Cyberpunk was dead. We found him in his flat, with the pattern of his ’deck’s keyboard imprinted on his livid face. His eyes were pale, the blue tint they had in life having mostly faded away in death. He was still jacked in, but there wasn’t much left of his ’deck except for a smoking black wreck of plastic and silicon. The skin around his datajack was scorched, as if a high-voltage electrical current had been sent in a feedback loop over the Net and back through his ’deck. Black ICE. It looks like Cyberpunk had fallen victim to a lethal batch.

It would be difficult to locate the source of the program that flat-lined Mr. Derek Jacobs (that was Cyberpunk’s real name, when he wasn’t tripping the light fiber optic). The ROM decks that ran his hacking programs were slagged. He had an external HDD plugged into his ‘deck, so the IT guys in the lab might be able to run a tracepath if there was any legitimate data left to salvage. One thing’s for sure, though. Cyberpunk got himself way in over his head.