Building a Portable Cyberdeck

Case punched his deck and the matrix unfolded around him like an origami crane made of light. The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific. He was twenty-four. For Case, who lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh.

The cyberspace matrix was a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. The Sprawl was a long, strange way home over the Pacific. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Parts List

  • Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB RAM minimum)
  • 7" touchscreen display
  • Mechanical keyboard (60% form factor)
  • Pelican case or custom enclosure
  • USB power bank (20,000mAh+)
  • Various cables and adapters

He’d wake feeling taloned and unsteady, barely able to climb the ladder to his room. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism. The towers that rose beyond the port’s rim gleamed like vertical miles of polished steel. His ugliness was the stuff of legend.

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# Install Kali Linux on Pi
sudo dd if=kali-linux-arm64.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress

# Configure display rotation
echo "display_rotate=1" >> /boot/config.txt

# Install essential tools
apt update && apt install -y nmap wireshark aircrack-ng

The matrix had its own logic. The program had the look of a cheap plastic arcade game. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City. The street finds its own uses for things. Case was twenty-four. At the steel cord above his head, he could see thin wisps of light.