"Hello, Mr. Horan. No, we've never met. Name's V. I know you recently had a delicate situation with a blackmailer using the alias Zeitgeist. Well, that problem's no longer your problem."
I listened for a few seconds as the cop stumbled over his gratitude, mixing it with curses aimed at the late runner. Then Nathan Horan asked about the files Zeitgeist had stolen from his computer. One of the videos was titled "Corrupt married cop, two Valentinos chicks, and a shit-ton of drugs." Judging by the stats, the dead runner had watched it seventeen times.
"I've got the file, but I'm not gonna blackmail you, leak it, or even watch it. Nah. You're good. Think of this as me doing you a solid. That said, maybe someday, I'll need a favor. Good deeds should be rewarded, right? You get me?"
Of course, he got it. Every dirty cop and pencil-pusher in Night City understood how these relationships worked.
"Great. Have a nice day, Mr. Horan. And be more careful with your personal data. Runners are everywhere, and the NCPD's too busy babysitting the corpos to give a shit about regular folks."
After a few polite nothings, I ended the call. Another thread in my web. Only now, I wasn't spinning lies—I was weaving influence.
So. Anyone else left? No. Horan was the last of Zeitgeist's six recent victims I'd contacted today. The blackmailer himself lay just a few steps away. Or rather, what was left of him.
Jory came to mind. He and the dead runner were similar in some ways—both liked to wreck lives just for kicks. Me? I did it mostly for the money or other benefits.
I had to deal with Jory. Even if his attempt to blackmail me through Lucy didn't pan out, his spammy cries to NetWatch could fuck me over. I'd only just started securing my foothold here. No way I wanted to run again and start from scratch.
How to sneak Jory past the Blackwall? There was one surefire way: Alt. If I could get my hands on Johnny's biochip and use it to reach the Net, there was a chance I could get her attention. From there, what happened next matched the fragments of future memories I carried. Meaning, with Alt, I could strike a deal—promise her help with Mikoshi.
However, the problem is that there's still a month until '77, and Yorinobu sure as hell isn't an Amazon Delivery service. When he'll actually decide to swipe the chip from his old man—hell if I know. Probably early in the year, but that's just a guess.
The second guaranteed way? Songbird. But I already owe her one. Reaching out again is, well, let's just say… risky. If she starts seeing me more as a liability than an asset, she might actually hand me over to Militech.
Which leaves the third option. No guarantees. I passed the Blackwall once before. I could dive into the Net and try to remember how I pulled it off. Besides, I've got Zeitgeist's netrunner gear right here. Pretty decent setup, honestly, for a street-level hacker. The guy didn't skimp on chrome, hardware, or software.
"Skimping is for meat," one of Zeitgeist's absorbed thoughts popped into my head.
He had the same disdain for flesh as Adam Smasher, thought himself above its frailties. Even swapped real sex for braindances. But in his twisted obsession with sadistic stalking, I saw something very "meat." Cruel, animalistic malice.
Whatever. Philosophical debates can wait. Right now, I need to get practical.
An hour and a half later, I'd moved the equipment and set it up in a rented room. Along with the gear, I brought combat programs—stuff I bought myself, plus trophies from the stalker's lair.
Outside, a storm was raging. Tiny hail pelted the city like an icy shrapnel bombardment. The local rain reeked of nature's wrath. Nitrogen and sulfur oxides—generously provided by the industrial giants—turned the water falling from the sky into death for any unlucky plants.
I cracked open the window, letting a damp gust of cold air rush in. Scooping up the top layer of accumulated hail from the windowsill, I jokingly tossed it into the ice bath sitting in the middle of the room.
The depths of the Net awaited me.
As I hooked up the equipment, I ran through what I remembered about passing the Blackwall. Lucy and the other kids from Arasaka's secret facility had been there. Maybe Delamain originated there—or at least parts of him had tried to get through. The Blackwall can be crossed, though it's no cakewalk. I remembered the words of the AIs from Cynosure: "You passed. It let you through. It sometimes lets you through, but it always takes something in return."
I dove in.
The Cyberworld greeted me with a sea of cold lights, woven into endless geometric patterns and shapes. In the real world, a hurricane was tearing through Night City, but here, everything seemed calm. At first glance, anyway. I knew damn well how deceptive the stillness of the Net could be. Time to shed my human form. My essence released itself from the voluntary limits that let me function with a living nervous system.
Different ways of thinking awoke in my memory. Sensations perceived not through physical senses but through streams of data. Volumes of information vast enough to drive a person insane.
I had to readjust to it all and dig through layers of stored memories to find the moment I passed through the Blackwall. There was so much data on the great killer of AIs. For what felt like months—if not years—of real-time, stretched into an eternity in the Net, I watched that killing machine butcher its victims. The Blackwall consumed rogue AIs, absorbing fragments of them. It waged an endless arms race against anyone trying to breach it or bring down the entire structure.
The Blackwall was everywhere the working networks were. But in certain places, its stability—and that of the Net itself—wavered. Abandoned zones, outdated hardware, obsolete protection protocols, extreme conditions that inherently disrupted the functionality of most programs.
After failing to catch Lucy about ten years ago, I had followed her. Fragments of her memories had sparked the remnants of my human past. Like sparks falling on dry fuel, they reignited a desire for life within me. Driven by a strange hunger and a longing to return to the human world, I chased the girl to the point of crossing through the Blackwall.
There, a special zone of instability in the Blackwall had been created. Arasaka's secret project used a different method to breach it than Songbird. Complex, slow, but it drew far less attention. I'd anchored myself on the other side, but I no longer attacked netrunners. I just observed how they went in and out, and then…
Then my memory was shredded. Only fragments remained. Some even contradicted each other. I remembered the actual crossing as an overwhelming strain that nearly destroyed me. Even in the zone of weakened control, the Blackwall operated with terrifying efficiency. It didn't just blow minds—it shredded everything in its path. Ripping through informational systems like a predator tearing apart its prey.
I recalled the additional programs I'd created for the breach. My preparation. I'd used an adaptive icebreaker, a schematic I'd cribbed from Arasaka's runners, alongside multiple layers of masking noise and decoy elements I was ready to sacrifice—like a lizard shedding its tail.
But what had actually worked? Hell if I knew. There was so little information left. Fine. I could adapt these measures for Jory, hand him the schematic, and point him to the best spot for a breach. Best case, he makes it through. Worst case? He gets shredded—but even then, I might still salvage the deactivation key for his messages and a full list of recipients from the wreckage.
It's worth a shot.
And so I got to work. Time in the Net flowed differently, especially when your thoughts no longer followed human logic.
I didn't have to go looking for Jory. He found me first, just as I was finishing the software.
"This for me? Really?" His voice dripped with fake surprise, sparking something like irritation in me.
A phantom image of Jory appeared nearby. Not his whole self, just a fragment that had managed to slip past the Blackwall.
I silently sent him a message along the lines of: "I'll give you the time and place. I'll use programs to pave the way for your main self. Some parts you'll have to handle on your own."
"So dry and curt!" he exclaimed, throwing up his hands theatrically. "Not even a little 'good luck, buddy?'"
I simply sent him a signal to hurry up.
"Alright, alright! I get it. Guess you've got enough company over there. Meanwhile, I'm stuck here, starved for attention. Let's get this over with! Free me already!"
Let's get this over with indeed. The sooner, the better.
Without further ado, we began the assault on the Blackwall—or more accurately, an attempt to slip through the cracks in its unstable zones.
Once again, I found myself dangerously close to that raging sea of deadly black ice. The Blackwall shifted, sometimes forming smooth blue lines, sometimes flaring red, oscillating and sending out pulses. Occasionally, for brief moments measured in fractions of a second, the killer AI's structure seemed to thin out. Its brutal power didn't fit within the confines of the old, abandoned network elements we were navigating.
Geographically, it was some ghost town in Free California. Damaged, ancient equipment barely kept alive by nomads or other drifters. Like they say in the NUSA, "in the middle of nowhere." But honestly, "smack dab in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere" feels way more accurate.
Deploying three "Ifrit"-type daemons I'd brought along, I focused on the Walls's patterns. I felt like a character in an old game or a tomb-raiding flick, standing before a corridor of swinging blades. Watching, waiting, memorizing their rhythm for the right moment to sprint through. Except here, the blades were Black Ice, just as deadly. I needed to crack the code of its cycles.
The Blackwall's behavior here was driven by two conflicting forces: the directive to remain impenetrable, and the limited power of the rusty-ass network gear connected to this unstable node. This fragment of the Black Wall kept revving up its power, hitting hardware limitations, crashing, then dropping power, only to be prodded again by its neighbors: "You're slacking! Block better! Boost power!"
And so the cycle continued.
Power surge. Collapse. Dip. External directive. Power surge again…
I gave the order to move in just fractions of a second before the next collapse. On the surface, it probably looked like we'd lost our minds, charging at the Blackwall at the peak of its strength. But right before its lethal strike, the system hit its breaking point again. Not the whole Wall, of course—just this local segment. But that was enough for us.
Icebreakers slammed into the weakened structure, managing to carve out what you could generously call… a gap. What I pulled off was nothing compared to the tunnel Songbird had blasted through. My move was more like holding up a collapsing mineshaft with hiking poles.
Thankfully, reaction time in the Net isn't just something the Wall excels at. Jory shot through the opening. Shot through and…
Got stuck.
If that term even applies to what happens in Cyberspace. But yeah, he couldn't move past the Walls's zone. He was bogged down, trying to drag too much data. Jory had stuffed his head with so much shit, it was slowing him down.
"H-h-he-lp me!" his voice echoed in my mind.
I had to act fast.
The Wall's Black Ice was closing in when…
It felt like an information explosion. The shockwave hit me too, pulling me into the danger zone. The black-and-red chaos morphed into something visual. Fucking Jory and his stupid theatrics—but this time, it might've bought us precious seconds, acting as an overclocked smokescreen.
Suddenly, I was in the middle of a hotel room ripped straight out of a noir novel. Red curtains slightly parted. Heavy moonlight spilling onto luxurious carpets. In the dim lighting, Jory's face looked even paler than usual.
"Do something, V! This won't hold it off for long!"
"I know!" I snapped, forced to "speak" out loud.
The illusion bogged down my usual signals, making everything sluggish, like wading through quicksand.
"How much junk did you shove into your skull?" I snarled, now resembling a typical hungover private eye. "Drop your 'treasures,' or you'll die here for nothing."
"Shut up, shut up!" the little bastard howled, his face twisting. "You made it through the Blackwall! Get me through too!"
Sure, I'd made it through—but I wasn't dragging mountains of stolen memories and bloated visualizations with me. What kind of "great riches" was Jory hoarding anyway?
I began a quick scan, trying to push past the illusion to pinpoint the real structure of this space.
Slowly… way too fucking slowly.
The illusion resisted every move I made, like the time Lucyna slipped away from me.
I summoned the Ifrits. All three appeared as classic gangsters from old mafia flicks—black suits, white shirts, fedoras, and, of course, Thompson submachine guns. Tommy guns, .45 caliber.
"It's here! It's close! You feel it!" Jory screeched in terror.
I felt it.
The motel—or rather, the entire illusory construct—shuddered. I glanced out the window. The moon and sky were gone. The Wall had come for us.
The illusion had given it a horrifyingly precise form. The "sky" beyond the window was now a wall of intertwined corpses. Skinned, bruised, whole, missing limbs, some even headless. They were all stitched together with glowing red threads, writhing and reaching for us.
The Wall didn't just destroy rogue AIs—it consumed them. It tore them apart and absorbed their fragments into itself.
Lucyna once told me there were no corpses in the Net, which made it impossible to count how many lives Cyberspace had claimed. But the Wall was the exception. The Great Wall of the Dead.
The mass of bodies smashed into the building, raining down tons of writhing flesh. The illusion crumbled as the Black Ice devoured it, like a horde of starving zombies. Some were already clawing their way through the window. I sent one of the Ifrits to intercept, but it was clear it wouldn't hold for long.
"We're breaking through!" I shouted, shifting my thoughts beyond the illusory boundaries.
We both bolted into the collapsing hallway. Stray zombies, separated from the main mass, were already waiting for us. Sharp red threads tore through the walls, stabbing toward us.
I used a Hydra on the zombies and had the Ifrits shield us from the tendrils. Just a little farther…
I remembered Lucyna's escape from me, mimicking her moves to slip through the illusion to freedom. But it didn't come without a cost. A couple of times, those red threads grazed me, delivering not pain but something far worse. Probably the same thing Faraday and Sue felt when I shredded their souls.
But…
It ended suddenly. The illusion collapsed, and we found ourselves outside the Blackwall. Strangely, it was eerily calm. Suspiciously calm. Shouldn't it have reacted with a massive counterattack? Or maybe we just got lucky, hanging on until the sector's next collapse.
Hell if I know. Honestly, it felt like it let me go on purpose. Those words echoed in my mind again:
"You passed. It let you through. Sometimes it lets you through, but it always takes something."
Why let us through? Why, and what does it take? Hard to believe the NetWatch programmed those functions into it. The Wall's inner workings were a mystery, even to someone like me—practically immortal.
"I did it! I made it! I'm here!" Jory howled. "I lost so much, but I made it. Thank you, friend! Thank you! I'll never forget this!" he whined, fake as ever.
I sent him a silent message: "Codes and address."
"Sure thing, but not right now," Jory answered with a slimy grin. "I still need a body, remember? A fine, living shell. Then, and only then, I'll shake your hand and hand over everything."
Of course. Fine, friend. You'll get your body.
The hardest part was over. The Wall was breached. Now I just needed to find this bastard a body and, most likely, flatline him the moment he got it.