Access to Arasaka

• The Arasaka Corporate logo - three circles arranged in tree-like triangle over a vertical "stalk" - appears prominently in this card's artwork.
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• Kiribati is a small third world country in the south Pacific. The card artwork shows images of computers and third world slums juxtaposed.

• "ACME" may be a reference to the company often referred to in the classic Warner Brothers animated cartoons. In these cartoons, almost any time a product was seen, it was labelled with the ACME brand name.
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The Arasaka logo (three circles on a tree-like branching stem) is visible on the deck in the artwork.

• The flavour text on this card comes from the Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook called Rache Bartmoss' Guide To The Net.

• What appears to be the word PAX appears in the lower left corner of the card artwork - this is Latin for Peace.

• The flavour text on this card reads:

"Oh how sharper than a serpent's tooth is one of these suckers clamped onto the boot sector of a drive!"

This is derived from the play King Lear by William Shakespeare, in which the title character laments that his daughter Cordelia refuses to make grandiose her profession of filial love for him and calls for a curse upon her. From Act 1, Scene 4, Lines 272-286:

"Hear, Nature; hear, dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility;
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,
Turn all her mother's pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!"

• The artwork shows orange telephone numbers in United States format - a three-digit area code in parenthesis followed by a seven-digit local number. The audit refers to telephone call records.
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• "Aujourd'Oui" means, roughly, "todyay". It is a mix of the French words "aujourd'hui" (today) and "oui" (yes). [This translation was offered by a native French speaker.] Alternately, it may be read in English as "yes-today", which sounds somewhat like "yesterday".
• The Aujourd'Oui is also a bar in Walter Jon Williams' Cyberpunk novel, Hardwired:

"The Aujourd'Oui is a jockey bar, and they are all here, moonjocks and rigjocks, holdjocks and powerjocks and rockjocks-the jocks condescending to share the floor with mudboys and dirtgirls who surround them, those who hope to become them or love them or want simply be near them, to touch them in the zonedance and absorb a piece of their radiance."

• The text on the purple sphere in the centre of the artwork is lines of computer code in the BASIC langauge.

• Orbital Air is a Corp from the Cyberpunk 2020 universe.

• Karl Baedeker was a German who published a famous series of travel guidebooks beginning in 1839. Baedeker Guides have now been in print for over 150 years and are still available. H. P. Lovecraft writes in the short story Imprisoned with the Pharoahs in 1924:

"... in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo the Bagdad of Harun-el-Rashid seemed to live again. Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiayeh Gardens along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter... "

• The flavour text of this card reads "I knew I should have taken the left region from Albuquerque!" This is a reference to the Warner Brothers cartoon character Bugs Bunny, who often states "I knew I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque" when he gets lost.

• Wizards of the Coast Netrunner NetRep Mark "Sparky" Schmaltz has revealed that this card was designed with an installation cost of zero bits. This was erroneously changed to 2 bits during the production process. Since this error does not adversely affect the game's playability, an erratum has not been issued.

• The flavour text reads "The survival of Bushido into cyberspace has spiritual significance to many execs." A similar quotation, referring to Al Capone, is found on the icebreaker Wild Card. Bushido is the code of honour of the Samurai of fuedal Japan.
• The figure in the artwork has the Arasaka corporate logo on its chest.

• In Cyberpunk 2020, Rache Bartmoss is a famous netrunner now intimately linked to the net. In the introduction to Rache Bartmoss' Guide To The Net, Spider Murphy writes:

"Rache Bartmoss, somehow, had his heart stopped... But, since Rache ran for days at a time (and at light speed), he still manages to survive. He's out there now, hooked into the Net. His life support machines... cooled him down to prevent decay. Super-cooled him, in fact... In his cryogenic condition, his brain is able to continue to operate at slow speeds... And it is during this period of downtime ("...he can transmit data at about 2400 baud, which is positively crawling by 2020 standards... which pretty much puts him out of the netrunning biz.") that he writes the Guide to the Net, subsequently edited and distributed by Spider Murphy. In the game CyberGeneration (set in 2027) Rache's cyberdeck is upgraded to handle his supercooled condition, and he runs the Net for the Eden Cabal, fighting the Incorporated States of America. It is then that he creates several "Bartmoss AIs" to aid the Cabal (and they're all as nuts as he is)."

• This program, arguably the strongest icebreaker in the game, is a play on the Magic: the Gathering card Black Lotus. Black Lotus is well-known to be the most overpowered card in Magic: the Gathering, and this power has made it by far the most valuable and sought after card in that game.
• "The Black Dahlia" was also the nick-name given to an actress who was brutally murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. The killing is the focus for a book of the same name by James Ellroy. Black Dahlia is referenced in the early film "Out of the Past".

• Generically, a boardwalk is a wooden walkway built over some less easy to negotiate terrain. More specifically, The Boardwalk is a famous example of such a walkway, built along the beach in Atlantic City. "Boardwalk" is also the name of the most expensive property in the United States version of the Parker Brothers board game Monopoly.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• This card may be based on a real program call Salami. Salami is more a time bomb than a virus, it doesn't reproduce. Once deposited into a bank computer system, it monitors all the transactions of that bank. All banks make some percentage from each transaction, and the mathematics is not really precise. For example, supose there is a 1.53% calculation on an account with $1235, you should get $1253.8955. Since you can't really have $.0055 the bank usually just rounds this number up. Salami, as a virus, takes this $.0055 and deposits it to an account owned by the virus's planter. Since banks perform thousands of operations a day, this quickly adds up. In 1986 a college professor, Rifkin, stole $10.2 million from the Security Pacific National Bank. In 1987 a similar virus was used by a bank cleck in Australia (not sure where) to steal $4 million. Butcher Boy seems to be a game version of such a virus, butchering the decimals of the corp's accounts and transfering it to the runner.

• The names of these two cards are the names of two constellations of stars. The constellations represent the two hunting dogs of Orion, the great hunter of Greek mythology, and are near the prominent constellation of Orion in the sky.
• The French version of Canis Major contains flavour text.

• This card is named after the mythical three-headed dog which guarded the gates of Hades, the Underworld of Greek mythology.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The Chimera was a creature from Greek mythology with combined features of a lion, goat, and snake. In modern parlance, a chimera can be anything which combines the aspects of several normally unrelated objects. In German, "chimera" is used to denote a bio-organism combining several different origins - a term in growing use thanks to genetic engineering.
• This is not one of the original "Demon" killer programs from Cyberpunk 2020. The Cyberpunk 2020 list includes, in order of strength, Manticore, Hydra and Dragon.

• This card of course refers to the classic rags-to-riches fairy tale of Cinderella, in which the title character rises from a life of squalour as a servant to her unloving step-family to become married to a handsome prince and live happily ever after.
• The effect of the card is more aptly described by breaking down the name into its component parts, i.e. Cinder+Ella. Some translations of the fairy tale even call the heroine of the story Ella-of-the-ashes. As a firestarter, Cinderella reduces runners to ashes.

• The card artwork shows a Picasso-esque cubist face drawn over an aerial image of New York City. The image is aligned with east towards the top of the card. Manhattan Island appears at the bottom, with Central Park clearly visible just left of centre, Long Island appears to the top and right of the stylised face, and the Bronx region to the left. The artist, Sue Ann Harkey, used a closer up image of Manhattan on the card Ice and Data's Guide to the Net.

• The flavour text of this card reads "There ain't enough bits in this here register fer the both of us, pardner." This is an allusion to the cliched line from western movies: "There ain't enough room in this here town for the both of us, pardner." The card artwork strengthens the ties to the western movie genre.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The figure in the card artwork is seated in front of what appears to be a map. The map bears no resemblance to any readily recognisable part of the world.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The various screens in the card artwork display what look like medical images of human heads - either x-rays, CT scans, or MRI images.

• The face of Crash Everett looks remarkably like that of Marc "Sparky" Schmaltz, Wizards of the Coast Customer Service Netrunner NetRep.
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.
• In the Cyberpunk 2020 background, fixers are go-betweens for any kind of deal. If you know what you want, but not where to get it, ask a fixer.

• Crystal Palace is an orbital space station the size of a city in the Cyberpunk 2020 background. It is owned by the ESA and orbits at the L-1 Lagrange point, between the Earth and the Moon - thus the long time-lag effects which are simulated by the card. High above the petty concerns of the mud-bound world, Crystal Palace is a hub of the Orbital Rich and the commerce that made them that way. It does not hurt that they have orbital mass drivers to enforce their presence...
• The card artwork is based on an illustration of Crystal Palace from the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game.
• A location called Crystal Palace Station also exists in the novel Teklab by William Shatner.
• Crystal Palace is also the code name for Cheyenne Mountain in the USA, under which is the command bunker for US defense command SAC and NORAD. It was designed to survive a direct nuclear strike... the whole place is on springs and is buried deep inside the mountain.

• This card's name is an obvious corruption of the word "cipher", meaning a substitution encoding used for encrypting text.

• The flavour text on this card reads "An eye on top of a pyramid? No, that's not our net logo; you must have us confused with another outfit." Wizards of the Coast employee Glenn Elliott explains: "The guy who wrote it was actually thinking of the Free Masons. He did think it was pretty cool when someone pointed out the SJG/Illuminati reference, but it was actually written with the Free Masons in mind." The "SJG/Illuminati" reference comes about because the logo of the various Illuminati products by Steve Jackson Games, including the Illuminati, New Word Order collectible card game, is an all-seeing eye on a pyramid. (Although note that the Illuminati and the all-seeing pyramid were not invented by SJG, but have a long history in themselves outside the gaming world.) Interestingly, it is the incidental SJG reference which seems much more obvious to gamers as the probable source of inspiration for this flavour text than the intended reference to the order of Freemasons. Or maybe it really is a conspiracy...

• The word "naga" means "snake" in Sanskrit. Snakes figure strongly in Hindu mythology, being worshipped second only to cows. From the web page Thailand: Legends & Sculptures:

"In a long and involved legend, the Naga becomes closely involved with the Garuda (a great winged creature) who is forced by the Naga King to procure holy water (Amarit) from heaven. Garuda eventually manages to do this and returns to give the snake the water and thereby obtain the freedom of his mother (previously captured by the devious Naga and held prisoner). Seeing all this, Vishnu rewards him by granting his wishes and using the Garuda as his carriage (hence the name given to the national airline of Indonesia). Unluckily for the Nagas, the Garuda becomes immortal and they become his food."

• The Nagas are not always depicted as evil and besides lending themselves to appearing as long sculptured palisades and banisters, they also form a seat on which the Lord Buddha sits, his own head sheltered by the head or heads of the snakes and his body resting on the coils. The origin of this pose, especially popular in Khymer art, comes from the legend that Naga sheltered the Buddha after he achieved enlightenment. At this time he spent several weeks wondering what to do in his new found state, when a storm arose and threatened his very existence. The Naga king arrived in the nick of time and protected him.
• Nagas are also seen as mythological serpent-genies in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist myth. The Nagas are water gods, generally friendly in disposition, and are depicted as large snakes with human heads and faces. An example of their friendliness is shown in the instance of the Naga Muchalinda protecting the Buddha from the storm. These mythological Nagas are sons of Kadru, the daughter of Daksha, and inhabit subaquatic paradises, dwelling at the bottom of lakes, rivers and seas in splendid, jewel-encrusted palaces ever alive with dancing and song.
• The flavour text of this card reads:

As it says in the Upanishads, O thief: "You have a right to your labour, but not to the fruits of your labour."

The Upanishads are very old Hindu religious texts.

• The flavour text is a takeoff of the saying: "The enemy of your enemy is your friend".

• "Deep Thought" was the name of a computer in Douglas Adams' humorous science fiction novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In this sequel to his cult classic, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is revealed that Deep Thought was built to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After 7.5 million years of computation, Deep Thought revealed the answer to be 42. "Deep Thought" was also the name of a state-of-the-art chess computer built by IBM to challenge chess grand masters to human versus computer contests. Presumably this version was named after that of Adams.

• A detail of this card's artwork can be seen on one of the television monitor screens on the card Dieter Esslin, by the same artist.

• In the film Robocop the big Corp OCP (Omni Consumer Products), located in Detroit, has a private police contract. The cars in the card artwork resemble cars from that film.

• The artwork on this card contains a monitor screen with a detail from the artwork of the card Department of Truth Enhancement, and another with a detail from the card On-Call Solo Team. All these cards were drawn by artist Matt Wilson. The third monitor screen contains an image which resembles the character Aeon Flux from the graphic novel series of the same name. (I do not know what connection Matt Wilson has with this character, if any.)
• Matt Wilson was questioned about this card at the Essen Game Fair in Germany. He said the mystery monitor screen artwork represented another card he had painted for the limited edition of Netrunner, but for which the artwork was rejected because it showed some explicit detail. The card in question was an Ice with a design name of Arabian Woman, and Matt believes it was later changed to Cinderella.

• Disinfectant is the name of a popular freeware virus-detection and elimination program for Macintosh computers.

• An Edgerunner is one of the players playing characters in a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign. "Inc." may be a joke, because corporate, one of the character classes, is least popular. The flavour text reference to "sweeping for back doors" is probably because Netrunner is one of the character classes.

• This card's title forms the acronym "ESC", by which the card is often called in the NETRUNNER-L mailing list. "Esc" is the common label on the "Escape" key of computer keyboards, which is appropriate since Emergency Self-Construct effectively alows a Runner to escape from death by meat damage. This link has been confirmed as deliberate by Wizards of the Coast.
• The term "construct" has its origins in William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. A construct is a computer copy of someone's personality.

• The note on the CD in the artwork of this card is an obscure reference to the collectible card game Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (formerly known as Jyhad), by Wizards of the Coast.

• The "ESA" stands for EuroSpace Agency, a powerful Government organisation in Cyberpunk 2020 which owns and operates the Tycho Moon Colony.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The Arasaka Corporate logo is visible in the card artwork.
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The overlaid grid and command options on this card's artwork are reminiscent of the view seen by The Terminator in the film of the same name.

• In computer parlance, a "firewall" is a secure network connection between a site and the network in general. Communication across the firewall is severely restricted in an attempt to keep hackers from accessing data on the "safe" side of the wall.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The Arasaka thug pictured on this card looks strangely similar to KISS rocker Gene Simmons.

• "Gideon's Pawnshop" is the name of a shop which gets blown up in the movie The Crow.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The flavour text on this card reads:

"Is it really more nauseating than Worm?"
"You've got to see it to believe it."

This refers to the icebreaker Worm, which has a flavour text implying that it is indeed nauseating to watch.

• In the Cyberpunk 2020 universe, Grubb was one of the researchers who developed algorithms that generate the 'Net as a wireframe topography. These algorithms also coordinate other machines with their relative locations. (pg. 128, CP2020)

• The name on the door in the artwork is "Howard Whelan CEO".

• "WNS" stands for World News Service, a Corp from Cyberpunk 2020.

• The flavour text on this card reads

"... from Arasaka to Cuernavaca to Oaxaca - to me the gear does come."

This completes the sentence begun in the flavour text of R&D Interface:

"I have a friend in Oaxaca who sells to Ops in Cuernavaca who supply a tech at Arasaka..."

These flavour texts are references to the Tom Lehrer song Lobachevsky. In one verse, a complicated scheme to get plagiarised documents is described:

"I have a friend in Minsk, Who has a friend in Pinsk, Whose friend in Omsk Has friend in Tomsk With friend in Akmolinsk. His friend in Alexandrovsk Has friend in Petropavlovsk, Whose friend somehow is solving now The problem in Dnepropetrovsk. And when his work is done - Haha! - begins the fun. From Dnepropetrovsk To Petropavlovsk, By way of Iliysk, And Novorossiysk, To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk To Tomsk to Omsk To Pinsk to Minsk To me the news will run, Yes, to me the news will run!"

• The flavour text on this card is taken from William Gibson's cyberpunk short story Johnny Mnemonic.

• In the Cyberpunk 2020 history, the ESA Tycho Moon Base drops a Rock on Colorado Springs in 2008 to end an orbital war between the ESA and the U.S. In 2009, the U.S. attempts to take over the ESA Crystal Palace Station. ESA drops a 12-ton Rock off of Washington as a warning! These Rock Drops are achieved with orbital mass drivers. The Cyberpunk 2020 timeline, p. 168: 
  
  "2008: US assault on Soviet weapons platform Mir XIII. EuroSpace Agency intervenes, and orbital war breaks out between the "Euros" and the "Yanks", until Tycho Colony mass driver drops a rock on Colorado springs. An uneasy peace is reached. 
  2009: Abortive takeover by US 'terrorist group' of Crystal Palace construction. ESA discovers Defence Intelligence Agency plot and drops 12 ton rock off Washington as a warning."
  
  
• A possible literary reference: In the animated television special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (based on the Peanuts comic strip), the children go trick-or-treating. After each house, they compare their acquisitions, and Charlie Brown always says, "I got a rock".

• This card's title is the same as that of a popular children's game, in which one player must "spy" a visible object, give its first letter, and have the other players attempt to guess the object.

• The background of the artwork shows a plan of Manhattan Island, New York. Overlaid on top is a green computer terminal printout, which is a Unix file system listing. The artist, Sue Ann Harkey, used a wider aerial view of New York on the card City Surveillance.

• The card artwork contains a representation of the Mandelbrot set, or perhaps some other fractal. It also has Greek letters in the background. Plainly legible letters include iota, chi, epsilon, tau - which together may be rendered in Roman characters as "ichet". This may be a form of the word "ice".
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The Arasaka Corporate logo is visible on the floppy disk being held by the figure in the artwork.

• A card with the name of Invisibility also exists in the Magic: the Gathering game.

• "Joe" is USA slang for coffee, and "jack" is USA slang for injecting a drug, thus this card is a joke on taking coffee intravenously. This is reinforced by the flavour text: "There's too much blood in my caffeine system".
• Jack 'n' Joe is also a mixed drink made with coffee and Jack Daniels whiskey.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• Japanese interrogators used(use?) an effective way to get information. They would have a machine drip a single drop of water on the restrained victim's forehead regularly. This would eventually drive the victim mad.

• Both in name and artwork, an obvious reference to the famous 15th century French military leader and martyr, Joan of Arc, also known as the Maid of Orleans.

• The purple android figure in the artwork resembles the droid C-3PO from the film Star Wars, while in the background just behind its head is the droid R2-D2, wearing some sort of hat-shaped thing.

• Karl is a character in the cyberpunk novell Bad Voltage by Jonathon Littell.

• This card is named for the classic piece of graffiti of a person with large nose and fingers hanging over a fence - as seen near the centre of this card's artwork.

• The symbol tattooed on Leland and on his jacket is the same as the one on the card Cruising for Netwatch from the Proteus expansion (v2.1). Coincidence? Or is Leland a spy for Netwatch? Who knows...

• The character Livewire is described in Cyberpunk 2020, pg. 212: 
  
  "Livewire is a Netrunner who used to be associated with a solo team known as the Devil's Horde... These days Livewire can usually be found in a small shop that he runs out of the back of The Short Circuit, a local bar."
  
  
• Livewire is also referred to in the cyberpunk novel Bad Voltage by Jonathon Littell.

• The outline of the metropolis of Chiba, a Japanese city across Tokyo Bay from Tokyo, is in the background of the card artwork. The central symbol is the classical Yin-Yang symbol of Chinese philosophy, representing the dichotomy of the universe into dark/light, male/female, odd/even. The characters in the halves of the symbol are the crossed-Y symbol for yen (the Japanese currency) and "eb", standing for eurobucks, the currency of Cyberpunk 2020.

• This card's name is a reference to the classic Warner Brothers Loony Toons cartoons. The flavour text reads "Of course you realise... this means war", a common saying of Loony Toon character Bugs Bunny after being attacked or one-upped in some way.

• This card's name is a reference to the Usenet newsgroup misc.forsale, in which Internet users offer sundry miscellaneous goods for sale. The hyphen may have been inserted for greater legibility.
• Wizards of the Coast game designer Glenn Elliott has revealed that a Corp version of this card existed during playtesting, but was "even more broken than the Runner version due to the tendency for the Corp to install more cards".

• This card's name is an anagram of Timetwister, which is a card from Magic: the Gathering which has an almost identical game effect. "MIT" refers to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which in real life is a world-leading software research institute.

• "Namatoki Plaza" sounds suspiciously like the Nakatomi Building, the setting of the first Die Hard movie. Wizards of the Coast NetRep Sparky avows that the similarity is purely a coincidence.

• N.E.T.O. is first introduced in the Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net. In the words of the esteemed Rache himself [pg. 105]: 
  
  "N.E.T.O. is a string of bulletin boards found all across the Eurotheatre [the netspace region comprising Europe as far west as Warsaw and as far south as Algiers] which carry all the interesting information you can't get anywhere else in the corporate-dominated region. I don't particularly know what this acronym stands for, nor do I really care."

• Netwatch is yet another corp in Cyberpunk 2020. They police the Net for illegal hacking.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• "Nevinyrral" is Larry Niven backwards (just in case you actually didn't know that!). Larry Niven is Richard Garfield's favourite author, and a well-respected science fiction writer, probably best known for the novel Ringworld. The word "Nevinyrral" also appears on the card Nevinyrral's Disk in Magic: the Gathering.

• New Galveston is a major city in Bruce Sterling's cyberpunk novel Islands in the Net.

• This card's title refers to Usenet newsgroups. In Wizards of the Coast's gaming magazine The Duelist, issue 12, Netrunner designer Richard Garfield states that the Usenet newsgroups contain a wealth of information, but it is buried amongst an even greater amount of junk. A Newsgroup Filter would be a large program, hence the 2 MU, but could be very profitable.

• From left to right the people shown on this card are collectible card game artists Dan Frazier, Doug Shuler, and Mike Kimble. Dan, wearing a "Jester's Cap", produced the artwork for the card Jester's Cap in Magic: the Gathering.

• In Cyberpunk 2020, a nomad is one of the character class types.

• "Omni Kismet, PhD" is an anagram of Mike Pondsmith, designer of Cyberpunk 2020. The painting on the card is a portrait of Mike.

• In Cyberpunk 2020, a solo is one of the (most popular) character types, and it amounts to being a mercenary, although some are permanent employees of a corp.
• A detail of the card artwork is visible on one of the monitor screens of the card Dieter Esslin, also painted by Matt Wilson. Matt says that the monitors on On-Call Solo Team should also display some pictures and messages, but there was a problem in production which meant these were left off.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• Regional AIs are a concept first found in Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net. He terms them Transcendental Sentience AIs. According to him, they are artificial intelligences spawned simply because of the net's presence. 
  
  "What makes the Pacifica Region what it is? Well, really, nothing, it just is, because the Pacifica Region itself is an artificial intelligence." - Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net, p. 14. 
  
  This is the quote which presumably spawned the Pacifica Region AI card. In the Pacifica section of Guide to the Net, we see Bartmoss has named the AI "Packer". According to Bartmoss (the only runner to claim TS AIs actually exist), the most coherent TS AI is Akira, the Tokyo/Chiba Regional AI. In this case, Akira chose the name for itself.

• This is an obvious reference to the Greek myth of Pandora's Box. In the myth, Pandora succumbed to the temptation to open a forbidden box, thereby releasing all manner of darkness, tragedy, and evil to the world. The last item to be released from the box, however, was hope, the strongest force which allows humankind to live with the blacker whims of fate.

• This card's flavour text reads "Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk...". This is what Curly of the Three Stooges says when something amuses him, such as throwing pies at other people's faces.
• This card is the only v1 card with the keyword "DecKrash".
• The beginning of the decimal expansion of the mathematical constant pi (3.141592654...) is shown in the card artwork background.
• The French version of this card is called "Pi Gnon" and has the flavour text "Heu, le code c'est 3.14159 et... vous voulez vraiment toutes les decimales? Je peux pas vous le faire au PI-fometre? Non pas dans la tete!" The word "pignon" in French means either a house gable, or a pinion gear. The word "gnon" is slang for a strong blow/impact - so the title could be translated as "Pi Hit". The term "au pifome'tre" means guesstimating, or following intuition. The full translation of the flavour text could read: "Uhh, the code is 3.14159 and...do you really want all the decimal-places? Can't I just take a wild guess (to do it for you)? No! Not the head!"

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The face that appears on this card is Richard Garfield.

• The scene on this card's artwork is reminiscent of a scene from the film Dune by Dino DeLaurentis. The scene from the film shows Rabban Harkonnen (the fat guy in the foreground) and some Sardaukar elite fighters in the back. In Dune the House Harkonnen overthrows the House Atreides with the secret support of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.

• During the 1960's, research laboratories raced each other to find ways to polymerise various molecules. The result was an explosion of different plastics and applications in which they could be used. An in-joke with chemists at the time was that soon someone would make the ultimate breakthrough and polymerise water - and be able to turn all the oceans into one large piece of plastic.
• This card's artwork has some cryptic writing in the background: 
  1.Krk/Pcrd (Kirk/Picard) 
  2.Thx DS Frm KT (Thanks D. S. [Doug Shuler?] From Kevin Taylor) 
  3.Ma11/Sc03 (meaning unknown) 
  4..3 Fraziers/Pi (Dan Frazier, card artist? meaning uncertain) 
  5.-tract all -ths (meaning unknown)

• "Pox" is a generic term for a viral disease. It is notable that up to the present day there has only been one successful extermination of a viral disease: smallpox. The smallpox virus now only exists in research laboratories, awaiting final destruction as decreed by the World Health Organisation.
• A card with the name of Pox also exists in the Magic: the Gathering game.

• The 3-dimensional plot on the card artwork shows, as might be expected, that maximum security is only reached with the greatest expenditure of time and expense.

• This card is full of references to the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The main figure in the art is very much like the book's main character, Hiro Protagonist, and the flavour text fits also. It not only refers to hypercards, a type of information transfer method in Snow Crash, but also talks about the giant panda or something. In Snow Crash, the 'Net' is really the Metaverse, where users have an 'avatar', which can appear any way the user wants it to appear, say as a giant panda.
• The flavour text on this card says: "...well, here's my hypercard..." HyperCard is a Macintosh computer program which creates and reads "stacks", which are multiple pages of information in a single data file.

• "LDL" stands for Long Distance Link. In Cyberpunk 2020 these are network links between geographically widely separated regions, and are used by netrunners to make them harder to trace.
• In the card artwork, there is a picture of an R&D Interface on the ticket in the guy's hand.

• Many players are not quite sure what this agenda represents in the game world setting. Wizards of the Coast NetRep Sparky has revealed the following: 
  
  Concept: The Corporation co-opts a counterculture movement, warping it into working for the Corporation rather than against it. In essence, the members of the movement sell out to the establishment. 
  
  
• The "Babylon" reference may be explained by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). In this story, the people of Babel attempt to build a tower to reach into heaven. God intervenes, making the workers speak different languages so they cannot understand one another, and the tower falls into ruin. Project Babylon represents an attempt to put a lot of time and effort into a single agenda, in the hope that it can be scored before the runner knocks it down (liberates it).
• The rock band pictured on the card art bear some resemblance to a real-life band called Gwar, who dress up in huge styrofoam costumes to gain this appearance.

• Cattekin is an AI that went rogue in the Cyberpunk 2020 game setting.

• The flavour text on this card reads:
  
  "I have a friend in Oaxaca who sells to Ops in Cuernavaca who supply a tech at Arasaka... "
  
  This sentence is completed in the flavour text of HQ Interface: 
  
  "... from Arasaka to Cuernavaca to Oaxaca - to me the gear does come. "

• Raffles was a gentleman thief, which explains the artwork on this card. The famous Raffles hotel in Singapore is named after him, as is the Rafflesia plant, or stinking-corpse lily, a south-east Asian rainforest parasite which produces the largest flower in the world. A film starring David Niven was made about the life of Raffles.
• Raffles and Tinweasel share similar card artworks, showing a question mark shaped creature holding up a flat image of a person in front of the same stylised padlock.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• "Rex" is Latin for "King". Rex is also a common dog's name.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The flavour text on this card reads: 
  
  "I hear we have to watch out for a new icebreaker called 'Paper is True.' " 
  
  This refers to the simple game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors", in which two players simultaneously reveal a hand-gesture representing one of those three objects. Scissors cuts [beats] paper, rock blunts [beats] scissors, paper wraps [beats] rock.

• "Rockerboys" are a character type in the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game. Rockerboys basically live the fast-paced life of rock musicians. They are independant musicians, ones not owned by the media megacorps.
• The French v2.0 version of this card has the flavour text: 
  
  "Et cette fois, essayez d'en engager un qui ne declenche pas une emeute!" 
  
  This translates to: 
  
  "And this time, try to hire someone who won't start a riot!" 
  
  
• The English v1.0 version has no flavour text.

• Ever wondered why Ronin Around is the kick-arse card it is? Well, in the words of the esteemed Rache Bartmoss himself (Bartmoss' Guide To The Net, p. 82): 
  
  "This is a freelance traders' BBS at the fringe of Tokyo frequented by some of the most frightening netrunners alive... There's a lot of great people to be found here, and any of them will help you if the price or cause is right. "
  
  
• Ronin is a literal term for "unmastered people" in Japanese, but really means "masterless samurai". Ronin were a series of samurai that attacked daimyos that killed their own daimyo in feudal Japan, so basically they are rogue warriors.

• Rustbelt is one of the global geographical regions in Cyberpunk 2020. Rustbelt includes the most of the central USA and Canada.

• "Schlag" is the stem of the German word "schlagen". It means to strike or hit. "Hund" is the German word for dog or hound. "Schlaghund" therefore means, roughly, "Hit Hound" or "Strike Dog". This is something of a direct take-off from the beginning of the cyberpunk novel "Count Zero", by William Gibson. In this novel there is a robotic tracking dog loaded with high-grade plastique. It tracks a person and when it gets close it explodes.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• This card's flavour text mentions the character Urza Bloodrunner. Urza is also a character in Magic: the Gathering, being one of the famous artificer brothers. Two cards in particular from that game - Glasses of Urza and Sunglasses of Urza - represent pairs of magic spectacles.

• The picture for this closely resembles the Sentinel robots from Marvel's X-Men comic, and have a similar effect (Killer).

• Shaka Zulu (1787-1828) was a military leader and king of the Zulu people of south-eastern Africa. He was born a Zulu prince, but was rejected by his father. He joined the enemy Mtetwa people and conquered the Zulu in battle.
• "Shaka" is a Zulu word meaning "beetle" and this icebreaker's relatively weak strength (which is upgradable) could represent his lowly status (even though he was born a cheif's son) and rise to power. Shaka also introduced the short stabbing spear used by Zulus and revolutionised the stratagy used at the time. He was eventually betrayed by his half-brother in front of his mother. Zulu imagery is used in this card's artwork.
• In the Cyberpunk 2020 universe, Shaka was a black runner.

• All of the icons floating around the humanoid in the artwork are taken directly from the illustrations in the Chrome Book 1 expansion for Cyberpunk 2020. The Shell Traders are a group of program traders who set up shop in the Pacifica region. They buy and sell code, but not in the normal way. To quote Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net, page 35: 
  
  "They don't deal in electronic information, they sell disks! Disks, for god's sake, that they send through the mail! Have they no concept of modernization?" - overheard in the Eurotheatre. Despitee the attitudes of these Runners, distributing software on such "fixed transfer media" allows for much better security than file transfers on the Net; it also means that, as what they have is stored on floppies and not on their hard drives, they don't have to worry too much about Net security.
  
  
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The flavour text on this card reads "Practise safe hacks: use Spartan shields". This is a play on condom slogans, which urge people to "Practise safe sex". "Spartan" is a geographical variant of "Trojan", a popular real world condom brand name.

• The name of this card is taken from the Cyberpunk 2020 Night City Sourcebook, p. 117: 
  
  "The Short Circuit is a bar set on top of the Argus offices [this entry is part of the entry B4#13 Barbican Building]. Favoured by many of the city's netrunners and techies, it is highly useful for people looking for help in those areas. The bar's other interesting feature is its rotating floor, which allows patrons to see a panoramic view of the [Night] City below. Although there has been a lot of Corporate interest in the bar, Livewire [see Cyberpunk 2020 p. 222] has forbidden recruiting there because he's had problems with corporations and no longer trusts them (or the people who associate with them). Rough, street-hired bouncers make sure no one exceeds the dress code. In addition to normal booths, there are booths with interface jacks which allow netrunners access to an area in netspace where the bar is represented. Whether online or not, many netrunners use the bar as a gathering place to exchange news and services."
  
  
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The card artwork contains the English letters "JM", "SF", and the number "2021". The Japanese writing is translated as the fragments "Keanu Reeves", "JM", and "the year 2021...". These are a references to the cyberpunk science fiction film Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves. Another fragment of Japanese, beginning in parentheses, spells out "U-i-ri-a-mu" (William) - possibly a reference to cyberpunk autthor William Gibson.

• The card art depicts targeting cross-hairs centre on some sort of medical scanning image of a human head - possibly a simple frontal x-ray since what appear to be eye sockets are visible.

• This card is derived from a program originally called "George" in Cyberpunk 2020. As in "Which way did he go George, which way did he go?"

• Skälderviken is a bay on the south-west tip of Sweden, at approximately latitude 56o 20', longitude 13o 45'. It is also the name of a settlement on this bay. In Swedish, "viken" means "the bay". The word appears in the Eurosource source book for Cyberpunk 2020. "SA" has been postulated to mean: 
  
  "Sociedad Anonima" (meaning, in Spanish, "Incorporated", as might befit a company name) - this seems the most likely intention. 
  "Societe Anonyme" (French, and meaning the same as the Spanish version) 
  "Site Administrator" 
  "South Africa" 
  "Special Agent" 
  "System Administrator"

• The text on the card artwork in the upper left corner reads: "Vidmail: re-route RGB, R. Talsor". RGB is the common abbreviation for the Red-Blue-Green colour system used in colour video displays. R. Talsor is an abbreviated form of R. Talsorian, the game company who published Cyberpunk 2020 and co-published Netrunner.

• This card is a possible reference to a character mentioned in William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. In the story, Molly and Case were talking to the Finn about the character of Tessier-Ashpool and their vat-grown assasins. The Finn recalls a friend named "Smith" who purchased a valuable jewel encrusted head that was used as a terminal later in the story.

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• Kali is is the godess of destruction in Indian mythology. She is portrayed as having six arms, as alluded to in the card's flavour text.

• The artwork on this card contains images (the spider on the orange rhombiod at left, and the green quadruped and human figure) taken from the mysterious lines which can be seen near Nazca, Peru. Some people claim these lines are relics of visitations by alien visitors.

• The artwork on this card shows some boxes with backwards writing on them. The smaller of the two readable boxes says, "Access Denied, Kevin One" and the larger one reads, "Login: Kimble One, Enabled". "Kevin" is a mystery, but "Kimble" may refer to Mike Kimble, one of the card illustrators.

• This card's artwork shows a classic stepped pyramid of the ancient Central American Mayan civilisation. These pyramids were used for religious rituals, thus may qualify as temples.

• A tesseract is the 4-dimensional analogue of a cube.

• This card's flavour text reads "Why, yes, I do speak fluent Navajo." This is appropriate for a code [gate] breaker, since the United States military used the native American Navajo language as a code during World War II. Native Navajo speakers were used as "code-talkers" to relay messages by radio. Although the Japanese military interecpted these messages, they were never able to decipher them.
• Raffles and Tinweasel share similar card artworks, showing a question mark shaped creature holding up a flat image of a person in front of the same stylised padlock.

• The flavour text on this card reads: 
  
  "I have discovered a truly elegant codebreaking routine. Unfortunately, this chip is not large enough to contain it."
  
  This is a reference to the famous Fermat's Last Theorem. Fermat was a mathematician who annotated his copy of a book with the Latin equivalent of: 
  
  "There are no positive integers such that xn+yn=zn for n>2. I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain."

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The Arasaka Corporate logo is visible on the silos in the card artwork.
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• This card's flavour text reads: 
  
  "Sweetheart, the emotional processing of two lonely ROM constructs isn't allocated a megabyte of RAM in this crazy world."
  
  This is a modification of the line from the classic film Casablanca, spoken by Rick: 
  
  "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

• The original Trojan Horse was of course a ruse used by the Greek army to infiltrate the city of Troy in Homer's classic epic The Iliad In modern times, "Trojan Horse" has come to refer to a destructive computer program disguised as a harmless or useful piece of software. When an unsuspecting user loads the software, expecting one thing, the Trojan Horse will actually do something destructive to the system.

• This card refers to the Tycho Moon Colony (Base), built in 1999 according to the the Cyberpunk 2020 history.

• The flavour text on this card reads: 
  
  "You know there was actually a time when three megabytes was considered a score to the black market." 
  "What's a megabyte?" 
  
  This is a reference to the opening passages of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, in which the protagonaist, Case, had "a hot three megs of RAM" that he was trying to fence for a substantial sum.

• The flavour text on this card is a reference to this passage from Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: 
  
  Situation: The council have come to knock down Arthur Dent's house. He is lying in front of a bulldozer in protest (and to stop them doing it). A council official, Mr. Prosser, is trying to convince him to get out of the way... 
  
  Prosser: "But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the planning office for the last 9 months." 
  Dent: "Yes; I went round to find them yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call any attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody about them or anything!" 
  "But the plans were on display.." 
  "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them!" 
  "That's the display department.." 
  "With a torch!" 
  "Ah well, the lights had probably gone.." 
  "So had the stairs!" 
  "But look, you found the plans didn't you?" 
  "Yes. Yes I did. They were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'!"

• Both the card name and the artwork are references to the Warner Brothers cartoon character Elmer Fudd. In many of these cartoons, Elmer, dressed in traditional hunting gear, would often utter the memorable words: "Be vewy vewy quiet... I'm hunting wabbits."

• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The man on the seat in the card artwork is former USA President Abraham Lincoln, as represented in the statue in the Lincoln Memorial building in Washington, D.C. The stars and stripes background is a part of the USA flag. The five "ghost" images of Lincoln appear in the colours red, white, green, black, and blue - which are the five colours of magic in the Wizards of the Coast game Magic: The Gathering.

• The flavour text on this card reads: 
  
  "The survival of Al Capone's cronies into cyberspace has almost spiritual significance to many runners."
  
  A similar quotation, referring to Bushido, appears on the Corp ice card Banpei. Al Capone was a notorious criminal who epitomised the Chicago gangsters of the 1920's. Although eventually arrested, he was only ever charged with tax evasion because of difficulties in proving other charges.

• The name "Wilson" is used as a nickname by the main character in William Gibson's Cyberpunk novel Count Zero. The origin of the term is explained: 
  
  "A Wilson,"... 
  The Finn looked at him, blankly. "A what?" 
  "A Wilson. A fuck-up. It's hotdogger talk, I guess..." Did it again, Shit. 
  The Finn gave him a very strange look. "Jesus. That's your word for it, huh? I know the guy..." 
  "Who?" 
  "Bodine Wilson," he said. "First guy I ever knew wound up as a figure of speech." 
  "Was he stupid" Bobby asked, immediately regretting it. 
  "Stupid? Shit, no, he was as smart as hell." The Finn stubbed his cigarette out in a cracked ceramic Campari ashtray. "Just a total fuck-up, was all. He worked with Dixie Flatline once..." 
  
  
• The French version of this card contains flavour text.

• The flavour text on this card is in Latin and reads "Voluntas vincit omnia". This may be translated as "The will conquers all". This phrase is found in the role-playing game Ars Magica (originally published by Lion Rampant, then by White Wolf, then by Wizards of the Coast, and now by Atlas Games), as the motto of the Order of Hermes. It is also found on the Tremere coat-of-arms in the Vampire game supplement book Vampire: The Dark Ages, by White Wolf. According to the background, the Tremere were founded by members of the Order of Hermes. Wizards of the Coast NetRep Sparky says that it was chosen because it was concise and sounded best among the house mottos (and not specifically because it was Tremere).

The artwork for the Serra Angel card from Magic: the Gathering appears on two cards:

• Zetatech Software Installer (Background)
• Raven Microcyb Owl (coffee mug)

Spider Murphy is another Cyberpunk character from the R. Talsorian game.

The "Daemon" class programs in Netrunner are called "Demons" in Cyberpunk 2020. The reason for WotC renaming this class of program is, as stated by WotC representatives, the fact that "daemon" is a term used in current computer terminology while "demon" is not. There is an unsubstantiated rumour that the change was also made to keep the game free of any references to things which might seem "demonic" to various religious groups. However, the change is so slight and the official reason sensible enough that it seems unlikely there is any truth to the rumour. Bob Kruger, Netrunner editor, says:

About a year ago [mid-1995], Tom Wylie suggested we call the programs "daemons" because the programmers' term has been around for a long time, and it describes the class of programs in a valid way. The rest of us on the team agreed. Our primary concern in making this decision was to appeal to a computer-savvy crowd. This decision had absolutely nothing to do with a desire to sanitize the word "demon".

The Imp, Afreet, and Succubus are taken directly from Cyberpunk 2020 in the same sequence of strength. One Demon is also still missing... Balron. This is the toughest demon in Cyberpunk 2020. There is actually a "daemon" class of programs in Cyberpunk 2020; they make their appearance in ChromeBook 3. They bring netrunner tactics back to the old idea of inserting viruses into the opposition's computer and letting their computer run the virus for you. Basically, they are a self-acting version of the demon software, able to carry several programs compressed as subroutines.

"AP" means Anti-Personnel. (Don't even think about it...) :-)

"BBS" stands for Bulletin Board Service.

Programs and ICE names that were taken unmolested from Cyberpunk 2020 include the following: Hammer, Jackhammer, Worm, Code Cracker, Dupree (Dupre), Wizard's Book, Raffles, SeeYa, Speedtrap, Krash, Virizz, Viral 15, Invisibility, Replicator, Shield, Force Shield, Reflector, Flack (Flak), Aardvark (upgrade), Zombie, Liche, JackAttack, Imp, Afreet, Succubus, Crybaby (upgrade).

The following Corp names are taken directly from Cyberpunk 2020: Arasaka, Militech, Zetatech, Microtech, Trauma Team, WNS.

In Cyberpunk 2020, Arasaka Security are THE most powerful security firm in the world.

They maintain the largest armed force of any corporation... mostly licensed out to other firms as corporate security guards, couriers and mercenaries... To the Arasaka corporation, they are loyal to the point of death. Arasaka is more interested in fostering its own political goals... and they use their position of trust with major corporations around the world to gain inside information, contacts and advantages that will help them to realize their ultimate goal of political and economic control of Japan. - Cyberpunk 2020, p. 214.

"Filched Radar Rig" found on page 9 of the Rulebook is an anagram of "Richard Garfield", the Netrunner game designer.

The fictional soft drink "Fizz" is mentioned in the flavour text of Livewire's Contacts and pictured in the artwork of Wilson, Weeflerunner Apprentice.

R. Talsorian Games are set to release a new Cyberpunk 2020 game supplement called Rache Bartmoss' Brainware Blowout, which will contain CP 2020 rules and statistics for the new Netrunner programs not originally in the role-playing game.