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Dive into Digital Space

Finally, I’ve decided on a name for Cyberpunk City, unless I decide I don’t like this name and choose to change it later.

LittleBadWolf doesn’t miss, and this piece is no exception.

Enigma had been exploring the city of Machresse, on a plane whose name still eluded him, for some time, under the guise of a freelance detective and mercenary. As he had been taught, the best way to learn a people is to walk among them, as one of them. His mission, as always, was to bring home the culture and innovations of the planes he visited, so that his people and their future generations could benefit from their collective knowledge.

The people of this city, and quite possibly the rest of the plane, relied heavily on a network infrastructure to facilitate almost every aspect of normal life. As a citizen of Magistrum City, he was accustom of similar technology, but as a supplement, rather than a dependency. When he questioned one of his contacts, and old ratkin, about the security of such dependency, the mind mage could swear his saw the rodent’s eye light up.

With his psionic magic, the mage-detective was no stranger to intruding into abstract spaces. He had entered numerous minds, for many different reasons. Whether it was to help patients recover for mental ailments or to gather information for an investigation, he had been to the world inside people’s minds more than once.

Such experience made it easy to follow the old artificer’s explanation as he showed off a device designed to help its user enter the network. After a lengthy explanation, and a number of clarifying questions, the elder engineer gave Enigma the opportunity to use the device himself, to practice exploring virtual space.

To his surprise, the experience was so close to diving into someone’s mind that the wolfkin could swear he felt his magic reacting in such the same way. As he plummeted into the virtual city, representing all of Machresse’s collective data, he wondered what possibilities Magistrum artificers could make reality with such technology at their disposal. Artifice had always been a barrier for him, immune to his psionics for lack of a brain, yet here he was exploring virtual reality with no more difficulty that he would a flesh-and-blood mind.

In that moment, Enigma could almost sense a whole new world opening up to him.