Static on Channel 9
A pirate media star vanishes mid-broadcast — but her feed keeps streaming from somewhere under the Combat Zone, and three factions want the signal traced first. A Cyberpunk RED one-shot for 3–5 players.
Free — copies it into your campaigns with your session tools.
Premise
Channel 9 isn't a channel — it's Dora Vance, a pirate Media who's spent six years hijacking dead broadcast infrastructure to run exposés nobody else will touch. Nine days ago she walked into the Combat Zone chasing a story and didn't walk out. The twist that has the whole city watching: her feed never stopped. Every night at nine, Channel 9 goes live from somewhere under the Zone — new footage, her voice, her cadence — and last night's episode named three city councilmembers in a water-contract kickback scheme, with documents Dora couldn't have had when she disappeared.
Stakes
Whoever's running the feed is either Dora in deep trouble, or something wearing her voice and spending her credibility — and the feed announced tonight that episode twelve will name 'the man who owns the Zone's water.' That man, developer-warlord Silas Okonjo, has posted an open bounty on the transmitter's location. Dora's producer is paying the crew to get there before the bounty hunters, the councilmembers' fixers, or Okonjo's own people, because whoever controls that signal by midnight controls what half a million people believe about their drinking water.
Scenes
- 1
The Producer's Problem
A rent-by-the-hour edit suite above a noodle franchise, blinds down, three of Dora's dead-man switches already tripped
Marisol Ubaka, Dora's producer and the other half of Channel 9, shows the crew what she hasn't shown the fans: the new episodes are cut wrong. Dora's face never appears after day nine — voice only, over footage. The documents in episode eleven are real (Marisol verified two), which means someone with genuine access is feeding the broadcast. And the encrypted production channel Dora used pinged once, three nights ago, from a repeater node in the Zone's old subway layer — with Dora's key, four hours AFTER that night's episode aired. Someone has her keys, or someone has her.
Decision point: Marisol can keep the feed's fans — thousands of them, organized, doxx-happy — out of the crew's way, or point them like a weapon at the other factions for cover. Using the audience makes the crew's approach quieter and makes every mistake public forever.
If they go sideways: If the players want to just wait for tonight's broadcast and trace it live, Marisol says yes — and so does everyone else in the city with a scanner. A live trace works but arrives simultaneously with two rival teams. The early subway ping is the only lead that gets them there FIRST.
Tech + Electronics/Security Tech — DV 13 to pull a physical sector off the repeater ping; DV 15 to also date the equipment — the repeater was refurbished recently, with parts from a corp inventory - 2
Zone Etiquette
The Combat Zone — Reclaimers' toll bridge, a bounty hunters' staging bar, and the mouth of the old subway
Getting to the subway layer means crossing Reclaimer turf, and the Reclaimers are Channel 9's most devoted audience — episode eight got their water ration doubled. Their toll captain, a wide grinning man called Deacon Furlow, waves crews through for cash or for answers: everyone's asking about the feed, and Furlow has started running a side business selling 'verified' Dora sightings, all fabricated. At the staging bar, the crew can eyeball the competition: a four-person corporate extraction team pretending to be scavvers (their boots are wrong), and Okonjo's bounty coordinator openly recruiting locals at a folding table like a job fair.
Decision point: The Reclaimers would die for Dora — telling Furlow the truth (that the feed may be hijacked) could raise an army of allies or torch the crew as the people who called Saint Dora fake, depending entirely on how it's said and whether Furlow's sighting business survives the telling.
If they go sideways: If the players fight their way across instead of talking, the Zone responds as an ecosystem: word travels ahead of them, the subway mouth is barricaded by the time they arrive, and their descent happens under thrown light and eyes — no ambush, just an audience, which in the Zone is worse.
Facedown (COOL) — DV 13 to walk the toll bridge without paying blood or answers; Persuasion DV 15 to turn Furlow honest — his sighting racket is worth 200eb a day to him - 3
The Studio Under the City
Meridian Street subway station, sealed since the '40s — now a broadcast studio, a sickroom, and a stand-off
The station is lit, powered, and dressed like a shrine to Channel 9: rebuilt transmitter, edit bays, walls of tape. Dora Vance is here — alive, feverish, right leg wrecked from a nine-day-old fall, and furious. And the feed's new episodes are being made by the people keeping her alive: a cell of ex-corp infrastructure workers led by a water-treatment engineer named Ada Reyes, who pulled Dora out of a collapsed maintenance shaft, patched her, and then — while Dora was septic and raving — used her rig, her keys, and her voice archive to broadcast the documents THEY brought with them. The kickback evidence is Reyes's own: she's the whistleblower Dora was coming to meet. Dora's rage isn't about being rescued. It's that episodes went out under her name that she never verified, and one document in episode eleven — she's now checked — is fake.
Decision point: Reyes admits the fake immediately: a forged invoice added to make the real scheme legible, 'a true story with one false page.' Tonight's episode twelve — the Okonjo episode — is cut, loaded, and armed on a timer, and it contains two more documents Dora hasn't verified. Dora wants it stopped. Reyes wants it aired. Both of them turn to the crew, and above their heads, the first bounty team's footsteps ring on the station stairs.
If they go sideways: If the players came in loud, Reyes's cell scatters to defensive positions and the scene runs as parley-under-guns — but Dora shouts the situation from her cot in fifteen furious seconds, because the one thing a Media does under fire is make sure everyone has the facts.
Human Perception + EMP — DV 13 to read that Reyes is telling the whole truth about the fake; DV 15 to also read what she's NOT saying — she knows exactly who tipped Okonjo to the transmitter's existence - 4
Nine O'Clock
Meridian station, all approaches, T-minus twenty minutes to the timed broadcast
Everything converges before the timer runs out: Okonjo's bounty team holds the north stairs, the corporate extractors (working for the councilmembers, here to destroy the archive) breach through the old ventilation, and the Reclaimers — if Furlow was turned or the fans were mobilized — arrive as a wildcard flood. The transmitter is armed with episode twelve. Dora, propped at the main desk with a mic and a fever, can kill the broadcast, air it, or — if someone gets her thirty clean seconds — do the third thing: go live, as herself, face on camera for the first time in nine days, and tell the whole story including the fake page. Every faction in the station wants a different one of those buttons pressed, and several of them have guns.
Decision point: The crew ends up holding the room, which means holding the choice: the verified-but-explosive truth about Okonjo (Reyes's cut), silence (the councilmembers' and Okonjo's shared preference, worth double pay from either), or Dora's thirty seconds — which burns the fake, saves the feed's soul, and admits on-air that Channel 9 can be hijacked, a confession that some of her own believers will never forgive.
If they go sideways: If the crew simply grabs Dora and extracts her, the timer runs out unattended and episode twelve airs as cut — fakes included. Two weeks later the forged invoice is exposed, the real scheme collapses with it, and the players get the epilogue where they learn what the broadcast button was actually worth.
Autofire/Handgun or Martial Arts — Holding the stairs is combat vs Okonjo's team (standard bounty pros); the extractors avoid the fight and go for the archive — Athletics DV 15 to cut them off in the vent gallery
NPCs
Dora Vance
Forty-one, gray streak she's had since thirty, leg splinted with conduit and vending-machine wrap, voice raw from fever and fury. Even flat on a cot she interviews everyone who enters the room.
Compulsively precise — corrects dates mid-crisis, cites episode numbers like scripture. Her code is the whole personality: verify, attribute, air it anyway. Would rather die than run a correction, which is why she's never had to.
Ada Reyes
Fifties, municipal coveralls with the patch ripped off, safety glasses pushed up into gray hair. Hands that have rebuilt the transmitter twice. Carries her evidence in a waterproof document tube like a talisman.
Methodical, unglamorous, morally exhausted — twenty-two years of filing internal complaints made her an engineer of last resorts. Doesn't defend the fake invoice as right, defends it as LEGIBLE, and the distinction is her whole tragedy.
Deacon Furlow
Huge, sunburnt, gold-capped incisor, runs the toll bridge from a lifeguard chair under a beach umbrella. Sells water, passage, and lately, hand-drawn maps to Dora sightings he invents nightly.
Jovial, mercenary, and quicker than he performs. Loyalty stack, in order: his people's water ration, his margin, and Saint Dora — whose episode eight is laminated and nailed to the toll post.
Silas Okonjo
Appears only on screens and through his bounty coordinator: bespoke suit, reclaimed-oak office, the studied calm of a man who moved from breaking strikes to breaking ground. Calls the Combat Zone 'the portfolio.'
Courteous, patient, allergic to being recorded. Negotiates like the money's already spent and everyone else is arguing about the receipt. Genuinely believes piping water into the Zone at 40x markup makes him its benefactor.
Endings
Thirty Clean Seconds
Dora goes live, face-on, fevered and precise: the rescue, the hijack, the fake page, the real scheme — and, if she's had the conversation that surfaces it, her own 2039 confession, aired on her own terms before Okonjo can ever spend it. The feed's numbers crater for a month, then triple: turns out corrections are a genre nobody had tried. Reyes faces the fraud she added and the real documents both stand up in the recall election. The crew gets paid by Marisol in cash and by half a million viewers in the strange currency of having been visible on the night it happened.
Episode Twelve Airs
Reyes's cut goes out — verified pages, fake invoice, all of it. It works exactly as engineered: Okonjo's water contracts are frozen inside a week, the councilmembers turn on each other, and the Zone's ration doubles. Then the forgery surfaces, as forgeries do, and takes the true scheme down with it in the backdraft. Channel 9 becomes a cautionary tale told by the same corps it spent six years bleeding. Dora, healed, starts over on Channel 10 with an audience of exactly the people who stayed — and a list, which the crew is on, sorted into columns she doesn't explain.
Dead Air
The broadcast dies — sold, spiked, or shot. Somebody pays the crew very well: Okonjo's coordinator with a bonus for the archive, or the extractors' employers with a wire from a shell company. The Zone's nine o'clock goes back to static, and the Reclaimers hold a wake for a channel with Furlow presiding, laminated episode eight at half-mast. Marisol doesn't take the crew's calls. Months later, at nine sharp, static on the old frequency resolves for eleven seconds into a voice — cadence familiar, source untraceable — reading one sentence: the names of everyone who was in Meridian station that night.
Sequel hook for Cyberpunk RED campaigns
Dora's archive — wherever it ended up — includes forty hours of raw tape labeled 'NOT FOR AIR: the water is the small story,' and the first ten minutes are enough to show why episode twelve was only ever meant to be the season premiere.
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