He glared down at the plastic chip in his hand. His clawed grip holding it just lightly enough to not damage it, but tight enough to vent a fraction of his frustration with its existence. The card was barely large enough to read the words printed upon it, maybe the size of a playing card in truth but tiny in his large hands.
A tiny, infuriating card. A card that all the reasoning he had told him to keep and store on his person for its irreplaceable benefit. A card that he would absolutely need for things he hadn't even considered in… maybe ever.
Clenched between two angry fingers was a plastic chip that bore five words and the silhouette of a woman with distinctive ears.
CYBERPSYCHO PASS
VERIFIED : DANGER-US
His optics burned red glaring down at it. His optics turned to the packaging it had been removed from, now laying discarded on the table in front of him. No address listed, which means it was hand-delivered by one of her agents, which means he was still being watched by the fucking cats, which meant he was still being watched by her.
His hand twitched, instinctively trying to destroy anything nearby.
He clamped down on that immediately. Performing a long inhale followed by a longer exhale. It was purely performative, his internal air-batteries didn't need refilling for another 12 hours or so, but it tricked his mind into calming down.
He was an independent now, which meant that he would potentially be subject to the laws regarding cyberpsychos. It was bullshit, of course, those were for fuckers that couldn't control themselves. He was perfectly in control, his murder was deliberate and calculated, not wild and random. But he was a fullborg, which meant that clause 21 would always apply to him regardless.
The standard operating procedure for government-sanctioned fullborgs involved a tracking chip wired to an automatic frame-disabling program in case he went on a murder spree. For the public benefit, they called it, really it was to make sure nothing could kill the government and corporate approved murderers in turn without serious efforts on the part of the meatbags.
The entirety of the cyberpsycho laws were almost entirely ignored in Night City, Nightcorp simply didn't have any way to enforce it with their limited budget and influence, and no faction particularly wanted to enforce it either. A dangerous Night City was a profitable Night City. But they weren't ignored elsewhere in the world, they were enforced stringently, especially for independents.
Independents that he now was, and thus subject to clause 21. They would also try to invoke clause 22 and 23, no doubt, as he was a military-class fullborg who wasn't associated with any major organizations. He would kill the entire planet before he let some fucker put a kill-switch in him. That would mean needing to fight the entire planet, though. It wasn't something he could afford yet.
There was a way to avoid that however, with clause 25. A corporation or government could sponsor the fullborg in question. They would be treated as already being tracked, but in exchange any trouble they caused would be laid at the feet of the faction that sponsored them. The sponsor would be legally liable for the actions of the fullborg in question, and thus, sue-able.
A cyberpsycho-pass was the token of clause 25, containing a chip inside that could be read off with the contact information of the sponsor. A token that represented the sponsor.
He was Adam Smasher. He was the most dangerous man to ever live. He was an immensely desirable asset to dominate the loyalty of. If he wanted a sponsor, it was almost guaranteed that it would come with loyalty contracts and non-negotiable chipware. This was an immense boon to get without strings attached, and something he could wave to get all those fuckers in checks and regulations to fuck off with.
The problem is that it did have a string attached. A little string that led right back to her. A string that was currently making him see red.
He was currently something beyond furious. The issue is that he had no way to vent, and rejecting the pass was such a stupid decision that he couldn't do it, the logical part of his mind wouldn't let him.
The smell of burning fuel came to him, and he closed his eyes in focus. The micro-jets on his back and legs that had been flickering on and off intermittently were forced to halt once more. He engaged a manual shutdown in his internal readout, set to re-enable in a few hours. It would be annoying if those lit something on fire that he didn't need currently burned.
What vocabulary could be accessed to express his contempt for the tiny, infinitely useful item in his grip?
He turned the question over in his mind a few times, tasting it, letting it settle briefly, making sure to take it in entirely before finally coming to a mostly-satisfying conclusion.
Genocidal is how he currently feels.
He needed to hurt and kill something. Many things. A great many things in fact. With perfect self control, he accessed his internal agent and made a call. The call buffered for a moment, before connecting.
"...Adam? What is it?" The voice of the cougar came over his internal phone. She sounded worried, perhaps nervous, ultimately irrelevant.
"Rogue." He addressed her by name. "I need a list of every active bounty you have." His voice was slow and paced, deliberate in pronunciation and intent. He paused for a moment, before cutting off what she was about to say with a small correction. "Wait. Clarification. I do not mean 'many' active bounties. I mean. Every active bounty, that you have."
"...Sure thing Adam… Is this some sort of mission for the kids or that company you're putting together?" She was hesitant in asking, apparently detecting his obvious tone of voice.
"No." He answered. "I just need to go for a walk."
His optics burned red, glowing brightly in the darkness of the room.
—
He stomped his way into the adjacent room, the living room of the apartment the brats had chosen for them to stay in while the Ebunike was getting refurbished, and made his way for the door. Along the way, the woman looked up at him from her place in front of the flatscreen on the wall. She stood up quickly and called out as he stomped by. "Was the package goo…" She trailed off as she noticed his carefully controlled fury, as he stopped in place and glanced over to address her. "...oh, was it bad?"
He stared at her for a long moment. He deliberately inhaled and exhaled before replying. "Good, but infuriating." He spoke the truth. "I'm going out to murder something."
Quickly, she power-walked over to a container in front of the door that he hadn't paid attention to until now. She opened it quickly and reached inside, and he simultaneously appreciated the way her ass looked in those jeans while disapproving of her shit lifting form. Straining with the weight, she pulled out an appreciably large gun. Midnight Arms MA70 HA, the belt-fed variant.
Barely managing to heft it in one arm, she bent down again to grab something else from the container.
He walked over to see what she was trying to lift. Once he got close enough, he saw that it was an ammo hopper and loaded belt, ready to attach to the gun she was struggling with. Ah, good, she had prepared a gun for him.
He bent slightly, and put a hand on her shoulder. She froze at once, apparently having not noticed his heavy steps behind her. Putting another hand on her hip, he forced her to straighten up her back and bend her knees instead.
"Like this, woman." He commanded. He heard her swallow slightly. "Lift with your knees."
After a moment, she got what he meant, and adjusted her stance. Slowly, straining with the weight of the hopper, she rose from her crouched position at a more steady pace. He kept his hands in place to make sure she didn't fuck up the pose. Eventually, she had raised high enough to lock her joints in place, and thus hold the objects up without greater strain.
He furrowed his brow. She smelled off, not like oranges as she typically did, but strawberry or some variant of pink fruit.
She turned, face flushed with the effort and offered the items to him. He slung the ammo hopper over his shoulder with ease, grabbing the belt with one hand. She, much more easily, offered the gun to him with both hands. "David's birthday is coming up soon and I remembered that I should probably get something for you too, but I didn't know when your birthday was…" She reached up and brushed a lock of red behind her ear, looking down and to the right.
He took the offered gun, attached the ammo belt, and let it rest against his shoulder. "No idea when it is. I don't celebrate it."
"Oh well… would you… like to?" She stumbled over her words, fiddling with her shirt. That same old faded Hard Rock Cafe shirt he gave to her a few months ago.
He snorted. This was entirely unnecessary. "Sure. Pick a date woman." He really didn't care about celebrating his date of birth. It was just another day to him.
"...Okay." She responded, still not looking at him. After a long few moments of silence, he asked his earlier question.
"Woman. You don't smell like oranges." Left unspoken was the actual question. She was a grown woman, she could figure it out.
"Oh! It-uhh-the Strawberry was on sale, so I got it. It seems a bit silly, thinking about it, I have enough now that I don't need to chase deals so much but it… uhh…"
He raised a brow as she trailed off. She fidgeted again. "I'll go get the orange again, I actually prefer it really."
He grunted and rolled his optics. "Don't waste money woman. Strawberry is fine."
"...you like it?"
He didn't care. It wasn't lemon-scented after all. "I said it was fine, didn't I?" He was mostly out of patience for this conversation, so he turned towards the door leading out of the suite and called out over his shoulder. "I'll be out for a while, maybe a full night. Tell the brats I'll be back in the morning if they get back before me."
"I'll get the power washer ready."
He stopped at the door and turned to stare her down. She returned his gaze, apprehensive over something. He doubted it at first, but having a meatbag handle all this little shit for him was very helpful, especially now that he didn't have corporate serfs doing this for him.
"This is why I like you, woman. You're useful."
With that parting comment, he exited the apartment. A bounty list scrolled past his field of view as he stomped through the halls and out the entrance. Good work, cougar, he was going to use this well.
Now then. Which bounty had the biggest numbers?
--
Ping was a rather simple program. It was simple because all it really was was one of those most basic functions of a computer, one that was required for the computer to communicate to any other device. A simple 'system check' program that detected what other systems it was connected to, or could be connected to within the local host. It was very hard to guard against it, almost impossible to detect unless you were actively watching your system's readout, and probably something that will never go away.
It was a thing required for systems to communicate with other systems, hard to get rid of it and keep the whole 'Net' thing running. The best you could do was landline everything and put in a verification check at every system, and even then it could be bypassed for something that wasn't much of a threat on its own.
ICE did nothing to stop a Ping program, because the program was just an activation of a system's core function that you had already breached, and wasn't registered as a potential danger, because it couldn't be unless you wanted your system to sound the alarm every time you sent information from one system to another. Such as using the NET at all.
It was theoretically possible to stop a Ping program and keep a connection to any other device, just not practically possible, and certainly not on any kind of budget.
Ping, despite its almost universal application, wasn't too terribly useful for veterans. Typically a veteran will already know exactly what they can and can't connect to through their Virtuality optics. All Ping did was slightly automate the process, and might reveal an extra system or two that you didn't notice. Always nice to have on hand for the double-check, but dedicated warrunners usually had one of their squad handle it and that's it.
Just about every netrunner had their own variant of Ping, because it was taught as the beginner program to build on your own. The tutorial program, useful as a learning tool and gateway into programming more complex programs. The very best Pings were monstrous examples of pure efficiency, used as a way to flex programming mastery between netrunners and not much more.
It was a Ping program. Even a very fancy Ping still only did that one thing. The fanciest Pings were shown off as a way to brag about how good someone was at optimizing a simple program and incorporating additional functionality.
Uriel had his own Ping program, first used back in Pacifica to keep watch through all the cameras at once. His 'Ping' spread a line of fire through every camera, which let him place a Watcher program to alert him when something within the 3 set parameters occurred, which then let him take his awareness to that location as fast as possible and assess the situation from there.
Lots of boring, basic, easy-to-learn programs were used all the time at this point, usually without conscious realization on Uriel's part. He didn't store them anywhere except his own head, and once he memorized the program he just… well thought about the code really hard and rezzed it. He wasn't sure how he was doing that exactly, and he could handle about three at a time, but he still shouldn't be able to do that unless he was making the program from scratch each time.
Or, re-making them he supposed. They were different from the instinctual programs he usually used, the ones that relied so heavily on his ability to out-processing power his target. That wasn't really something he could rely upon for a while at least.
Pft. That's what he would say if he (Adam) was poor. But Netwatch opened their very expensive, super-rare, raid-boss exclusive shop to everyone who survived the RABID awhile back. During that, Uriel convinced Adam to buy exactly two things.
A personal desktop computer and a Ping program. Both of which were in their vault of 'things Netwatch doesn't want to sell to the wider public' (the ones not willing to fight RABIDs). Nothing stopped people from then selling these from Netwatch to outside buyers for ludicrous sums, of course, but the very limited supply kept the troubles of such down.
The personal desktop computer was a custom built and then confiscated from a now-long dead and very wealthy euro Netrunner. It was scrubbed of anything potentially dangerous by Netwatch, and put into the vault of goodies for someone to buy later on. It could handle a single data-architecture (server in Uriel's terms), a lot of program storage space, and a pretty good amount of processing-power to throw at problems.
That computer, now set up in the Ebunike's captain's room, was about the size of a motorcycle and cost him (Adam) 54,000ed. It was this computer that the Succutary was currently sitting inside (checking on her, her ICON was currently herself in a slingshot bikini).
The Ping program was another custom built, this one apparently built by a Chinese Corporation focused on net-security. That corporation lasted only a few years before Netwatch was tipped off that it was really being run by a small host of unsanctioned AI. The corporation was promptly dissolved and all assets raided by Netwatch, and then confiscated immediately. China avoided legal repercussions by agreeing to having a local Netwatch station set up near their Korean border, specifically so Netwatch could keep an eye on Seoul.
It was a very shiny, very optimized, very effective Ping with exactly one expansion in use-case. It was labeled as 'Fractal-Pattern Self-Propagating Ping-class Executable' in their files, and it was a very sexy program. What it did was simple.
It was a Ping that kept going. It didn't just detect all systems within the local host. It detected all systems that the local host could potentially connect to through the Net. A self-propagating Ping that kept going until it hit a pre-programmed limit, up to the limits of the City-Net itself.
For most people, all this information would be useless on its own. It was simply too much information to use all at once. It was a program that practically required both an automated sorting program and administrative AI to sort through that incredible amount of information and make it useful again. Even then, that information only gave the information that a Ping program would, revealing all the systems that were connected to the Net within about a City or so. On top of that, it took a while to map the whole system unless you gave it a specific set of limits.
The wider the area you search, the longer it took to map out. Now, he couldn't understand how this program did all of this quite yet, but he had isolated the sections of code that did do that. Now he just had to figure out hyper-optimized AI code.
In this situation, it was very useful to him and Adam. Activated remotely upon leaving the apartment, with the Succutary ordered to parse through the information after the first layer of organization and find specific targets, which she would then relay to Uriel for further use.
She had almost screamed in defeat and frustration, before he explained what he was looking for. Bounties. Acceptable Targets. People that Adam and he were intending on killing.
Then she asked if she could watch with a blood-lusty expression on her ICON. She was a Succubus-class program after all, her encoded purpose was murdering people, even if in a different form than this. He allowed this, so long as she wasn't slowing down her pace in sorting through the information that the fancy new computer was taking in and putting through one round of sorting.
So while this session of genocide was mainly to relieve stress, there was no reason you couldn't make a really solid profit as well.
For the next few hours, Adam tracked down and slaughtered targets that seemed real fun to butcher. And in the background, in netspace, every few minutes, someone in the city would find their cyberware cooking them from the inside-out. The recording was sniped, saved, and sent off to verify the bounty.
Uriel had to admit, when he killed the ones that really earned their bounties…
…He didn't normally enjoy killing people. That was more of Adam's wheelhouse. He understood why Adam enjoyed killing, hard not to when they shared a mind, but it wasn't his thing.
He wasn't about to weep over people dying, people died every day. It would be hypocritical for him to care overly much about any one of them over the other. He enjoyed the fighting, but he tried to not care about them living or dying in the end. Not unless they might be useful later.
But good God.
This was satisfying.
He ignored the stare of the Succutary and focused on his work.