Netrunning consumed me.

  When I slotted that first shard into one of my ports, I never could have imagined the effect it would have on me.

  By all accounts, it should have been boring. It was a simple breakdown of all the different programs a runner was expected to encounter or wield themselves. Then a breakdown of different systems, highlighting their best known strengths and most glaring weaknesses.

  I found the IDPs the most fascinating part of that section. The Intruder Deletion Programs were exactly as ruthless and as unrelenting as they sounded, and every corpo worth their salt used them. Want to risk hacking into their stuff? Well, have fun evading their IDPs while they tried to block you, track you down, and then fry your tiny netrunner brain.

  All of this was accompanied by programming. Lots and lots and lots of programming.

  The basic quickhacks used as examples had their entire programming broken down, explaining exactly why each one used up a certain amount of RAM, caused the intensity of overheating that it did, etc.

  This meant that I got those quickhacks, too! Sure, they were kind of shit. I knew they were widely considered as both middling quality and of middling effectiveness. But they were there*.*

  I couldn’t try them just yet. While I had most of the required tools, courtesy of my thievery, I still needed a deck. But the second I managed to get my hands on one, I’d be testing those quickhacks out on everything within easy reach.

  Before that, though, I had a ton of learning to do.

  And I loved it. Each and every bit of it. Even the endless courses on the most popular and useful programming languages. I stuttered through those at first, constantly double-checking my references just to barely clobber together a program. It was ridiculously simple, designed solely to open up and display a wall of text. But it was mine. I had made it.

  As the days kept passing, my skill grew. What took me hours to do at first was reduced to an hour, then to half an hour. Eventually, I was flying through those simple tasks at the speed of thought.

  Well, at the speed it took to access my growing library of code, copy out the relevant bits, and then paste them where they needed to go. As it turned out, that’s mostly what coding was: tracking down the right bit of code that someone else had written and others had optimized within an inch of its life, and then making the best possible use of it.

  Oh, I could code from scratch if I needed to. Slowly and a bit clumsily, of course, but I could do it. Still, why bother? Why strive to reinvent the wheel when someone had so kindly shoved the wheel’s optimized blueprints into a file for little corpos to admire and copy?

  The exercises did slowly amp up in difficulty, especially when I got to the bits meant to test my understanding. That was when the Grunnings Corporation, which had set up the training program and commissioned the shards, decided to be smart and sneaky.

  They freely offered up much higher quality versions of real, valid quickhacks, then barred them behind an exercise in frustration. Someone had meticulously gone through the code and butchered parts of it. Enough was left of the overall structure that you could see what each of the quickhacks was supposed to be: a ping, a breach, an overheat, a data scrambler, and a data looter, respectively. But the more useful each was, the more it was messed up. If I wanted to claim them, I had to restore the bits of code someone had taken a digital hammer to.

  The ping took me a week. The breach took me over twice as long. The other three I finished within four weeks altogether, but I wasn’t exactly happy about that turn of events.

  If I’d done it because of my growing skill and ingenuity, I wouldn’t have complained. Unfortunately, it felt like my brain wasn’t the only thing inside of my skull that was soaking up all the information the shards had for me.

  The issues began to appear right as I was wrapping up the breach. I was lying on my back, eyes closed so I could devote myself fully to the streams of code I had pulled up and enlarged to cover my artificial field of view. All I noticed at first was a moment or two of minor glitching, like the code had wavered within my digital vision.

  Then, as I completed my work on the breach quickhack and opened up the overheat, things got… weirder. The ‘healthy’ parts of the code remained unmolested, but the faulty bits glitched and moved around in my vision, before I even properly examined them to ascertain they needed to be worked on.

  My eyes had apparently mastered the detection of faulty code well ahead of me. They just helpfully marked out the issues it took me hours of careful study to find.

  I would have been a lot happier if the faulty code would stop shifting into formations in my glitched vision, where it resembled grinning faces.

  That little discovery did a lot to speed my progression along, but I still wasn’t moving quite fast enough for my eyes. Oh, no. The stupid things took it a step further when I was halfway through the overheat. Rather than an ominous mess doing its best to traumatize me, the glitching started to tease me with bits of half-finished code instead.

  It was just snatches of it, really. Snatches which I barely caught as they scrolled across the occasionally glitching areas of my vision. Nonetheless, when I copied them down and tried to fit them into the code I was working on, they fit better than even my own repairs did.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Sometimes, they were exceedingly simple yet elegant solutions I wouldn’t have thought to make myself, paring down the bloating of the code and letting it do more in exchange for fewer resources. Other times, the coding my eyes so readily offered up to me was sheer brilliance. Complex bits of programming that went beyond the training samples I was still stuck using.

  I didn’t know what to think about any of it, not at first. In fact, I lost a couple days of sleep and had to buy sleeping aids when Mela noticed my increasingly zombie-like appearance and behavior and decided to lean on me to take care of my health.

  Eventually, though, I decided I didn’t care. It wasn’t like the eyes themselves would ever hurt me. Far from it, they were incredibly helpful, both with their danger detection and with whatever they were doing to help me learn how to code faster and better.

  So, I took their suggestions, noted them down, and used them when appropriate. I even strived to improve upon them. This swiftly proved to be a challenge when the quality of ‘advice’ offered by my eyes increased in direct proportion to how fast I was learning.

  In tandem with all this progress, however, I was also getting frustrated.

  Everything I’d learned and done thus far was highly theoretical. The programming, the basic runner education, even hunting down and fixing up the quickhacks so I could make them my own. The shards naturally had practical bits as well, but I couldn’t access them.

  The reason was simple: I didn’t own a cyberdeck.

  I had the neural links and interface plugs. Thanks to my stolen wetware overhaul, they were of high quality. Thanks to the same overhaul, I also had a bit more RAM to play around with than would usually be associated with the barebones implants.

  Unfortunately, that was it.

  I couldn’t run a single quickhack. Even if I found a way to force my wetware to try, I’d literally fry it all, along with my eyes and most likely my brain. After all, the deck was a piece of hardware that supported that kind of thing. It stored quickhacks while also enabling a higher degree of connectivity to all the tech around you.

  According to my learning material, the first decks were large, unwieldy things that confined a runner to a single room and ate up more power than was strictly healthy for the economy. The slightly more modern versions had evolved into something resembling a light, sleek briefcase you could tote around with you, and had much more reasonable power consumption needs that advanced batteries could supply.

  All ‘wild’ runners tended to favor these sleeker decks. For one thing, you could quickly jack out of them. You could also set up more convenient cooling units that sapped away the heat produced by the deck. That would keep you and it from combusting when you were deep-diving or really leaning into your quickhacks.

  The third and final advancement in deck design was the one that truly put corporate netrunning on the map. It also kicked off an immense mess where runners had to learn how to fight, protect themselves, and generally infiltrate secure buildings. Those decks could be neatly slotted into suitable ports that had the requisite wetware bits, allowing you to carry them around inside of yourself. They were no more noticeable than a slotted shard.

  It really made the corpos sweat. Runners could simply stroll into their office buildings, find the nearest point where they could personally jack in, and then overturn the security while yoinking all the data they wanted from inside the various expensive firewalls.

  That kind of deck was way out of my price range. Funnily enough, though, I did have a port capable of slotting one in. Apparently, the wetware I’d stolen and brought to Glim as a ‘bonus’ to my eyes was way better and more advanced than I’d ever anticipated.

  It was also entirely useless to me. I didn’t dare imagine how many credits I’d need to shelve out for a deck that good.

  Not that those super advanced decks didn’t have drawbacks of their own. Their obvious size limitations meant they didn’t have as much RAM as their bigger cousins. And while their temperature issues could be minimized by using them smartly, they could still overheat, which meant you were in even more danger of ending up fried along with your deck. That was the risk you took when you inserted something into the base of your spine, after all.

  Again, though, not my problem. My problem was getting my hands on even the oldest, most obsolete of decks so I could start practicing some real netrunning.

  The one bright spot on my horizon was the fact that I was in a much better position financially than I’d ever been before.

  I was still paying for utilities, which came up to around 100 credits monthly. I did pick up an occasional snack at some of the nicer establishments in the outer district now and again, particularly to tame Mela’s temper when it threatened to rise due to something stupid I said or did. But other than that, I had shockingly few expenses.

  I didn’t have to replace my clothes all that often. The Kittens took care of my meals, which used to be my biggest daily money drain. Their ripper was keeping me in good health, because Mela always took me to him after demolishing me every sparring session.

  So, between saving the majority of the credits I got from Catill and what I had left from my shard shopping trip, I should have been able to afford one of the more basic, bulky decks easily.

  If only somebody was willing to sell me one.

  See, netrunner gear was just about the one thing rarer and more valued than netrunner training. Corpos were all too willing to let poor outer district residents shell out a ton of credits or sign their souls over to them for training resources. They weren’t quite as prepared to let people get their hands on the equipment that would let them put that training to use.

  After all, even a middlingly capable runner could cause all sorts of mischief. Take me, for example. I hadn’t yet moved onto the ‘advanced’ shards. I hadn’t even opened the personalized legacy set. Still, I knew I could already hack into vending machines, small tech like cameras, and the less protected systems that littered the slums and parts of the outer district.

  It was for this exact reason that runners in these districts were treated like minor royalty. Royalty that you had to keep a gun trained on most of the time to ensure their cooperation, but royalty nonetheless.

  As such, I was once again faced with a choice: who should I go to for help? Catill, or the Kittens?

  Catill had finally stopped shooting me dirty looks a month into my relentless studying. I didn’t want to ruin things again.

  Going to the black market I now knew existed was an option, of course, but I figured it wasn’t all that smart to do without backup.

  The Kittens could provide that backup. Shit, for all I knew, they had a few decks lying around and would be perfectly happy to let me have them if it meant getting another runner.

  The downside, of course, was that I might end up exactly like Mort. Or that Mort might decide he didn’t like competition, and I would have an ‘accident’ in my not-so-distant future.

  Not for the first time, I sighed forlornly and collapsed back onto my bed as I got back from a day of work at Catill’s.

  Decisions, decisions.