Private Darkpatch Contract: Seeding a Shadow Signal

[GhostKey]

Left/Keyrunner (Fixer): Alias Tag: Clicker | Echo-ID: CK | Undervine Alias: CK117 | Race: Mirialan
Profile: Small-time Mirialan Keyrunner, Honest, Reliable, but Twitchy.
Assistance: Undernet Backdoors.

Right/Target: Alias Tag: Shardwalker | Echo-ID: SW | Undervine Alias: SW009 | Race: Lorrdian
Profile: An ex-corporate Lorrdian neuromancer turned undernet mystic. He claims to have 'walked the Shard', a mythical cyberspace code-fracture said to hold rogue AI ghosts, ancient secrets, and forbidden code. Speaks in riddles, half holy man and half cyberterrorist.

• Darkpatch Contract: Seeding a Shadow Signal
• Mission Brief: Two slicer job. Find and establish a quiet, secure connection with the Black Net Prophet, a spectre in the Undernet. The shifting layers of the undernet hold corridors of forgotten code and rogue programs. We need you to skirt close to the Nullframe Abyss, and to monitor and restore each other in case of signal degradation.
• Risk Level: Blueline Level 2. Abyss proximity. Minor interference is expected. Watch for data spectres, rogue AI and passive trace signals, you aren't the only one looking for your target; counter-slicing is possible, along with likely obfuscation by your target himself.
• Target Status: Signal drift detected. May require constant recalibration to reduce signal loss due to abyss proximity.
• Undervine Whisper: Even the quietest signals leave echoes; the abyss leaves none.

Payment Each:
1x Spoofed Echo-ID Replica, good for 2-3 uses.
1x Drift Token for Nomadic holonet and undernet data havens.
5,000 Credits

---

Sitting in his Denon apartment, he patched an AT-Line direct into the side of his neck, his vision fractaling-out into the datastream before he resynced into the current. A second later he rezzed into the Undernet preloading mission node. Cheap hardware to use, but he was a datagrub trying to work his way up, he couldn't afford better.

How a small-time keyrunner like Clicker had pulled a contract like this was his first thought. Also, this didn't feel like Blueline work; whispers of the undernet abyss on the deeper layers had him uneasy.

His Undernet Echo-ID resolved into a ghost-grey render of himself, the symbol of a Key glowing on the back of his jacket. His features were gridded, low-res—a default in the starting node. On other nodes they'd sharpen up. Some nodes pulled your details into perfect clarity, in others things just got weird, this one was a low-bandwidth safe zone, with a limited signal trace, revealing little about each slicer.

Ghostkey blinked, scanning the datascape. Who was his team-up for this run?

Saul Whesai

Undernet Starting Node Inspiration​

 

[Saul Whesai]

Another Undernet Echo-ID would show up soon after him. Saul was unsure about how all this worked, with this being his first time out. He had heard rumors about the Undernet before but hadn't had the time or a permanent place to try it before. After getting a new apartment and the equipment needed to unload himself into the Undernet. The wires extended off his cybernetic arms, the same AT-Line's GhostKey was using. It was time to see if this Undernet was worth the investment.

Taking a breath, he focused on the surroundings of the safe zone. His avi looked like a homeless man with a painted-over gasmask, the ragged clothes hanging off of his electronic bones. Seeing GhostKey's Avi which looked like the contact he was given, he slowly walked over, waving hello. He hoped that he would be kind to beginners. He would need the time and space to experiment with this place, not being run out into the front lines right away. "Ghostkey?"

GhostKey

 

[GhostKey]

"Hey, yep, looks like I'm echo-live and glitch-free." A miracle considering his rig was scrap-grade, patched and jury-rigged just to hold the signal together. He blinked, adjusting to the gridded nature of the starting node, low-res but a steady feed.

"They didn't wire your handle. What's your tag?" Gotta keep things clean, no names, just echoes. GhostKey's voice still marked him as a late teen, unmodulated as it was. He wondered if the other slicer had filtered his voice. Scanning his appearance, "looking spire." Cool, low-key, good look for this kind of run.

"Ready?" No point lagging. He wasn't big on waiting around. Young, keen, and masking his excitement as best he could. This job was his backdoor into the big leagues!

A holo-interface blinked into existence beside his hand, lines of translucent light sketching out the mission feed. Handshake protocols locked in, a confirmation ping echoing in their audios. The gridded environment they were in flickered, raising into a layered overlay of the Undernet's deeper sectors, a rough idea of where a trace of Shardwalker their target might be. Somewhere beneath it all, past the uncertain static, the Nullframe Abyss lurked like a signaless void.

"You syncing clean? Seeing any ways to slip by?" He scanned for back doors, entry points manifesting as floating access terminals or flickering breach gates leading to deeper more likely nodes. If the other slicer hesitated, GK wouldn't push, just offer help. He was wired and excited but didn't want to burn their shot early.

Mind to matrix in this node. They didn't control everything in here—the Undernet physics had its own rules—but they had just enough juice to inject their own code and programs, draw up their interfaces, and bring their own key jammers in to scramble the locks, maybe more if they were creative.

Saul Whesai

 

[Saul Whesai]

The tag "Ratcatcher" flickerered to life above his virtual head. Saul trusted that he "looking spire" was a good thing. Looking hestient at the younger man's wanting to push on ahead, he sighed though his mask before nodding, getting himself mentally ready for what was to come. "Sure Kid, lets give this a try." Noting the same mission objectives that were infront of his partner, he replied with a calm voice that tried to suggest he wasn't out of his depth as he felt. "I'm syncing fine, lets get this job done."

Trying to keep his feet as their environment shifted, he glanced at their enivorment, seeing what new things opened up for them both. Looking around as the young kid talked, he saw one access panel dug into one the shifting hillsides. It was going to be a climb to get there. Pointing it out to Ghostkey, he said. "Looks like its going to be a climb..." Walking up to the cliffface, he started to climb up the front of the hill. Thankfully, it would be a short climb up to the access nod, but as he grunted with the effort of trying to get to the next area, he could only hope that the next area would be easier.

GhostKey

 

[GhostKey]

"Looks like we're stack walkin' Ratcatcher," GK decided, blind to the fact that his crewmate was just as green in the stack, gripping a gridded ledge of raw code as the system hummed around them. The deeper they climbed, the more he felt his footing slip—gaps in the architecture like corrupted fragments, execution core threads looping in on themselves to error routines. A lag-spike brought him to a stop for a nano "Yo! Getting delay. Latency spiking, lock my sync-line. Seeing any code fragmentation?" "He ran a stabilizer pass on the other slicer just in case, a precaution they weren't in deep yet.

Ghostkey didn't see any fragmentation, but he wasn't exactly an expert at reading the deep undernet layers. He pulled himself up alongside the other slicer toward the terminal, eyes lifting up toward a door of compressed light, faint from here, twisting in and out of legible connection.

"See it?" he pinged, tagging the data elevator to a higher rez—a tower of glowing lines, compressing and decompressing streams of pulsing data endlessly. Not a pleasant ride—getting scrambled in the stream was not comfortable, but it was fast and more importantly, quiet.

He redoubled his grip on the fractured grid-ledge, his voice finding processing time threaded through the digital weave of their environment. "Pickin' up anything outbound on the terminal?" Wondering if it would lead them where they needed, could be a misdirect or dead end just as easy.

Saul Whesai

 

[Saul Whesai]

Its was hard to understand GK's terms that he was using but he got the general ghist of things. He felt himself slipping like his partner was but all he could do was keep going. They were taking a chance that he hoped would work out.

As they came along the terminal, Saul could only nod as they came along the stream of pulsing data. It was a maginfientic sight, tons of data streaming past his eyes. He sinked everything in abit before coming back to the situation at hand. Looking at the data flow's destintion via the terminal, he saw that it went exactly where they needed to go, the next area. "It seems geniune... I guess we will have to see for ourselves." And with that he stepped into the datastream, closing his eyes as his body turned to light streaming across the Undernet.

GhostKey

 

[GhostKey]

Ratcatcher signaled clean and GK exhaled, hoping the other slicer was watching his link the same way he was covering Rats. GK's Denon street slang was heavy, trying harder than he needed to. Just a kid from Kashyyyk's forests, way out of his element, hiding it behind Denonese and tech-speak. Bytegods willing the other slicer wouldn't notice. Not that Clicker, their Keyrunner, hired legends. He hired hungry hands, not known ones.

Climbing the stacks, literally, the Undernet's layers, GK pulled himself to the elevator. His sync flickered once but held. Minimal loss, or so he told himself. At least Ratcatcher's signal looked clean. Endless data towers stretched beyond his view and the doorway was a touch away.

He pressed a hand to the stream and derezzed, unravelling into compressed lines of code. Data injected, pulled through the elevator's interface. His T-link flared, the scrap-tier rig nearly sparking hard enough to fry his neurons. His vision fractured, scrambled lines washing over his HUD before the node fully rendered into view.

He blinked back into existence.

"Forcesakes, I hate scramble lines." GK shook his head, letting his system resync, the pain in his forehead dulled. He scanned the environment, syncing to the next node.

"We get in clean? Anything ride the stream with us?"

---

The Stacktower Node

Not as gridded, more electrical, and illuminating in appearance. The Stacktower Node screamed corpo code, built by standardized limited AIs but abandoned, rewritten, or sliced into something else. A floating metropolis of glowing skyscrapers stretched out like a circuit board, data-lights pulsing with preprogrammed cycles. The corridors between them shifted, code rewriting itself but not at random. There was a pattern.

"Corpo-drones, whatever," he muttered. Looked a little insulted to be slumming it in some forgotten data-maze, even if corpo fingers hadn't pressed a key in cycles.

"You seeing it?" He pinged a corridor where pathways flickered at odd ticks, signal distorted the code hard. Something was masking the route. "Either the system's collapsing there, or someone wants it to look that way."

Follow the pattern and risk a trap, or force a new route and deal with whatever called this node home?

Saul Whesai