Friday Night Firefight: A Cyberpunk Isekai

After stumbling across the RCS warehouse, I spent the rest of the day in the abandoned apartment across the street, jotting down notes on everything I observed. I threw a couple pings at the RCS security system and discovered something intriguing; they didn’t have a dweller on the premises. Most large corporations had a dweller or two protecting their NETArch from intrusion attempts, but not RCS.

In theory, this should have made hacking into their security systems slightly easier. However, despite the lack of a netrunner stationed inside the warehouse, the NETArch was still some of the strongest I’d seen. RCS was a corporation, and even the smallest corporations had plenty of money to spend on security. I carefully mapped out the edges of the NETArch, not enough to trip any alarms but enough to notice the tell-tale signs of black ICE and daemons that could melt my face off if I tried to break in like a normal netrunner.

As I watched the warehouse, I jotted down my thoughts, trying to come up with a feasible plan on how to pull off a heist on a corporation like RCS. Most of my ideas were quickly struck down or reworked over the next couple hours. They either weren’t close to being feasible or required far more money than I had.

Some ideas might have worked if I had access to certain netrunning programs I’d heard about online, but those were expensive. The rest of my plans were so outlandish they would only work in a movie or a tv show. Eventually, after hours of sitting in the abandoned apartment and parsing through all the information I had, I came up with the outline of a plan.

RCS HEIST PLAN

Step 1: Get more money.

Step 2: Figure out how to neutralize the physical security around the warehouse. Pings of the RCS system show 12 RCS workers and guards on the premises and ?? number of Tyger Claws. At least two, probably four, possibly more.

Step3: Figure out how to break into the NETArch. Not good enough to fight daemons or counter black ICE. Can I shut it down somehow? Worm? But how do I get the worm into the system?

Step 4: Drive the RCS vans out of the warehouse. Two vans pull up at 630pm for the Tyger Claws. There are an average of two to five RCS vans in the loading bays at other times. How many can I steal? Also, what’s in those two 630pm vans?

Step 5: Slip away with no one noticing.

All in all, not the greatest plan. Panam was able to jerry-rig a generator and set off an EMP to bring down a Kang-Tao AV with only a couple hours of planning. And here I was, creating the most basic of outlines for a heist that would determine if I had an apartment next month.

What worried me the most were the Tyger Claws. What were they doing operating this far north in Watson? And without claiming their territory with graffiti marks? Normally, whenever the Tyger Claws were around, they painted everything with their graffiti Tyger heads and you could hear their Kusanagi bikes idling. But not only did they not mark their territory, but the only time I saw the Tyger Claws leave the back room of the warehouse was when they were stocking up those vans. My best guess was that they were using the vans to smuggle some kind of product.

I woke early the next day, grabbed my backpack, and wandered around Watson looking for vending machines hidden in out-of-the-way spots. I was nervous about overusing my vending machine hack. I didn’t want to get too ballsy about stealing from vending machines for fear that someone would find out and come for me.

Part of me knew that was a ridiculous fear. Who the hell would send someone after a vending machine thief? I didn’t even know if that was a thing. I mean, this was Night City and corporations did have private armies on their payroll. But would they target someone taking a few of their eddies? My years of being a normal, law-abiding citizen was keeping me from hacking every vending machine I could find and grabbing all the goods in them.

I pondered the incongruity of being too afraid to steal from a vending machine while simultaneously preparing to make off with a couple vans full of goods from a major Night City corporation, and then got down to work. I desperately need seed money for the heist and grabbing cans of NiCola from vending machines and selling them to local businesses promised to earn me a few eddies.

I sidled up to a vending machine, breached the security, reset the price for the cans, filled my bag close to bursting with NiCola, and trudged off to various restaurants and food carts throughout Kabuki to negotiate a price of two eddies per can. Do you know how heavy 30 cans of NiCola in a backpack are? By the time I got back to my apartment that night, there were massive purple bruises on my body where the shoulder straps had dug into my skin.

But the money I got for the cans, along with most of what I had left in my bank account, let me purchase two programs at the Dewdrop Inn – Yoko’s netrunner café.

“Why these programs?” Yoko asked as she slid the two chips towards me. “They’re archaic and outdated. I’ve got more modern stuff that’ll work better.

“Well, if they’re so archaic and outdated, you shouldn’t charge me so much,” I countered as I slipped the chips into my pockets. I’d fiddle with them on my laptop later before tossing them onto my cyberdeck.

“Now that I think about it, they’re not too old. You’re getting a good deal for them.” She grabbed her tablet and went back to scrolling through it. “If you ever want any daemons or anything serious, you know my number.”

I laughed and stepped out of the Dewdrop Inn. The truth was that Yoko was right about both programs being almost completely useless for netrunning. Or at least, that was the prevailing wisdom. And that was why I was able to buy both for only 300 eddies.

The first program Yoko had sold me was a simple image editor. There were dozens of apps on the market that were more popular. The program I got didn’t boast all the tools that professional photographers liked, and it was too unwieldy for the average person to use to touch up their photos. The second program I bought was a virtual assistant that let netrunners and techies control different programs in their apartment. You could slip the VI into an apartment’s subnet and use it to send out shortened commands to all the technology linked to that subnet.

With a few simple commands, a user could turn on their lights, open and close their windows, control the tv, and do a handful of other tasks. It was like having a really dumb Alexa whose only job was interfacing with your kitchen appliances. Neither program was very popular, and I was able to get both for a bargain.

I spent the next three days parked in front of my laptop, ironing out all the wrinkles of my heist plan and fiddling with the programs Yoko had sold me. If I’d been a true netrunner with access to a real cyberdeck and one of those chairs, everything would have been so much simpler. Instead, I was forced to rely on my cyberdeck OS, a laptop, and the kindness of netrunner collectives who doled out free information to newbies and script kiddies.

I found a BBS – netrunner message board – on the city NET filled with old-timers interested in passing on their knowledge to the next generation of netrunners. One guy helped me code a worm that would give me a one-time backdoor into any system it infected. He was dubious that I’d get it to work though. There were two main drawbacks to it that he pointed out right away. The first was that I had to have privileges already established before the NETArch would accept the worm. The second was that any dweller worth their salt would easily notice the intrusion, but the worm was small enough that most automated security software wouldn’t take a second glance at it. Another netrunner taught me about a well-known exploit that worked on the city NET but warned that it was only useful if I could physically connect to a city NET access point.

None of the netrunners I spoke with were interested in trading me any of the good programs they had. For one, I was relatively unknown. I hadn’t pulled off any big gigs that I could brag about. I also didn’t have a real cyberdeck or a chair, and most serious BBS’s required netrunners to be able to deep dive before they would welcome them in. I was using my laptop and the city NET to gain access to the message boards that were only useful to newbie hackers.

The other reason I couldn’t get any good programs was that I didn’t have anything worthwhile to trade. My entire netrunner arsenal included ping, the worm I coded, a virtual assistant nobody wanted, and the image editing software that was considered subpar at best. I couldn’t sell any of my programs for information, exploits, favors, or daemons.

After three days of working with netrunners on the message boards, my two programs were finally ready for the heist. I woke early the next morning and left the apartment but didn’t need to go far. The Yaiba building was nearby, and I spent an hour trying to probe its NETArch defenses. The security around the building was way too difficult for a novice runner like myself to breach. I didn’t trust that I could do it silently, and I definitely didn’t want to alert one of the Yaiba building’s residents to any sort of intrusion.

My plan for the heist was still coming together, and one of the major sticking points I had was finding a fence who could sell all my ill-gotten gains without alerting either RCS or the Tyger Claws that I was the one who had robbed them. If everything went according to plan, I’d be stealing between two and four RCS vans from the warehouse. I knew that none of the normal Kabuki vendors I sold my scrap to would be able to handle the amount of stuff I needed to fence. It was a big job, which meant I needed someone who knew what they were doing.

I was sure that Marcus, the Dime-a-Duzz owner in the lobby of my building, could fence at least one of the vans. He had a bunch of contacts out in Heywood and should get a good price for anything I stole. But I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. I needed another fence who knew what they were doing and wouldn’t rat me out at the first sign of trouble.

I walked back to my apartment and spoke with the owner of the Ru Lai restaurant next to the lobby. His tiny store served some of the most delicious meat buns I had ever tasted – even though I was pretty sure it wasn’t meat stuffed in them – and I had quickly become a regular after I moved in. After explaining what I needed, he was more than happy to help me out.

He tossed me a purple mesh top that I slipped on over my shirt, a couple of flyers for his shop, and one of the meat buns in the window. I set off back to the Yaiba building and started making my way up the floors, slipping flyers for the restaurant under every office door I passed. At each door, I snuck a peak at the NETArch, searching for one particular resident I knew lived in the building.

Most of the offices in the Yaiba building had decent security. Nothing too fancy; just enough to give the average netrunner pause. That meant it was twice the strength needed to stop me from poking around. It wasn’t until I got to the top floor that I found what I was looking for.

The stairs abruptly ended before I could reach the penthouse office of the skyscraper. I probed the strength of the NETArch wrapped around the top floor and found it was much stronger than anything else in the building. The only thing I could puzzle out of it was an IP address, but that was enough. I made a note of the IP address in my notepad and grabbed the elevator back down to the lobby.

A few hours later, I was back in Kabuki, picking up some last-minute items for the heist. My dwindling funds were starting to hate me because I had spent most of what was left of my money at a flea market stall where I bought a grey jumpsuit that wouldn’t stand out against the drab rooftops of northern Watson. I only had 30 eddies left in my account, and I spent 20 of them on XXL Burritos and cans of NiCola, stuffed them in my backpack, wiggled my way into my jumpsuit, and set off for North Watson.

I made a quick pass around the RCS warehouse, checking to make sure there was nothing new with the security, and continued heading north. I didn’t want to spend too much time wandering around North Watson. The warnings that Fred and Mor had given me about Maelstrom territory were at the front of my mind. I had even heard that things were starting to get worse in North Watson lately. Whole camps of homeless were disappearing up here. I wanted to get out of the area quickly, but there was one last thing I needed prepped for the heist.

I found it a couple blocks from the warehouse.

The entire area seemed vaguely familiar. A road curved down towards an industrial section of the city. Abandoned buildings littered several city blocks in every direction, and the road eventually spilled into a storage area filled with shipping containers stacked atop each other. As I got closer, I slowed and found a spot next to a building, pulled out one of my XXL Burritos from my bag, and started munching. While I ate, I scanned the area.

Nobody pay any attention to the guy in the jumpsuit. Just a worker on his lunch break, eating a burrito. Nothing to see here.

I immediately noticed the signs of Maelstrom activity in the surrounding area. There was a burnt husk of a car situated next to a loading bay and a graffiti mask of a Maelstrom face adorned one wall of a nearby factory. If that wasn't enough to erase all doubt that I was firmly on Maelstrom turf, several gang members were lounging on cheap plastic chairs, pulling guard duty. I wanted nothing more than to run and hide in my apartment, but I needed to make sure that these particular Maelstrom members were who I needed.

I finished my burrito and crept closer to the gang members, hiding behind several shipping containers to do so. I peeked my head out to grab a quick scan. One of the gang members sported a dog collar with spikes that matched the dozens of spikes embedded throughout his upper body. His optics were massive metal things that made him look like some kind of bug, and that weird fake skin stuff was stretched to breaking over his body. When I scanned him, an NCPD file popped up in my vision. Tom “Ymir” Ayer. Wanted by NCPD authorities for dealing in illegal stimulants.

Bingo.

I made a note of the building the Maelstrom were guarding and quickly walked back to the RCS warehouse before popping into a nearby alley to make final checks on all my equipment. I had my grey jumpsuit on, the two programs I bought from Yoko were stashed away, my laptop was in my bag along with a bunch of XXL Burritos and NiCola cans, and my notepad and pen were seated in my front pocket.

It took no time at all to jimmy the old lock on the building next to the warehouse, climb a couple sets of stairs, and then burst out onto the roof. I sprang over a nearby ledge, hopped onto a few air conditioner units to lessen my fall onto the RCS warehouse roof, and then crouch-walked my way into position.

And with that, I started my first real heist in Night City.