The rain was an abrasive static over the sprawl of Neo-Tokyo, catching the fractured light of a thousand neon signs that bled like digital wounds onto the wet tarmac.

Jack was a ghost in the crowd-flow, his jacket smelling of ozone and cheap protein. Behind his ear, the neural jack felt like a cold, persistent ache—an interface scar. He was a runner, one of the meat puppets who rode the edge of the Corporate Net for the kinds of data that could erase a name, or crater a board. But the big names didn’t crash; they just shifted their weight.

He slipped into a ground-level stall, the air thick with the reek of synthetic noodles and the low-grade hum of bad power. The vendor, an ancient, scarred man with eyes that hadn’t seen the sun in decades, pushed a bowl of steaming slurry across the counter. No words, no transaction. Jack drank the broth standing, his focus pinned to the street framed by the doorway. The job was clean: breach the Arasaka tower, snatch the exec’s black file, and flatline back into the crowd. Clean, until it wasn’t.

Outside, the skyway was a grid of buzzing, automated traffic. Drones, their running lights flashing like nervous pulses, cut through the high-level smog. Jack signalled an auto-cab—no driver, just a smudged cred-slot and a faint, chemical smell of disinfectant. He thumbed a phantom ID into the reader and watched the tower loom ahead. It was a black, featureless spine of plasteel and mirrored glass, guarded by layers of ICE—intrusion countermeasures humming with a silent, biological malice that could turn a man’s brain to soup.

He entered through the lower maintenance levels, slipping past the salarymen, their faces slick with apathetic sweat, all running on bad sleep and heavy-duty stims. The service door was a courtesy, left unsecured by the fixer’s ghost program. Jack followed the corridor down, his boots silent on the mesh floor. He found the access port in a cramped closet full of buzzing climate control units, pulled the connector—a simple, elegant piece of grey-market hardware—from his coat pocket, and jacked in.

The Net hit him like a wall of frozen electricity, the vastness of the system cold and total. He wasn’t Jack anymore, just a stream of cold code, moving through shimmering firewalls that looked like deep-sea ice floes. Arasaka’s defences were a classic nightmare: razor programs that flashed like chrome teeth, trying to bite his avatar and draw digital blood. He was old school, dodging the lethal vectors, weaving through the blinding spray of data. Then he saw it: the target, a vault of encrypted light, humming with proprietary power.

He used a skeleton key program, easing it open with the patience of a safecracker working in the dark. Inside were names, shell corporations, and the paper trail of massive payoffs to silenced whistleblowers—the real gravity of the city. He dumped the whole block to his deck, feeling the pressure of corporate security closing around his connection. A hunter-program grazed him; the shock was a white-hot spike that tasted like burnt sugar and blood in his mouth.

Jack jacked out, slamming back into the damp reality of the closet, a soundless gasp leaving his throat. Distant alarms began to wail, a thin, meaningless sound in the corporate void. He was already moving. Back on the street, the rain had turned to a stinging sleet, but he was just another shadow dissolving into the endless human sprawl.

Later, he met the fixer in a dive bar on the edge of the industrial sector. She was younger than she looked, with chrome optics that caught the dim light like cat’s eyes. “Did you bring the fire?” her voice was a flat, uninflected synth.

Jack slid the low-profile data chip across the scarred tabletop. “It’s done. You have what you paid for.”

She nodded once, transferring the creds. No thanks, no small talk. Just the exchange. He ordered a Single Malt—cheap, recycled synthetic—and watched the endless loop of simstim news flickering on a broken screen, reporting a minor merger between two subsidiary companies. The file would leak, the damage would be contained, and the machine would keep running. Empires didn’t crash easily, but a runner kept running anyway.

In the morning, the rain would stop, and the city would wake up, hungry and beautiful, just as it always did.