Arcology Heist
A dying fixer hires the crew to steal her own cortical backup out of a corp arcology — before the corp wakes it up and asks it questions. A Cyberpunk RED one-shot for 3–5 players.
Free — copies it into your campaigns with your session tools.
Premise
Rosa 'Ledger' Quintana has fixed jobs in this city for thirty years, and her liver has maybe thirty days left. Fifteen years ago, cash-desperate, she sold a cortical scan of herself to Danforth-Osei Biosystems under a 'medical research' contract. Last week DOB's Human Capital division reclassified their scan library as an 'interrogatable asset class.' Everything Rosa knew in 2030 — every safehouse, every client, every body buried for half the city's underworld — is sitting in cold storage on sublevel 6 of Danforth Tower, waiting to be booted and deposed. She's hiring the crew to get it out before legal finishes the paperwork.
Stakes
If DOB wakes the scan, a fifteen-years-younger Rosa — loyal to no one alive, terrified, and cooperative — testifies against half the crew's own contacts, patrons, and possibly the crew themselves. Rosa is paying with the only thing she has left: her book. The whole book. Every favor owed to Ledger Quintana, signed over to whoever brings her herself.
Scenes
- 1
The Client Is the Cargo
Rosa's booth at Bettina's, a 24-hour pho counter in Little Saigon she's run jobs from since the '20s
Rosa lays it out over soup she can't eat anymore: the scan is on an air-gapped storage array, sublevel 6, Danforth Tower — a mid-tier arcology with four thousand residents, a mall, and corporate levels wrapped around the core like a fist. She has the original 2030 contract, a current DOB internal memo (bought dear) scheduling her scan for 'asset validation' in 72 hours, and one asset she's ashamed of: her granddaughter Mercy works in the tower. Food court, level 3. Mercy doesn't know what her grandmother did for a living, and Rosa wants it kept that way harder than she wants the job done.
Decision point: Rosa's employee angle is the clean way in — and using Mercy at all, even just her badge patterns, breaks the one condition the client set. Take the job with the restriction, or push Rosa to choose between her granddaughter's ignorance and her own ghost?
If they go sideways: If the players refuse the job or lowball her, Rosa shrugs and starts calling other crews from the booth phone in front of them — and the third name she dials is someone one of the PCs owes money to. The job is happening. The only question is whether they're inside it.
Human Perception + EMP — DV 13 to read what Rosa isn't saying: she doesn't want the scan destroyed — she wants it back - 2
Casing the Fist
Danforth Tower public levels — mall, food court, residential lobby — and the crew's own prep
The tower's public face is open to anyone with a shopping profile: three mall levels, a food court where Mercy Quintana slings bao, and a residential lobby with a delivery entrance that swallows two hundred gig couriers a day. Below that, corporate layers, and below THOSE, cold storage. Working the site surfaces three viable doors: a medical-waste contractor whose trucks dock at sublevel 4 twice nightly; a DOB Human Capital auditor named Emmerich Voss who drinks alone in the mall's whiskey bar and badges into 6 tomorrow for pre-validation inventory; and the freight elevator's maintenance netrunner access — old NET architecture from the tower's 2038 retrofit, never fully migrated.
Decision point: Pick the door: the waste-truck run (loud gear, tight timing), Voss (a human being who can be bought, tricked, or worn), or the retrofit architecture (best access, and the tower's Black ICE is old, mean, and unaudited). Prep time is one working day — spreading across two doors means both are half-prepped.
If they go sideways: If the players spend too long casing, compress the clock honestly: Mercy comments to a 'regular' (a PC in cover) that some corpo team was photographing the food court's service corridor today — DOB's own security is pre-validating the route, and the 72 hours just became 24.
Tech + Electronics/Security Tech — DV 15 to map the sublevel access topology from the retrofit blueprints; DV 13 via Streetwise if they buy the waste contractor's route sheets instead - 3
Sublevel 6
Cold storage — a server morgue: racked arrays in refrigerated aisles, one bored guard, one very awake counterparty
The infiltration lands them in an aisle of humming racks, each holding a few hundred people-shaped datasets. Rosa's array is where the memo said — already unracked, sitting on a transit cart, prepped early. Standing next to the cart: a DOB contractor named Ilsa Brandt, corporate extraction specialist, who is stealing it too. Her clients are DOB's own board rivals, who want the scan library moved off-book before regulators audit the 'asset class.' Brandt is outnumbered, unbothered, and proposes a professional solution: they walk out together, split the exit, and settle ownership outside — because the alternative is both crews fighting in a freezer while response teams converge.
Decision point: Deal with Brandt (she has the better exit; her clients want the whole library, but she genuinely doesn't care about one array), take her down quietly (she's alone — why is she alone?), or grab the cart and run their own exit plan cold. Every option is playable; only one of them answers why a specialist came without backup.
If they go sideways: If the players dawdle or fight loud, the freezer does the escalating for you: thermal alarms read combat heat as refrigeration failure, and the response isn't guards first — it's the aisle doors sealing for 'asset preservation,' with everyone inside and DV 17 to beat the lockout before the real security arrives.
Stealth + DEX — DV 15 through the racked aisles under camera sweep; the Netrunner can drop it to DV 13 by looping the aisle cams — the retrofit architecture reaches down here - 4
Who Gets to Be Rosa
The exit — waste dock, freight elevator, or Brandt's route — and Bettina's after, if anyone makes it
The exit runs hot: Brandt's presence (dead, allied, or robbed) has consequences on the way out, and DOB's response team is led by someone unexpected — Voss the auditor, who turns out to be the only person in the building who's actually read Rosa's file, and who wants sixty seconds of parley before anyone starts shooting. His offer: DOB can be made to certify the scan 'corrupted, disposed' — paperwork nobody audits — but only if the array never surfaces anywhere, ever. He's not protecting DOB. He's protecting four thousand other people in that library whose files get 'validated' next if this one walks out the door and proves the asset class is real.
Decision point: Deliver the array to Rosa as contracted, take Voss's deal and destroy it in front of him (breaking contract with a dying fixer whose book is the payday), or the third thing nobody's said out loud: boot it. There's a shielded reader on the waste dock. Fifteen-years-younger Rosa could be asked what SHE wants — and whatever she says, somebody in the crew has to decide if a backup gets a vote.
If they go sideways: If the crew just runs the guns-out exit, let it work at cost — Cyberpunk exits do — but Voss's sixty seconds arrive anyway, later, at Bettina's, as a one-man visit with the certification paperwork and no backup, because he's the kind of tired that stopped being afraid a while ago.
Handgun/Shoulder Arms or Athletics — DV 15 exit-under-fire beats; DV 13 if Brandt's route is live; Facedown vs Voss is COOL vs COOL — he's DV 14 and knows it
NPCs
Rosa 'Ledger' Quintana
Sixty-eight, wrapped in a good coat gone loose on her frame, jaundice under a lifetime of sun damage. Still runs three phones. The booth at Bettina's has her name scratched under the table from 2031.
Transactional to the bone and honest about it — 'I never sold anyone who didn't price themselves first.' Gallows-funny about dying, absolutely humorless about Mercy.
Emmerich Voss
Fifties, corporate gray worn like a penance, whiskey bar regular who tips exactly twenty percent. Reading glasses he actually needs — never chipped, on principle nobody at DOB has ever asked about.
Precise, exhausted, courteous to service workers and cold to executives. Talks like a man deposing himself. Has decided something recently and become calm the way people do after.
Ilsa Brandt
Forties, movements economical to the point of stillness, mid-grade cyberarm deliberately left with visible wear — advertising that she doesn't need better. Speaks four sentences a minute, all of them load-bearing.
Professionally amiable the way a toll booth is: fixed rates, no grudges, no exceptions. Respects competence instantly and visibly discounts everything else.
Mercy Quintana
Twenty-two, hairnet, forearm burn scars from the bao steamer, studying logistics certification on a cracked slate between rushes. Has her grandmother's exact eyes and none of her wariness.
Friendly on autopilot, sharp underneath — clocks regulars, remembers orders, notices badge colors. The kind of employee who'd make a corp proud and a crew nervous.
Endings
Delivered
The array reaches Bettina's. Rosa spends a night talking to herself through a rented reader — the crew can eavesdrop or grant the door — and comes out at dawn with wet eyes, a burial site for Mercy's debt-proof, and the book signed over as contracted. The scan, at its own request, goes into the East River off a pier young Rosa liked. DOB writes off the loss. Voss's poison pill proceeds to its next fixer, next tower, next crew.
Certified Disposed
The crew takes Voss's deal and the array dies in front of witnesses — degaussed on the waste dock, paperwork stamped. Rosa gets the truth instead of the ghost, takes it like a pro, and pays half: the half of the book with her enemies in it, which is either an insult or the most useful thing she owns, and she won't say which. Three weeks later, four thousand files quietly reclassify back to 'inert research data,' and an auditor nobody thanks buys a round for the whole whiskey bar.
The Vote
They boot her. Fifteen-years-younger Rosa comes up sharp, adjusts fast, and asks the question that unravels the room: 'Is she paying you with MY book?' What follows — negotiation, reconciliation, or one Rosa buying out the other — the crew brokers between a dying woman and her own unfinished self. However it settles, both Rosas agree on the last clause: Mercy gets the ledger, clean, with the debts pre-burned. The crew gets paid by two clients. Voss gets a copy of nothing, officially, and sleeps fine.
Sequel hook for Cyberpunk RED campaigns
Rosa's book, in whoever's hands, contains a page flagged in her 2030 handwriting: 'DO NOT COLLECT — sold them something that wasn't mine. If they ever find out, run.' The debt has been accruing interest for fifteen years, and the counterparty's name is one the crew already knows.
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