She looked at Mercer, who was at a loss for words, and said seriously: "The money you've saved should be spent on your other needs, right? Don't you still want to mess around with cybernetic implants and all those weapon things?"
Mercer could only nod in the end.
Seeing him agree, Lucy smiled: "Okay, then it's settled."
"Don't tell Rebecca and V." Mercer looked at her and said seriously: "They need to spend the money on themselves to survive future missions."
"Alright, I won't say." Lucy smiled, her mood looking quite cheerful: "Let me spend the money for you then."
"Why are you so happy to spend money on me? Be careful, or you'll end up with nothing!" Mercer laughed.
"Wouldn't that mean you're gaining both love and money?" She said playfully, with a sly smile on her face.
Mercer reached out to pat her head, but Lucy took a step back, shaking her head: "Do you know... being patted on the head is quite annoying?"
"I know, why do you think I want to pat your head now..." Mercer quipped, then looked back at the computer after retracting his hand.
"Alright, I'll write two programs, and you help me test them." Mercer prepared to get to work, to write a few NCPD-style programs through the backdoor vulnerabilities hacked by Venus.
"Sure." Lucy sat down beside him.
In fact, there wasn't even a need to write programs; Venus had directly stolen programs that were already written, and Mercer just needed to reconstruct and optimize these NCPD programs to turn them into his own.
The written programs could be input into the prosthetic eye through a brain-computer interface, and during execution, they could directly connect to the NCPD's dedicated network line to access the NCPD database.
He first transmitted the program to his prosthetic eye through the brain-computer interface, then unplugged it, closed his eyes to restart the prosthetic eye, then turned his head to activate the scanning program and looked at Lucy.
[Lucina Shima]
[Age: 16]
[Affiliation: Civilian]
[Criminal Record: None]
[Wanted Bounty: None]
Seeing the age of sixteen, Mercer found it hard to hold back.
"Why are you laughing... send one to me too." Lucy said, and she transferred a copy of the program from Mercer's computer to herself.
Once the program started, she scanned Mercer with a glance and then let out a somewhat speechless laugh: "Eighteen, huh?"
"You can customize the data displayed, just omit the unnecessary information."
After saying this, Mercer didn't dwell on it and turned back to continue programming on his laptop, and after about ten minutes, he let out a long sigh:
"Alright, I've made an embedded version of the program, loaded into the brain-computer interface.
It not only includes this scanning program but can also monitor NCPD calls at any time, connect to the city's cameras controlled by NCPD, view real-time map data, dispatch status, etc.
This version of the program is a high-level version for our insiders only, let me think..."
Mercer had a sudden idea and said: "Let's call this software Watchdog."
"What kind of weird naming is that?" Lucy quipped, though she wasn't really surprised.
"Alright, hurry up and try it out, let's test together to see if it works well."
Mercer smiled and urged her to install it, while he started the program test.
Even in the Evil Land, he could still manage to stably connect to the NCPD system. With a thought, a map of Night City appeared in front of Mercer, with blue dots representing the NCPD moving on various streets.
At the same time, he could see many green signal sources. When he connected to one, the view of the city camera appeared in his prosthetic eye.
Mercer curiously controlled the camera to look around the street view, even zooming in to scan a small thug smoking by the roadside.
The person's name, criminal record, and bounty amount appeared before his eyes, and not far from this guy, an NCPD car slowly brushed past him, with the officers inside glancing at the thug and then driving off indifferent.
Mercer continuously switched the viewpoints of the city cameras, and even though he was in the Evil Land, he could easily view the entire Night City through the cameras.
Excluding the more chaotic areas where public cameras had long been destroyed by thugs, most of the area was almost under Mercer's eyes.
Mercer also tested the traffic signal control system, changing a traffic light from red to green five seconds early.
Finally, Mercer listened in on some NCPD calls, and after hearing the dispatch messages from the control center for a while, he was satisfied and shut down the software.
"The software needs some settings; we hackers have network access vaults, so it's fine, but people like V, who only have brain-computer interfaces, probably can't transmit this much network data in one go."
Lucy reminded.
Mercer nodded and said: "It can be optimized later. If you ask me, all they need is to view a map and scan character information, the rest of the functions are just for show for them.
We'll set these functions to be off by default, and they can enable what they need when they need it."
Lucy acknowledged with an 'Mm,' and then enthusiastically immersed herself in using Mercer's software to have fun with Night City's public cameras.
The feeling of openly using public cameras to observe Night City from miles away was indeed quite fascinating.
Meanwhile, Mercer made a video call to Old Wei with the program.
Old Wei was sitting at a table, head down, busy with what looked like repairing a second-hand implant: "Why are you suddenly calling me?"