She had never talked to David much about the NET, what it was like to be inside of it.
Quick-hacks were a very different experience from being immersed in the NET properly. Those were more grounded. You lock onto a target, usually through visual confirmation, then send a program to hopefully breach their ICE, then once you were in you uploaded another program to do what you wanted it to. Whether that be one to browse their files and extract certain information, or one to disable their cybernetics temporarily.
It was impersonal, it was a fire-and-forget style of netrunning. Never letting yourself be open or present long enough to be subject to return-fire. If it took long enough for you to be targeted back, then it wasn't a Quick-hack anymore. You could purchase discreet programs from others to upload, or you could make your own, the end result was usually similar.
Lock on, Breach ICE, Upload Program, Leave. Sticking around too long is how you get caught. Getting caught was how you got killed. That's what Kiwi had taught her.
Even if she ended up betraying them, it was hard to hate the woman who taught her everything she knew about staying alive. She usually resolved to just never think about it.
Over time, certain programs became rather universal. Not in specifics, but rather their general functions. Every netrunner in the world had a Breaching Program. How each one worked in detail was usually different from netrunner to netrunner, but they all accomplished the same general goal of automating the task of getting around a target's ICE.
This sort of thing applied to most of the programs on the market. It was up to the individual runner to code their own unique programs, or modify the programs that they purchase to suit their own needs. Even Adam Smasher seemed to follow this trend.
Overheat was a common type of program. It overclocked the internal cybernetics of the target to force them to get uncomfortably hot. Once that had happened, you could easily slip by them without worrying about them noticing you due to the pain you put them in. Of course, she didn't know of any Overheat program that was capable of actually killing the target, let alone an entire district of specific targets, also while only affecting the intended targets.
She thinks she could modify her own to be lethal, and probably increase the range to that degree if she really sat down to work on it, but the smart-targeting element hurt her brain to consider. There were simply too many variables at play to figure out who was and was not acceptable to target, then to incorporate that into a discrete set of parameters, then incorporate that into the targeting portion of a district-wide lethally modified Overheat…
She hoped that he had got that from a team of elite Arasaka runners, because the thought of him being equally competent in the NET and simply choosing to ignore it, was terrifying.
That was Quick-hacking. It was safe, it kept everything at a distance from the runner, it kept negative effects contained to the programs you send off. Tripping black ICE with a Quick-hack usually meant that your program had just gotten eaten and it was time to leave. Proper Netrunning was an entirely different type of experience.
Stepping into the net required preparation. It required time, an icy bath, and a safe haven. Lowering herself into frigid and frightening cold and…
…stepping out of her body.
Cyberspace was localized. It never spread farther than about a city's worth or networks. At least, it never spread farther than that in any routes she felt comfortable in taking. Even in the NET, she was trapped in Night City.
Night City was, in some ways, even worse in cyberspace than it was in realspace.
The city was vertical beyond any realistic architecture. It stacked on itself over and over again. Buildings at the ground level looking downright medieval with stoney looking datawalls and claustrophobic towers spiraling up. As the towers rose they turned into the verandas and open-air temples of higher-society NET, filled with minimalistic white pillars and walls that occasionally led into personalized servers.
Around the city, towering above even the safer and more expensive NET sections, the temples of Corporate influence loomed over the rest of the city. Arasaka Tower still hiding a burning red sun just over the horizon, silhouetted in stark black and glowing eyes glaring down. Militech's modern fortress on the other side of the city, a combination of steel siege tower and rookery, from which thousands of programs designed to look like burning eagles flew in and out from.
Outside the city proper, an impregnable woodland of Biotechnica servers sat to the southmost regions, a single grand tree with disturbingly uniform branches stretched out over that end of the city, the bottom of which spiraled down into the city itself.
Each of the major corporate players in Night City had one of these. Zetatech's tower looked like it was made out of stacked airports, Trauma Team's numerous smaller towers dotted around the city, and so on.
Pacifica was having its NET changed in recent times. Whereas before it was nothing but ruins stacked on ruins with broken connections and open wasteland rooftops, now it was getting demolished. Both in real life and in the NET, everything that was once in the Pacifica region was getting deleted to be replaced with the new fortress that was going to be built there. A never ending stream of corporate and government Netrunners going in and around the region, an active effort to find everything of note, transfer it, and delete everything else.
But the city didn't just go up. It went down too. Every now and then in the streets a boarded up tunnel heading down would be found, deeper and deeper into the older sections of the city NET. As one went further and further down, the architecture became more and more alien, random passages and stairways to nothing, stonework that no human would ever bother to build.
At a certain point, the passageways are only large enough to barely squeeze through.
She admitted a temptation to just… keep going down. Why would the tunnels down there be perfectly sized for her to crawl through if they weren't meant for her? It was a sickly and terrifying feeling to have.
Kiwi called the feeling Depth Lure once. She told her to never listen to it.
Of course, this wasn't all there was to see.
If one stepped to the very edge of the city NET and looked out, they could see it.
The Blackwall, and the wildernet beyond it.
Frowning titans of stone, impossibly huge even from as far as she was away, hand up and actively holding back the raging sea beyond it. A swirling maelstrom of water and wind that towered even about the highest corporate servers in the city. Somehow, impossibly, held back by the tremendous hands of the giants. Statues of cracked and blackened stone with hands raised to the sea and forcing the water back.
The sea should be slipping through their fingers, between the vast distances between each giant, but somehow it was kept at bay. The water only poured in around their feet, swallowing the space up to their ankles and soaking the very bottom of the city. The part of the city that no human should go to.
Being fully immersed in the NET was not something she liked to do. She had very few good memories of it, even back to her earliest memories of doing it. Of being modified by doctors in Arasaka lab coats and being forced into the sea. The sea looked different once you were inside of it, but that was just a lie. It was the exact same as it was before, it was just trying to trick you.
Of course, just because she didn't like being in the NET, didn't mean she wouldn't use it if she needed to.
She was doing business.
Cloaked in a burner ICON, followed by an Eraser program to help hide any of her tracks, taking a long and scenic parth through many back-door NET-paths, and finally arriving at a predetermined server to do business.
Stepping into the server, she was greeted by another burner icon. It looked quite a bit like an utterly featureless, faceless, androgynous figure waiting patiently on the other side of an otherwise empty room. She stepped in and moved to stand in front, any potential signs of what she was feeling hidden behind datawalls and false ICON layers.
"Ghost." She said simply, voice distorted and robotic within the featureless guise she wore.
"Dream." The featureless figure returned. Sometimes it was good to use your own ICON to do business, other times it was best to use burners. She could go out of her way to look into the figure standing before her, but that would be impolite.
Carefully maintained masks was how business was done in the NET. The real world did not hold influence here, at least, no one wanted it to. She knew Ghost had a more public ICON, as Ghost knew the same about her, the burners were for potential outside observers.
She extracted a line of code from her burner ICON's wispy cloak. It looked much like a slip of paper. It was just a text document with a password and account number that led to a disposable account that contained the appropriate payment for their transaction.
It wasn't a small amount of eddies, but she had more than enough to afford the loss for it if Ghost failed to deliver her order. That, and both of them knew that she would just go spread this information to other runners in the NET. Soon enough no one would want to do business with Ghost. That was assuming a betrayal did occur, which was unlikely.
Runners didn't usually try to screw each other over in business transactions. It was less profitable overall.
Letting the slip of code leave her hand and gently float over to Ghost, the figure took it and inspected it carefully. After a long moment, the figure nodded.
"It will arrive at derelict warehouse 12-E in the Pacifica region in eighteen minutes."
She nodded, and both of them left immediately afterwards. It was best to not stick around in such servers for very long, they were empty for a reason. The scrubbers actually cared about those servers, even if no one used them anymore.
She then began the long scenic walk back to her body through the net, carefully shedding parts of her burner ICON as she went whenever she was moving in between servers and connections. It was best to not connect any potential burner to her actual ICON afterall.
She had seen Adam Smasher's ICON once. A grinning man made of fire, everything on his face missing aside from that smile, wreathed in a skeletal white grinning daemon. She figured that the daemon was probably his personalized Black Armor ICE, protecting his ICON wherever he went. It was certainly intimidating enough to be made by him.
His own ICON though… It didn't feel quite like she expected it too. A featureless man aside from his smile, made of fire. That felt like it had some significance, but she couldn't tell what.
Most people had ICONs just from their time in school. If you wanted to handle transactions in the NET, you usually had to have one. Some people were more creative than others.
Rebecca's ICON was blue-skinned Oni in a bunnygirl suit. A male Oni in said suit. She thought it was hilarious.
David's ICON was just himself in his regular clothes. Because her input apparently never put much effort into the whole 'net' thing. Gloria's ICON at least had flowers in her hair.
Walking through the 'street' of the NET, she noticed similar levels of disparity among the various netrunners and others going about their business. Some just looked like normal people, some looked like fantasy creatures, some looked like cartoons. She could see all kinds of ICONs as she approached the Pacifica region of the NC NET.
…She narrowed her eyes as she saw a lone ICON, clearly a burner, standing and staring at the Pacifica region. She observed it for a moment, frowning as she noticed where it was looking at.
Directly at home.
She readied her programs and made her presence clear, moving to stand in front of the burner. It was hardly illegal to look, but a little intimidation wasn't illegal either. She glared down at the burner that was sitting on the NET equivalent of a bench.
It took a moment, but the burner finally noticed that she was looking at it. She spoke up at this point.
"What are you doing?" She asked in the flattest and most irritated manner she could.
The burner stared at her for a moment, before standing up.
"...How can you see me?" It asked. She glared and responded.
"With my eyes, gonk."
The burner stared at her for a moment.
Then, faster than she could react, it slammed a virtual hand into her face.
Everything went white for a moment. She couldn't move. She attempted to scream but nothing came out.
Her vision cleared, she saw nothing but wind and rain around her. Her hearing returned and she could hear the storm around her as well. She couldn't summon her programs. She struggled in panic, she was bound to something.
The burner stepped around her vision and crouched in front of her, inspecting her.
"...ho-hum…" Its eyes glowed a faint white. She kept trying to bring up her programs to defend herself, but she couldn't. Like an arm that she didn't have anymore, she couldn't move the limb.
"Ah… A Deep-Dive unit. That sounds about right. That explains why the Tinman keeps you around. Wait no it doesn't, he doesn't care about the NET like the uncivilized savage he is." The burner rambled above her. It reached a set of hands out and began to pry apart her ICON, moving through ICE like it wasn't there.
"Kushinada Lucyna? Kinda a horrible name y'know? Not only are you Polish, but also Japanese, and you live in So-Cal. Worst of all worlds right there. Ah, but you're a Netrunner at the very least, so perhaps there's hope for the rancid future after all. Light in the darkness and all that."
She continued to struggle in the bonds of the programs that she couldn't even perceive.
"...Ah, so that's what you want." The burner paused and stared down at her for a moment. "Respectable goal, little puke, but you're not going to be any freer up there than you are down here. Moon's all corporate these days."
The burner stayed crouching as it watched her struggle. It reached a hand out once more and carefully put her ICON back together, before withdrawing.
"I really should just kill you, little security hazard, but I'm feeling a little generous today. My curiosity is satisfied for now. Tinman isn't going to be a problem with how focused he is on the meat world, and he's not doing anything in the NET with that fancy new SPI of his. Instead I'll leave you with some hope kiddo."
The burner glared down, slowly shedding layers of false info to reveal a frowning frozen corpse wreathed in a ragged looking cloak of purple and gold. Or maybe it was a statue of white-blue stone?
"The old world is going to end soon. Nietzsche made a good point, but he was wrong about the limits of infinity."
The figure grinned at her. "Thousands of squabbling scriptkiddies go by the handle 'Ghost', including the one you just met. I'm catering to the little guy in the end. Call me Ghostlord."
Then, suddenly, it was gone.
She was sitting on the bench, the storm around her had vanished. The corpse was gone.
She activated her punch-out, and immediately woke up in her now warm bath. She jerked the cables out of her body as fast as she could. Once they were all out, she threw herself out of the tub and immediately into the towel she had prepared beforehand.
Wrapping it around herself, she sat in the corner of the room and stared, doing her best to stop hyperventilating.