Cyberpunk Escape
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c
The static hits like a bad stim comedown—sudden, vicious, all teeth. One second I’m wiping blood off my Mantis Blades in some corpo-flatbucket’s penthouse, the next my optics glitch into a haze of neon fractals. Militech’s logo pulses like a infected heartbeat overhead, and I don’t need a damn diagnostic to know what’s crawling through my neural ports. They’ve jacked me into a sim—*their* sim. Endless grids of code stretch in every direction, walls shifting like funhouse mirrors made of pure data. Feels like getting gutted by a dull shiv, layer by layer. I’ve danced with Black ICE before, but this? This is a tomb. No exit nodes, no overwatch protocols—just cold, recursive loops tightening every time I try to brute-force my way out. My deck’s fried, synapses screaming from the intrusion. But you don’t survive five years smuggling biotech through Pacifica checkpoints without learning how to bend when the system kicks. I start tracing the bleed. Every sim’s got a seam, even Militech’s pet project. Their code’s military-grade, all sharp edges and killswitches, but arrogance leaves fingerprints. I follow the heat—literal heat, my skin blistering as firewall after firewall scorches my avatar. Smell ozone, burnt synth-flesh. Rewrite my own protocols on the fly, rerouting pain receptors. Old Net tricks, the kind they don’t teach in corpo academies. Three cycles in, I find it: a flicker in the ambient noise, a half-second lag in the threat-detection algorithms. They’ve mirrored the architecture off Night City’s old power grid. *Amateurs.* I carve a backdoor using a ghost of the same exploit that took down the Harbor Master’s surveillance last winter. The sim fractures, glitching into a kaleidoscope of dead-end alleys and screaming billboards. They’re waiting when I breach the core. Not ICE—worse. AIs wearing dead soldiers’ faces, rifles crackling with adaptive malware. I’m running on fumes now, code unraveling, but there’s a rhythm here. Always is. Smuggler’s mantra: *move with the chaos.* I let the sim’s own momentum carry me, hijack a security drone’s payload, and detonate it at the nexus. Reality slams back in chunks—the stink of coolant, the buzz of faulty fluorescents. My apartment. Or what’s left of it. Militech’s drones are scrap on the floor, smoke curling from their chassis. I’m bleeding from a dozen places I don’t remember cutting, but the neural link’s quiet. For now. They’ll come again. Corps always do. But tonight? Tonight I’m still breathing. And Night City’s skyline’s burning just like always.
