GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 18: The Arasaka Tower Heist

 Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Infiltration

Jar picked up a suit of Arasaka body armour on the black market for Paxos to wear during their infiltration; she then went and picked up the revolver and rifle the guards used.  The next morning, Peacock finally heard back from Arasaka and went in for their first day under their assumed name "Hermione Granger".  They would be working as the bodyguard for Katsuri Sugimoto, a junior division head in intelligence, whose last bodyguard had died in the line of duty.  Orientation wasn't exciting; they got their ID card and corporate licenses for their firearms, which had to be signed in at the end of every shift.

A typical day would involve arriving at Arasaka Tower at 4AM, suiting up in the barracks on the 30th floor, then heading back downstairs where they would then pile into a convoy of armoured trucks that went to pick up the mid-levels from their heavily guarded apartment compound.  They would then serve as Sugimoto's shadow for the rest of the day until he returned home, typically around 8PM.  The onboarding took even longer, so by the time Peacock had arranged for a getaway vehicle with the Birds of Prey, their nomad family, they were completely exhausted and had no time to properly rest.

On the day of the heist, Peacock drove in, their fancy tech pistol concealed in a newly-implanted hidden holster and a scrambler smuggled inside a secret pocket, and parked the getaway car in the employee parking lot.  They then suited up and boarded the armoured convoy to pick up Sugimoto.  From there, they proceeded to shadow their charge to his office without incident (other than a spilt coffee).  Later in the morning, Paxos hacked the cameras and she, Jar, and Specter snuck in through a loading bay, their fake IDs granting them access through most locked doors, and Paxos was able to use her stolen uniform to scout ahead.

They hung up an "out of order" sign in front of a bathroom where Jar and Specter spent the next few hours; at one point a technician came in to investigate the sign and, after Jar failed to sweet-talk him, got knocked out for his attempt to do his job.  11 o'clock finally rolled around and Sugimoto and Peacock headed up to the enormous meeting room in the 70th floor.  As Sugimoto was one of the most junior execs, they were among the very first to arrive, and it was an extremely tedious hour of waiting before the bigwigs finally started to show up.

The Bird With Magic Fingers

Kazumi Kanata was seated only two to the left of Sugimoto, and as she walked past Peacock was able to pick the data vault passkey from her back pocket without any of the several dozen people in the room noticing.  A few minutes later, Yorinobu walked in flanked by a team of 5 bodyguards, and didn't come anywhere near where they were standing; they'd have to wait for an opportune moment.  The meeting finally got underway, and the first topic was the Arasaka "intervention" in Chad.  The president had already been assassinated after the attempt to nationalize their gold reserves, and the question now was how best to spin it.  It was going to be pinned on local left-wing extremists, and marketing was cooking up humane-sounding language to give the corp diplomatic cover for troop movements...

After a mere 20 minutes, Yorinobu stood up and said they were breaking for lunch, as he hadn't eaten that morning, and everyone began to slowly file out.  On his way, Yorinobu walked right past Peacock, and with everyone watching, they took the passkey straight out of his front pocket completely unnoticed.  Once Sugimoto was seated in the dining room, Peacock snuck away and plugged the scrambler into the agent port at the back of their skull, then got into contact with Paxos, who decrypted it live.  Groaning at the concept of having to climb 50 flights of stairs, she went and gathered the others from the bathroom and they started up.

About 15 minutes later, the stairclimbers were finally on the 69th floor landing; Specter was drenched in sweat inside his Metalgear, but the others were doing better, and Paxos sent the signal.  Upon receiving an encrypted blip, Peacock again abandoned their post to meet with the others.  They knocked 3 times on the stairwell door, then opened it and passed the keys to Jar before turning back around and heading back to a very boring day to avoid further suspicion.

Going Down

Paxos, Jar, and Specter then started right back down the stairs, with Paxos about half a floor ahead so she could try to talk their way past.  This turned out to be prudent as a red-headed man in a suit stepped out into the landing at just about the 30th floor.  It took her a moment due to his totally different hairstyle, cybereyes, and clothes, but Paxos recognized him as Trevor Nakada, the media who'd hired them way to steal BioDyne's tax documents way back when.  She took a moment and breached his system, then put on her best authoritarian guard voice and said the stairwell was locked down due to a security concern.

Trevor acquiesced and turned to leave the stairwell, but something about the way he reacted made Paxos think he was onto her, so she used the backdoor she'd just installed to shut down his cybereyes.  His hand fell away at the wrist, revealing the barrel of a gun, which he fired blindly, not hitting anyone but making quite a bit of noise in the echoey concrete stairwell.  On hearing this, Specter triggered his Sandy and leapt down the stairs in fast-motion, and punched the Trevor in the torso with his cyberknuckles, which staggered him.  A Short Circuit hack from Paxos then finished knocking Trevor out.

Specter picked up Trevor's body and everyone exited the stairs into the intelligence division offices in search of somewhere to stow their unconscious cargo.  As per usual, Paxos was able to create openings for the others to sneak past through a combination of looping camera feeds and distracting employees, and they soon had placed Trevor in a closed bathroom stall.  They then crossed the rest of the floor mostly unseen, and started back down the east stairwell.

Almost immediately, they heard someone step out into the stairwell from the floor above, and Paxos doubled back to run distraction.  It turned out to be two other heavily-armoured corpo cops, and Paxos was able to successfully slow them down enough for Specter, who was just barely able to move at this point, to stay ahead of them.  Unfortunately, in order to not raise suspicions, she had to follow them to the 23rd floor break room while enduring such wonderful conversation topics as "fucking homeless people", "fucking liberals", and "the NCPD were right to gas everyone living in the sewers but they didn't go far enough".

Since neither of them were carrying a scrambler, Jar and Specter stayed put in the hallway and waited for Paxos to regroup, hoping they weren't found in the meantime.  Unfortunately, it was lunchtime, and what sounded like a small group of people came into the stairwell from the floor above.  They snuck out into the offices of Political Contributions, and were able to stay concealed without stumbling into anyone.  They waited for a while, then went back into the stairwell, and were undisturbed until Paxos found them around 10 minutes later.

They continued down and were again interrupted by a group of researchers in lab coats, this time going up, who Paxos convinced to take the elevator ("Stairs're closed due to sewage maintenance").  Once they were gone, the crew finally made it to an empty Research Subbasement 3, where it seemed all the employees had gone for lunch.  A number of idling computer terminals filled most of the room, while the data vault sat on the far side.  Jar figured which passkey went in which slot and the doors slid open with a hiss as mist from the liquid nitrogen cooling system billowed out.  Not wanting to waste time, Paxos jacked in but once she'd opened the main directory, she encountered a problem.

Nobody knew Japanese.  

Paxos' deck couldn't fit all five files, so they needed to work something out.  The fifth one could fit on a shard, but nobody had one on them; Jar went to go scrounge one up from the rest of the lab.  Specter knew Chinese, but couldn't make sense of the kanji, nevermind the hiragana.  Paxos spent some time looking at the files in depth, and, unlike the filenames, they were mostly in programming languages she was fluent in.  After some examination, File 2 looked to be a video game, so they could just take the rest and sort through them later.  Jar came back with a shard he'd stolen from a computer, and they sat tight while Paxos transferred over the files.

She decided to take everything but the video game, including File 1, which was way too old to be what they were after, but was likely to be highly profitable.  In the middle of the file transfer, they heard the elevator ding, and looked over as a young-ish man walked out and back to his desk with a steaming hot burrito in one hand.  He sat there, eating and (probably) watching videos on his chyron, utterly oblivious to the wide open data vault.  It took another ten minutes for the transfers to finish, but when they did, the crew slunk back to the stairwell without burrito-guy noticing anything.

Getting Out

The crew made it back to the ground floor without further interruptions and got into Peacock's car (they'd given Specter a spare key the night before).  Paxos got in the trunk and they drove off, with noone the wiser.  Once they were safely outside snooping distance, they turned back on their unencrypted comms and Paxos got to work deciphering the files when she suddenly cut out.  Jar pulled off the highway and into a parking lot, then he and Specter jumped out to see what the hell was going on.

With Specter assisting, Jar was able to safely jack Paxos out and run a full reboot of her cranial 'ware.  He wasn't certain, since it wasn't supposed to be real, but this seemed to be a lot like the old street legend of the Soulkiller program that could digitize a person's consciousness.  Now that they were (probably) out of sight of any 'Saka cameras, they loaded up Paxos in the back seat and drove off into the city.

Back at Arasaka Tower, lunch was coming to a close and the meeting got back underway.  Peacock had the impression that their boss, Sugimoto, didn't much care for them, but that didn't matter because they just had to finish their first (and last) day on the job and then they were home free.  The meeting continued for seven hours, and upon returning to Sugimoto's office they were yelled at for another hour for failing to berate the intern who had spilled coffee near him earlier.  All told, they didn't make it out of Arasaka Tower until 9PM.  When they finally regrouped with the rest of the crew at Jar's place, Paxos had finished going through the paydata.

The files they had were:

• Soulkiller
• the "save your soul"/"relic" program (essentially a modernized soulkiller)
• the shredder they were looking for
• a collection of data on the brain chip they'd sold to Militech a few weeks ago

The brain chip data included all files Paxos had seen on the shard from Martha, but it also had novel data on two human trials.  One was marked as failure due to subject's death, while the other was ongoing.  Jar noticed something curious: the two test subjects were identical twins.  Or, maybe... clones. 

At any rate, Specter made the dead drop outside of Kang Tao on the 17th as they'd arranged with Martha; Paxos had renamed the shredder to English and had briefly checked that it did what it was supposed to.  The next day, Jar dropped by and picked up their prize: the datafort credentials of (former) Kang Tao intelligence director Ruslan Sokolov.  A quick stop off at Fernandez got them a price check: 200,000 eurodollars.

Notes:

Further skillshard usage is banned, as they are too good for the cost.  They're a cool idea but if they were to be pointed appropriate to what they should be in lore they'd probably cost as much as high-end combat 'ware.  You might be able to just make them fixed skill-12 or something (ie professional level) but that's just about useless in GURPS Action where characters have 15 DX.

Peacock didn't even need to use Luck to pick the pockets due to good rolls.  They've certainly earned the "The".

The disadvantage of infiltrating in the middle of the day: there are lots more people going on lunch breaks.

There was some discussion over whether to delete the video game in the data vault; after all, gamers are reactionary and the revolution cannot come about until the gaming class has been abolished.  Sadly, they decided to leave it.

Paxos almost died to Soukiller because she failed her check by exactly one.  Jar then made his roll with 10 degrees, so he was able to save her.  Had he not, she would have lost a bunch of max humanity, as well as some advantages and disadvantages.