I had gotten an invite to about three such sites, mainly on my advanced knowledge of medicine and cybernetics rather than any "31337 hax0r" knowledge, and in fact, was considered barely better than a "newb" as far as my actual knowledge of computers was concerned. I was very careful to only post things that were legal on any of these private sites, as I had the feeling that at least one of them was probably run or at least monitored by the authorities as a kind of honey trap. I stayed anonymous, but most of the posters assumed I was a Ripperdoc, as my breadth of knowledge about the subject and of medicine, in general, came through in most of my posts.
I didn't think NetWatch itself would bother with such things, but NCPD NetSec might. Although, then again, from everything I knew about how Corps operated, I could see an ambitious NetWatch agent setting up such a site in order to keep his or her case numbers up. It just kind of depended on how slow their year was.
I had thought my series of VPNs and proxies was pretty good, but it turned out that I barely managed to avoid being directly identified immediately upon beginning posting there, and mostly by accident. I lived so close to Clouds that Jin allowed me to use Clouds' much much faster Net connection. They had a pipe going out that was bigger than some data centres and barely used their full capacity except for burst situations where data was backed up in remote locations and only occasionally.
I suspected they kept encrypted and complete backups of all of the client's interpersonal ideals in a remote, safe location in the case of data failure at Clouds. Some of their clients had been having years-long relationships with their dolls, and it would crush business if they were lost. Jin obviously wouldn't let me access the Clouds private subnet at all, but he allowed me parallel access to their external net connection, similar to what was offered to their guests while they were inside their premises, which I only used after piping it through about a half dozen proxies and VPNs.
It wasn't enough! Apparently, on one of the dark sites I had started posting on, it was kind of a hazing ritual to try to dox any new members, and a number of people started trying to trace my connection. A few of them traced it as far back as Clouds, and the guesses were that I was either a doll myself, one of their techs working there, or, more likely, I had somehow used a non-traceable relay, for example, placing a directional radio link relay on the outside of the twelfth-floor building. As such, I got a semi-passing grade of "better than a newb," but only barely. The truth was, though, that they had traced me completely.
In any case, one of the large names on that site, which I used more than the other two, started privately asking me if it was possible to incorporate a defibrillator system into a netrunner suit, explaining the simple and cheapest type of "black ICE" just stopped your heart. Only the really high-end ones broiled your brain or similar terrible fates.
I hadn't even really known what a "netrunner suit" was, but it was generally an armoured form-fitting one-piece that included things such as powered internal cooling systems, which were useful when runners did actual deep dives, especially if they were doing so somewhere other than their home. It was most commonly used by either corporate netrunners or edgerunners when they attacked private, air-gapped subnets. There were a lot fewer of those these days, but twenty years ago, that would have been the norm rather than the exception it was today.
Looking up a few pictures of people wearing them, I wondered if I would ever use one. I couldn't see myself doing it. They were so form-fitting that they left very little to the imagination, after all. Maybe if I put on something over it!
That started my first paid collaboration online, as I felt it was a very easy problem. Defibrillation was a very old and mature technology. Old and mature enough that I first suggested she just get an internal biomonitor and simple defibrillation implant, the kind that a cardiac patient might get. They were cheap and simple. However, she nixed that idea completely and insisted that any solution had to be completely air-gapped from her personal operating system, as people had tried that before and still got flatlined. She didn't have samples of the black ICE source code, but it was clear to her that part of the payload included first temporarily disabling an afflicted person's implants, the same way that my Disable Cyberware quickhack functioned.
She had left me one of her netrunner suits in a boutique electronics store in the nicer part of Heywood, which I suspected probably sold other things as well, and I had waited for lunch before driving over to pick it up with Gloria.
The shop had a lot of interesting things in it, and I had to be buzzed in through a little antechamber, which I suspected had a number of sensors to detect weapons. This was the good part of Heywood, but Heywood still had more population than any other part of Night City, and therefore just by numbers, had more crime, too.
"I'm here to pick up a package," I told the man working behind the counter.
He glanced at me, giving me the elevator-eyes treatment, curious. Although my ZetaTech Self-ICE didn't have any customized ICE installed yet, featuring only the default systems, it still had its built-in adaptive, intelligent firewall, which was enough to shut down the ham-handed port scanning attempt the man was giving me. It was the kind of port scan that I would have tried when I was just starting out, just using the network map utility with the default options, which was about as subtle as a right hook.
How annoying. That showed him I was, potentially, more than just a simple courier. Normally, I would respond in kind, and I had learned how to be at least a little subtle. I rarely port-scanned people directly these days, as people were almost always connected to public devices around the subnet, and if given a little time, I would attempt a breach protocol attack involving some innocuous item, for example, a vending machine or net-connected lightswitch and then use that as a proxy to scan the target. A lot of people, even sophisticated and security-conscious people, would end up whitelisting such devices if they were around them every day on their internal firewalls. It was stupid, but it saved some time, so it was very common.
Now though I was just playing the part of a slightly more than a simple courier, I frowned at him and said, "I'd appreciate it if you stopped that immediately."
He held his hands up, placatingly, with a vaguely German accent, "Sorry, choomba. It was clear this was your first time here, ja?" He motioned to one side, to a series of lockers in the back of the shop that I hadn't seen when I came in, "Packages are left or picked up in those automated, unattended lockers. If you have the correct passphrase, that is."
I nodded at him and told him before I turned to walk to the back of the store, "Thank you." I heard him say something a little less than complimentary; even living here for over half a year, I still hadn't gotten used to the fact that what I considered normal politeness seemed almost anachronistic and almost offensive to some people.
I walked up to the lockers, and there was a simple LCD display and a computer with a sign that declared it was air-gapped, not networked to anything, nor capable of being networked at all. The directions for use indicated that you should pay at the counter if you wanted to leave something here and that all consignments would be seized after the time period elapsed. You could rent a locker by the day, month or even year.
There was a card slot, so I suspected the clerk had some way to program a simple magnetic card with a cryptographically signed token that included the rental period. I nodded; it was a simple, effective and hack-proof system. At least on its surface. The keyboard was included in the kiosk and was both old-fashioned and looked bulletproof. I carefully selected the option for retrieval and typed in the password I was given, and pressed enter.
One of the lockers clicked open, and I glanced inside to see a small, nondescript box. It was sized enough for clothing, but before I took it out, I took a small plastic wand from my pocket and waved it around the box. The wand wasn't something I had built but bought. In fact, I saw similar models in this store while walking through it. It was a broad-spectrum electromagnetic frequency receiver combined with a simple chemical sniffer; it would detect outgassing from most kinds of chemical explosives, although the very newest types that featured metallic explosives couldn't be reliably detected. Thankfully, those types of explosives were hard to get, even for most corporations.
The box was neither emitting any kind of radiofrequency radiation that I could detect, nor was it likely that it was a bomb, so I nodded, replaced the wand inside my jacket and grabbed the box, and closed the locker door. The clerk was smiling as I started walking to the front of the store, saying, "You know, we inspect all packages left ourselves. There are chem sniffers built into each locker. I mean, we don't want to store bombs, either."
I snorted at him, "And if you were me, with a job to pick up a package, would you trust the professionalism of a store you've never been to?"
"Well... when you put it that way," the man said, shrugging, "No, I wouldn't."
I nodded at him, "Thanks. By the way, do you sell all manners of software here?" I wasn't sure I would trust any potentially illegal software I bought at a random store, but I could always slowly examine it for malware.
Now it was his turn to snort, "And if you were me, with a job as a clerk at a regular everyday electronics store, would you trust that some gonk you just met isn't a netpig?"
"Well... when you put it that way," I told him, grinning, "No, I wouldn't."
He laughed and said, "So, we only sell the absolute most legal of software here! Maybe come around more often..." he shrugged.
I nodded. I didn't think he was any kind of netrunner, I was better myself unless he was posing as a no-nothing, which was possible, but even if he wasn't, he probably, by virtue of operating a semi-legal electronics store, was probably a lot more "in" with the community than I was. I'd return to this store, it was interesting, and I saw a number of items that I might be able to use either in whole or in parts. It was kind of like a small boutique radio shack.
When I got back to the truck, I hopped in next to Gloria, who drove most of the time. Theoretically, she should drive all of the time that we had a patient in the back, but she was a good clinician, and I didn't want her to get rusty as a simple bus driver, so whenever she wanted to, and the acuity of the patient wasn't too serious I let her provide patient care while I drove us to the hospital.
"What's that?" she asked me, glancing at the box while eating a burrito.
I hummed and opened it, "It should be a netrunner's suit," I told her, not bothering to lie. It wasn't illegal, and if I didn't answer her, she would just get more and more curious and have more implausible guesses if my read on her personality was right. If I didn't show it to her, by the time our shift ended, she would be sure it was Johnny Silverhand's actual silver hand.
Or a consignment of illegal drugs, which she would be upset that I hadn't brought her in on my smuggling side hustle. She had a baby boy who just turned three and no father in sight, or "mainline output" as the popular vernacular went, although I thought those terms seemed a bit vulgar.
I opened the box and fished out a netrunner's suit in dark grey. It was clearly for a woman, but one a little bit more petite than I was. Gloria's eyes got wide, "Woah, nova. You're a netrunner, Taylor?"
I held out the suit next to my body. My online friend must barely be five foot three or four at the most. Besides, it had a lot more room in the chest than would be necessary for me. If these things were bespoke items, it was obviously not modelled after my body. I gave her a side-eye, "You think this would fit me?"
She glanced at it and said, "I guess not. Why do you have a netrunner suit, then?"
I shrugged at her, not bothering to prevaricate but not elaborating either, "I'm pretty handy, and one of my online friends asked me to help customize this thing for her." I then carefully folded the suit and placed it back into the box, leaving the box on the floor. I glanced at the flashing but muted alerts on my company-provided software. We were technically on our lunch break and, therefore, out-of-service, but there were a number of pending calls.
I asked her, "Want to get back to it? I'll drive, and you can finish your burrito. Looks like a bit of the old ultraviolence has been occurring." Nobody got my dated literature references these days; my mom would have been so upset at the lack of culture in this world.
She shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure. Let's change spots." We hopped out and swapped seats, and I perused over the potential calls we could select. They were sorted by potential profitability primarily and patient acuity secondarily, and although we could technically select anyone we wanted in this type of situation when we were coming back in service — if we regularly picked calls, the company wouldn't be well compensated for, we'd have some "splaining" to do.
"Looks like a shoot-out with some Voodoo Boys and unknown parties; you were just talking about wanting something interesting. The trauma gods were listening," I told her, amused, as I pulled the ambulance into the street. The Voodoo Boys were a gang of mostly white males that made most of their money by selling a large variety of drugs to the middle class, mostly college students and similar. That said, they were still very violent. But compared to some of the borged-out gangs like Maelstrom, they were peanuts.
She grinned and nodded. I liked Gloria a lot; she was a fairly good person and a good medic. She also enjoyed doing the medically difficult calls almost as much as I did. She was already scanning the nearby cars in preparation for us going code 3 while I called Dispatch.
The equipment I had gotten from the late Doktor was in fairly good condition. I had set everything up in what I was considering the "public" area of my apartment; it was where I saw people who came by for my illegal medical advice or treatment.
The ubiquitous "Ripperdoc chair" that everyone associated with back alley cybernetics installation was also convertible into a full-featured biobed featuring medical scanners and advanced life support systems and was built by Meditech. The bed was over a decade out of date, but the medical modules installed were replaced and actually somewhat new, being made in 2058. Everything was still in good condition and well cared for.
