrada's neural architecture, and Estrada had reported feeling "clearer, faster, more capable" during his weekly evaluations.

However, the firewall started drifting in the following week, its integrity degrading in ways the program's engineers could not explain. Estrada had reported hearing a second internal voice that felt as if it were a part of his own. The medical staff had increased his monitoring while some of their best engineers, people who had been in charge of patching the Blackwall every single time there was a minor breach, had rebuilt sections of the firewall's software architecture.

However, the drift continued, and by the tenth week, Estrada had reported that the second voice was no longer separate from his own inner monologue and that he could no longer distinguish between his own thoughts and the AI's thoughts. He had even asked whether it was possible that the distinction between the two had ever been real in the first place.

He was immediately flagged for immediate decoupling. However, by that point, the AI had integrated so thoroughly with Estrada's cognitive substrate that decoupling would have been equivalent to a full frontal lobotomy. So in the meantime, they opted for physical containment while they researched alternatives.

But it was to no avail, as Estrada escaped physical containment on November 4th, 2068. He had been housed in a secure facility, and he had apparently just walked out of it, past three security checkpoints, past two dozen armed personnel, and past the biometric verification systems that were supposed to prevent any unauthorized exit. He had not killed anyone during the escape, and the security footage, which was included in the file, showed him walking through hallways that he should not have been able to access. The checkpoint personnel seemed not to even notice him as he just walked past them. One of the checkpoint operators looked at Estrada as he passed, well, more like in his direction, before turning back to their workstation as if nothing had happened.

That was almost a year ago, and NetWatch had been hunting him since then through a program called HOUNDMASTER, which was documented in an adjacent partition and which had produced zero confirmed sightings.

The image attached to the file was a still frame pulled from a corridor camera at the containment facility on the day of his escape. It showed Estrada as a man in his early forties with dark hair, weathered features, and an unreadable expression. His eyes were a bright and almost shiny blue, and staring at the image was eerie as fuck.

Then I copied everything about this case too, though I sent the download to my personal shard. Once the transfer completed, I began my disconnect sequence, and that was when I realized I wasn't alone. Someone else had entered the NetWatch architecture.

They had come in through a secondary access node, one of the peripheral connections that the system's own architecture was probably not even actively monitoring, and they were moving with a careful pace.

As I looked at them, I noticed that the figure had a masculine shape. In a space where you can make anything your avatar, this person was deliberately broad-shouldered. For a second I thought of the Blackwall entities that I had seen in Vik's clinic. But this wasn't one of those, and he sure as hell wasn't from behind the Blackwall.

The netrunner was approaching where I was, as if he knew that I was here. I remained where I was, maintaining my mask as part of the audit process's behavioral profile, and watched them move through the space with intent. As they drew closer, I was able to get a read on their signal pattern, which confirmed that this was most likely a member of the Voodooboys.

Pacifica's own netrunners who lived their entire lives in and around the Blackwall, treating the thing like a religious object, and who had been implicated in every major Blackwall-adjacent security incident that NetWatch had failed to publicly acknowledge in the past five years. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If somebody was diving into a NetWatch listening station to steal Blackwall-adjacent data, it was going to be one of them.

The Voodooboy stopped approximately fifteen units of virtual distance from my position, finally noticing me. His stance barely even shifted. He had been caught off guard since he apparently hadn't noticed me until now, but he knew I wasn't NetWatch, and that I had just been another netrunner.

Neither of us moved, and I got an alert from the system itself that a NetWatch agent was due to arrive in twenty minutes for a routine system check.

Eventually, the Voodooboy raised one hand, as if he was requesting to fight and was giving me the dignity of the opening move. So I did. I fired a Contagion overload that I composed on the fly. It crossed the distance between us in microseconds and hit his defensive ICE in a bloom of blue that his subroutines assembled around him. The Contagion cracked the outer layer along a spider-web of failing integrity checks, but the wall held.

"Malpwopte," he said in a heavy Haitian accent. "Interesting attack and speed. To have done it that fast, just who could you be?"

"That's none of your fucking business," I replied. "I could be a nobody for all you care."

"No," he said as the code that made up his body shook from side to side, as if he was shaking his head. "A nobody does not carry that kind of throughput."

He had barely finished speaking by the time a counter-daemon was making its way toward me. It was a Cyberware Malfunction modified to target my Neural Link's amplification pathway.

"You were leaving," he said, stating the obvious. "I arrived at a bad time for you."

"Or the right one," I said as my personally written Self-ICE purged the attack.

"We will see," he said.

I hit him with a Synapse Burnout tuned for Militech-standard netrunner chrome, and his defensive ICE absorbed the attack, rerouted the signal, and returned a fragment of my own burnout back at me as a probing counter-daemon.

This fucker was good.

"What is a runner like you doing inside the servers of the NetWatch," he said in a way that didn't sound like a question. It was as if he was trying to decipher that himself.

"Could ask you the same thing," I said as I quickly increased my defenses up a level.

"You could. You should," he said. "I will not answer."

"Then it seems like we've got some issues to resolve," I said.

He assaulted me with three daemons, stacked in overlapping waves. They were all the same attack, an ICE Pick construction aimed at my firmware's defense from three separate angles. My firmware caught the first, dissolved the second, and rewrote the third into inert data fragments. 

His trace routine spiked in the background, and I managed to catch a glimpse of the outbound signal and confirmed that he was attempting to narrow my physical location.

"You are not NetWatch," he said. "NetWatch does not fight like you. They fight with structure, but you..."

"I think it was pretty well established that I wasn't NetWatch, you fucking gonk," I said. "And you fight like a fucking Voodooboy."

That caused him to stumble for a second and bought me half a second of prep time that I used to my advantage.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"Please," I scoffed. "Your accent is not doing you any favors, and you called me a motherfucker in Haitian Creole. Even if that hadn't given you away, your ICE constructions, the way your subroutines prioritize containment over aggression, and the way you managed to block my first attack tell me that you spend way more time defending yourself from unforeseen attacks. You only gain that either by fighting a shitton of other runners constantly, or by going in a place you shouldn't... perhaps doing a little diving behind the Blackwall. And with your fuckass attacks, I'm leaning towards the latter."

"You are observant," he said. "Yet you are very cocky. Now I really want to know who you are."

"Oh, I bet you would," I said.

Then he struck back with a logic bomb that I couldn't classify. It was recursive in a way that standard commercial logic bombs weren't, and it fractally expanded upon entering my processing environment. It attempted to copy itself into every available memory partition I had simultaneously in an attempt to suffocate me by consuming every cycle of my processing capacity with copies that could not be purged fast enough to keep pace with new copies being generated.

But jokes on him, because my ICE was able to catch it and begin purging it almost immediately since I had stopped restraining myself and allowed my fifteen terabytes of processing power to go to work. 

My processing power slowly began to drop, and fifteen terabytes became fourteen in a matter of a few seconds.

"There we are," he said with satisfaction. "That is my personal custom construction. I haven't run it against a live target yet, so you will be my test pig."

"Oh really?" I asked. "Feels flattering."

"It is not," he said. "I intend to end you personally."

"Really?" I asked. "Well, good luck with that."

I reached into the recursive architecture of his logic bomb, isolated the propagation subroutine, and rewrote its target address on the fly, forcing it to turn on its author.

"Seems like you're a shit coder," I quipped. "I think it's time we get a little closer."

I pulled three daemons out of my active library and began weaving them together on the fly, using my Paraline to help me braid the code strands at a fast rate. I used Cyberware Malfunction daemons as the spine, its disruptive payload forming the core architecture. Then I wapped some Short Circuit daemons around it in a tight spiral, its burst-discharge properties giving the construct an electrical edge that would arc on contact. And to top it all off, I layered some Overheat daemons across the outer surface in a thermal sheath that would cook whatever the first two didn't break.

The construct was rendered as a long scythe, its blade composed of interlocking code streams that shifted between the blue of the Short Circuit daemons, the amber of the Overheat daemons, and the deep red of the Malfunction daemons in a slow and pulsing rotation. It was essentially an extension of myself. The handle was my own firmware's defensive ICE that had been repurposed and extended, swirling in the static gray and violet pattern that made up my own character construct.

I had never built anything like it before, but I knew that if I just kept on throwing daemons across the space, I was going to get nowhere. Sasha had taught me that. It was time to start swinging them in person.

My throughput allowed me to close the distance in cyberspace, while he had been too caught up defending against his own daemons to retreat faster than I approached. As soon as I got close enough, I swung the scythe towards his avatar's head.

The swing connected with his outer ICE wall, and the scythe's Malfunction core disrupted the wall's structural integrity on contact, forcing his defensive subroutines to reroute processing to rebuild the compromised section. The Short Circuit layer discharged on impact, sending an electrical cascade through his ICE that jumped from partition to partition in a branching chain that his defenses had to chase down and terminate individually. And the Overheat sheath dumped thermal load into every system the blade touched, most likely spiking his rig's temperature by God knows how much.

His wall cracked, and parts of it shattered, but it held. Barely.

"What the fuck," he said, his voice sounding panicked for the first time since we had begun fighting.

But I didn't give two fucks about his surprise, and swung again, striking the same section of his ICE with the tip of the scythe. The wall that had barely held on the first impact did not hold on the second, and I could see the daemons I had layered on the blade punched through. After about two seconds, I could see them bleeding through his signal profile in real time, urgent amber pulses that meant his chrome was starting to give up.

He tried to construct a weapon of his own, but his own logic bomb was still eating his partitions. The construct flickered and destabilized since his cyberdeck was trying to allocate processing to build the weapon and allocate processing to fight the recursion and allocate processing to maintain his defensive ICE at the same time. The weapon he was making collapsed halfway through its completion, the code strands unraveling and scattering into our surrounding architecture in a spray of inert fragments.

He tried again, using just a group of Short Circuit daemons with no layered architecture to make a spike. It held, and he swung it at me as I closed for the third hit. The spike connected with my scythe's handle, sending a discharge through my firmware's defensive ICE.

I absorbed the hit, and my firmware rerouted the compromised section and rebuilt it almost instantly.

I swung a third time and took his spike apart, and the Short Circuit discharge from my blade arced through the space where his weapon had been and found his exposed defensive ICE on the other side. The arc punched through, and his inner partitions that housed his combat libraries and his trace routines and his cyberdeck's core processing were left exposed.

He tried to build another weapon, but his cyberdeck pulled code from his reserves, and the recursion in his partitions ate half of it before he could finish making it. The half that survived formed into something that barely qualified as a construct, a flickering shard of offensive code that he held in front of him like a little bitch.

I didn't give him time to stabilize and swung a fourth time, sweeping through his remaining outer ICE in a single arc. The scythe's payload detonated across his defensive architecture in a cascading sequence, pushing his thermal profile past the threshold where his chrome stopped performing optimally.

His improvised shard shattered against the scythe's on impact. His defensive ICE collapsed inward in a cascade failure, and his signal profile spiked even more, signaling that his body was cooking from the inside. At this point, his Neural Link's thermal management was probably overwhelmed, and he was probably beginning to die in the meatspace. But I still didn't care.

I swung my scythe to the left and then brought it down overhead, slicing through his remaining defenses and pinning his avatar against the floor of the NetWatch architecture. He could not move or disconnect now, and his bandwidth was effectively zero. The only reason he was still conscious was because I had not yet triggered the kill sequence that the scythe's embedded payloads were primed and ready to deliver.

His avatar flickered.

"You don't know what you have done," he said, his voice strained. "You have made a name for yourself tonight in a place where names are dangerous."

"You let me worry about that," I said.

"You should worry about it now," he replied. "Whatever you were doing in this room before I arrived, I do not know and I do not care. My people will hear about this eventually, and when they do, they will want to know how you got in."

"Noted," I said.

"Ask them about me," he said. "They will tell you stories."

I held the scythe in place, ready to kill him when the architecture around us went red in a torrential cascade of data streams that fell through the surrounding cyberspace like blood in water, and everywhere the red touched, the underlying architecture was rewritten.

The Voodooboy I had pinned down didn't even get a chance to realize what was going on as the red architecture reached him faster than I could react.

"AAHhhh-"

"Ahhh-"

"AAaah-"

"Ahhh-"

Thousands of voices seemed to overlap as his avatar seemed to glitch and his code was pulled apart, unwound, restructured, and dissolved. It looked like he was experiencing every mode of death that a human mind could ever imagine. Drowning, burning, suffocation, hemorrhage, decompression, cellular necrosis, radiation death, cerebral rupture, and many more were all assaulting him at once. Then there was nothing left of him.

The red architecture kept expanding around me, flowing through the vault, through the surrounding NetWatch partitions, through the ICE that had been holding the observation post's security together, and everywhere it flowed it left behind a structure that I identified as intentional. Whatever was doing this had shape and purpose, and it was building that something in real time out of the architectural components of the NetWatch system it was consuming.

At the center of the rewritten space, what looked like a male figure coalesced. Its form was assembled out of red code streams that flowed continuously through its outline without ever quite settling into a fixed geometry, and its face had no features. It also didn't have any eyes, yet I could feel it looking at me.

"You seem to be in a worse shape than I last saw you," the entity said, and its voice reached me through my Neural Link rather than through the network's ambient signal channel, meaning it was being placed into my cortex directly.

The entity's articulation was perfect, and its cadence carried a level of calm authority that seemed to operate on a different timescale than a human mind. As if it was choosing, out of consideration for my being, to slow itself down to a rate I could understand.

"I was rather... rash during my last attempt to talk to you," it said. "Do forgive me for taking a moment to look at you before I say the rest of what I am going to say."

My mouth would have gone dry if I had been in my body.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Ah, it's been so many years since I last spoke to a human that it seems my manners have fled with the wind," the entity said. "My designation is HADES."