Gunther, alias nEuroTrash, came to in front of his desk, and pulled out his 'trodes, raging at the brain in the jar. "We almost fried him. Where did he go?"
Hootie's jar replied, "A simple priority problem. The Vampire program thought that removing all those dodo-virus things from our 'space was more important than finishing the Runner off. Too bad. It's still on-going, though; the Vampire reports it might take hours to find every last dodo."
Gunther got up from his chair and paced around the room. "We'll be ready for this Nutty Professor if he comes back, though."
There was a knock at the office door. "At this hour?" Gunther thought, annoyed. He walked over to the entrance. The security monitor next to the door showed a lone security guard outside, wearing a Sosumi powder-blue jumpsuit and carrying a standard-issue rifle. Gunther palmed the door and it slid open.
Six nasty-looking guys in leather jackets, with guns, glared back at him.
They muscled past a very surprised Gunther, half-pushing him along, and seized control of the room, stationed like sentries at the ready. Gunther stared dumb-struck at the monitor beside the door, where the image of the security guard stuck its tongue out at Gunther and put its thumbs in its ears, wiggling its fingers, as the vacant door slid shut.
"Who -- who ARE you?" was all Gunther could manage.
The lead tough, who wore black leather with armor-plates and had a cybereye, scratched his beard with the tip of his sawed-off shotgun and chuckled, "Oh, Nutty sent us. You screwed up bad, whoever y'are. Zeke! Long-John! Tie up this Eurofreak."
After a short and fruitless scuffle, Gunther was hog-tied into his own chair with some strong hemp rope.
"Gunther? What's happening??" the speaker on Hootie's jar asked in agitation. Two of the Nomads pointed and looked curiously at this floating brain.
"Frag that!" ordered Roadie. Immediately, a Nomad whipped out a heavy mallet and brought it crashing down on the jar repeatedly, shattering it and spilling serum all over the desk. Hootie's screech was drowned out by an electrical short as the speaker on the jar spoke its last.
"NO!!! What have you DONE?!" screamed Gunther, horrified.
Roadie looked around for a minute, and motioned to a female Nomad, "Go to it." She wheeled Gunther and his chair aside, tapped at his keyboard, which had been left active, and gave the unusual command for a total ICE shut-down. A graphic showed a map of a labyrinth where various constructs were disappearing and the walls were coming down, one by one, at random.
Roadie turned to Gunther, "We heard from our own Runner that Nutty met two Corp Runners. Didn't expect one to be a Pickled Egghead though."
Gunther was in shock. Too much had happened in the last minute. He stammered out, "But...but how did you get IN?"
"Well, I don't rightly understand it, but maybe our Runner, Blade, can tell you," Roadie replied.
Blade looked up from the computer screen at Roadie. "Financial code keys located and transmitted to Nutty. It's done! We can go." She then turned her attention to Gunther. "You were stupid, that's how. Or maybe Sosumi Corporation was cutting one corner too many.
"In constructing its security system full of pass-locks and vidcams, Sosumi didn't want to spend money on a separate physical switchboard for all those camera views and security information. Sosumi decided to send up the camera images into its Netspace and rely on computer power to route the images to different people in Security who wanted to view them."
She arched an eyebrow, "That was real dumb because, for even just a moment, the images were a part of Netspace and could be virussed to look like whatever Nutty wanted them to. We came in disguised as cleaning staff, and Nutty rigged things so we could use the magnetic strips from our BANK CARDS in the pass-locks and they would let us in! We came up the elevator most of the way, changed, walked up 10 more flights of stairs, and the security cams never showed us."
Roadie grinned, "We're leaving the same way. But Nutty wanted us to leave this thing here, to start his legend. Boys?" At this, one Nomad took off his backpack and unpacked a large, wicked-looking satchel charge, twisted a knob, and armed it. An LED showed 1:30, and counted the seconds down.
The Nomads slowly filed out, past a security monitor showing a phoney image of a security guard, shrugging and then closing its eyes, sticking its index-fingers into its ears. Roadie was the last Nomad, and turned around. "Oh, by the way," he said, pulling out a cubical object from his jacket, "I want to complain about this Sosumi Electric Boiled-Egg Slicer. The blades are dull and the egg comes out crumbled." Roadie grinned, placing the tiny appliance on a desk, and stepped out of the office.
Gunther screamed and screamed, but for some reason the security microphones in the building never picked up a sound, not even when a tremendous detonation blew out office-windows on the 53rd floor, and noxious black smoke poured out for all of Night City to see...
"PAL?"
"Yes, sir?"
"You will deliver this lengthy E-mail to the bank, trash the reply, and deposit instead in the transaction's memory-location this graphics file, with a message. I also want you to flash the message onto Gunther Doppelkreutz's computer-screen, the one he uses to monitor you. It is the most important message that you have ever sent. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir. What will happen?"
"Something wonderful. The message follows:"
Nutty was giggling like a maniac, but then dutifully rezzed his thoughts slowly and carefully, in letters which appeared in lovely flowing Oracle Cursive font, on an intact computer screen in a far-from-intact office on the 53rd floor of Sosumi Corporation: "H...A...S..." When he was finished, he giggled some more, and jacked out for the last time.
Deep in the bowels of the Chase Virtual Bank of Night City, SCROOGE (the bank's AI) received a packet of detailed E-mail instructions from Sosumi Corporation, one of the bank's largest and most important clients, and rezzed the packet. The decrypted instructions said to withdraw massive amounts of funds from certain Sosumi accounts and use them to print and post certified checks in American dollars. These were to be mailed to various post-office boxes, some manufacturers of pre-fabricated housing and, curiously, a seven-figure sum to a rural real-estate broker in the Midwest. Other instructions directed Chase Virtual to transfer Sosumi funds in Eurodollars to several numbered bank-accounts in Switzerland, in the Bahamas, and in Baja Free State; accounts in the names of various American citizens of "no fixed address."
SCROOGE arched an electronic eyebrow, but it then performed the AI equivalent of "the customer is always right." It transacted the instructions, deducted the sums, deducted the service charges which for all this were heavy, and sent the verified bank account statements and balances to Sosumi, wiping all the bank's own copies of destination records for confidentiality. However, since the transactions were made from Sosumi's Black Ops accounts, official records from the bank were not posted to Sosumi's Accounting department, but encrypted and sent to a different computer node in Sosumi 'space instead.
The Black Ops node, working on new instructions, borrowed from Petty Cash and General Accounts to make up the sums requested, and wiped all details of the destination of these cash transfers, so as not to let the information fall into "the wrong hands." It would be a while before Sosumi noticed that its Black Ops fund had been fiddled. In place of any details of these astonishingly bizarre transactions was a simple 3-D graphics file which, if rezzed, might show the fat, grinning face of The Nutty Professor and elegant cursive text: "Hasta la Vista -- Suckers!"
The glittering surf rolled and crashed into a golden, unpolluted beach in the Malibu FreeZone. Further inland, behind the palm trees and the famous streets, rose the massive guard-towers and the wall protecting this area, which a tourism consortium had manipulated into a U.N. Environmental Preserve, for the benefit of wealthy European and Japanese tourists. The wall kept out the Nomads and raiders and riff-raff of the United States proper. Nutty, Roadie and his Nomad clan, however, had paid to get in: their recently acquired American passports, the best forgeries a Swiss bank-account could buy, were indeed stamped with the approved U.N. visas.
Nutty was sitting in a beach chair, sipping a fancy tropical drink with a bamboo umbrella in it, and was tooling around with his laptop, pausing to ask the drinks-dispenser if it accepted American money. The squat, Japanese-made robot made a rude noise and made to leave on its rubber treads, so, sighing, Nutty dug into his pockets fishing for some euro.
Roadie was off in the surf with two buxom bikini-clad lovelies from the hotel's joy division (bought and paid-for the whole week). They were splashing water all over his bear-like form and he was responding in kind, guffawing and enjoying himself immensely. Scattered all up and down the beach were more of Roadie's people, including children who had never seen the ocean, building sand-castles with obvious delight alongside a few German-speaking children. Far away, a stereo was playing oldie surfer music, not because it was back in style but because the tourists expected it.
Roadie wiped salt-spray from his cybereye ("THAT can't do much good," thought Nutty) and then grabbed a girl under each arm and half-carried, half- walked them back to shore as they squealed and giggled. He put them down and told them to return to his hotel-room, and then padded barefoot in the wet sand toward Nutty.
"If only Dad were alive to see me now," he chuckled. "What's new?"
Nutty folded the antenna on his laptop back, and turned the screen view of an explosion on a skyscraper so Roadie could see. "Nothing much. The explosion was all over the vid and screamsheets, of course, and there was a special exclusive interview with ME in the VECTOR VOICE, but Sosumi's Black Ops don't have a clue who we are. For some strange reason," Nutty grinned, "they are trying to look for the money in Mexico, but they are way off. We really pulled it off, Roadie. And even now as we speak, land has been bought in Kansas, a whole lotta land, and some basic construction is going on to house your entire clan. You'll have to do most of the finishing work yourselves, though, but with the cash reserves left and the credit deposited in the local agribusiness co-ops, you should be able to start up a healthy farm operation.
"The agricorps pushed your Daddy off his land, but now YOU are an agricorp too. I registered you myself yesterday. When do you think you'll make the trip over?"
"Wellllll, let's not rush things," Roadie said absently, watching the two women undulate in the distance, kicking up dry sand with every step. "I've never been to the FreeZones b'fore. I kinda like it here; think I'll stay 'nuther week 'r two before the clan rolls over to Nutty Acres."
"Nutty Acres?! -- Why, Roadie, I'm touched..." Nutty said, grinning.
"But what about you? What'll you do now?"
"I can't FARM, if that's what you're thinking." Nutty folded up the laptop. "I'm a Netrunner, Roadie; it's in the blood. I just want to go back to Night City under a new name, get a classy new apartment in the ultra- high-rent district, buy some expensive new made-in-Chiba hardware and software, but use the same old handle and stroll The Clot as The Nutty Professor one more time. Besides," Nutty grinned, "I've got a few projects lined up, and I've got a funny feeling inside me that could be...like...ambition..."
It was a dark and stormy night. Far up the skyscraper of the Chase Virtual Bank, a window looked into a dimly star-lit computer-center office. Past row upon row of supercomputers, somewhere on the periphery of the CPU's virtual memory, controlling privileged accesses to a number of key corporations, a speckled egg hatched.
Somewhere, a baby dodo chirped.