Friday Night Firefight - A Cyberpunk 2077 Isekai

Friday Night Firefight - Chapter 14

"Hacking is some bullshit," I muttered as I closed the lid of my laptop and stood from my desk.

I stretched, my body feeling an almost visceral need to get far from the work my laptop represented, and wandered over to my bed where I slumped over. I stared up at the ceiling and cursed the lack of furniture in my tiny apartment.

It had been a month and a half since I had sold the Arasaka Tower arcade cabinet to Yoko and got a new identity and some cyberware in exchange. Almost immediately after leaving Vik's place I went to an apartment building near Lizzie's and rented a one-bedroom. What money I had left after the surgery and the clothes went towards rent and food, so I wasn't able to stock my place with a ton of furniture. All I had was a desk and a bed, and most of my days were spent wandering between the two, relentlessly studying programming and hacking. And all that time in my apartment, staring at a computer screen and trying to decipher this world's version of hacking, had led me to one unassailable conclusion.

Hacking was some bullshit.

And not the good kind of bullshit. In the game, V could stroll into a warzone, do a quick scan of everyone, and then 20 seconds later people would be shocked into unconsciousness. That was the good kind of bullshit. That was the kind of OP skills I had hoped for when I had traded Yoko for the cyberdeck.

I wanted an advantage that could make me ridiculous amounts of money in short periods of time or turn me into a murder machine whose very gaze struck fear into the hearts of my enemies. When I got the cyberdeck, visions of me becoming a virtual god, striding through meatspace like a netrunning giant, snapping off overheats and short circuits and stealing valuable information danced through my mind. But hacking didn't work like that in the real world.

It was similar, in many ways, to the boring type of hacking that I had been studying in my past life. Except worse because in this world there was no Youtube full of videos of kindly Indian dudes explaining why my code was garbage. Instead, I was forced to spend countless hours staring at a laptop screen, wondering why I was bothering with netrunning at all.

One of the first things I had learned about hacking in the 2077 world was that quickhacks weren't all that powerful. In the game, V could rock up to a room filled with Scavs, drop a cyberpsychosis quickhack, and then sit back and watch as the problem took care of itself. That wasn't possible in the real world. Most everyone in the city had some form of ICE – intrusion countermeasures – packed onto their neuroports that were meant to stop netrunners from just waltzing into a room and wiping out everyone with quickhacks. People's ICE ranged from 'barely there' to 'holy hell, it would easier to just put a bullet in this dude.' And once you finally broke through that ICE, quickhacks relied almost entirely on a person's cyberware to be effective.

They weren't spells that you could just fling around willy nilly. You had to specifically attack a person's cyberware before a quickhack would be useful. You want to use a reboot optics to temporarily blind someone? Better hope that your target is rocking optics and not just their normal boring eyes. Short circuit forced a person's cyberware to release the power of its internal battery in a static discharge. But what if your target only had subdermal armor or titanium bones – two very common cyberware upgrades that didn't have internal batteries? How about weapon glitch? It was only useful for messing with fancy smart weapons or tech guns that most people didn't bother with. You couldn't hack a Lexington or a Unity. Those were boring normal weapons. Even ping, one of the most inobtrusive quickhacks in a netrunner's arsenal, wasn't all that useful.

As a program, it could map out all the ports connected to the same network. That was undoubtedly useful. Until it wasn't. A bunch of guards walking the perimeter of a secured warehouse might all be connected to the same security network. In which case, Ping gave you a bevy of information in the form of telling you how screwed you were if you tried to sneak into the place. But what about random gang members hanging out in their own home base? It was doubtful that they were connected to some security server which meant that Ping was next to useless.