Masamune’s text sat pinned at the top of my deck display.
**Masamune**: Send the output. Now.
The unit had turned into a warm box overnight. Fryer oil had slipped in and settled into everything, mixed with damp plaster and the faint burnt smell the junkyard deck gave off when it spun hard. The new processor Vik had jammed into my skull yesterday kept my optics from hitching as often. The Self-ICE case sat on the counter, empty now, because I kept it as a reminder that I’d put another lock inside my own head.
The output bundle waited in the folder Masamune’s package had created. One compressed dump. One receipt file. The dump looked familiar in shape—routing, device IDs, handshakes, timestamps—but the meaning still stayed buried in places my brain refused to unwrap cleanly. Proprietary, the same way corp tools always were: built for people who already had the map.
Staring at it too long pulled the same physical response every time. Teeth wanted to grind; shoulders wanted to climb; a push behind the eyes tried to turn delay into motion. Drift did that now.
Hands moved anyway.
A copy went to a shard first. The cheap port fought the connector, then seated with a click. The transfer bar crawled while the deck fan climbed into an ugly whine. Raven fingers held the shard steady with the right pressure. That smooth control still landed wrong inside my chest, the way a tool worked too well when the person holding it felt tired. When the copy finished, the shard went into my pocket. Then I made a second copy—wrapped in encryption I didn’t trust and still used.
Home left a thread; a public data term drowned the first hop in other people’s noise. It also invited other people’s problems. Clear enough.
Jacket on; Talon stayed home. A rifle case in Kabuki turned a normal errand into a headline. The stairwell door stuck and complained when my shoulder shoved it open. The building smelled worse near the ground floor where garbage bins lived. Outside. Scooters rattling on bad bearings. Someone yelling into an agent call. A vendor setting up under a torn tarp.
The Galena started on the second try and settled into its rough idle. I drove with both hands until the street tightened, then one hand, then both again when a van cut across a lane without looking. The chrome arm held the wheel steadily.
The first kiosk on my route had a pair of men leaning under an awning, eyes moving too slowly for boredom. The Galena rolled past without braking. Two blocks later, another data term sat under a flickering strip light beside a vending machine that never stopped rattling. The screen was burned-in with old news, and the shelf under the ports was sticky enough that the deck case clung.
The token slot asked for payment. I fumbled the first disc, then found the right one—and the tiny slip put heat under my skin. I slid the cable in; the port fought, then seated. The kiosk UI stuttered, then settled. The destination field filled itself through my agent with Masamune’s address. A prompt appeared under it.
FULL OUTPUT — CONFIRM.
I hit confirm. The upload started. He was watching the pipe.
The bar climbed in small steps. Heat built inside my bag and pressed into my ribs. Every few seconds my eyes forced themselves off the progress bar to check the street, because people loved stealing from anyone who acted hypnotized by a screen.
A corner of the kiosk flashed a new prompt.
AUTHORIZE ASSISTANCE.
Stomach tightened. That could have been a service wrapper, a compromised kiosk, a leech nearby trying to ride my connection. The urge that rose next felt too physical to be simple caution, a hot pulse behind the optics pushing toward a fast decision.
Self-ICE immediately made itself known. It didn’t speak in words. The fucking piggybacker got blown clean off my virtual back. Thank fuck. The upload kept moving.
A man drifted into my peripheral and stopped near the wall, pretending he belonged there. Jacket too warm for the day. Still patience. Eyes on the shelf, not my face. His reflection sat in the kiosk screen.
“Term live?” he asked.
“It is,” I said.
His gaze slid toward the destination line. A shoulder shift blocked his angle without turning it into theater.
“Sending corp?” he asked.
“Sending,” I said.
He smiled with scratched caps on his teeth. “Two hundred eddies and I forget your face.”
A thin red trace indicator lit up on the display edge. A number ticked upward. Fuck.
“Step back,” I said.
He stayed close and leaned in again.
The Raven forearm pressed into his chest and pinned him to the kiosk side panel with steady pressure. Plastic creaked. His breath came out sharp.
“Easy,” he said.
The trace number jumped.
He twisted, trying to slip sideways. Raven fingers caught his wrist. I twisted it with him and kept going. Tendons tightened. His face changed and the sound that left him was ugly.
The trace number spiked hard. A quick system line cut through my vision, terminal-dry, gone almost as soon as it arrived.
TRACE SHUNT — READY
Another line followed, colder.
TRACE SHUNT — EXECUTED
The red number dropped hard, then started climbing again at a slower pace. The kiosk flickered once and steadied. The upload bar kept crawling.
The man stopped fighting. His eyes flicked to my chrome and then to the street, checking for friends that weren’t coming. His mouth worked once, then shut.
“Walk,” I said.
I let his wrist go. He backed off, rubbing his hand, posture tight, and melted into foot traffic without looking back. He kept his hate and his fear wrapped up where he could carry them.
The upload ticked past ninety. The kiosk tried to pop another assistance prompt, and it died before it finished drawing. Self-ICE was present, a lock you didn’t feel until something tried the door. Worth every eddie.
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The bar hit the end.
TRANSFER: COMPLETE.
LS→ARB: sister
Cable out, deck back into the bag. I walked away at a regular pace. The agent chimed before I reached the Galena.
CRED // IN: E$2,000
NOTE: EXPENSES
Two thousand eddies. That was his reply. I was actually starting to like the guy. Except for the fact he forced me to run fucking unknown code in my brain.
Driving back took the longer route. Traffic moved in waves; a delivery drone clipped a sign and kept going.
The unit door chain slid into place. The room felt smaller with the deck on the counter and the message history in my agent. The shard copy went under the loose floorboard beside ammo and tape. The board squealed once when it settled back down.
The overlay flashed without ceremony.
SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC: COMPLETE
LEVEL: 4
ATTRIBUTES:
BODY: 5/6
REFLEXES: 4/4
TECHNICAL: 5/6
INTELLIGENCE: 5/5
COOL: [LOCKED]
CLASS SEED: IMPERSONATOR
PROGRESSION CHANNELS:
SHINOBI: 04
ENGINEER: 05
SOLO: 03
NETRUNNER: 03
HEADHUNTER: [LOCKED]
PERKS:
SHINOBI — QUIET STEP
SHINOBI — GRIP DISCIPLINE
ENGINEER — JURY-RIG
ENGINEER — SCRAPWORK PROTOCOL
SOLO — PAIN BUFFER
MURK MAN — ICE COLD CONTINUITY
JUNKYARD NETRUNNER — BUFFER DISCIPLINE
JUNKYARD NETRUNNER — TRACE SHUNT
SKILLS:
RANGE TRAINING: 20/50 (POLICEMAN)
HAGGLING: 17/50 (GARAGIST)
MECHANIC AFFINITY: 24/50 (GARAGIST)
BRAWLER: 12/50 (MURK MAN)
NETRUN: 20/50 (JUNKYARD NETRUNNER)
ENGRAM CACHE (3 SLOTS):
[01] JUNKYARD NETRUNNER — COMMON (ACTIVE)
[02] GARAGIST — COMMON (IMPORTED)
[03] MURK MAN — UNCOMMON (ACTIVE)
CYBERWARE:
ARMS:
Raven Microcyb F-24 — COMMON
OCULAR:
Kiroshi Optics SD-5 — COMMON
NEURALWARE:
Zetatech Neural Processor Mk.2 — UNCOMMON
SELF-ICE
Seacho Electronics Mk.2 — UNCOMMON
SYNERGY ENGINE: ONLINE [ ]
PACKAGE: ARMED
DRIFT: PRESENT (MODERATE)
STATE: NOMINAL
The money sat in my account with its polite label. Masamune kept silent, and that silence carried more weight than the original message, because there was nothing to answer and nothing to solve.
Hands went to the sink. Water ran cold at first, then warmed. Soap did nothing about the feeling under my skin, the residue of that pinned message and the moment the trace number spiked and the system offered a button that worked.
The towel on the hook had started life white and lived gray now. Fingers wiped on it anyway. The mirror over the sink caught my eyes in the bad light. Green with that subtle catch again, the cheap optics seam refusing to disappear, hair stuck to my neck from sweat. The processor sat under bone and wires and kept doing its job in silence.
I stared at the ceiling until the stains stopped arranging themselves into shapes, then rolled onto my side and reached for the agent with the careful slowness you used around things that bit.
No new message. Silence—on purpose.
I got up anyway, because the room was too warm and my skin felt wrong. The deck sat where I’d left it, ports facing away from the light as if that mattered. I neither touched it nor looked at the folder. I went to the window instead and cracked it a few centimeters.
My skull still carried the kiosk’s red trace number. It didn’t matter that it had dropped. The memory stayed, my brain holding onto the shape of panic as if it was useful inventory.
I filled a cup, drank half, put it down. The water was warm before it hit my tongue.
The urge came back, pushing from behind my eyes: open the dump, decode it, understand what I’d just sold. The pressure had texture now. It wasn’t curiosity. It was momentum hunting a rail.
I breathed through my teeth and did something petty instead.
I opened the agent’s settings and built a new profile, bare bones. No contacts carried over. No history. Cleaning out the rooms, I called it. A clean wallet behind a clean key. I moved a small amount into it, enough to pay for a kiosk and a ride and a bad decision. The rest stayed where Masamune could see it, because I wasn’t stupid enough to pretend I could vanish with his money and have my head stay attached.
Then I went down to the deck and checked the local cache the package had created.
It wasn’t just the dump and a receipt. There was a third object under them, hidden in the folder tree the way corp engineers hid things when they wanted to claim it was “there the whole time.”
Entropy\0\3650\.
My hand hovered over it and stopped. The back of my neck prickled, the same warning I got when a link looked too clean in an email chain. I didn’t open it. I copied it to the shard in my pocket on reflex.
Self-ICE didn’t announce anything.
I sat on the edge of the cot and forced my hands to do something else: field strip, wipe down, re-oil, reassemble. Techilancer. A few months and I’d either have a small revolution or an unstable prototype.
When the gun was done, my eyes drifted back to the deck anyway.
I told myself I needed a plan. That was what I used to say before I did something risky at work, before I clicked into a system that was not mine, before I chased a fault because it offended me.
Sending from my unit was a mistake. I’d avoided it once. I wasn’t going to get lazy after the first payment.
I slept in scraps until the light outside turned white and mean. Every time I dozed off, my body tried to jerk itself awake. The kiosk prompt kept flashing behind my eyes: AUTHORIZE ASSISTANCE. It felt less like a scam now and more like a door I’d been lucky to keep shut.
By noon, I was moving.
I didn’t take the Galena this time. I went on foot—through crowds, down alleys that stank of old piss and power strips cooking in puddles, past kids kicking a cracked ball against a wall. I bought a cheap mask from a stall that sold counterfeit filters and wore it anyway.
I picked a kiosk I’d never used, one wedged under a stairwell beside a ramen place that smelled aggressively clean. The screen was newer. The keyboard still had that same polished shine from too many hands.
I paid, plugged the deck in, and didn’t stare at the progress bars. I kept my eyes on reflections and movement and the edges where people pretended to exist without purpose.
This time the destination line didn’t fill itself.
I typed Masamune’s address manually, using the shard copy as a reference. My fingers were steady until the last character, and then they weren’t. One tiny slip—backspace, correction.
My ears went hot.
I selected the dump, attached it, hovered over confirm. Pressed.
The upload started. No assistance prompt this time. No red trace indicator. Just the bar climbing in small, ugly steps and the fan in my bag spinning up until it pressed hot into my ribs.
Halfway through, a message arrived.
**Masamune**: Good.
**Masamune**: Stand by.
Two lines. No punctuation beyond the period, and it still read as a hand resting on the back of my neck.
The upload finished. I pulled the cable out, wiped the port on my sleeve, packed up, and left at a normal pace.
The walk back took me through Kabuki’s loud parts on purpose. I bought useless things I could throw away later: a bland chemical drink and a roll of tape with a fake brand name. I stopped at a vendor who sold cheap knit caps and bought one, then shoved it into my pocket without wearing it.
When I got back to the unit, I stood in the hallway and listened for a bit.
Footsteps above, a door closing down the row, someone coughing wet behind a wall. Nothing that felt pointed at me.
I went in, locked up, and sat down hard enough to make the cot creak.
The system overlay stayed quiet, and that made my skin crawl. It was never quiet when something big changed. This was a different kind of quiet, the kind that meant I’d already been accounted for.
I waited for the next message that didn’t come.
Hours passed. The room cooled a fraction when the sun shifted. Kabuki’s noise changed pitch when vendors packed up and generators took over. My stomach reminded me it existed. I ate the dried meat and hated it, then drank water and tried to pretend it helped.
Near midnight, the agent chimed again.
**Masamune**: Location tomorrow.
**Masamune**: 14:00.
No address yet. Just a time, a demand, and the casual confidence that I’d comply.
My jaw tightened. I felt the urge to answer, to bargain, to ask questions that would get me buried.
I set the agent face down on the counter and stood there staring at the cheap laminate until my vision stopped fuzzing at the edges.
Fourteen hundred—less than a day’s lead, not enough to build anything that wasn’t dumb.
So I did the boring prep.
I cleaned the pistol again, checked my meds and the bandage edges even though the cut was sealed, then counted ammo twice and got the same number both times.
---
Morning came.
I moved through my routine with a stiff economy. Shower was a joke, just water over skin and soap that smelled of chemicals. Hair tied back, because Misty’s voice had been right even when it annoyed me.
At 13:20, the agent chimed.
A pin. No text this time. Just a location that landed hard in my gut because it wasn’t Kabuki, and it wasn’t a public place that made sense.
An industrial edge.
I stared at the pin for a bit, then turned the agent off and put it in my pocket anyway.
I left the unit and walked into the heat, letting Kabuki swallow my shape for a while before I went looking for a ride.
