Created G.H.O.S.T. System - A Cyberpunk Story

‘This is Ko. Sevorah was just going through the old logs on the NetConnect she installed on you. It seems like these Scavs were part of a larger cell, instead of just working alone like is normal. If any of them got away after getting a look at your face, you might want to be careful. Scavs don’t typically go out for revenge, but they also don’t generally work together. Just thought you should know.’

‘Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind. A few escaped, but I don’t think they were the ones who had seen my face. Hard to know for sure. I’m sure they would be able to find me on the security cameras there if they tried.’ He sent back after a moment.

She was right. Generally, scavs went after people who were unarmed and had flashy looking cyberware. They didn’t go after people with obvious combat ability or upgrades of that nature. It made it hard to judge whether or not they would come after him.

As an unseen bonus, he now had Ko’s information, and he hadn’t even had to ask for it. The sly girl just finding a way to give it to him like that. He knew she had been into him.

***

A short while later, he was sitting alone in his dingy apartment with the crate of items pulled up in front of his worn couch.

Before he could open it up, a call from Jonas the Slick appeared on his HUD. Trace leaned back and let it ring for a few seconds before answering it.

“What do you want?” He asked, suddenly tired and regretting the decision to answer the call.

“Hey, is that any way to talk to the broker who helped you when you needed it?” A slick voice that made you want to punch the speaker asked.

“Jonas, your information was bad and nearly got me killed. The scav den wasn’t empty outside of the two Virtual-Connect junkies like you promised. Your information was bad, and it nearly cost me my life! So, yeah, I’m going to talk to you however I want at the moment. Now, what do you want?”

“Just calling to check in and see if you got the items is all.”

Trace gave a humorless laugh. “I hope that’s a joke, Jonas, I really do. Which part of I almost died did you not understand?”

Apparently, that was too much for the man, as he began running his mouth off and cursing at Trace.

With a roll of his eyes, he hung up the call. That was one less payday. Luckily, he had taken all the money from the scavs that he had, or he would really be hurting at the loss. As it was, the amount he would have originally earned would have nearly covered his apartment’s rent for the month.

Now he had that covered in spades. For the moment at least, he could afford to not take jobs from a weasel like Jonas the Slick.

Taking the items out of his courier bag, he set them to the side for the moment. He would look them over later and see what each contained. Right now, he was more interested in going through the crate.

Popping the unsecured lid off, he began removing one item after another.

The guns he set carefully on the table that he never actually ate at. The small useless microwave the apartment had come with was broken, and he didn’t have a stove or the funds to buy real ingredients. It was cheaper to buy ‘Food-in-a-Can’ most of the time. Was it less satisfying, absolutely! Did it cost less while still supposedly giving you your daily needed caloric and vitamin intake? Well, the latter was debatable, but the former was a resounding yes.

Regardless, it meant he wouldn’t miss the sudden loss of space.

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The cartons of ammunition went on the table as well, along with all the loose rounds that he had found. Of which there had been many.

The first aid kits he opened and then placed them underneath the table in plain view. He would go through them and combine them later until he only had whole and complete ones, if possible. The other medical supplies he placed on clean clothes behind the first aid kits. Some of those supplies would end up going into the kits as well after he thoroughly disinfected them all. He had left the worst of the items behind, but everything had been touched by the filthy scavs at some point.

The crypto-vault prisms he placed to the side for later along with any other techie-looking items. That meant pretty much all of the hardware and data prisms he had taken from the server rack. There were a lot of random items that he had simply grabbed in the heat of the moment. However, there were some useful items, like the tools he had found in the back closet. The blood that covered them made him suspicious as to what they had been used for, but that wasn’t his concern.

Finally, the only thing left in the crate was the black box they had been using as the main unit of the server. Lifting it out carefully, he began examining it with a care he hadn’t been able to at the scav den.

The short look he had managed to take there revealed all there really was to know about it. It had the normal ports on the back and was in a completely custom 3D-printed chassis. If he wanted to know more about it, he either needed to plug it in, or take it apart. Both presented their own difficulties.

He wasn’t sure he would be able to get it back together again if he took it apart. On the other hand, plugging in a computer that had been running scav programs just didn’t sit well with him either. Even if he didn’t plug it into the net, it might still have a wireless connection of some sort.

Trace kicked the crate away and placed the server computer on the floor in front of him while he thought. It wasn’t like he really needed to do anything with it, but he was curious as to why the scavs had been running a server…

That thought brought him up short as he remembered Ko’s message. The scavs had been part of a large cell network, not just working alone, as was normal. That meant the data prisms he had collected might be worth a whole lot more than he had originally thought. It also meant that he would be in a lot more danger from the scavs once they found out he had scraped the place clean.

Something that he was sure they had discovered by now.

His apartment should be relatively safe for the moment, but he would need to make plans to move sooner rather than later.

It also meant that he couldn’t risk plugging the custom server in until he had taken it apart first. Hopefully, it would still turn on afterward so he could sell it when the time came.

Grabbing his new -to him- tools, he gave them each a quick cleaning to remove the crusted-on blood. Then, with plenty of cursing and a whack or two in specific spots, he set about opening the printed case. A task that was much harder than it should have been, but that he still accomplished in the end.

The mangled remains of the black aluminum printed case were spread out in front of Trace, revealing something he had never expected to see. Someone had taken a braincase, an old one by the looks of it, and then converted the person’s brain into working as a computer. Most of the odd shape had been due to it needing to hide the braincase. The rest had gone into the components that had made the conversion possible.

Trace had heard of things like this, but they were beyond illegal. They were torture for the person inside the braincase, and the process had been known to completely remove and erase a person’s identity before. It went beyond amnesia, as there was no chance of the memories ever returning.

He found it hard to swallow past the thick, uncomfortable ball stuck in his throat as he began to carefully unhook the braincase from its prison. There was a port he hadn’t noticed on the bottom that led to the nutrient port for the braincase. Checking the level, he found that it was about half-full. It was an amount that should last for anywhere from a few weeks to years, depending on the mixture they had given it.

Once he had fully pulled the braincase free of the enclosure, he was able to get a closer look at it. It was old, like really old, that much he was sure of. Despite that, it was not a model he had ever seen before. It had no identifying markers that he could find on it anywhere. There was no serial number, corporation logo, or anything he could use to look up who might have made it.

It was possible to do a general image search, but those had grown notoriously unreliable over the years.

The braincase showed signs of old damage, and where it had been patched over in places with metal welds. There were other places on its surface where the metal had a sort of heated patina to it. It was as though there had once been dozens of small dents that were no longer there.

That didn’t make a lot of sense though. There were no marks of them being popped out from the outside. That meant someone would have had to hammer them out from the inside of the braincase. Needless to say, such an action would be a death sentence for the person inside.

He supposed the case could be a refurbished model, but he had never heard of that being done with braincases before.

Either way, it was an oddity, and nothing more at the moment. He needed some method of communicating with whoever was inside the braincase and determining if they were even sane first. Once he had decided on their mental condition, he would go from there.

If they were too far gone, he would simply pull the plug. It would be a better death than the non-life they would have otherwise lived. Either way, he had been documenting everything since the first moment he saw the braincase. If he had to pull the plug on it, he would turn over the files to the police and let them handle the scavs. They might be useless for everything else, but this was one of the few things even they could be trusted to handle.

The question of the moment was how was he supposed to communicate with a head?

Trace looked around his small apartment, flipping open cupboards and old boxes, looking for anything that might spark an idea. He didn’t have much that was actually worth anything, but he did collect a fair amount of old junk. One of the things he enjoyed doing was tinkering with older tech and trying to bring it back to life.

It was partially why he wanted to try his hand at programming. There was only so much you could do on the hardware side of things if you couldn’t fix the corrupted programming. Sure, you could simply replace the bad chip with a new one, but with some of the old items he had messed around with, that wasn’t an option.

Of course, he wasn’t an idiot. Trace was smart enough to know that as soon as he got enough money, he would move away from older technology. It was what he played around with because of its availability, nothing more. If he could afford better items, then he would. There was no sentimental attachment to items from some older time.

Shoved away, forgotten in the back of his closet, he found an old monitor alongside some speakers he had found ages ago. He had dreamed of turning them both into prime movie-watching items. Then he had fixed them and changed his mind. The color quality on the screen was horrendous, and the speakers had too much power in them. No matter what he tried, they kept ripping through the material connecting the old-school cones.