Interlude 4: NetWatch

It was strange, the things you focused on when in shock.

For Ronald, it had always been the sounds. The whir of the engine, the subtle patter of raindrops lashing the roof of the hovercar, the hum of life coming from the city below, the straining of the fabric against his body, the rustle of the papers against his hands, the subtle whistle of his own breath and the almost inaudible clicking sounds that would emanate from his implants as they moved with him.

It was calming, in a sense, the hypersensitivity to sound. In moments like these, it helped to establish a sense of control that suddenly seemed missing from his life. Unfortunately, it was simultaneously suffocating, his mind processing far too many inputs from a single source and promptly shutting down, leaving his mind blank for the first time in years.

Honestly, Ronald didn't know whether to laugh, or to cry.

At least he was alone. When he had first heard the news, Ronald could swear he'd had a cardiac incident, there and then. It was the kind of worst-case scenario that he had dedicated his whole life to attempting to prevent.

Because the Blackwall, in all it's binary, artificially intelligent glory, had been broken.

Not pierced, or penetrated, or even bypassed. Those were all problems that NetWatch had been dealing with since it's inception, and Ronald and his agents were swift and efficient in their response to such threats. No, all was well one day, and then the next, the previously impenetrable barrier of the Blackwall had been cut down to swiss cheese, only functioning to the extent that it still did because of the various subordinate programs that remained functional. When the problem had been brought to him, Ronald had thought the problem was with his workstation. The conscious entity behind the Blackwall doesn't simply crash, it's just not possible.

That only left one possibility. Somebody had deliberately broken it.

Ronald hadn't even known that that was possible. It was certainly a terrifying prospect, that someone or something out there had the power to simply rip through a firewall that the best programmers in the world had dedicated the last six decades to erecting, to crash an artificial intelligence the was so mind-meltingly sophisticated and vast in scale. If this mysterious entity could tear apart some of the best digital defences on earth, who knew which other systems it could penetrate? Which systems it already had?

Ronald was suddenly very keenly aware of the fact that he was suspended hundreds of feet in the air, with nothing but a thin sheet of metal below him to protect him from the sweet kiss of oblivion. Of the fact that his very life was in the hands of one of those systems.

Needless to say, Ronald tossed the papers in his hands aside, gripped the controls, and promptly switched off the autopilot.

More important, however, was the fact that until the AI of the Blackwall could be fully restored, a process which would take a minimum of a few days more, many of the daemons of the Old Net had the run of the new one. To that effect, Ronald had sent out the word amongst his operators. As far as he was aware, they had all gone dark, switched off those implants that they could, and cut themselves off from the Net for the next fortnight whilst the AI systems of the Blackwall were repaired. It was a dangerous gambit, to be sure, and Ronald was sure that some of them had had to break their cover to do it, but it was a necessity. Everything else was secondary from this day forwards. Finding the entity that broke the Blackwall was priority one, and all hands on deck would be required to have even the slimmest of chances of success.

Hence, Ronald had spent the past few hours of his journey reading a report that had been printed on paper. It was almost a novelty, and exorbitantly expensive, given the popularity of the holo and of datashards in general. Still, it remained the one medium that Ronald was one-hundred percent sure was completely un-hackable, and the peace of mind that knowledge brought far outweighed any of the monetary costs of acquiring the obsolete medium and the means of using it.

It was paranoid, but the situation warranted paranoia from all those brave enough to continue to operate on the Net. Even the Voodoo Boys, who were notorious for their desire to bring down the Blackwall, had seemed shocked at the events unfolding before their eyes, at least according to Mosley. The gang had been trying to breach the Blackwall for years now, and now that it had finally fallen, it seemed they were no more eager than he was to venture through it's remains.

If it weren't so fucking tragic, it would be funny. Careful what you wish for, eh?

Still, this was merely a sideshow to the real problem. You see, short of a truly gargantuan advance in quantum-computing tech, brute-forcing the encryption surrounding the Blackwall was impossible. The only people with the kind of resources to be able to make the investments into that kind of research were the megacorps, and Ronald simply couldn't see any incentive for them to do that. They only stood to lose if a million rampant AI's were suddenly released onto the net, and the Blackwall and NetWatch had been established for their benefit. The possibility of attack-by-proxy remained a possibility, as even though the primary consciousness of the Blackwall had been broken, many of its subordinate functions remained in operation, meaning that the breach in the defences was one that only enabled the passage of certain types of entities. Even still, it was far too risky a ploy for a corporation that had the resources to employ a veritable army of netrunners to do the job instead.

That only left one possibility, and it was the one that made Ronald's stomach churn.

You see, the only way to break the Blackwall's encryption, other than with particularly advanced quantum computers, was if you had access to the source-code. And that was the single most tightly-controlled file in all of human history, especially given that it gave one the power to utterly bugger up the central consciousness of the AI that ran the Blackwall, and consequently, the Net, in the first place. Ronald had reviewed the security arrangements himself, and they were truly unbreakable, from all angles. Not even a nuclear holocaust would be able to break those kind of safeguards, meaning only one thing...

NetWatch had a traitor.

Fortunately, the aforementioned arrangements meant that the pool of potential suspects remained quite small. Unfortunately, every single person on that list was far more powerful than Ronald could ever hope to be. If this really was a conspiracy, the mind boggled at it's sheer scale. To be able to turn even the very highest authorities at NetWatch against the very purpose they had dedicated their lives to; it was a terrifying prospect to consider.

Ronald struggled to imagine what cause could possibly be so important as to warrant such a massive betrayal. For it had to be some mysterious cause, some conspiracy, some grandiose objective that could sway the hearts of the people at the top. These people had inoculated themselves against personal corruption, a long, long time ago. No mere bribe or piece of blackmail would be enough. Unfortunately, Ronald, in his position as a lowly Operations Manager, could only speculate, and in the current circumstances, that was worse than useless.

Back in the land of reality, Ronald had at least seen some success. Though the hardcore netrunning community had discovered the breach in the Blackwall almost the moment it had been made, some quick thinking had allowed Ronald to suppress the news and prevent it from going any further. It had required physically pulling the plug on some of the most critical interchanges in the world under the guise of 'system maintenance', but the majority of the general public remained ignorant of the events unfolding before their eyes.

Thanks god for the news's obsession over the death of that man. Who was he again? The one that got run over?

Ronald mentally shook his head, bringing his focus back to the matter at hand. As he came in to land, slowing his speed and reducing his thrust until he could feel the tell-tale jolt that informed him that he was safe to switch off his engine, he considered his options. He opened his door, only to find two men in identical suits standing at the edge of the landing pad, waiting for him to emerge from the vehicle. "Mr Cheever, the board members have been waiting for you." One of them began to speak, but Ronald ignored him after his first sentence was uttered, too absorbed in figuring out his game plan.

Obviously, revealing the truth behind his suspicions in front of the board was a no-go. If one of them was in fact a traitor, then doing so meant that Ronald wouldn't be leaving London and returning to Night City alive. Simultaneously, he had to be able to justify the expenses he was taking to find the person or thing that temporarily brought down the Blackwall. It simply wouldn't do to act as if everything was normal, not only because the lie was an easy one to spot, but because it would likely lead to his dismissal on grounds of incompetence.

It was a fine line he had to walk, between stating the urgency of the absolute crisis that this was, and of presenting the reassuring falsehood that Ronald had the situation under control. If he was lucky, he would even be able to glean some clues as to the identity of the traitor during the course of the meeting. Assuming of course that he made it out unscathed, and that the consciousness of the Blackwall was restored in time, there only remained the problem of discerning the identity of the person or thing that did this, and why.

Ronald still wasn't sure what he wanted to do with that information. It took a terrifying degree of technical proficiency to be able to outmanoeuvre an AI on the Net, much less one as developed and sophisticated as the one controlling the Blackwall, even with it's original source code on hand. If this person was really as powerful as he imagined, Ronald didn't think he would do much of anything at all about it. As committed as he was to protecting the integrity of the Net, and of all the infrastructure that depended on it to function and keep human civilisation from plunging back into the dark ages, he was even more loyal to the notion of staying alive and unharmed.

All of that, however, was a concern for the future. As Ronald stepped out of his hovercar, and made his way to the rooftop entrance of the building, flanked by the two men in suits, he only had the meeting on his mind. Everything, from the fate of the world as he knew it, to his very own survival, hinged on the outcome of that meeting.

No pressure.

Moves are being made, but by who, and to what end?

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