Progress was steady, but too damn slow. At this rate it'd take me years just to be competent enough for real netrunning gigs. And gigs meant money—serious money—if you didn't fry your brain in the process. The trick was simple: don't poke something bigger than you. In Night City terms, don't end up like T-Bug. She wasn't bad. Just unlucky enough to cross Arasaka, and when that happens, you don't get a retry.
Practicing basic neuro-scripting had its charm. Debugging with your brain was a hundred times faster than typing lines into some archaic IDE, and the deck's interface corrected the dumbest mistakes before they became problems. The Spiker was fine for what it was: a toaster with ambition. Overheating was a real issue though. I tried rigging a compressor for cooling, it helped a little, but the Spiker still choked when I pushed too hard. No shortcuts there.
Using the Spiker, it took me a few hours to finally cook up a program that cracked that simulated database. Plenty of similar simulations were buried in my files, so I kept grinding through them. My short-term goal was simple: figure out how to access the BBS Sasha mentioned. A platform for netrunners could prove invaluable, and if I wanted to stop fumbling around like an amateur, I'd need to tap into that world.
When I woke up the next morning, Sprocket was sprawled across a bench, bandana slid down around her neck, eyes bloodshot. The smell of booze clung to the air, sharp and sour, like hospital-grade alcohol but nastier.
"Are you drunk?" I asked, dropping my bag near the stairs.
She groaned. "…no, just… hangover…"
Three days of intense hangover later, I was basically running the front alone. Talking with clients, receiving orders, even doing paperwork. The part of the business nobody thought about, but without it nothing functioned.
I also tried tackling some of the harder car jobs. Shouldn't have. Screen repair? I gave up halfway, left the parts scattered across the table like a corpse mid-autopsy. Considered buying a training shard for vehicle electronics, then saw the price tag—thousands of eddies, all black market, half stolen off corpos, half laced with malware. Sprocket called it "expensive suicide," even though she knew exactly where to source them.
What I could do was experiment with vehicle systems. Hooking in with a personal link made half the job trivial. Most of it came down to brute-forcing a virtual key, walls of zeroes and ones until you finally got a handshake. Remote hacks were worse—every manufacturer had their own quirks, little variations designed to waste your time. Even a simple unlock could take minutes, and that was if the car didn't trip an alarm.
The interesting part? No mandatory trackers here. In most countries, cars had 24/7 corp-approved GPS feeds, but Night City outlawed that years ago. "Security reasons." Translation: corpos didn't pay enough to be granted the privilege. Of course, the companies still sold their own tracker chips with the promise of "privacy." I laughed out loud at that.
Auto-driving tech existed, but it was tangled in laws, fees, and arbitrary limits. Your shiny new car might drive itself half a mile before cutting the engine and telling you to walk the rest of the way. Great for convenience. Terrible for getaways.
Still, it clicked. Stealing cars could make serious eddies. But stealing the wrong car—from a Tyger Claw capo, or some wired-up merc—would mean a bullet in the skull long before payday. Not worth it. Our garage never saw anything higher than budget Arches and overworked Quads anyway. A Caliburn would probably fry me before I even touched the ignition. Still, there was a fixer in the game who specialized in stealing cars across the whole map. He must have figured out a way to know which were safe and which were suicide.
After half-failing at being a mechanic for most of the day, I decided to shop. Stuck to safer parts of Heywood this time. Picked up spare mags for the pistol—I'd ditched one mid-fight last time, muscle memory from the game betraying me. Bought actual clothes too. Hand-washing my only outfit every night sucked, and my jacket was gone. Grabbed a few pairs of jeans, shirts in muted colors, and a new jacket—dark red, loose enough not to print a weapon. No neon. Night City was loud enough without me glowing.
Shoes I ordered online; no chance I was trekking to Santo Domingo just for boots. Delivery went to a locker under a fake name. "Ryan Smith." Boring enough that no one would ever question it.
Food was next. My stomach was eating itself by then, so I grabbed something fast before heading back. Last stop: aluminum foil. Lots of it. Cheap insurance to help mask the DR11 case. The Militech hardware still sat in my room like a live grenade, and sleeping near it wasn't exactly restful. A Faraday cage was overdue.
When I got back, Sprocket was half-buried in an engine block, bandana still hanging loose at her neck.
"Feeling better?" I called, hauling the bags inside.
She grunted without looking up. "Took some toxin flushers. Better than your bullshit water method."
"Wrong. It's gotta be water, lots of it."
"Clean one? Real Water's too expensive," she muttered.
I sighed. At least she was upright. Real Water was a brand that sold bottled water for ninety-nine eddies a gallon. And there was no way to tell where they got it from.
She waved a tool vaguely in my direction. "Want a job? Just finished with fuel injectors on a client's car. Needs delivery."
"You do deliveries now?"
"Only when the eddies are stupid enough." She pointed with her elbow. "You remember that rich kid from two days ago? Daddy bought him an Archer Quartz for his sixteenth. Wants it dropped at his Little Japan garage. Paid in advance."
I eyed the car. Badly tuned, paint a mess. But still worth something.
"Not really in the mood."
"Forty percent cut."
"…Deal."
The Quartz stank like old fast food and cheap weed. Kid hadn't even bothered to clean it before throwing eddies at us. Whatever. I holstered my gun, strapped on my vest, and got moving.
When I first pulled out of the garage, I had to honk at a group of homeless blocking the driveway. They scattered, glaring at me like I'd just ruined their living room.
News played over the radio: Watson lockdown again. A cyberpsycho killed thirteen NCPD officers before MaxTac finally put them down. My hands tightened on the wheel. In the game, I'd tried sparing them, telling myself they weren't monsters. Now the news called them animals, "too much chrome." The truth was uglier. Cyberpsychosis wasn't magic insanity. It was people breaking under the weight of this city. The city built them, then shot them for becoming what it made.
The red light ahead turned green, pulling me out of it.
My holo pinged. Vik.
"How are you feeling? Important news. Blood and tissue samples show multiple mutations. Sent them to an old friend in the field, could take weeks. For now: you can handle more chrome, but your nervous system needs more time to adapt. Absolutely no bioware until we get results."
I typed back: "thx. Been taking my meds regularly. Cyberdeck next Saturday maybe?"
"We'll see."
The garage accepted the Quartz without a fuss. Automatic doors scanned the plates, and a holo marker lit up the reserved slot. Easy.
I messaged Sprocket that the job was done.
On foot, I drifted deeper into Little Japan. Neon bled from every sign, and crowds moved like a tide. I wasn't here for food or shopping, though.
I'd been reading up on the Church of Tech Orthodoxy regularly. A bunch of zealots led by a guy named Wig Firth. Preaching purity of technology, hating chrome, spitting on the "sins of modernity." The whole schtick. Seemed laughable, but cults always had money, or at least hardware worth taking. And zealots made the easiest marks, not the types to run to police.
I passed a tagged wall on the way—"FIRTH SAVES"—painted in crude black letters over faded Tyger graffiti. It looked fresh.
I stopped for a second.
Maybe this was a bad idea. But a little scouting while I had time, and all my gear, couldn't hurt.
The closer I got, the quieter the street felt. The noise of Little Japan peeled away until it was just my boots against cracked concrete. That wasn't normal. Even the back alleys in Heywood had more life than this stretch.
The church itself didn't look like much at first glance. Another converted warehouse, steel shutters painted over with half-faded slogans. Murals of halos wrapped around circuit boards, chipped and peeling. Half-burnt incense sticks shoved into cracks in the pavement. Above the doorway, a buzzing lightbulb sign flickered weakly: TECH ORTHODOXY – PURITY IN DESIGN.
Two people stood near the entrance. Neither had visible chrome. No glowing optics, no synthetic arms. Just shaved heads and the blank, heavy stares of people who gave up on curiosity a long time ago. Their robes looked homemade, stitched together from drab fabric in uneven cuts. The kind of look you only chose if you wanted to scream anti-consumerist while still hoping people noticed you.
Pretty much lined up with what I had read on their forum.
One of them clocked me as I slowed down. He looked me over from head to toe, searching for "impurity," and shook his head disapprovingly when his eyes landed on my personal port. His face was a roadmap of scars, probably from ripping out implants. The robe covered the rest of his body.
I pulled my jacket tighter and kept walking like I had somewhere else to be.
My optics were still running. Logged faces. Marked the door. Counted cameras. Two above the main entry, one down the alley covering the side. All ancient hardware, barely functional. A quick scan confirmed what I already suspected. No wireless signal. Local-only. Maybe not hackable at all unless you ran a cable straight into it.
I circled the block once, casual, like I was just another guy wandering. On the backside, the building's loading doors were sealed with heavy locks. Not mag-seals, not biometrics. Just old industrial padlocks. These people would not even compromise their beliefs on security. Any boosted punk with chrome arms could rip them open without breaking a sweat.
What they did have was a steady trickle of visitors. Small groups drifting in twos and threes, all dressed like beggars but too clean to really be. Some carried old relics of tech, rusted datachips and stripped circuit boards, holding them like offerings. Trash, dressed up as holy relics.
I wondered what they did with the donations. Broke them down? Burned them? Sold them to a junk dealer while preaching about purity? Probably all three.
I leaned against a lamppost across the street, pretending to scroll my holo, eyes on the door. My gut said there was more here than just lunatics in robes. Night City never left space unused unless someone was paying for it to be unused.
I typed a quick note to myself: T.O. confirmed church location. Possible target.
Maybe Maine, Dorio, and Rebecca could be convinced to clear the place out someday. Not sure Sasha would be much help against religious meatheads with hammers, but that was a problem for later.
The front door creaked open, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the silence outside. A voice boomed from inside, carried by cheap speakers.
"Brothers, sisters, seekers. Enter unburdened. Leave the lies of chrome behind. Reclaim the purity of design."
Three people shuffled inside. The door shut. Quiet again. Soundproofed.
I exhaled slowly.
"Yeah," I muttered, "definitely a bad idea."
Still, I logged the time. Noted the flow. Snapshotted the faces. If this cult was half as stupid as their sermons, they might be the easiest mark of my life someday soon. The people coming here might even make easy prey on their own. Maybe I could pose as a collector for donations, if I felt like risking it. Some of them looked like they had decent money to waste.
Not tonight.
I turned, pulled my jacket collar up against the evening air, and headed back toward the main strip of Little Japan. The neon glow bled into the side streets again, drowning out the silence. My stomach growled. I was hungry again.
The church could wait.
It was getting late. I could use the time to practice, but why not try some local cuisine first.
The market nearby was still alive with food stalls. Most of them sold the same generic reheated crap from supermarkets, but one caught my eye. Sushi. That was new. I wasn't sure fish even existed anymore with how polluted the ocean near Night City was.
I approached the old man working the stall. His counter was worn but spotless. As I stepped closer, holo price tags blinked into view. Expensive.
"Is this real fish?" I asked.
"こんにちは.ラットでございます,お客様."
Right. Japanese.
"A plate, please?" I pointed to a tray with rolls neatly arranged, wasabi and soy sauce on the side.
I transferred the eddies and he pushed the plate toward me, handing over a pair of chopsticks.
The taste was strange. The texture of the fish was slightly off, but it was still good. Maybe they used something grown in a tank. Or maybe it really was fish, just not the kind I expected.
Halfway through the plate, someone sat down next to me.
A catgirl. Wow. Ears, whiskers, even a white tail trailing behind the stool. That was a first for me. Called Exotics here.
She gestured lazily at the counter. The old man slid her a plate without a word. She didn't eat. Just poked at it a few times and stared at it. Her ears twitched once. Strange.
I finished my plate, thanked the cook, and left.
The walk back to the shop was quiet, but by the time I reached the block, the homeless had gathered again in the street out front. They lingered in clusters, muttering, passing bottles, staring at anyone who came too close. Maybe NCPD would chase them off if I made a fuss? Nah.
Sprocket was gone. Her Quadra missing from its spot in the garage. I slipped inside, dropped into my room, and started unpacking the foil.
Building a Faraday cage sounds complicated, but it boils down to wrapping something in enough layers that it stops talking to the outside world. Cheap but effective. I cut, folded, and taped until the thing was big enough for a suitcase.
While my hands were busy, I hooked into the Spiker, trying to multitask.
I browsed through the solutions I'd already used on the earlier simulations. They didn't look like junk data, but every time I solved one, the results were slightly different. Why? Was it generating semi-random outcomes on purpose?
As I leaned over the half-built cage, my torso inside the foil shell, I reran one of the simulations. I used the same solution I had before. This time, the result didn't go through.
A strange error appeared. Connection error.
"Huh."
I pulled back out of the cage and stared at the message.
Something about it didn't sit right.