The Lattice, Netrunner Café
The Lattice sits under a forgotten skybridge in central Nashvegas, where the rain tastes like copper and the streetlights hum with dying circuitry. You do not find it unless you know what you are looking for. Even then, the sign overhead blinks through three false identities, a small loop of digital misdirection meant to keep the curious from lingering too long.
Inside, the air is warm with synth-coffee and recycled ozone. The lounge fills the front of the space with pale couches and mismatched chairs salvaged from offices that died during the last recession. Light leaks from soft neon panels, blue and violet, a slow pulse that gives the room an underwater feel. Patrons come here to look casual, relaxed, anonymous. Every one of them is running overlays behind half-lidded eyes, scanning the room, sniffing for pings.
A central corridor divides the Lattice. On one side, behind thin composite walls, sit the netrunner pods. Six rooms in a row, each with a reclining rig that looks like some broken marriage between a dentist’s chair and a military medframe. Wires snake from spinal ports into cooling towers and black-market servers. No two rigs are alike. Some have old carbon arms bolted on for convenience, some still show serials from clinics that would like their property back. The hum of processors is constant, a soft mechanical breathing that fills the back of the café.
Kess keeps her desk at the front, a red slab of polymer under a strip of yellow light. She is old tech, the kind of person who remembers the early days of node diving before the corps locked the world down behind proprietary gates. Fiber-optic strands hang from her hair like fading constellations. She watches everyone who steps through her door. She never asks what a runner is planning, only how long they need the room.
In the far rear, past a door that never sits fully closed, are the guts of the place. A server core tucked against the wall, its panels glowing a faint, angry pink. Storage racks whir with cool air and hidden fans. A back office holds three chairs and a desk where deals are made before anyone plugs in. A small medtech alcove sits nearby, stocked with enough gear to pull a fried runner back to breathing, though Kess charges double for that.
The Lattice is not safe, not really, but it is neutral ground. A place where runners can slip into the dark, vanish into their work, and surface again with new secrets. It is a sanctuary built out of discarded parts and old promises, a quiet corner of the city where the real war does not stop, it just changes shape. Here, under bad lighting and the slow heartbeat of old servers, information moves like current. And the only real rule hangs carved into the wall near the pods. No runs on the local net. A lie everyone agrees to keep telling.