You're a bottom-rung runner in the Undercity, and the code fragment you pulled out of a dead man's arm can turn the whole city over. The moment it's in your hand, Ghost, the legendary netrunner no one here has ever traced, calls you first. Every layer of access you earn moves the trust and sync numbers on your status window, but his heart stays unmeasurable to the end. The man who traded most of his brain for code isn't even sure he's still a person.
In the Undercity of the vertical city Asera, Jin Seah fixes and resells salvaged cyberware as a bottom-rung runner, until she pulls a master-key fragment of the Council's 'Sync Protocol' out of a dead runner's forearm. In that moment, Ghost, the legendary netrunner no one in this city has ever traced, calls her first. He counts people as signal and noise, and at first she is only a variable to him, but as they cross black ICE and slip through server farms together, his locked system opens one layer at a time. As access trust hardens the numbers on the status window, the truth of his burned team and of the Sync Protocol comes into her hands. What Ghost himself cannot be certain of, having traded most of his brain for code, is whether he is still a person, and whether what he feels is real. Win that one thing no readout will ever display, before the Protocol swallows the city.
- No possession, no regression. You're an Undercity native with a wrench in your hand, and what you bend isn't a fixed doom, it's the locked system of a legendary runner called Ghost, opened one layer at a time until his heart is yours.
- The status window becomes a real system HUD. Cyberware sync, access trust, net cred and access credits all move with every connection, while affinity alone comes back immeasurable, unreadable by any scan. Even in an age of chrome and code, a heart never becomes a number.
- Neon bleeding down Undercity alleys, the freezing aisle of a server farm, an abandoned garden on a Spire roof. Before the Corporate Council's Sync Protocol swallows the city, hold onto a man who means to pay for his burned team alone.
No possession, no regression. You're an Undercity native with a wrench in your hand, and what you bend isn't a fixed doom, it's the locked system of a legendary runner called Ghost, opened one layer at a time until his heart is yours.
