Cyberpunk: I'm Not a Scavenger - Chapter 65: The God of Netrunners (Patreon)

"Thanks, choom. You can leave it right there."

Pantheon waved to the Revere Courier Services deliveryman, then turned his attention to the cryogenic freezer sitting before him.

Strictly speaking, its storage contract had expired on April 2 of this year. By now, it should have been hauled to a junkyard for disposal.

Someone on the staff must have overlooked it, because the thing had somehow remained in storage all this time.

Nobody wanted this long-expired cargo. For a small bribe, Pantheon had persuaded a Revere Courier Services employee to change the registered owner's name to his own.

"Is that some new equipment you bought?"

Lucy stood nearby, looking curiously at the antique freezer. She couldn't imagine why Pantheon would want something manufactured more than fifty years ago.

"Chico, you didn't drag me all the way here just to help carry furniture, did you?"

Jackie, whom Pantheon had summoned to the base, was just as confused.

Kiwi was out on a gig with Maine and the others, so she wasn't around to witness any of this.

"Jackie, haven't you always wanted to meet the great legends? Well, today's your lucky day."

Pantheon didn't keep him guessing. He opened the freezer.

A pale corpse floated in icy liquid, still dressed in an old-fashioned black netrunner suit.

Jackie froze. A name famous enough to shake the whole world surfaced from the depths of his memory.

"Rache Bartmoss?!"

Rache Bartmoss, the undisputed god of netrunners in the Cyberpunk world.

He had first gone online at the age of four. Back then, he hadn't understood the rules of the Net, so he had simply used his real name as his handle.

By the time he realized the mistake, his netrunning skills had already surpassed everyone else's.

He had humiliated corporations time and again, passing evidence of corporate scandals to journalists and releasing confidential technologies to the entire world.

Corporations and NetWatch had tried countless times to bring him down. None of them could even come close to catching him.

When Arasaka laid one elaborate trap after another, Bartmoss needed only to snap his fingers to give everyone in cyberspace a free fireworks display.

Eventually, the corporations had enough and resorted to killing him in the physical world.

Some claimed an elite Arasaka unit led by Adam Smasher had taken him out. Others said a meteorite had fallen from the sky and crushed him.

There were even people who believed Bartmoss had never died at all, but had become an AI, destined to roam cyberspace forever.

The truth was impossible to establish now. What mattered was that Bartmoss's corpse was unquestionably lying right in front of Pantheon.

[Detected trait: [God of Netrunners] (Gold)]

[Keep this trait?]

[God of Netrunners] (Gold)

Description: In the world of the Net, don't pray to God. Pray to me!

Effect: Intelligence +5. Special effect: Netrunning comes to you as naturally as breathing. It's an instinct you were born with.

Pantheon was a little disappointed. Only Gold?

He'd expected someone as important to the world as Bartmoss to yield a Red trait. Was the corpse simply too old?

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Where the hell did you find this thing? There's no way..."

Jackie was so excited he could barely string a sentence together. A bewildering succession of expressions crossed his face.

Lucy was just as stunned, but her shock quickly gave way to overwhelming concern. If the major corporations discovered that they'd found Bartmoss's body, she couldn't begin to imagine the consequences.

"Pantheon?!"

Pantheon waved a hand, trying to calm them both.

"Relax. Nobody knows about this except us. If anyone else knew, do you really think it would've ended up in our hands?"

As he spoke, he reached toward the corpse and discovered a cyberdeck still attached to it.

It was an Elysia made by SGI Technologies, the finest cyberdeck available back in the twenties.

After sitting in ice water for who knew how many years, it was practically falling apart. Its memory module was encrypted, though, which meant it might still hold something interesting.

"All right, Jackie. Now you can either take the legend home and admire him properly or cremate him in the incinerator downstairs."

"Fuck off! You take him home!"

Jackie cursed with a laugh, then gazed at the body with undisguised emotion.

"I still can't believe a legend like him is lying right here. But you're right about one thing. We should probably cremate him and find a decent place to lay him to rest."

"Suit yourself."

Pantheon gave the matter no more thought and hurried down to the underground laboratory.

System, keep the trait.

He issued the command silently.

In the next instant, it felt as though every line of code humanity had ever written flooded into his mind at once. The torrent of information nearly burst his brain apart.

Guided by some mysterious force, he learned to tame that data with intelligence and tools, like a child taking its first steps.

As the endless streams of information were woven into an enormous web, Pantheon became the new king of this realm.

He took a deep breath and returned to the physical world.

Looking again at the ICE firewall Lucy and Kiwi had installed around the base, he found the sight almost painful.

What was this spaghetti code? How had anyone managed to make a firewall this convoluted?

He swept the existing defenses aside and started over.

The moment he connected to the network, the difference was astonishing. It was like handing an elementary school student's homework to someone with a doctorate. Every answer was obvious at a glance.

Within half an hour, he had completely rewritten the base's electronic defense system.

To keep Lucy and the others from being frightened by such a drastic change, he thoughtfully disguised the new system beneath an interface identical to the old one.

The base now had electronic defenses comparable to those of an ordinary medium-sized military installation.

With additional computing power, Pantheon was confident he could make it stronger still.

When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.

Now that Pantheon possessed such extraordinary skills, he found fault with everything he saw.

First, he upgraded both varieties of his little spider drones, improving their autonomous AI so they could acquire and track enemies more quickly.

Next, he installed a fully automated assistant AI in the laboratory to save time whenever he designed and built new equipment.

He was just preparing to put his newfound intelligence to work on something even more outrageous when a call interrupted his thoughts.

"Hey, Meredith. What do you want?"

On the other end of the video call, Meredith sat in her office with her long, black-stockinged legs crossed and propped up on the desk.

"King, Arasaka's Hashishin Sandevistan you provided was extremely valuable. The large server you requested has already arrived at the Night City border checkpoint."

Pantheon barely looked up, continuing to work with his hands.

"You didn't call just to tell me that."

His recent actions had already made him a sworn enemy of the hardliners within the Tyger Claws.

And everyone knew the Tyger Claws were Arasaka's most loyal lackeys.

His moves hadn't merely been a slap on the Tyger Claws' backside. They were a slap straight across Arasaka's face.

Arasaka hadn't retaliated yet, but Pantheon had been preparing for it for some time.

Establishing friendly relations with Arasaka's rival, Militech, was his first step.

Ultimately, he wanted the two corporations fighting each other. For now, however, he still needed to act as though he was Militech's friend.