The air in Night City tasted different here less ozone and synth smoke, more damp earth and the lingering, metallic tang of decay. Like shit old metallic shit.
Agents Kael and Reyes stood in the ghostly remains of the Night City Zoological Gardens, a testament to the pre collapse ambitions and dreams of the corpo dreamers. It was located deep within a particularly dilapidated part of Pacifica.
Decades of neglect had allowed the urban wilderness to reclaim it. Vines choked rusted animal enclosures, holographic flora flickered weakly on broken projectors, and the distant, distorted cries of synth animals played on loop from decaying speakers.
This was the manifestation point Reyes had pinpointed in Night City, the place where the anomalous Blackwall leakage was bleeding into the Known Net from their own cache.
Their target was an unassuming, concrete administrative building nestled deep under what was once the primate exhibit, a stark, brutalist block now draped in creeping kudzu and graffiti.
This bunker like facility housed a hidden NetWatch cache, a discreet node for deep net monitoring and emergency access, chosen for its isolation.
"This is it," Kael stated, his voice flat. "The point where the veil thins."
Reyes deployed a portable diagnostic rig, its spider like limbs latching onto a discreet maintenance port near the building's overgrown entrance.
He bypassed the local security protocol, which was minimal and easily overwhelmed. The internal hum of the facility, though faint, told him the cache itself was active.
"Accessing local surveillance," Reyes murmured, his fingers flying across the holographic interface.
The building's internal systems were a mess of corrupted files and dead ends, but the external cameras, linked directly to the cache's core logic, had thankfully retained their integrity. Feeds flickered to life, displaying distorted, grimy views of the zoo's main plaza.
Kael's eyes narrowed, zooming in with his optics. The footage was grainy, but undeniably clear enough to identify the key players. It showed a brutal firefight, Apex, Angel, Jackie, Rebecca, and Teos glitched face battling a well drilled Arasaka team designated 'Valkyrie'.
The Valkyrie squad comprised four heavily armored bodyguards, a sleek, lethal looking assassin, and their own dedicated netrunner. The sheer audacity of a direct assault on Arasaka, even in a forgotten corner of the city, was astounding.
"Look at them, could they have been hired by another corp?" Reyes murmured, a hint of professional respect in his synthesized voice. "That kind of coordination against an Arasaka assault squad... those edgerunners are top tier. Especially the two operating in tandem." He pointed to Teo and the perched sniper up on the gorilla exhibit. Their movements, their tactical awareness... they're no amateurs."
"There," Reyes pointed to a specific sequence in the footage, correlating it with their own cache's internal logs. "Just as the Blackwall anomaly flared. Look at the runner. The younger one, with the dark red hair, but his face is glitched." The camera feed, momentarily distorted by a surge of localized electromagnetic interference, cleared just in time to show Teo.
His face on the grainy footage was a shifting mosaic of static and pixelation, deliberately obscured by some kind of netrunner cloaking software, but his hair color and the fluid, almost twitchy aggression of his movements were clear. He was ducking behind cover, firing his tech pistol. Then, the critical moment. After Teo flatlines the net runner.
The footage showed Teo, abandoning his firearm, and kneeling down toward the cache jacking into the port next to the screen. Teos eyes bulging and his optics displaying layers of green code.
A low, internal glow, distinct and unnatural, pulsed within the facility's glowing red walls. A vibrant, emerald green LED light, not part of any standard NetWatch protocol, flared from unseen ports on the building's exterior overtaking the red.
Kael leaned closer to the screen, his mind racing. "Did he… He just interfaced directly with this node. With the cache itself. Fucking psycho!" His voice was low, filled with a grim realization. "That green light… that's not his quickhack signature. That's the leakage. The one we detected from HQ."
Reyes pulled up a diagnostic overlay correlating the footage's timestamp with their Portland cache's internal logs. "Confirmed. The moment his external comms peaked, triggering a direct interface with this cache, the specific Blackwall leakage signatures amplified across our network. And that green pulse… it's identical to the fleeting visual artifacts we've been detecting in the Blackwall data streams."
A chill, far colder than the sub-basement air, settled over Kael. "So, this kid... he's… just a runner who jacked directly into the cache… no protective counter measures, suddenly stumbled upon the anomaly. He just interacted with it. His hack, somehow, became a conduit? Or maybe... he provoked it."
"The Blackwall isn't designed for two way traffic, Nightshade," Reyes muttered, his brow furrowed in deep thought. "Whatever that green light signifies, whatever energy he tapped into or released, it's unprecedented. This isn't just data seeping out. It's an AI fragment, or some new emergent entity, actively trying to interact with the Known Net, and this kid's digital signature is wrapped all over its manifestation."
Kael stared at Teo's glitched face in the
freezing frame of the footage, then at the pulsating green light from the cache. "This isn't random. That punk, his presence, that chaotic battle with Arasaka, the AI's leakage… it all converged here for a reason. There's something more to this pulse, this bleed through from the Blackwall, it's more concerning than we initially thought. It's not just a passive leak, it feels… directed. And he's either a catalyst or a target."
He straightened up, his resolve hardening. "We need answers. And the fastest way to get them won't be through data streams anymore."
Kael's gaze returned to the image of Teo, cold and calculating. "This runner is the key. He's either completely unwitting, or he's playing a game he doesn't understand the rules of. We need to find him."
Reyes nodded, already keying a query into his rig. "Searching all known Night City databases for a netrunner matching this profile. Young, male, known associates of these edgerunners. We'll start there."
"No," Kael said, his voice decisive. "This is too sensitive for the usual channels. We can't risk the wrong ears hearing about Blackwall leakage. Our jobs are on the line. This has to be handled quietly, discreetly. We're not just looking for a netrunner who broke into a corporate system. We're looking for someone who somehow touched the un touched. This is a priority. We need to question these individuals. Especially the runner. " The implications of an AI bleeding through the Blackwall, potentially using a netrunner as a nexus, sent a shiver down his spine.
The hunt was on, and it was far more dangerous than any mere corporate conflict. These two needed to handle this quick or this could be the end of both of them… or perhaps that runner himself.
A/N: Hopr this makes sense point out any flaws and I'll fix dem.