Wallace never considered himself the best driver, but he was good enough to steer through the various twists and turns of the now-chaotic roadways out of Pacifica. Normally, in disastrous events like this, he'd been hunkered down right now and waiting for the metaphorical storm to pass. Unfortunately for him, the moment the Netwatch Net-Tripwire on the Blackwall broke was the moment he had to get to work.
The first thing was to assess the level of breach in the Blackwall, of which there were six. A level one breach was a lone AI that had slipped through and was currently passive. This level of breach required an agent to communicate with the AI, assess the personality matrix, and then either leave it alone or try to convince it to go back across the wall. Most of the time, AI were here on accident and were simply waiting for an appropriate authority to send them back safely.
The Blackwall did not play nice with other AI, only certain routes were safe for most of them.
A level two breach was a single AI that had gotten through and was currently active. This is the primary job of most Netwatch elites, tracking down these threats, locking them down, and kicking them back across the wall or deleting them if possible. Now, in a net-battle between a newborn AI and an experienced runner who's down to his last six-pack of smash, he'd personally bet on the newborn AI most of the time. Netwatch Wargs were both very experienced and had all the fancy tools that all the global funding could buy them to help, and even then they had a 15% casualty rate most years.
There was a common joke among netrunners, that there are very few male netrunners. Most living runners were female, and that had an element of truth to it. Netwatch typically saw more male recruits than females, for reasons that he never bothered looking into. Very few of these netrunners live to retirement.
A level three breach was the tipping point in which multiple Netwatch elites were typically called in to handle the threat. It involved a newly openly route through the Blackwall being formed by some faction, and active AI starting to wander through. It was a job that required at least two elites to handle, one to hold off the AIs, the other to seal the route.
You couldn't seal the route just on this side though, that would be too easy. You have to descend to the bottom of the Net-architecture, fighting through the swarms of Black ICE, hostile AI, and whatever enemy netrunners that decided to dig this 'tunnel', all the way to the wildernet at the deepest levels, and then start sealing from there, working your way back up. If you just seal it on one layer, then it's too easy to break through, such seals are temporary at best. You had to seal each and every layer of the 'tunnel', working your way back from the edge as you layered ICE again and again.
A level three breach was a job that an entire Netwatch Wolfpack was called in for, three to seven veteran agents, often working with whatever corporate or independent netrunners were in the area to help the event. It was one of the few times he had to get off his ass and actually put forth some effort.
Officially he was retired, but that's the thing about Netwatch. Once you were in, you were in. They were a tight-knit bunch, and retiring often meant 'I'm not doing jobs anymore, but I'll help out when you need it.'. Nobody wanted the Blackwall to fall, their entire modern civilization depended on it.
A level four breach was when the Blackwall fell in a localized area. This was a potentially city-ending disaster, demonstrably so because they have an example of it happening in the past.
Tel Aviv used to be a city in Israel.
Israel almost isn't a country in the middle east anymore. The Mideast Meltdown back in 1997 turned every nation in the middle east except Egypt, Syria, and Israel into radioactive puddles, the refugees had to go somewhere, often violently resisting any attempt to turn them away. The three remaining nations in the area swelled, filled with the survivors from the Suicide War, and started to lose control of their own nations as crime and poverty swelled.
Israel handled this as well as it could, even if it was now completely cut off from its primary backer in the US, with the US undergoing its own collapse in this era. They handled it mostly with violently gunning down as many refugees as they saw heading for their country.
This worked until the Datakrash, which destroyed much of the more advanced infrastructure they relied upon to manage their impromptu defense. No longer able to supervise their borders as well, their nation started to be filled with more and more wandering wastelanders who wanted the safety of civilization. They handled that as well as they could…
Until someone decided to put a level-four breach in the Blackwall of Tel Aviv back in the 2050s. AI swarmed until the city itself just had to be cordoned off entirely. Now, much of the Israeli military is dedicated to making sure that nothing in the city gets out, including much of their military cyberforms and the factories that make them in the city. Israel only funds their efforts through foreign investment, turning much of their international policy into one of securing more funding for themselves from anyone willing to give it.
An entire nation crippled into begging for international alms because no one could close a level-four breach in time.
Wallace lived here, so he had a vested interest in making sure it stayed afloat.
Netwatch, with express permissions from most every country on the planet, had developed a series of bounties and incentives for any netrunner willing to help in the event of such breaches. A level one breach would net the runner a 1,000ed reward. A level two breach would net the runner a 10,000ed reward. A level three breach would net the runner a 50,000ed reward and a free subscription to the Netwatch Pin-up Calendar for women.
A level four breach? Confirmation of your aid in helping against one of those would net you 50,000ed and legal forgiveness for all non-felony crimes. Helping out in one of those would give you a clean start for anything you did in the past below felony level. It was a very tempting thing for many, especially as prone to legal gray areas and minor crimes as netrunners often were.
It was only forgiveness though, not exemption from the law. If they committed another crime afterwards, it was entirely within the right of the local government to prosecute them. Most criminals were repeat offenders, so this resulted in very few people actually turning their lives around. There were some cases of it though, that was always nice to see.
The moment he noticed the tripwire-ICE breaking and saw the hole opening up in the sky, he sent out the alert to everyone in the city using his old Netwatch authorization codes (they never expired on their own, the boys back in Europe had to cancel them manually). This got just about every Netrunner who was high enough level to matter against swarms of AI to sit right the fuck up and get to the breach site.
Where he now had to go to make sure his city didn't die, instead of staying in his nice bunker with his cute wife and cute daughter and cute granddaughter. He grumbled at the unfairness of it all.
He pulled to a stop and honked at the group of kids he saw running (running!) up the road. They turned to him and ran over to his truck as he rolled down the window.
Yes, truck. A flatbed truck with a roofed back, partly filled with a massive mobile server to help him coordinate the breach-defenses. It was the standard type of gear an old retiree like him would have in his garage.
"You kids going up to Watson?" He spoke as they approached.
Adam Smasher's apprentice, now fitted with a spare arm, yelled back. "Yeah! You offering a ride, choom?!"
He nodded and waved for the four of them to hop in. David Martinez, Lucyna Kushinada, Rebecca, Katsuo Tanaka. All in combat gear and running north for some reason. His truck would be faster, and he had the room for them.
"Off to fight strommers? Where's your mom, kid?" He spoke idly, waiting for them to throw themselves in his very nice, very large truck. Tanaka hopped in the passenger side front, and the other three hopped in the 3-seater back.
His truck was a very nice truck, it cost him a pretty penny, and he had a nomad buddy soup it up a couple times.
"Rebecca has friends with the Mox, so we're going up to help them out. Mom got recruited by a guy from Trauma Team to help them out in stabilizing lower-priority peeps." Martinez quickly explained, and Wallace nodded as he burned rubber through the Santo Domingo main road. He had to take the long way, as the roads to the corporate plaza were shut down entirely right now.
He glanced in his rear-view mirror, and got a closer look at the battle-glove on Lucyna's left arm. He narrowed his gaze a bit, then focused back on the road. Casually, he spoke out to her.
"Nice Battledeck kid, you got any program-chips for it yet or are you running on an adaptor plug right now?" He recognized the thing on her arm, mostly because he had an older model currently worn over his own left arm.
A Netwatch Icewolf Battledeck. An armored gauntlet dedicated to an integrated cyberdeck, and loaded with a special innovation that wasn't sold on open markets.
Lucyna tensed up, showing that she knew exactly what he was implying by her having that on her arm, and cautiously answered. "I'm using an interface plug, if that's what you mean.". So she was running off the programs installed in her old cyberdeck still, that wouldn't be enough for what was coming up.
"There's a suitcase below the backseat, open it up. You can borrow some of my old ones for this." He simply replied, as right now really wasn't the time to prosecute her for restricted equipment.
Hearing the sound of her cautiously moving to grab the case, and the click of her unlatching it to swing it open, he smirked a bit at her small inhale of air.
Program-Chips were a simple in-theory but tricky-in-production innovation. Instead of loading a program directly into the limited space of the cyberdeck, you loaded it onto a chip, and installed chip ports onto the deck itself. It normally took around ten minutes to reformat a cyberdeck to have different programs installed and at the ready.
A Netwatch agent could change out every program in his Battledeck in a few seconds if he practiced enough. Eject the old chips, install the new chips, refresh the deck. It provided immense tactical flexibility to any agent, and was a decisive advantage over everyone else.
That suitcase she opened up was one of his on-the-go spares. It contained around 100,000ed worth of program chips in rows and rows. Any amount of money was worthless if it didn't help him stay alive.
"Hey, Wally, what was with that announcement you made earlier? The Blackwall has a breach in it or something?" Rebecca spoke somewhat nervously, he nodded and explained.
"Well, it's less that it has a breach and more like it suddenly stopped existing in Watson." It was a pretty fucking bad situation overall, but theoretically any AI willing to dig enough tunnels and collapse them all at once could do this. With that strommer earlier being a Ghost, it was very possible that some 'AI' have been doing just that.
Something like this would require basically all the net-architecture in the entire region to be painstakingly reconstructed. It was a huge fucking mess already, and he was very glad he didn't have to pay for any of it.
"...That sounds very bad." She replied eventually.
"It is incredibly bad, that's why Netwatch has rewards set up for anyone willing to help keep it contained. Speaking of which, mind if I borrow Lucyna for this? I'm going to need all the help I can get." He spoke aloud, and all four of them gave him a briefly suspicious glare before turning in on themselves and starting up a private call for a bit.
While they were doing that, he pulled up to the police blockade on the last bridge into Watson and pulled to a stop. Three officers pulled guns on him as one slowly walked up to his open window. He reached over to the glovebox to pull out his Netwatch badge and held it up to the lady about to ask him questions.
She gave it a look, ran the security number through her personal computer to make sure it lined up, and eventually nodded to wave him past. He drove up to the other side of the bridge, and parked before the second police line. NCPD netrunners were already struggling to keep everything afloat in their area, he could see their ICONs clash in the sky above.
In the distance, he could see probably a hundred or more ICONs of about every Watson-local netrunner struggling to keep the flood of insane programs held back.
He arrived before it all went to shit then, good on him. Time for the hard work.
"Here we are kids, Mox territory is dead ahead, I'm staying here to start the defense. Is Lucyna going with you or staying to help me?" He asked, getting out of his truck to open up the back and start booting up the powerful mobile system.
"I'll stay, I'll do more help here than with them." She didn't look especially happy about it, and she pulled her output into a firm and demanding kiss immediately after. "You are not allowed to die, got it?"
Martinez nodded, somewhat dazed, before breaking out into a cocky grin. "Not possible."
"Hey what about us huh? No love Lucy?" Rebecca flatly complained. Lucyna gave her a dismissive wave with a slight smile on her face. Rebecca gave an exaggerated cry of frustration before she, Tanaka, and Martinez ran off into the region proper.
Lucyna looked nervously at their disappearing forms, before turning to him as he finalized the boot-up sequence.
"Ready for hard work kid?" He asked aloud, and pulled out two heavy-duty interface cables from the interior of the truck. "I need you to keep my body safe while I'm unconscious. The NCPD should help keep all the physical threats back right now, it's the Net-threats that might take me out while I'm managing this."
She nodded and stared at him like he was a mass murderer or something. Twitchy kid, huh?
"Don't worry about them, just flash my badge if they come to ask what you're doing here."
With that final statement, he jacked the two cables into his neck and separated from his body. As he did so, he punched the activation code into the virtuality of the console.
That activated the district barrier program.
In the virtual world, a pillar of light erupted from his truck, expanding infinitely up into the sky. It then began to spread to the left and right, sending requests to all the data-terminals in the region.
As it expanded, he began to define the GPS coordinates, the barrier slowly expanding outwards in this area as it got the appropriate permissions in the defined area.
The Blackwall ran off every system in the world, because it had to in order to function as a firewall. Everything with a wireless connection had the Blackwall installed on it in some fashion, because it linked the processing power of everything together in order to be as powerful as it was.
The Whitewall was a secondary barrier program that could be erected at will, not quite as expansive as the Blackwall, and not online until it was actually needed. It was meant to redirect all wireless signals going into or out of the area through its host server first.
Everything that used a wireless connection in Watson was suddenly locked into Watson, with only a single way in or out, that being the 'gatehouse server'.
His very nice truck suddenly turned into the one way out into the wider net from Watson, and the one way into Watson from the outside.
It was his job to make sure that only Netrunners came in and out, and that every AI stayed in the region. He had to keep this up for the next three hours, until the non-retired members of Netwatch arrived en-masse.
He hated his sense of responsibility sometimes. He sent Lucyna a data-package to explain what exactly was going on.
In Virtuality, he looked up to see the hole in the sky was expanding out, but not fast enough to escape the endless wall of white slowly closing it off from the rest of the world. He nodded once, and stepped back into his body, unplugging the two-step verification from his neck, and out of his truck.
Battleglove on his left arm, sight fully focused on the virtual world, he began to rez his array of programs. Appearing in a whirlwind of snow, a pack of three massive white wolves began to stalk around him.
If even a single AI got through the gatehouse, they could collapse the entire barrier. That might cause Night City itself to fall. Needless to say, he couldn't allow that to happen.
He glanced over to Lucyna, who was still somewhat enthralled by the Whitewall. He smirked once, remembering the first time he saw it too.
"Start rezzing your programs kid, we're in for the long haul right now." He spoke, she shook out her wonder and nodded at him.
The icon of a Samurai manifested next to her, its weaponry and armor morphing as she applied more and more supporting programs to it. One powerful Black ICE and a support array? He supposed she was still young, she'd learn to stop relying on only one line of defense eventually.
His wolves burst forwards and up and tore into the side of a cackling Balron, currently being held back by various low-grade Wolfhound ICE programs. The NCPD netrunners noticed, and cheered slightly, moving back from the frontline and towards the Gate-server. He nodded and let them inside, where they went through the process of taking pain-killers and re-rezzing their programs.
"The cavalry's here boys!" a woman with curly black hair cheered as her Wolfhounds got refreshed.
"You all know what to do right? They teach you it in the NCPD runner courses just in case right?" He asked, to which one of them waved a hand.
"They stopped it this year to save on budget." The NCPD runner laughed. "Of course, they might reconsider it real soon." There was a burst of laughter from the various ICONs in his gatehouse server, himself included.
The server pinged for a moment, and he turned to quickly verify what was on the other side of the Whitewall and tried to come in.
He gave the permission for access when he verified that it was the ICON of a netrunner, a local one. The woman clad in the ICON of an anthropomorphized fox with nine tails and a large bust gave a grin as she entered.
"I heard you boys give big eddies to gals looking to help."
He nodded firmly, eyes still on the Balron in front, sending the appropriate data-package that listed the relevant rewards. The NCPD went back out, their Wolfhounds joining his Winterwolves in attacking the now weakening Demon. The Balron immediately turned one of the Wolfhounds into scrap-code with a swipe of its claws.
She grinned and rushed out to join them, rezzing a variety of attack programs. Lances of fire began to shoot out and incinerate various Demons moving to support the Balron.
The server pinged again. He glanced back through the other side.
There was a line of ICONs forming.
He began to verify them, knowing that around half of them were probably going to die in this.
Three hours.
They had to last three hours.