Takamura’s teachings drastically altered Caiden’s abrasive temperament. The valuable lessons he learned allowed him to deflect and tame his anger through discipline and clarity of the mind. Caiden continued these practices, as they were a means to cope with his inherent unrest and deep-seated anger. Vantz, on the other hand, had tapered off from his practices in favor of the pursuit of the ideal bachelor lifestyle. Vantz had gone to his classes for the day and his date, Viana, was nowhere to be found. She was probably enduring her morning walk of shame.
After his routine, Caiden grabbed a quick breakfast and returned to his room to review the specs of the virus he developed. Caiden was also a student at the same university as Vantz, but decided to put his classes at the Advanced College for Technological Studies on hold so that he could focus on his freelancing and other side projects that he deemed more important. His life as a premier hacker helped him amass a pretty penny and a great deal of notoriety on CWR. Most of the Creds he earned, he had saved, or invested. He would rarely spend any money on anything he dubbed useless. He had always showed an impressive aptitude for forward thinking, as well as a great knowledge of technology and science.
The vulnerability for the Prime-1 bank job was going to disrupt the security infrastructure to the bank’s system, and simultaneously trip the alarms of the building as they utilized the same subnet. Someone was going to be fired for overlooking this. The caveat, was that it would only work for one hundred and twenty seconds, giving Caiden a small window of time to hack the bank’s financial reserve account for the seventy-five million Creds.
Once the Creds were successfully extracted from Prime-1 Bank, Caiden designated the funds to go through five different dummy accounts before it reaches Slavo’s account. This way, it would throw off anyone trying to track the movement of the money. Slavo’s account was attached to the private bank, Enzen Banking. They were notorious for taking clients with a reputation and had somehow managed to avoid any criminal implications in their dealings with their disreputable clientele.
Caiden had planned another part of his payback with Slavo’s Enzen account once the money arrived after the job was completed, but he needed some more information in order to build a proper procedure. He decided that he needed to figure out Slavo’s backstory.
“Slavo, Slavo, Slavo. Let’s take a little look at your background, shall we?”
He logged back into CWR under a throwaway username called ‘Mr. Knowone’, and proceeded to hack into the Psi-Corp Police department in search of Slavo, to see if he had a record. Unsurprisingly, Slavo had a laundry list of misdemeanor and felony offenses; domestic violence, witness intimidation, murder, racketeering, fraud, theft, illegal Cybernetic transporting, and drug and human trafficking charges were on his record.
“Highly decorated, aren’t we?” Caiden said to himself as he reviewed Slavo’s file. Simply put, Slavo beat every single charge against him due to his strong ties to the powerful and fearsome Chimera Crime Syndicate.
It appeared that Slavo had been appointed as the man in charge of Chimera’s extremely lucrative sex slave trade business on the black market a little over a year ago. They ran The LoveMaars brothel in the BlackLight District, ironically the most dangerous borough in the entire city. The LoveMaars was a luxurious twenty story high rise building, styled as a VIP only hotel. It was located on the west side of BlackLight, wedged between both the Nova Central and Cosmica Districts.
They claimed to have the most beautiful women and catered to the largest high-profile clientele base in the entire city of Neon District. Only the big spenders could afford even the least expensive of women in their stable. Word of mouth had it, that top level executives of Zonos Inc. had been linked to the brothel as frequent customers. This speculation led to a massive political firestorm in the media and further cemented their corrupted status. This scandal did nothing to ease the growing tensions between them and the people of the city.
“The LoveMaars is known to net anywhere from five hundred thousand Creds to one million Creds a week? That’s ridiculous money! And it looks like the Psi-Corp police are in on it somehow. Chimera’s gotta have at least a quarter of the force in their back pocket,” Caiden said to himself as he continued to research.
There was an additional police report attached to Slavo’s file. It was a story about a woman and her husband that were killed in a murder-suicide, with Slavo labeled as a key witness. The majority of the details on the report were digitally redacted, making it difficult to piece the entire story together. In the report, Caiden learned that the woman was the mother of twin daughters, aged sixteen at the time of the incident a year ago. There was nothing that indicated their current whereabouts in the profile, other than a small detail that alleged the twin girls were the ones behind the murder. But the statement was speculative, and no other reports followed on that assumption.
“Hmm, too many details amiss. Not to mention Zonos Inc. officials being linked to the brothel. There’s gotta be some sort of link between the two.” Reviewing all of his findings again, he recalled the strange post he read earlier from the user 2ofTheSame on CWR. “The riddle about captivity. The strange person who reached out to me right after. The Net Code address I found. The brothel. The fact that there is nothing more on the twin daughters of the slain woman, not even death certificates of theirs. The common denominator in most of
