My assumption was correct! I could, in fact, use the jacket to hide the cords connecting the cyberdeck to the back of my neck. Even the slightly-too-long sleeves of the jacket helped. They draped over the handle of the briefcase-like deck and hid the spot where the wires exited, making it nearly impossible for anyone to spot what was going on.

  Of course, that meant I no longer had an excuse for refusing to leave my home and test myself against the wide open world of electronics.

  Still didn’t keep me from standing at my own door for nearly twenty minutes, on the verge of trembling.

  I should have asked Mela to accompany me. Or even Garren. Either of them could have presented an intimidating presence that would ward off the lowlifes of the slums. Not only would that have lowered the chances of anyone paying attention to me, but they’d have been right there to bail me out of trouble.

  Relax. Breathe. How many people in the slums will be able to recognize this exact model of cyberdeck? How many could spot the cables, let alone identify them?

  ‘Not many’ was the answer to all my internal ramblings, but that still wasn’t a zero. Nor did it account for the especially keen-eyed. Sure, the cybernetics on people stuck in the slums were mostly cheap and half-broken, but what if there was someone out there with eyes as keen as mine? I was pretty sure that I would be able to spot the cables.

  I almost started hyperventilating at that thought. Slowly, I managed to reassure myself that even with my ridiculously keen eye model, I would need to be on the lookout for such details for my brain to process them.

  That helped a little. Before I could start second-guessing my every decision again, I ordered my door to open and stiffly stepped outside.

  Funnily enough, with every step I took away from my apartment, it got easier and easier to just keep walking. Letting inertia do its thing, I busied my brain with the thoughts of what I could target.

  This made a sardonic smile spread across my face. There was only one thing I could target first, in keeping with all the beginner netrunners, thugs, and thieves out there: vending machines!

  Didn’t matter if you were in the slums, the outer districts, or the core of the city itself. Every bit of Zanos was sprinkled with the boxy temples to consumerism.

  The difference across the districts was in the quality of the machines, as well as their stock. I was pretty ready to bet that the machines in the core of the city carried all sorts of yummy meals and actually useful items. They probably even looked appealing. I could just imagine the bright colors and promo material, based on the hints I saw in the outer and middle districts.

  In the slums? The vending machines were large, boxy, reinforced beyond any reason, and sold only the one-credit slop that didn’t meet the quality and safety guidelines of the outer district.

  At least the slop came in several different forms. You could pick between off-grey burritos, suspiciously green hotdogs stuck between grey buns, and some kind of oily shake that gleamed like a chemical spill in all the colors of the rainbow.

  The outer district sold slightly more palatable food that was a tad less likely to leave you riddled with cancer, but they also had vending machines for stuff like batteries and chargers. I’d even seen minor gadgets and such on sale in the middle district machines during my visit.

  In the slums, though? Tales told of such things being on sale here as well, once upon a time. Problem was, they actually motivated the residents of the slums to put effort into breaking the vending machines, to get at all the goodies. Most corpos didn’t bother with any non-food vending machines anymore.

  Because the machines that sold food were absolutely safe from any looting mentality. This was probably the result of several realities working in tandem.

  First, I could only imagine that anyone who broke into a vending machine and then proceeded to eat too many of its meals too close together died pretty fast. Second, the slop didn’t last long outside of the machine, so you couldn’t stockpile it and save it for later. Third, the food wasn’t palatable enough to justify the effort of stealing it.

  Last, and most important: if a vending machine was vandalized or robbed, it was usually removed from the street as a result. Seeing as the vending machines were the main food source for the vast majority of slum denizens, their removal meant slow starvation for everyone who relied on them.

  There were few things that united people better than the threat of starvation. Anyone caught messing with the food vendors was met with swift, and often lethal, street justice.

  Basically, the risk/reward calculation simply wasn’t appealing enough for most residents of the slums to even try to mess with the things.

  Unless you were a runner, a ganger bristling to prove just how ‘tough’ they were, or just plain stupid, of course.

  A combination of all three? Even better.

  This musing on the long and storied past of vending machines had done its job. It had distracted me enough for my feet to take me to the nearest one. Now, as I caught sight of the plain boxy machine, sweat slicked my palms and my mind churned over the quickhacks I had at my disposal.

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  A ping, a breach, an overheat, a data scrambler, and a data looter. All of them were loaded onto my deck and ready to fire off. The only thing left was to let my eyes do their thing, and then test the quickhacks out.

  I was honestly lucky to have those eyes. They removed the need for specialized runner goggles. I simply triggered the scan mechanic I’d made sure to add to my app hotbar, then watched with bated breath as a soft blue glow outlined all the nearby electronics I could connect to using the net.

  The vending machine lit up. And, as I kept walking towards it at the most leisurely pace I could set, I launched the breach quickhack.

  The quickhack was an inspired bit of coding, really. Or rather, an inspired lot of coding. It was designed to overwhelm every connection point between a device and the net by brute forcing it with different password combinations. At the same time, it choked any attempt to send out a warning to the wider network about an ongoing hack by flooding the entire bandwidth available to the device with junk data.

  Against a vending machine? Even with the average quality of my quickhack (at least, I was hoping I’d gotten it up to average quality), no warning was issued. I managed to breach the thing within two minutes.

  Not exactly a feat worth celebrating. The slum machines weren’t even properly secured against runners. The hardware that kind of security would require literally cost more than the entire contents of the vending machine.

  Still, my deck was old as all get out, and this was literally my first time using the quickhack. It was a result I could be proud of, even if an actual runner could just look at the stupid machine and hack it instantly.

  The next step, of course, was accessing the vendor’s data.

  I almost stepped on my own foot and planted my nose in the dirty concrete when my mind plunged into the sea of data. It scrolled quickly past my eyes, half-transparent so as not to completely block my vision. For a moment, I could barely figure out what was what, let alone how to trigger the various functions of the vendor.

  Then that same weird instinct I’d felt inside the simulated reality kicked in, and I was able to sort through the mess with rapid ease.

  By the time I stopped shakily in front of the machine, a mere thought on my part triggered it to light up, beep, and then dispense one of the hazardous burritos. As casually as I could, I leaned down, picked it up, and kept walking.

  As I did, I triggered the data looter on impulse, downloading the entire programming of the vendor onto my deck. I had more than enough space for it, and I was kind of curious to see what the machine’s programming was like.

  My heart didn’t stop threatening to beat out of my chest until I was well away from the vendor and more than halfway to the outer district checkpoint. I kept stealing glances at the burrito I was holding, suddenly aware that I had no idea what to do with it.

  Not eat it. Definitely not eat it. At the same time, it felt profoundly wrong to throw food away, no matter how bad it might be for my health.

  Then my eyes landed on a kid that didn’t look a day over seven, and I quickly made up my mind.

  The kid was slumped against the wall with their knees pulled up to their chest. They flinched when I headed straight for them, but whether out of weakness or just general numbness to it all, they didn’t even try to run. I stopped within arm’s reach of them, my eyes boring into the muddy brown orbs nearly covered by greasy hair, before I slowly reached out and put the burrito in their lap.

  The brown eyes widened as hands hesitantly grabbed onto the food.

  I broke eye contact and kept moving. An odd jumble of emotions burned inside my chest. Guilt, relief, pity… all wound together and bleeding through into each other.

  I easily could have ended up like that kid, if not for everything my mother had done to prevent it. Instead, I’d had one lucky break after another. At sixteen, I was somehow a member of the Kittens. I was learning to become a runner. I was in possession of the kind of equipment most outer district dwellers would kill for, let alone anyone in the slums.

  Yes, I was definitely lucky. Lucky enough that sitting around and wasting the chances I’d gotten would be the height of stupidity.

  With that declaration firmly rooted in my mind, I kept my feet on the route to the outer district. I didn’t have much I could practice against in the slums. The vending machines were about as good as it got, unless I felt ready to try and hack the rare cybernetics user, and I definitely didn’t.

  If I wanted to get anywhere at all, I would need the many and varied electronics of the outer districts to be my unwilling targets.

  Still, with the reminder of my fortune still stuck in my head, I didn’t feel that much fear or hesitation anymore. My determination was set. I wasn’t going to let small risks deter me from becoming something more than just another kid from the slums.

  That resolve served me well as I strolled through the outer district at a slow pace, constantly scanning for new targets and testing my quickhacks.

  My first target was another vending machine, this time one selling batteries and chargers. I took its code too, just to make sure it wasn’t the same as what was available in the slums.

  The process took a bit longer, a whole extra minute. But when it was done, I had a couple batteries and an extra charger for my scroll in my pocket.

  I didn’t just limit myself to theft, though.

  An AC unit mysteriously started heating a store instead of keeping it pleasantly cool. A small TV kept switching between channels until its owner angrily bustled up to it and started smacking it. A radio turned randomly on and off.

  It was… oddly thrilling, really. I couldn’t target anything big, but the small stuff I did toy with filled me with a quiet glee that made it difficult to stop smiling. I almost broke down into giggles when I turned off the icebox of a rude ice cream vendor who’d made a kid cry. Hopefully, he would only discover the problem when it was too late to save at least part of his stock.

  The rudest and riskiest thing I did was torment a couple of would-be ganger kids a year or two younger than me. They’d set up some kind of a speaker out on the street and were blasting horrible music while acting tough and harassing people trying to go about their day.

  One of them was sitting on the stupid loud thing when I decided to hack it and test out my overheat quickhack. I didn’t even make it stop playing music, so by the time it was hot enough for the kid to notice, he was forced to jump off it with a yelp and his hands on his ass.

  That time, I had to walk away faster than I would have liked while stifling my laughter with my fist. His look of outrage at having a scalded ass was too much for me.

  But my wandering about had to come to an end eventually. When darkness began to settle over the city, I hurried back to my home, filled with hope and new ideas. Stress-testing the quickhacks and collecting data from various electronics had revealed a ton of things I could work on.

  The day’s activities had also proved the worth of my resources. If I ever wanted to peek in on stuff’s coding, I had the perfect source of knowledge, didn’t I? And not just all the apps I’d downloaded recently. My eyes themselves were super helpful, and they were right there. Sure, they terrified me, but I couldn’t afford to let that stop me from using them.

  After all, hadn’t I just resolved to do whatever was necessary in order to grow?