Chapter 184

“Alright, everyone up. Slow and steady now.” I called out as we were guiding the people into the Behemoth. There was an understandable hesitation in wanting to enter the massive truck.

 

“Hey, it’s alright! We’ll be heading into Night City to drop you all off, it’s not like there are buses out this far yeah?” Malcolm called out, reassuring everyone as he even ran up and climbed onto the back of the behemoth. “I’ll be in the back with you. Come on. Let’s go home!” He shouted and that got them moving.

 

I shrugged. Malcolm had done a better job than I had in getting the hostages to relax. He jumped into the back of the truck with them, to be their contact as Ichi started up the truck. I would drive my Quadra, Hiromi would drive Malcolm’s car. And Rebecca?

 

I looked over and blanched.

 

“That is not what I expected you to pick.” I whispered to myself Rebecca had not jumped into the Archer Quartz, the little two seater that I thought she had been eyeing.

 

No, she had jumped into a massive Thorton Mackinaw. The same truck Panam drove, only Panam was normal sized. Rebecca looked like a kid while sitting in the drivers seat, but I couldn’t deny her massive grin was rather telling.

 

I walked over and climbed up to see what she was up to. And I laughed as she was working on the switches and things on the dash.

 

“Trying to figure it all out?”

“It’s a lot!” She argued, flushing a little embarrassed at her confusion.

 

“No worries. That one is the Crystal Dome Opacity. That one is the wheel differential. That ones the scanner.” I started, and each time I waited for Rebecca to play with the switches to get a feel for what it did.

 

“That one I have no idea. Some custom option probably.” I offered and of course Rebecca flipped the protector on the steering wheel and hit the switch.

 

The roar of two machine guns built into the front of the truck went off and absolutely destroyed an old shed next to the farm house.

 

We both went silent for a moment.

 

“Ffff-AHAHAHAHAHAH!” Rebecca broke into horrendous Goblin laughter as she realized her new truck had weapons.

 

“Of course it has weapons.” I mumbled, why did my Quadra not have weapons!? I should attach weapons!

 

“This is awesome!” Rebecca roared out and I couldn’t help but smile at her.

 

I was just happy, she was happy.

 

—–

 

The trip back to the city wasn’t too bad. We had to stop a few times for bathroom breaks for the hostages, but Malcolm had stayed with them specifically to be able to reach us in case something like that was needed.

 

Ichi didn’t want someone peeing in his truck.

 

When we all reached the city we released everyone at the first bus stop, which while half were relieved we weren’t kidnapping them, the other half complained about us leaving them on the edge of the city and not driving them all home.

 

Pretentious little shits.

 

Luckily no one pushed past complaining and we were soon on our way. The small bits of loot we had gathered would be dropped off for Hiromi to sell, and Dakota had already taken the other vehicles we had left behind, adding a bit of eddies for the gig.

 

More interesting though was Rebecca.

 

We had given Rebecca a monster truck.

 

“I kinda regret everything now.” I mumbled, as I watched her drive off, nearly driving over another car that was driving too slow.

 

Rebecca was splitting off to get her car painted and registered. And then she had said she really wanted to show it off to her brother.

 

In the end I was pretty happy with how everything had worked out.

 

Dropping off the loot didn’t take long and twenty minutes later we were all gathered up at Lizzies for an after gig party.

 

—–

 

After the party I headed home. Flopping onto my bed and passing out for the night. I woke up the next morning without much to do, so I ended up settling onto the couch and messing around with some Quick Hacks.

 

There was a lot that I still wanted to work on, my netrunning resources still weren’t complete, but the fact was, a lot of the high end stuff I wanted to do was out of reach still.

 

My mind often ran back to the Laughing Man, from Ghost in the Shell. The ability to in real time hack into someone and change what they were seeing.

 

The Major even used it to make herself invisible in a later episode, but the complexity of something like that was beyond me. If I wanted invisibility I would need to somehow hunt down some Optical Camo, which was basically impossible to find. It was a cyberware that was rarely put out on the market, as it was highly coveted. Any stealth solo wanted Optical Camo.

 

Imagine a thief that could go invisible. Of course they would want it.

 

Unfortunately I would have to take out some Arasaka ninja, or Militech hitman to get my hands on it at this rate.

 

So since neither option was reasonable, I was stuck doing something else.

 

Currently I was cleaning up another request from Yoko. Someone wanted a skeleton key to a network. Basically, they didn’t have a netrunner good enough to breach into the system themselves, but they still needed to get in.

 

That’s where I came in. They sent the data to Yoko, and she passed it off to me, as a test.

 

Well, really it was more that she just didn’t want to do the work I think. But it was alright. She promised me some favors for the work, and it wasn’t really hard.

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I knew exactly where the security system was weak, and with a bit of work, I had a quick hack that was small enough even some rezzer could breach through the system.

 

I sent it off to Yoko, but only after sneaking a little bit of code into it, that would basically blow confetti into her face when she opened the file.

 

She might have thought it was slick to send along a Daemon into the information packet she had sent me, but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t catch my little present until it blew up in her face.

 

I could only hope she was around other people on the net when it happened.

Stretching as I rose up from the couch I noticed Jun was missing. Him and Akari had been disappearing together a lot recently, but it was all because of that little shit that tried to get Jun into trouble.

 

Jun might not want me tracking him and killing him, but I swear if Jun had any further blow back over this nonsense, I would hunt that little shit down. Old friend or not.

 

I was just thinking about going out and grabbing a bite to eat when I got a call from Hiromi.

 

*What’s up Hiromi?*

 

*Motoko! Okay, listen! You need to turn on the radio! Right now! Go to Growl FM! 89.7! This is huge! Aaaah!* She squealed into the phone, and suddenly I felt… A disturbance.

 

*Hiromi, what did you do?*

*I talked to a ton of people! Radio now! It’s almost time! Ash said it would be coming up next!*

 

I blinked, because… What station was Growl FM? I don’t remember it from the game, was it gone by then? Then because I knew what I was going to hear, I glanced over to the radio and flicked it on with a quick breach.

 

“Of course that doesn’t mean Biotechnica are innocent in this. The Securicine reveal will be a black mark the corp may never recover from. Or from their last stock prices, they already have. That’s the truth of the game folks. Anyway, here is an amazing amateur track that was played last week at a little dive called Red Dirt. I want to introduce the whole city to Ghost in the Shell, and this will be, Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

 

I need to sit down. I stumbled over and managed to flop into the couch as my song started playing.