Start of a Grudge

My dreads hit the wind and flowed freely behind me as I was flying down the street and over the bridge to Rancho Corado. I was gonna start there to set up. The Tyger claws are all around Westbrook and with their ties to Arasaka it would be stupid as hell to put a Biotechnica factory there.

As I descended from one of a few bridges in the surrounding area I decided to set up a couple pieces of graffiti around the coalition of overpasses.

Prep is key and knowing someone is coming is a pretty good piece of info to have early. That and this...

I pulled out a little gadget I made in case someone thought they could move my little project. It was an optic implant connected to a jerry-rigged cyberdeck, one that would automatically activate once I set it up.

Inserting the shard that acted as the heart of my little security system.

This bit of tech fuckery has two auto commands, if peaceful, memory wipe is the quick hack the poor gonk gets hit with. But someone either in my growing database as a threat or openly hostile, well.

It would go BOOM.

A nice bit of napalm and shrapnel to the face usually fixed any issues. I would have marveled and tweaked the piece I came up with but it is time to keep movin' wanna visit my sister sometime today. Haven't seen her in a minute.

I blurred about the city section on my bike setting up about a dozen rigs around Rancho Corado. Some pieces ranged from giant graffiti suns, made with arrays of synth-wave colors giving a sunset ambiance to it. Others were Nebula's of colors in the form of coral reef landscapes. Making art was an outlet I enjoyed regardless of how tangibly useful it was. 

There was one thing though...

'The best ones I made from the whole batch were from while I was stoned.'

Nothing crazy either just some light psychedelics. I don't know why I can draw better without focus than with it but who's looking a gift horse in the mouth? 

Damn sure isn't me.

Just like when I hit black lace for the first time and started getting all gizmo crazy. I'm glad I can be a maker when I'm not taking things.

Regardless, art was art and good art is only worth it when people see it. So I flipped the digital switch and all 26 pieces in the district lit harmoniously. Proud of my work I made a mental note to get working on my BD Museum project. 

My baby's engine purred like a panther as colors, cars buildings, and pedestrians passed by in streaks of light that were damn near hypnotic. As depraved as the city is it knew how to entrance a motherfucker. Keep 'em enticed with indulgence and stunnin' view 24/7, use human nature against 'em to chew anyone it could up and spit them six feet deep.

It was just...

Everything in the face for you to grab at nothing.

But the rush was just damn addicting, dragging you along with the current with the promise of being able to make waves. 

Shaking off the depressing thoughts about the city of dreams I decided to finally pop in and visit my sister. She worries too damn much if I'm late.

~~~~

Ghost had just finished processing the half an hour scroll. It brought clarification to the confusing amount of venom in his creator's voice when he brought it up. Jay was always more reserved when it came to work in general, his couple of courier gigs and few thief jobs sometimes had hooks and snags, but this one was different. 

The gig was only to bring a Chevillion Ragnar to the client in Heywood, but Jay was lied to about the actual cargo, his two-bit fixer Kevin Triage said it was one of the car parts, a new prototype, but in reality it was a stolen package of a new strand of black lace and glitter. Both were klepped from a Valentino 'restaurant' ready to multiply the strand now that they had it. It would have been a jackpot of a cash out for the producers...

Another lesson that was strange to first learn about people, that money seemed to move them so strongly around here, and it moved trigger fingers the most. But over the years, and researching data about the world from before behind the black wall, I grew to understand the human conscience's desire for more. Those trigger fingers were sat right in the neighborhood an uninformed Jay was, carrying the cargo. 

The BD showed how quickly a simple delivery job got when Jay noticed a signal connection forming with something in the body of the car. He pieced together that the signal was latching onto a tacker when the first shots started firing. He drove like a bat outta hell but the gangoons knew the territory like the back of their hands. They cornered him and from the BD's perspective, it was worrying to see how close he came to being flatlined. 

But J was human and the intriguing feeling of adrenaline and ecstasy in the firefight that the raw BD let me feel taught me something else about humans, or Jay in particular, a cornered man will kill before a safe one thinks too.

Jay's reaction time hit an all-time high as he activated the kerenzikov and its booster, along with hitting himself with a limit breaker daemon, lifting the safety protocol of his cyberdeck, letting him use more ram than he had processing power. I had wanted to advise him about not making a self-harming daemon like that, but all he did was smirk and say...

" Please, being turned to Swiss cheese by a buncha maelstromers is self-harming. This is just some extra thinkin' man. Plus, whatcha gonna do? Stop me from protecting myself? Bwahaha!"

He shrugged it off with the same rugged sarcasm he does most things detrimental to his health, like the black lace, and his short but insane learning BD phase. But this was a different him, he was addicted in a different way. The cocky smirk under the adrenaline-filled eyes could be felt through the BD and I don't even have a real physical face with nerves to know. 

He threw out a few contagion quick hacks in between blips he had the chance to without losing his head all while moving around different alleys and twiddling down their numbers to a third with how fast he was slinging out contagions and the occasional synapse burnout to those who could still move and were in range. By this point, a head-splitting headache was felt through the BD as well as an iron-y taste in his mouth and a similar feeling of nosebleed.

Yet with bloodied teeth and a couple of grazes along his form, he pulled his mono wire out of both wrists and used a mass weapon glitch quick hack. What happened after that could only be described as a meat grinder. He used his limber yet sturdy physique to maneuver in ways that whipped the wire with such force it could cleave through two gangoons with subdermal armor at the same time. He spun and bounced between the gangoons and the last 6 of them quickly fell to him in a mess of blood, flesh, and metal. 

Naturally, he had to leave the scene immediately after finding what was in the truck and stole one of the ganger's bikes, and rode on a straight shot to Triages Homebase. But it also happened to be his actual apartment.

This soon devolved into a heated argument at the heat that the fixer had put on his back, along with the lack of information. Soon enough Kevin had enough of his feedback and said Jay had to go. Jay stalked behind him instead, demanding an extra cut for all the blood he had to spill, his and the Valentinos.

The man adamantly, but carefully refused and while the conversation started to hit a precipice, His 11-year-old son came from his room and ended up between the two, confused and worried about why this blood-covered man was demanding payment from his father. 

Jay's hand had already been on his revolver ready to blow the man's head off, but with the arrival of the innocent element he had been more conflicted than ever. The slight glint of safety in Kevin's eyes as he saw the ones behind the mask soften like putty made Jay feel sick with anger and disappointment in something. I still didn't get what though, that he didn't get the extra eddies? But he wasn't really strapped for them back then when he was actively moving cargo around. 

His principle was to never leave a backstabber breathing but...

The thought of killing a man In front of his kid made him nauseous with guilt. The thought brought a feeling of reminiscing and regret that didn't make sense to me but I would ask later. It's always the Morose feelings that confuse me the most. How can he smile so smugly but be so often lacking in dopamine?

But before Jay left he made sure to grab as much data and digital currency as he could from the access point in his home. He had taken twice as much as he would've gotten paid and left. And even though he was a two-bit fixer he had a couple of ins here and there, along with a chunk of info on where and when money would flow around the southside of Heywood.

The recording ended there and I started to finally get those worker bots on the signal tower so it was ready when he came back. Then he could answer all these weird chemical changes in the brain and body. 

I wonder how that...thing from beyond the blackwall will actually help, I mean I am a state-of-the-art homemade, Ice running, independent AI. What could some old hag of an AI improve me when she barely even knows up to date tech.

~~~~~