Day 1 – Prodding the Sims
I set aside a couple hours after closing the garage, just me, the Spiker, and the simulations. Fired one up, watched it load, and the first thing I noticed was how the machine choked. Every ten minutes it would hiccup, spit out error codes, or freeze up completely. I stripped the shell off for better airflow. Not like I was planning to resell it.
But the real catch? These"sims" were not self-contained. The second they ran, they sent out tiny handshake requests. I logged them: bare packets, neatly encrypted, too precise to be random. The Spiker barely had the horsepower to run the sim and DeadAir at the same time, so I had to swap them like juggling grenades.
On a whim, I cut the line mid-run. The whole sim stalled, then crashed. That confirmed it: the damn things needed a live connection. No self-contained program dies when you pull the cord.
So what the hell were they reaching for?
I fell asleep in my chair with the Spiker humming, no closer to an answer. I should have took more Cyber Security courses in college.
Day 2 – Sniffing Traffic
The garage ate most of my day. Rebuilding a Quadra suspension, swearing at bolts that would not move. By nightfall, I still had enough juice to sit with the Spiker again.
This time, I let the sims run while piggybacking the garage's terminal. Logged every outbound packet. It was a mess. Encrypted blobs, sizes all over the place like dice rolls. At first it looked like noise. Then I noticed timing. Bursts lined up with me interacting inside the sim. More activity when I pushed harder, especially when I screwed up.
Payloads were unreadable. The Spiker did not have the muscle. But something was clear: these sims were not "closed puzzles." They were phoning home, pushing data out, pulling responses in. Something was listening.
Sprocket was out cold in the next room, snoring like a broken exhaust. I thought about pinging Sasha, then shoved the idea away. If she had meant me to ask, she would have told me.
Six hours later, my eyes burned from log files. Sleep felt optional at this point.
Day 3 – First Chase
I woke up late. Sprocket had to boot my door in to drag me out. My skull felt like a rebar block, but I still ended up at the Spiker after hours.
New plan: grab one packet, trace it. Just one.
I picked a mid-sized burst, ran DeadAir for cover, and followed it. DeadAir only gave me a short window, ten, maybe fifteen seconds where local ICE went blind, so timing mattered. I hit the first hop, slipped into a relay in Heywood. Second hop, another. The nodes were ancient, some still running firmware from before the Crash. Too easy.
But the farther it went, the less DeadAir worked. By the third hop, the encryption had already rewritten itself. By the fourth, I was running on fumes, DeadAir blinking warnings. At the fifth, ICE finally swatted me out.
When ICE swatted me out, it wasn't a gentle disconnect. My vision filled with a white flash, ears ringing like I'd been punched. The Spiker's fan screamed, and I thought I'd fried the board. Took me a good five minutes before the nausea settled. All I'd done was chase a packet, but the system sure wanted me to know my place. I sat there sweating, telling myself it was just feedback, just a buffer overload. Still, I unplugged every cord before I let myself lie down.
But it was enough to see the pattern. The sims were not just running on my Spiker. They were piggybacking real infrastructure, riding backdoors someone had scattered across the city. I was not cracking anything. I was just grabbing the handrail as the sim pulled itself along.
I leaned back, half-grinning, half-delirious, until the Spiker overheated again and froze.
"FUCK!"
Day 4 – Out in the Wild
I was running on caf fumes. Two hours of sleep, maybe. Sprocket said I looked like shit. She was not wrong.
That night I left the garage, personal link patched into the Spiker, and started prowling local nodes. Vending machines, kiosks, busted dataterms. Most of it was junk: adware, firmware patches, dead logs. But every now and then, I caught something familiar. Same packet structures as the sims, like echoes.
I logged it all. Dumped it into the Spiker's cramped storage. By the time I dragged myself back, my head was splitting open. But patterns were forming. Same nodes kept cropping up again and again, especially in old residential blocks. Not high-security systems, just old boxes nobody had touched in years, still wired into the grid.
Backdoors. Built and left there deliberately.
The sims were using them to move their traffic. And I had been following the breadcrumbs.
I leaned back, staring at the naked Spiker board glowing faint in the dark. I wanted to get to the bottom of this, that's for sure.
One vending machine randomly spat out its whole inventory of energy drinks in response to my meddling, and I gladly took it.
I muttered, "Alright. I'm onto something."
Then I faceplanted into the desk upon returning back to my room, packet logs still crawling past on the holo.
Day 5 – Cracking My Own
Work nearly killed me. Some corpo brat fried his Mizutani firmware with illegal mods and wanted it "restored like new." Sprocket handled the mechanical side, left me with the task of restoring the firmware to factory settings. My hands shook so badly from caf that I almost bricked the thing three times.
By the time the garage lights dimmed, I was running on fumes but still dragged myself back to the Spiker. If following packets was not enough, maybe I had to peel the sims open.
I booted one up, let it stabilize, and started poking: runtime tweaks, debug commands, scraping the memory while it was live. Most of the time it spat back "access denied" and collapsed. But a couple times, the sim hesitated, just long enough for me to see where the handshakes were being prepared. Not decrypted, just headers, like the address on an envelope before it vanishes.
That was the trick: I was not cracking encryption. I was watching how the sim did it. Every packet was a carrier pigeon, and I was reading the knot in the string before it flew off.
DeadAir bought me a few seconds per attempt, fifteen at most before local ICE noticed and sniffed me out. After that, I had to yank the cord or risk frying myself. The Spiker was not cut out for more.
Then I caught something. A destination header, mid-hop. Kabuki district. Not an endpoint, not the BBS itself, just the next transfer point.
I leaned back, sweating, whispering the name to myself like it meant something holy. Kabuki.
Day 6 – Ghost Hunting
Morning came too early. Sprocket slammed a job sheet onto my chest while I was still half-asleep in the chair. Fuel pumps, brake lines. My hands shook too much to hold a wrench straight. She gave me that look, the one halfway between worry and "you are an idiot."
But when night came, I packed the Spiker into a bag and headed into Kabuki. The market was a storm of noise: stalls piled with chrome knockoffs, back-alley medics hawking implants, noodle vendors shouting into the night. Nobody looked twice at me slipping into the shadows under the roundabout.
That is where I found them: clusters of old data nodes, half-buried in concrete, covered in graffiti, still humming faintly. Most people passed without noticing. To me, they were arteries. They still felt warm to the touch.
I jacked in carefully. DeadAir pulsed in short bursts, blinding ICE long enough for me to slip onto the line. At first, it was garbage traffic: maintenance pings, ad pushes, stale firmware updates. Then I caught a familiar spike. Same packet structure as the sims. Same handshake pattern, shifting encryption right on cue.
I nearly shouted.
Tracing it further was impossible. DeadAir died after two jumps, ICE stirred awake, and I had to cut out fast before the Spiker cooked itself. But I had seen enough. These sims were not puzzles. They were sales channels. Their data was being pushed along pre-made trails, riding backdoors across the city, until it reached a server structure.
I staggered home and almost fell asleep in the doorway.
Day 7 – The Door Opens
I was a zombie at the garage. Dropped a wrench on my foot, cursed so loud Sprocket threw a rag at me, and she got the nasty juice right into my mouth.
That night, it was all or nothing.
I set up at the Kabuki node again. Packet logs open, DeadAir primed, Spiker stripped bare for airflow. Instead of trying to crack anything, I watched the handshakes like a hawk. Every sim packet that passed through carried a window, tiny delays, predictable quirks in the handshake routine.
That was my gap.
I waited until a sim connected, then piggybacked its flow. Not decrypting. Not breaking anything. Just slipping in on its coattails, hitching a ride as the packet moved deeper into the route.
DeadAir blinked out before I was halfway, ICE stirred again, and the Spiker screamed hot. But then, click. The sim did not crash when I cut tether this time. It shifted.
My vision flickered, left eye overtaken by cascading colors. When it stabilized, I was standing in a rendered space. Another simulation?
And there she was. A pink cartoon cat, standing upright, blinking at me with half-closed eyes.
"About time," Sasha's voice crushed through a filter. "Took you what, a week? Not bad for someone without a deck."
The cat flickered, body folding in on itself until her real avatar loaded, high-res, smooth, somewhere between stylized and human.
I looked down. My own form was just a default blue mannequin, featureless, clumsy. In the real world, I was still hunched over wires in Kabuki, sweat dripping into the Spiker's board.
I managed a grin. "So you knew."
"Of course I knew. The sims? Bait. Newbie test. See who has the brains to follow crumbs." Her eyes narrowed. "Did not think you would pull it off. Most never figure it out and stay solving them."
"I figured that would ruin the point," I said. "Better to learn the hard way."
She smirked. "Learn anything good?"
I shook my head. "Plenty. Enough to know these were not puzzles. They were pipelines, feeding data into something bigger."
"Exactly," she said. "Every cracked sim pushed data up the chain. I flipped those packets for a little scratch. You got the experience, I got the eddies. That is how it works."
Behind her, the storefront finished rendering: orderly rows of glowing stalls marked QUICKHACKS, TOOLS, CONTRACTS. Not chaos like Kabuki, curated and tidy. A façade for the real thing.
And my Spiker felt like it was going to ignite under the strain.
Sasha crossed her arms. "This is not the full BBS. Just the shallow end. Training wheels. You will not touch the real thing until you have a proper deck and a setup that will not explode."
I exhaled hard, half laughing at the absurdity. A week of no sleep, endless caf, packet chasing, and all I had managed was to claw my way into the kiddie pool.
But it was a start.
Then the cat's expression shifted. Serious, eyebrows furrowed. "Listen. About that hit. The Maelstrom ambush."
I tensed, remembering the experience.
She exhaled slow. "That was on me. They traced me from a gig I had pulled a few months back. I should have burned my trail cleaner. Should not have dragged you into it."
I almost told her to shove the fucking apology, but bit it back. Instead I muttered, "I made it. Did not exactly come out pretty, but I made it."
Sasha's jaw worked, but she did not reply. Maybe she caught the edge in my voice.
The pink cat flickered back into her hand, like a holo pet. She scratched behind its ears absently. "Anyway. You are here now. And that means you need a setup. Spiker will not cut it for long. You will hurt yourself before you get anywhere worth going. You will need a deck, ice-bath rig, Cyber Interface and thermal management implants. And money. Lots of it."
"Yeah," I said. "Figures."
She gestured, and the BBS shifted. We were walking now, or the illusion of walking, past rows of glowing stalls. Each one advertised something different: self-replicating worms, cloaking scripts, canned quickhacks. Most with price tags in the thousands.
"Yoko checks every listing herself," Sasha said. "Keeps the marketplace clean. No scamware, no buried ICE bombs. You buy something here, it is legit. Might still get you fried, but at least you know what you are holding."
We passed a section labeled TRAINING. Dozens of glowing cubes hovered, each tagged with course titles. Low-Level ICE Disassembly. Trace Masking 101. Obfuscation Routines. Half were locked, requiring rep or invites to access.
"This is where you either waste your life or make it worth something," Sasha said. "Knowledge is power here, but you pay for it in eddies, or services."
At the end of the row, the space unfolded into something that looked absurdly normal: a bar. Neon sign overhead, avatars clustered at tables, drinking code-rendered drinks.
"Social hub," Sasha explained. "Not everything is about eddies. Sometimes you just need a place to be seen. Sometimes you fish for work. Or for suckers."
I could not help but smirk. "You sound like you know that part real well."
She gave me a look that said she would admit nothing.
And then another voice cut in, a familiar one.
"New face," it said.
I turned. At the bar stood a woman's avatar, pale skin, hair tied back, wearing a kimono that shifted between colors like oil on water. Yoko.
She regarded me with a tone of respect, not like before. "You are that taco guy, right? Welcome to EdgeNet."
"I got one question. How did you access so many backdoors across the city? I broke my mind trying to understand." I asked with genuine curiosity. You would need plenty of time to go around to do that.
"People like you do. A new person would gladly install my program to a node for a quick buck. Depends on the node, but usually goes for around 120 a pop," she answered while staring at me.
Fuck, I want to do that.
"Shit, send me markers and I will do it."
"That's what I am talking about."
Then she flicked me a package of 67 coordinates for installation and her backdoor tool itself.
Suddenly the simulation around me glitched. The Spiker was practically melting from this much data throughput.
I turned to Sasha and told her, "I will be going for now."
She waved in response.
And then it all cut off, leaving me sitting among the trash and cans of energy drinks in the middle of the night.
...
I want to sleep so fucking badly.