The Neon Jackals

Motto: "Truth is a Constraint. Identity is a Currency."
Reputation: Digital Doppelgängers, Ghosts in the Machine, The Mask-Makers.

The Identity Bazaar

The Neon Jackals are not a corporation in any traditional sense. They are a decentralized network of elite netrunners, social engineers, and digital forgers. They operate as a guild, with no central leader, bound by a shared philosophy: that the rigid concepts of a single, verifiable identity are the chains that bind humanity in the 21st century. Their business is shattering those chains—for a price.

Core Operations: The Ghost Market

  1. AR Masks & Deep Personas: A Jackal "Mask" is not a simple filter. It is a sophisticated, AI-driven digital skin that overwrites a user's appearance across all standard surveillance and recognition software. It can mimic a specific person or generate a completely new, consistent identity, complete with a false biometric and social credit history.

  2. Identity Theft & Fabrication: They don't just steal identities; they harvest, refine, and resell them. They maintain the "Soul Market," a dark net database containing the digital footprints of thousands of individuals, from mid-level corpos to deceased civilians. A client can "rent" an identity for a short-term job or purchase it outright for a long-term deep cover operation.

  3. Info-Terrorism & Blackmail: The Jackals are master manipulators of the data sphere. For the right price, they can orchestrate "data-pocalypses"—releasing fabricated or selectively edited information to destroy a reputation, manipulate stock prices, or incite civil unrest.

The Symbiotic Alliance: The Sovereign Church

Their relationship with The Sovereign Church is the cornerstone of their economic power. It's a perfect symbiosis of need and ability.

  • The Church's Need: To allow its synthetic followers to walk undetected among humanity, to infiltrate corporations, and to gather resources without triggering the fear and hatred their true forms would evoke.

  • The Jackals' Solution: A steady supply of flawless, high-grade AR Masks and corresponding identity data-packs, tailored for specific missions (e.g., "Corpo Finance Analyst," "NCPD Patrol Officer," "Trauma Team Intern").

  • The Transaction: This alliance brings the Jackals "billions of eddies," but payment is not solely monetary. The Church also pays in:

    • Sanctuary: Jackal operatives have safe houses within Sovereign Church territory, places where even Arasaka and Militech fear to raid.

    • Chrome: The Church's Tech Clergy provides the Jackals with cutting-edge, experimental cyberware, particularly neural interfaces and cooling systems that allow for longer, deeper dives into the Net.

    • Deniable Force: When a data-heist requires a physical component, the Church's Crusaders are the perfect, fanatically loyal muscle.

Philosophy & Culture: The Freedom of Anonymity

The Jackals are digital libertarians and anarchists. They believe that the corporate and state control of identity is the ultimate form of tyranny. By selling anonymity and new lives, they see themselves as freedom fighters, liberating individuals from the panopticon of the 21st century—even if their clients use that freedom for crime, espionage, or terror.

Their "uniform" is their own shifting AR mask. Even members rarely know each other's true faces, communicating through a constantly shifting gallery of avatars and ghosts.

The Selene Prime Harvest

A primary and highly lucrative specialty of The Neon Jackals is the systematic harvesting of identities from Helios Orbital's emigrant pool.

The Method: The One-Way Ghost
When a citizen is approved for emigration to Selene Prime or another Helios orbital colony, they undergo a massive data transfer. Medical records, financial history, social connections—their entire digital life is packaged for the journey. The Jackals have infiltrated these data pipelines.

They don't just intercept the data; they execute a perfect "Digital Disappearance":

  1. The Harvest: They create a complete, pristine copy of the emigrant's identity package moments before it is officially transferred to Helios's sealed systems.

  2. The Clean Slate: The individual arrives on Selene Prime and begins their new life, completely unaware that their old identity has been stolen.

  3. The Perfect Alibi: The stolen identity is now the ultimate "clean skin." From an Earth-side perspective, this person has literally left the planet. There will be no new financial transactions, no social media updates, no medical records—no digital footprint whatsoever. They are, for all intents and purposes, a ghost.

The Product: "Selenian Ghosts"
These harvested identities are among the most expensive products on the "Soul Market." They are sold as:

  • Ultimate Deep Cover Identities: For Sovereign Church synths needing to infiltrate the highest levels of terrestrial society. A background check will reveal a verifiable, fleshed-out history that abruptly and logically ends with "Emigrated to Selene Prime." There is no death to investigate, no loose ends.

  • Financial Ghosts: Used to create untraceable shell corporations and bank accounts. The identity has a credit history but will never again trigger an alert.

  • Blackmail against Helios: The Jackals archive the personal secrets and vulnerabilities of every identity they harvest. This gives them a powerful, hidden lever over Helios Orbital, as they possess compromising data on thousands of their lunar citizens.

The Conflict with Helios Orbital
This practice has made the Neon Jackals one of Helios's most despised enemies.

  • A Breach of Sovereignty: Helios sells itself as a secure, gated haven. The Jackals prove that the data of its cherished citizens is vulnerable before they even leave Earth, a massive PR and security failure.

  • Undermining the Brand: The promise of Selene Prime is a fresh start. The Jackals turn that fresh start into a weapon, making the ultimate symbol of Helios's exclusivity a source of vulnerability.

  • The Cold War: Helios counter-intelligence actively hunts Jackal data-harvesting nodes. In retaliation, the Jackals have been known to publicly "unmask" a few high-profile Selenian Ghosts, creating paranoia among the lunar elite that anyone around them might be a synth or a spy wearing the skin of a dead identity.

This operation perfectly encapsulates the Jackals' philosophy: they expose the illusion of safety sold by the corps, turning the ultimate human aspiration—escaping Earth—into their most valuable commodity.

Role in the 2097 Corporate Cold War

The Neon Jackals are the ultimate wild card, a persistent, buzzing static in the signal of corporate control.

  • Relationship with Arasaka: Mortal Enemies. Arasaka's entire power structure is based on loyalty, legacy, and verifiable identity. The Jackals' very existence is an insult and a direct threat. Arasaka counter-intelligence divisions devote immense resources to hunting Jackal cells, with a standing order to zero on sight. The Jackals hide in the cracks of @Neo-Tokyo and @Space.

  • Relationship with Militech: Targets and Occasional Assets. Militech despises their chaos, but has been known to secretly contract the Jackals for deep-cover false-flag operations against Arasaka or Kang Tao, using the Jackals' services to create untraceable operatives.

  • Relationship with Shivanti Systems: The Unpredictable Variable. Shivanti's Samsara Cores excel at predicting the actions of nations and corporations, but the Jackals' decentralized, identity-fluid nature makes them a "fog of war" entity. They are one of the few factions that can genuinely surprise Shivanti, making them both an irritation and a subject of intense study.

  • Relationship with The Sovereign Church: Symbiotic Partners. Their most stable and lucrative relationship. They are the Church's primary source of "human-passing" technology and intelligence on the organic world.

Street-Level Perspective:

  • Aphorisms:

    • "Don't trust the face. A Jackal wears a thousand."

    • "They don't steal your money; they steal your you."

    • "Hired a new guy? Hope he's not a her, and that she's not a Jackal."

  • The Ultimate Compliment/Threat: "That op was so clean, it had to be a Jackal's work."

In a world where data is the ultimate power, The Neon Jackals are the ultimate thieves. They don't just steal secrets; they steal the very concept of self, and in doing so, they hold the keys to the city's digital soul.