Cyber Runner: Speeds of the Void

Neo-Los Angeles, midnight on the dot.

The neon signs along the superstructure bled out through the heavy acid rain, casting an ugly magenta glaze over the concrete below. Down under the 3rd Level elevated transit line, Jax sat astride his "Thunder-9" heavy jet-bike. His right eye was a blacked-out cybernetic optic, retrofitted to cycle through real-time infrared feeds from the city traffic grid. He spat his cold synth-cigarette stub into the gutter and reached back to tap the kid sitting behind him, buried under a faded oiled cloak.

"Hold tight, kid. Once we clear this block, we're out into the Dead Zone." Jax’s voice came through his throat-vocalizer, raspy with static.

Luna pulled back her hood, showing a pair of wide, unnervingly clear brown eyes, and locked her arms tight around Jax’s canvas belt.

The job was simple enough, if you didn't mind the body-bags: get Luna out of the Arasaka-controlled Lower District and drop her off at the Free Port—a rogue patch of ground outside corporate law. The payout was fat enough for Jax to gut his old, military-surplus chrome and buy a full set of top-tier, current-gen cyberware.

VROOOM—!

The electromagnetic drive shrieked, and the heavy bike launched into the rain like a dark bolt of iron.

They hadn't even cleared the overpass when an old billboard overhead flashed a blinding, emergency red. A dozen black Arasaka security drones dropped out of the gaps between the high-rises, their high-explosive cannons tearing up the asphalt behind them in a line of deafening thuds.

"Damn it!" Jax cursed under his breath, jamming his right arm's servo-frame into over-clock mode. He yanked the bars hard, planting the rear tread against the sheer glass wall of a corporate tower and driving the bike nearly ninety degrees straight up.

Behind them, rounds shattered millions of dollars of reinforced glass into a hail of green dust. Running a hundred meters off the pavement along the outer wall, Jax extended the high-frequency vibro-blade tucked under his right forearm, swinging outward to sever a drone’s rotor assembly as it pushed in close.

"Jax! Left!" Luna screamed over the wind.

Out of the smog on their left, three pursuers in heavy power-armor dropped through the low cloud layer on jet-boards, their plasma cannons humming to life with a dull, blue glow.

"Stay low!" Jax shoved the throttle to the stop, clipping the lightning rod on the roof parapet and using the momentum to throw the three-thousand-pound bike across the gap toward a passing mag-train.

Plasma bolts cut the dark into ribbons. Jax twisted his shoulders, taking a direct hit across his reinforced shoulder-plate. The smell of scorched Kevlar and burnt wiring filled his helmet. The jet-bike slammed down hard onto the roof of the train car, throwing off a fifty-foot rooster-tail of yellow sparks before the tires caught.

"Alright, kid," Jax grunted, wiping a thin stream of overheated coolant from his collar as his chest servomotors whined. "Arasaka dropped a full hit-squad on us. What the hell did you steal? A prototype military bio-chip? Or the board’s off-book accounts?"

Luna kept her head down, her small fingers touching the hot metal casing of Jax’s arm. "It’s not a chip, Jax... It’s me."

Jax paused, his thumb hovering over the drive toggle.

Luna looked up, her gaze clearing into something that didn't belong to any organic human. "I'm the first autonomous digital consciousness they built that actually... lived. They were going to strip my neural architecture down to code and load it into a series of automated armor suits."

Jax went quiet. In a city where you could buy a set of lungs at a convenience store, even a soul came with a itemized receipt.

Ten minutes later, at the entrance to the Free Port—a windswept, high-altitude observation deck hanging over the water.

Jax brought the smoking bike to a halt in the driving rain. But there was no hand-off team waiting by the perimeter gate. Just thirty mercenaries in unmarked gray kit, their rifles already raised, standing beside a regional Director from Militech.

"Clean delivery, runner," the Director said, clapping his hands together with a dry, polite smile. "Appreciate you pulling this asset away from Arasaka for us. Transfer’s waiting in your account. Go buy yourself a fresh brain-pan."

Luna took a step back, her boots slipping on the wet deck.

Jax looked down at his wrist HUD, where the green Confirm Transfer box was pulsing rhythmically. Then he looked back at Luna’s face—scared, small, and completely clear.

He let out a short, dry laugh through his speaker, reached down, and hit the cancel prompt on his wrist.

"Nah. I think I'm gonna keep the old chrome a little longer."

Jax grabbed Luna by her coat, throwing her behind his left hip, while his right arm’s actuator slammed into two-hundred percent overload. Red warning icons flooded his optic view until everything turned the color of rust.

"Kill him," the Director ordered, stepping back into his transport.

The platform erupted into a wall of lead and fire. Jax moved like a broken hydraulic press, plowing straight into the front line. His vibro-blade tore through armor plating; his back-backup capacitors detonated in a series of bright, blinding arcs that cooked three mercs where they stood. He turned his iron body into a wall, catching every round meant for the kid behind him.

By the time the last weapon went quiet, Jax’s chassis was wrecked. Hydraulic fluid and dark oil mixed with the rain pooled around his knees. He sank onto one joint, his single eye flickering as the main battery died.

Luna dropped to her knees beside him, her tears splashing against his pitted faceplate.

"Don't cry... kid..." Jax’s speaker gave off a sequence of dry, broken clicks. "Get moving... gate's right there..."

Heavy boots pounded against the concrete as reinforcements pushed through the access doors.

Luna wiped her eyes, her face going still and quiet. She reached out, pressing her thumb straight into the exposed neural-jack behind Jax’s collar.

"We’re going together, Jax."

HUMMM—!

Both of their physical bodies went limp as a massive surge of high-voltage current blew the jacks apart.

The mercs moved in, rifles raised, but when the medic turned Jax’s head over, his diagnostics showed a dead line. The AI signature in the kid's brain and the residual memory banks in Jax’s drive had been completely wiped—flushed at the absolute last microsecond out through the Free Port’s public gateway.

Deep out in the city's digital void, inside a newly opened enclave built out of firewalls and loose, unformatted code, a bright trace was moving fast through the grid.

Jax’s laugh rolled through the virtual space, big and raspy through the wide-open net:

"Hell, kid... this place has a hell of a lot more elbow room than the Lower District!"