The Tower: A Cyberpunk 2077 Story

Chapter 11

I reached Sandra's apartment, though I had to slowly haul the heavy case on my own because she refused to leave her sanctuary. When I was finally inside, I heaved the case up onto her counter and caught my breath while Sandra began hacking the lock. I looked around at the clean apartment styled after a Japanese dojo, except for the large turret hanging from the ceiling, dutifully rotating slowly as it scanned for hostiles.

"Excellent..." she mumbled as she started working. "Judy said you ran into some trouble with a guard?"

I nodded exhaustedly. "Yup, from SSI. Get this – he was guarding Holt. We're checking the guy's implants to see where they came from. It'll tell us who's behind SSI, whether it's Holt or a corp."

She smiled as she successfully hacked the lock and opened the case. Inside was a small, flat, rectangular antenna, a large mirror, a disconnected and bloodstained Mantis Blade, and a shard I recognized as the one containing the braindance of the attempted assassination. She put aside the blade and the antenna, then lifted the heavy mirror out of the box. I scanned it as she took it out, and out from behind the mirror ran a small power cable that was coiled into the case.

"That's not a mirror," I noted as I read the data on my Kiroshi interface. "That's a smart screen!"

Her jaw dropped in shock as she examined it, then darted over to a wall to plug in the power cord. "What's it doing?" she asked as it booted up.

At first, the display seemed only like a mirror. But when turned on, it flashed a blue, red, and teal pattern every few seconds between reflections.

"Oh, fuck," I whispered. "It's the same thing, the same pattern as the Peralezes' screens."

She stood up and studied it, then raced back over to the outlet and yanked out the plug. She panted as she looked up at me with the cord in her hand. "Not risking being brainwashed like them. V... This could be huge!"

I shook my head in disbelief. "So, Holt used SSI to condition Horváth to try to kill Rhyne, and he's conditioning the Peralezes so he'll win. But then why is he losin'?"

"Because it's not Holt," she observed confidently. She stood up and led me to a set of screens in her living room. She clicked them on, revealing dozens of information windows that took me a moment to comprehend. "Holt's paying SSI, but less than the Peralezes. I'm assuming it's because he's only one guy and they're a couple that each need individual defense. But Holt's not paying them enough to be funding their entire operation."

"Then who is?" I asked.

She smirked. "Night Corp."

My eyes widened, then I sighed and rubbed my temples tiredly. "Project Carpe Noctem... Once they found out the workers could be conditioned, they started work on the Peralezes."

"Oh no, this got started a LONG time before Carpe Noctem," she continued. "That project just happened recently, but I think they've been in the Peralezes' heads for decades. Look at this," she paused and brought up a set of small windows filled with timelines and descriptions. "Night Corp gave both Jefferson and Elizabeth grants and scholarships to give their education every possible advantage, and they kept them together as a power couple the entire time. Get this – as soon as they graduated law school 15 years ago, Night Corp put a few hundred million eddies into an infrastructure project supposedly to do with NCART, but the project failed without results. But that's exactly when SSI became officially registered as a new corporation. Night Corp started the investment in the perfect politician couple, then created SSI to keep the project going."

I frowned. "This is insane. How did you find out all of this so quickly?"

"Same way I found out about Carpe Noctem – it's all in Night Corp's systems. It helps to be working on the inside," she added proudly.