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Chapter 210 c
🕑 Added 2025-05-07 15:04:01 +0000 UTCChapter 210 c
Two days later, Regina sent a message.
A Delamain cab pulled up in front of a dilapidated building in Kabuki, Watson. Jackie glanced out the window. “What did Regina say? She said Hank’s here?”
“No,” Leo shook his head, “Regina said there’s a company here that keeps hiring workers every few days.”
Jackie forced himself to listen patiently. He knew Leo never spoke without purpose.
“The company needing workers isn’t strange, but what’s strange is that the demand never seems to be filled. Every so often, they need more people, as if there’s always some massive shortage inside.”
Jackie finally caught on. “You mean that so-called company is actually running human trafficking?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
“But Hank…” Jackie frowned slightly. Normally, the ones trafficked were ordinary people. Without combat cyberware, just a couple of Scavs with guns could force them to submit. But Hank was different. In the Valentinos, he was a tough fighter. A few random thugs wouldn’t be able to get close to him. And he had a gun, too.
Leo glanced at him. “No harm in checking it out, right, Jackie?”
Jackie nodded, agreeing. After all, they had no other leads. Instead of sitting around in El Coyote Cojo, they might as well give this a try—maybe they’d actually find something.
Leo first scanned the building with his tactical goggles, but to his surprise, there were no signs of trafficked victims inside, or rather, no one being “hired” under the guise of recruitment. In fact, there were barely any people inside at all. After a brief moment of thought, Leo decided to go in hard.
He equipped the Falchion and charged straight in.
A few minutes later, he had taken control of the situation. The enemies in the building were either dead or incapacitated, leaving only a suit-clad manager. Leo wasn’t in the mood to waste words. He signaled Lucy to jack into the man’s neural link. If the violent hack fried his brain, so be it—Leo hadn’t planned on letting him live anyway.
The manager tried to resist, but Leo simply punched him in the face, knocking him out cold. That settled him.
Lucy knelt nearby, pulling a black personal cable from her wrist and plugging it into the neural slot at the back of the manager’s neck. A few seconds later, Lucy clutched her head, face twisted in pain.
“Lucy?” Leo tensed.
The pain gradually faded from Lucy’s face. “I’m fine, it’s just…” Lucy gave the unconscious manager a deep, uneasy look. “His brain is full of corrupted data.”
“Corrupted data?” Leo blinked. “Is that normal?”
“Of course not. If an ordinary person’s neural link were full of corrupted data, they’d have gone insane long ago,” Lucy shook her head. “I don’t know how he’s still maintaining consciousness and awareness.”
V suddenly offered a thought. “Could this be some kind of anti-hacker defense?”
“Probably not. His neural link has no segmentation.” Some expert netrunners would rig their neural link’s outer layers with corrupted data, kind of like hidden traps in a vault, to protect the core. But this guy’s brain showed no such setup.
Lucy rummaged through the manager’s neural data for a while longer but could only extract one piece of useful intel: “Lilith’s House.”
Seeing that Lucy could get nothing else, Leo told her to disconnect, then casually put a bullet through the manager’s skull.
Back in the car, after a brief discussion, none of them had heard of this “Lilith’s House.” So Leo called Regina.
“Regina, we checked out that place, but the only thing the company’s manager gave up was something called ‘Lilith’s House.’ You got any idea what that is?”
“Lilith’s House? You’re kidding me, Leo?”
“Why are you suddenly so worked up? Sounds like you know something.”
“That’s a deeply hidden cult. Do you remember the Eden gang?”
“Of course I remember.” That was a long time ago—Leo, Lucy, and Rebecca had stormed the Eden gang’s hideout to pull the plug on their netrunner, since T-Bug had been trapped inside their subnet and killing the gang’s hacker was the only way to free her.
“If you compare Eden to Lilith’s House, Eden’s just a child.”
Leo frowned. A child? That exaggerated? He still remembered how insane Eden was—at their leader’s command, they’d dared to go head-to-head with the NCPD. That was why the 6th Street gang had tolerated their existence in Santo Domingo, letting them claim a piece of territory.
Now Regina was saying Eden was like a child next to Lilith’s House. Just how terrifying was this group?
“The biggest difference—and the scariest thing—about Lilith’s House is that they worship a rogue AI loose on the Old Net.”
“WTF???”
Leo’s head filled with question marks. A rogue AI? People actually worshiped that? In Night City, even a three-year-old knew how dangerous rogue AIs were. NetWatch had gone to enormous lengths just to build the Blackwall to lock them on the far side. Without the Blackwall, if rogue AIs could cross into this world…
Even those unfamiliar with Terminator know the basic story—humanity creates an AI defense system for military purposes. The system gains self-awareness, deems humans a threat, and attempts to exterminate them. But if rogue AIs ever breached Night City’s systems, the consequences would dwarf even Skynet’s rebellion.
Skynet still needed to seize control of U.S. military hardware to kill people, which gave humanity time to react and fight back. But in 2077 Night City, electronics and smart systems were woven into everyday life.
Who didn’t have smart appliances?
Who hadn’t undergone some kind of neural implant or cyberware upgrade?
If a rogue AI crossed the Blackwall and entered this side, it wouldn’t need to control machines at all. With just a flick of its digital fingers, it could wipe the entire human population of Night City off the map.
