Taylor Hebert's no Shadowrunner, just a talented technomancer who spends her days doing petty Matrix jobs. Then a crew of runners in need of a tech expert reaches out to her with an offer too profitable to refuse, and she discovers that for someone with her gifts, there are much better - and riskier - ways to make a profit.
No matter how much things changed, high school was still high school.
In the classroom, everyone had their place. They sat at their desks and pretended to listen to the teacher drone on about World Issues, but what's important is that they were all stationary, without any annoying variables. They didn't have room or time to wander off to throw hoops, skip out to the burger joint on the next block over for a substitute school lunch, or even run off to the bathrooms for a good cry. They were predictable.
Matthew Hellman always sat on the third row from the back, next to the window. He did that because it gave him an uninterrupted view of Rose Connaghty, who sat one desk in front and one to the right, because that put her in-between her friends. She was dating someone in the year above, which Hellman would know given how much time he spent scrolling through her social media.
Of course, as is the nature of things, Hellman himself – being on the football team, friendly enough and just a little bit dim – had the attention of Sarah Lancet, who sat directly behind him. She was very self-conscious about her height, despite both her parents being dwarves, and her social media scrolling tended to be limited to beefcakes who never dropped below six feet.
She had also gone blind as the result of an illness caused by a chemical spill near her tenement block, but the MassChem hush money paid to her parents had been enough to let them fit their daughter out with a set of adequate implants that were almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from regular eyes.
The quality was about on par with human basic, which put them well below the industry standard for optics, but when piggy-backing off a schoolgirl's cyberware beggars – and hackers – couldn't be choosers. What mattered was that they let me keep an eye on Matthew Hellman while he was in school, which was what I'd been spending the last three days doing.
The bell went, and since most of the class hadn't even unpacked their bags for this lesson, Sarah's vision was immediately filled with motion as people stood up and hurried out into the halls. Her eyes didn't have audio sensors, naturally, but I'd already compromised Hellman Junior's commlink to provide me with a live feed of every word he spoke.
Interestingly, I heard him brush off his friends in order to get out the classroom quicker, and I quickly abandoned Sarah's eyes in favour of following him through the school's security cameras, grumbling to myself at how half the cameras in this wreck of a building were non-functional, and a quarter of the rest could only manage black and white.
It had been two years since I left, but Winslow was still Winslow. The paint on the walls was still peeling, the teachers still looked weary and overworked, and the students were still the same mess of cliques and gangs and teenage politics that used to seem so important to me, but that now seemed so petty and meaningless.
Seen from the dispassionate eye of the cameras, the cliques were only obvious if I really paid attention. The gangs were the only ones that stood out, but even then I couldn't help but compare them to the real gang member's I'd watched through different cameras. Compared to that, the teenagers dressed up in Yakuza colours came across like kids who'd raided their parents' closet.
I lost visual on the target a couple of times, but his commlink's GPS meant I could get it back just as quickly. In the gaps, I piggybacked off any and every camera I could find, drifting through privacy locks on commlinks or cyberware like they weren't even there. It was a deviation from Matthew's pattern, and that meant I couldn't just keep one eye on him and another on a good book.
He stepped into an empty classroom, out of view of the cameras, and I listened attentively as he sat down, a chair creaking beneath him.
"So," he began, clearly talking to someone, "what do I have to do?"
There's the sound of something clattering against a wooden desk. I couldn't be certain, but it was light. Maybe a datastick. Could be nuyen on it or just data, but I'm not here to speculate.
"You get the number seventeen bus, same as usual." It was a girl's voice, with a local accent. Not deep enough to be an ork or a troll, but that didn't mean much. "You sit on the left aisle seat, three rows from the back. At some point, a man will stand next to you. He'll be wearing a military surplus jacket – UCAS military. You'll put this in his pocket."
"That's it?" he asked, sounding cocky rather than nervous. "I don't have to say something?"
"You won't say shit," another voice piped up, this one male. Already my sprites were trawling through Winslow's social media feeds, simpleminded programmes trying to match voices to faces and faces to names, but it was an inexact science at best and slower than I'd have liked.
"And that gets me in?" Matthew continued.
"That gets your foot in the door," the girl shut him down, and actually sounded a little pissed at the suggestion. "Proves you aren't some lightweight out for a cheap thrill, that you don't mind following orders blind so long as it's for the cause. Initiation's what gets you in, but you've gotta be vetted first."
"Hey, I'm all about the cause!" the kid protested.
"Remains to be seen. Now take the stick and frag off, SINner."
Matthew left the classroom moments later, the stick clenched in his fist tight enough that I could see his knuckles whitening even through the less-than-stellar resolution. I watched him slip it into the pocket of his jacket, but then I let him wander off to his next class with only a sprite monitoring his movements, while I watched the classroom door. Minutes later, the two others stepped out, and everything fell into place.
The girl looked almost normal, and my facial recognition soft finally pegged her as a member of the cheerleading team. A quick look through her academic records revealed a student who, while not at the top of her class, was getting grades that were more than respectable. The sort of model student who excels, but not so much that she sticks out. The sort of student who, under any other circumstances, wouldn't be seen dead next to the guy.
He was from the exact opposite of the social spectrum, and he looked the part. He wore his hair in a deep red mohawk, and his clothes consisted of tattered jeans and a tank top beneath a worn and faded leather jacket. As he turned to walk down the corridor, putting his back to the camera, I got a picture-perfect view of the snarling wolf's head emblazoned on the back of his jacket.
Sprites chimed up, laying folders of information at my digital feet. The girl was Samantha Bordin, though she went by Sam, and her parents were due-paying members of the Humanis polyclub. She herself posted on Humanis forums, but she must have approached Matthew in meatspace.
She's a cheerleader, he's a footballer. Doesn't take a genius to figure out how they met.
The guy was Rex Matthis, and he already had a record on file with Knight Errant. As if the jacket wasn't proof enough, there was a marker in his file linking him to the Chosen. Another human fascist with an axe to grind and a record of assaulting anyone whose ears were just a little too pointy, with a future of deniable grunt work for people like Sam.
With a stray thought, I gathered up the audio recording of the meeting, as well as stills of the three of them leaving the classroom, and sent them off to the client's comm, along with a message.
»Mrs Hellman, sorry to bother you at work, but I'm afraid I have bad news. You were right to worry. File attached.«
- Bug (12:15:24/14-2-70)
The client was a middle manager in a local firm that did subcontracted work on the periphery of Ares Macrotechnology's corporate empire, which meant she sent her son to Winslow rather than one of Ares' own schools. She'd been worried about some of what her son was saying over dinner, but I don't think she was expecting it to be more than a couple of bad friends leading him astray.
»Why would they make him do that? And what did they mean by initiation?«
- A.Hellman (12:20:13/14-2-70)
»By having him do something illegal, they gain leverage. Not sure you want to know what initiation is.«
- Bug (12:20:15/14-2-70)
»He's my son.«
- A.Hellman (12:20:21/14-2-70)
»Murder of a nonhuman. They pick someone SINless nobody will miss and have the initiate kill them. If it's an ork or a troll, the other gang members will usually cripple them first. Level the playing field.«
- Bug (12:20:25/14-2-70)
»I see. This isn't the news I was hoping for, so forgive me for not thanking you, but your payment has been earned all the same. Transferring the second half of your payment now.«
- A.Hellman (12:22:04/14-2-70)
I watched the nuyen slip into my account, then quickly sifted off most of it into another account I'd set aside for the rent money. I just about had enough to last the month and, so long as I could keep finding these odd jobs and easy paychecks, the month after as well.
The client was already calling Winslow, and she was looking up psychologists on the Matrix. I let my hold on her dataflow slip, pulling back through the ephemeral strands of networks that made up Brockton Bay. The city's Matrix stretched everywhere like a spider's web, constantly pulsing with the dataflow of hundreds of thousands of comms, computers and anything else that needed a connection to work. It was an anarchic mess of a system, part-built, part-grown in and around the old remains of the pre-Crash 2.0 net.
In and around the web floated islands of sealed networks, with strands of data clumped thickly enough to form robust walls, patrolled by ever-vigilant ICE. The private data-fortresses of corporations, gangs, fixers, shadowrunners and anyone else with a need for a little privacy.
Taken from a distance, I could see the entire city through a funhouse mirror; the networks of the grid-linked parts of the city glowed even brighter than they did in the real world with the sheer volume of data passing through its streets, while the city's more desolate areas were near-invisible, with only the occasional data-tap streaming pirated trideo to run-down tenement blocks at a bitrate that was barely enough to make the picture move.
I didn't focus on the city for long, though I dearly wanted to. It was easy to get lost in the brilliance of the digital city, to get sucked into its ever-shifting patterns and forget there was any meat attached to my mind until hours had passed and I'd wake up with my body twitching with hunger.
I was hungry this time, too, but not with the gnawing pangs that came from spending too long under. More like someone who hadn't eaten since last night, and who'd been following some high-schooler around since he left home that morning.
I almost rolled off the couch, taking a moment to stretch myself out and get used to standing up again before turning back and doing my best to get rid of the person-shaped dent I'd left in the cushions, to get the couch looking like it was before.
Home was just about right for a couple with a child, too cramped for two fully-grown adults and much too large for just one. Even two years on, the place was still filled with memories; family photos hanging on the walls next to work photos from the Dockworkers Association, bookshelves filled with legal texts I've never read and a ladder of notches on the kitchen doorframe, each annotated with an ever-increasing number.
I staggered into the bathroom and splashed frigid water onto my face to wake me up, blinking gormlessly at my reflection in the mirror as I got used to seeing through my eyes again. Once the colours were right, things were still blurry, and I let out a weary sigh before I went hunting for my glasses, finding them on the kitchen countertop.
I sighed again as I found a fridge empty of food, but not of beer, and briefly debated breaking open a packet of unseasoned instant ramen that had been sitting in the cupboard for months before giving up and pulling the comm number for a Jamaican place off the Matrix.
Doing so felt far more natural than ambling back across the room and sinking into an armchair, and I indulged myself by filling my vision with datafeeds before pulling up a copy of Great Expectations I'd been steadily working my way through. All digitally, of course, though I was pretty sure there was an old paper copy of the book somewhere in the house. Mom was a traditionalist like that. With literature, not politics.
To be honest, I never really saw the appeal of paper. It's fragile, takes up too much meatspace, and at the end of the day it's only ever going to be right for some people. The font will always be the same size, and if you can't actually see the text then you'd need someone else there to manually read it out for you. A datafile is suitable for everyone with a commlink.
Not that I even needed that. Not since Crash 2.0 in twenty sixty-four, when a fourteen-year-old me collapsed in the middle of school because my brain had just hooked into the school's wired network. It became even more instinctive once the wireless matrix rolled out, and for a couple of years I was too scared to do anything with it. After that I was on my own, and my fear of my abilities was overshadowed by my fear of being evicted from the only home I've ever known.
Someone buzzed at the door, and I pulled myself out of the armchair once more, idly bringing up the security feed from the corridor. The delivery guy wasn't the only person in the hall; the woman from apartment thirteen twenty-two was fumbling with her keys as she arrived back from her shift, while the building super was hammering on the door of thirteen twenty-five at the end of the hall.
The delivery guy was young and, at about six foot four, tall for a human. He was wearing motorcycle leathers and carrying an insulated box, open to reveal a paper bag with the joint's logo on it. I let the camera go as I opened up the door, looking down at him as his face paled and his mouth dropped open a little. In spite of myself, I almost found myself shrinking under the attention, instead grabbing the takeaway out of his hands and closing the door a lot quicker than I needed to.
Almost in spite of myself, I brought the camera back up and watched as the delivery guy stared at the door for a few moments, before pulling a comm out of his pocket. In a panic, I started digging through the device, pulling up his name, his call, location and browser history, until he just faked a signature for the delivery and walked off down the corridor.
I still watched him leave, taking the thirteen-floor trip down the elevator and collecting his bike from where he'd parked it up outside the lobby, chained to a lamp post. When he set off, I waited until his comm automatically fed a route to the heads-up display in his helmet before finally stopping the trace. He was going to the next delivery, nowhere else.
I snagged a beer from the fridge and made my way over to the balcony, using my mind to hit the switch that retracted the metal storm shutters and exposed the city to my meatspace eyes.
Rather unsurprisingly, the docks dominated the view. Dad bought this place because it was right on the edge of the docks, and he poured his heart and soul into those miles of wharves, jetties, cranes and warehouses. Poured everything he had into them, until they ate him up and spat him out full of lead.
Half of the docks were run by the Association in one way or another, the company renting and leasing access to anyone with nuyen while individual managers earned a tidy side-income from smuggling and mob backhands. From my vantage point thirteen stories up, I could see the logos of dozens of different companies spread out across the sprawling warehouses, a healthy spread of local corps and double-A giants.
Half the docks were independent, but they were also worse off. Their infrastructure was mismatched and rusting, and they couldn't hold a candle to the rest.
Segregated behind physical walls and legal extraterritoriality, Ares Macrotechnology's docks were like a city within a city. They were pristine and largely automated, with a constant flow of containers moving in on trains from Detroit before being loaded onto ships and sent off to ports the world over.
Their arcology lorded over this enclave like the keep of a castle, a great wedge-sided edifice that eclipsed any other building in the docks by an order of magnitude and made the skyscrapers of downtown look like spindly needles in comparison. The Ares logo – the head of a Greek warrior in red white and blue – seemed to almost be staring those towers down.
Three of those skyscrapers bore the Medhall Pharmaceuticals logo – a stylized black crown over a red M, on a yellow background. Ares was a supranational giant, a triple-A corporation to whom Brockton Bay was just one port city among many, but Medhall were local titans, homegrown and on the cusp of double-A status. They liked to promote themselves as the champions of the city – at least, the parts of the city whose ears were round.
I couldn't help catching sight of my own ears in the glass of the screen door, as the meagre light from the apartment turned it into a partial mirror. They'd never be round enough for Medhall's Humanis connections, but it's not like my ears were what people would notice first.
At over eight feet tall, I'd never be able to hide in a crowd. My mouth would be too wide if it weren't for the tusks jutting out of the underbite, tusks I'd had to spend years learning how to talk around if I didn't want to lisp. My hair – the colour of slate – fell down to my shoulders, and was parted by a pair of knobbly-looking horns that jutted out of my head. With grey-blue skin, I stood out even more.
I slid the screen door open, and my reflection disappeared. We kept some garden furniture on the balcony – the white plastic long-since stained yellow by the air pollution – and I slumped down in front of the table before unwrapping the bag and popping the ring-pull, taking a deep draught of cheap beer as I watched the city from a distance.
... That is a rather odd coloration for a troll. Has me wondering if she's a Fomor, or if she is really unlucky and Surged. Either way, definitely keeping an eye on this!
... That is a rather odd coloration for a troll. Has me wondering if she's a Fomor, or if she is really unlucky and Surged. Either way, definitely keeping an eye on this!
As a big fan of both Shadowrun and Worm, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. You've really captured the feel of Shadowrun so far, and Technomancer Troll Taylor is a fun way to take it.
By necessity, the Hairbrained Schemes games are limited when it comes to aspects of character creation and customization. Using trolls as an example, off the top of my head I think there's like three or four 'subspecies' or ethnic variants or whatever of the baseline troll meta human. Cyclops and Minotaurs don't show up in those games, but a very strong argument could be made for Giants and Fomori, Nordic and Irish-Celtics trolls respectively.
I don't actually have my shadowrun pdfs in front of me right now so I'm not 100% sure, but I think that the more exotic skin tones might only be found on the ethnic troll varieties?
By necessity, the Hairbrained Schemes games are limited when it comes to aspects of character creation and customization. Using trolls as an example, off the top of my head I think there's like three or four 'subspecies' or ethnic variants or whatever of the baseline troll meta human. Cyclops and Minotaurs don't show up in those games, but a very strong argument could be made for Giants and Fomori, Nordic and Irish-Celtics trolls respectively.
I don't actually have my shadowrun pdfs in front of me right now so I'm not 100% sure, but I think that the more exotic skin tones might only be found on the ethnic troll varieties?
I had always understood that regular trolls ran off the regular human palette and also the "stone" one. Stone colours showed up most often in their dermal deposits but could be any part of the skin. The newer editions really don't talk much about skin colour - I seem to recall 2nd ed books being way more direct about it but my collection of those is incomplete.
I had always understood that regular trolls ran off the regular human palette and also the "stone" one. Stone colours showed up most often in their dermal deposits but could be any part of the skin. The newer editions really don't talk much about skin colour - I seem to recall 2nd ed books being way more direct about it but my collection of those is incomplete.
Makes sense, and I never read the earlier books, just 3rd and 5th edition I think, so I didn't know that. Would go nicely to explain why some trolls are more aesthetically pleasant to the eye compared to others specifically because they either have very few dermal deposits in their skin or even none at all. I can totally see a troll with the nuyen to burn going under the knife to get said dermal deposits removed like a regular person would get a nose job or have a mole sliced off.
I do recall it being implied or outright stated somewhere that a significant number of trolls elect for dental cosmetic surgery specifically because they often suffer speech impediments due to their tusks and to try to avoid some of the stereotype of being considered big dumb brutes.
Makes sense, and I never read the earlier books, just 3rd and 5th edition I think, so I didn't know that. Would go nicely to explain why some trolls are more aesthetically pleasant to the eye compared to others specifically because they either have very few dermal deposits in their skin or even none at all. I can totally see a troll with the nuyen to burn going under the knife to get said dermal deposits removed like a regular person would get a nose job or have a mole sliced off.
I do recall it being implied or outright stated somewhere that a significant number of trolls elect for dental cosmetic surgery specifically because they often suffer speech impediments due to their tusks and to try to avoid some of the stereotype of being considered big dumb brutes.
Yeah, that's true. And it's not just the tusks but the rest of their dentition too. Orks have a similar but lesser problem. Interestingly for Orks this becomes a non factor when speaking Or'zet, almost certainly because the language evolved for that.
The other thing I would like to point out is that Taylor is exceptionally lucky to be able to stand up inside. Eight feet plus horns? Not many high density housing places build for that.
The other thing I would like to point out is that Taylor is exceptionally lucky to be able to stand up inside. Eight feet plus horns? Not many high density housing places build for that.
In Brockton Bay it really depends on the area. Some housing projects bend to the area's demographics and include features meant to be more accessible, even if it's just building one floor with abnormally high ceilings because trolls are customers too. This is particularly common in developments near the docks, as housing in the area was expanded to meet the demands of the dockworkers, who are disproportionately nonhuman. Danny Hebert chose to buy a place there for a reason, and wouldn't have moved his family somewhere they wouldn't be comfortable.
Other housing projects might include deliberately hostile architecture, designed to feel uncomfortable for those who are either too far above or too far below a human range of height. This isn't just limited to housing, either. Whether or not the buses used by the city are accessible to nonhumans - with enough headroom or enough oversized seats that headroom doesn't matter - is a political issue, and one that's used to indirectly influence the demographics of an area.
Never played the game though I do have the cRPGs in my backlog; my only experience with Shadowrun for now is secondhand through the adventures of America-san.
In Brockton Bay it really depends on the area. Some housing projects bend to the area's demographics and include features meant to be more accessible, even if it's just building one floor with abnormally high ceilings because trolls are customers too. This is particularly common in developments near the docks, as housing in the area was expanded to meet the demands of the dockworkers, who are disproportionately nonhuman. Danny Hebert chose to buy a place there for a reason, and wouldn't have moved his family somewhere they wouldn't be comfortable.
Other housing projects might include deliberately hostile architecture, designed to feel uncomfortable for those who are either too far above or too far below a human range of height. This isn't just limited to housing, either. Whether or not the buses used by the city are accessible to nonhumans - with enough headroom or enough oversized seats that headroom doesn't matter - is a political issue, and one that's used to indirectly influence the demographics of an area.
The next morning, I didn't wake up when the first rays of the sun poked through my curtains, or to the shrill noise of an alarm clock. Part of that was because my bedroom didn't actually have a window, but it was also because regular light and regular sound never seemed as real to me as the Matrix was. They couldn't hold my attention like it could.
The longer I spent in the Matrix, the larger the footprint I left, the more I risked drawing attention to myself. In following Hellman, I'd leapt from device to device, leaving my mark across half the school. Winslow's systems were kept on Brockton Bay's local grid, and that kind of trail had the potential to draw the attention of the Grid Overwatch Division, sending them hunting after my virtual persona and trying to dig up my body's location.
It was a small risk with a low-priority network like Winslow's, but there could be some unusually dedicated DemiGOD out there who decided to take the bite.
So, every night before I went to sleep, I'd focus on my connection to the net and let all its brilliant datastreams fade away into nothing, essentially cutting myself off from the Matrix. Sleep generally came easily after that – I was essentially turning all the lights out in my brain, after all – and overnight my brain would reboot, for want of a better word, until I'd wake up when all that data came flooding back into my mind and I could face the day with a fresh – and legally clean – persona.
For normal people, cyberspace was something they had to go out of their way to interact with. Even if it was something as simple as switching their optics over to augmented reality, there was still a degree of separation between their meatspace senses and the digital ones. Without those implants, or a commlink or something, their brain wouldn't be able to make sense of the data.
What set Technomancers apart – what set me apart – was that our brains were capable of interpreting that data on their own. There was no distinction in my mind between augmented reality and reality; between the icon on the wall showing the date, time and weather forecast and the worn synthwood desk covered in a decade's worth of wear and tear. I saw both, and both were equally real.
As I walked to the kitchen to make myself an unsatisfying breakfast – probably out of the packet of ramen I'd ignored the night before – I couldn't help seeing memories with every step. Dad's memories were laid out in the photos on the wall – of him shaking hands with government officials in City and State halls, corporate executives in front of immense infrastructure projects, and oil-stained engineers down in the bowels of some machine room – and in the data on his computer.
I'd long since read through the entirety of the latter, and it had given me a clearer picture of my father than actually knowing him ever could have. Or rather, it completed the picture. I knew what he was like as a father, what he was like at home, but you don't truly know a person until you know how they act in both public and private.
My dad's files were an account of a long struggle, against rent payments, against discrimination, against every petty little obstacle in his path. It was a record of meetings, whip-rounds, covert sales and backroom deals, charting the changing character of the Dockworker's Association as he and his friends slowly worked from the inside. The last files on the computer showed the fruit of all his labour; a Union by stealth, with its employees its biggest shareholders and a stranglehold over all non-Ares shipping in the city.
The last email he ever sent was a short note agreeing to meet with one of his major stakeholders, a woman he'd known for years. She wasn't there, of course; the Marche were waiting for him instead, and he was cut down by mafia bullets.
Mom's stuff was more neatly separated between work and pleasure. One wall of the living room was taken up by nothing but bookshelves, filled from end to end by paper copies of all sorts of literature. She had a digital library that held even more, along with all the files associated with her professor work for Brockton Bay University.
On a separate drive, she kept her work for the Ork Rights Commission – despite the name, they pulled double-duty as a troll advocacy group. Mom had been an active member of the polyclub since she was a university student herself, and her files were a long list of minutes from meetings, materiel for awareness campaigns, plans for protests and even a few files on a secret drive that detailed the work she'd done as 'Ms Johnson,' using the ORC's covert funds to hire Shadowrunners in service of the cause.
I'd gone digging through the Knight Errant files, but as far as I could tell her death was exactly as it seemed. Distracted driving. It seemed a poor death for someone like her, but I told myself there was no such thing as a good way to die.
The last memories in the apartment were my favourite, because they were the memories where all three of us came together. Dad's work photos took second place to photos of the three of us on a family holiday in Boston, or mom trying and failing to teach me to bake a cake, with more flour on the walls than in the bowl. There was a bring your child to work day photo of me using an industrial crane as a jungle gym, surrounded by a cluster of burly dockworkers who were clearly terrified and waiting to catch me when I inevitably fell.
Memories were all I had left of them, and all my memories were tied into this apartment. It's why I couldn't sell it, and it's why I spent so much of my time trying to scrounge up enough money to keep it. The neighbourhood had gone downhill with the Association moving its offices closer to the city centre, and the rent had gone down with it, but it was still right next to the docks. Prime commuter territory for any number of junior managers or dockworkers with the kind of specialised skills that earned them a little more financial respect than their peers.
My life was defined by the three thousand five hundred nuyen I sent off to the landlord at the end of each month. I had an automated system sending the cash, and he had an automated system receiving it. I wasn't even sure he knew who lived here, but I was fine with that.
If I missed a payment – even one – then it would flag on his system and he might actually start paying attention to me. Attention – of any kind – was the last thing I wanted, so most of my day was spent making sure I had money in the bank. Once I'd gathered enough to make the month's payment, then anything left over would be spent on essentials. Never anything fancy. After all, if I wanted to try steak made from real cows then I could just hop into the Matrix and steal the experience from a virtual restaurant. The taste would be just as real.
I'd actually done that for a job once. A restaurant on the edge of town wanted to flesh out the menu in the VR mirror of their meatspace mirror, so had paid me some Nuyen to acquire 'samples' from around the city, scrub the files of their attached RFID tags, and hand them over to create an instant menu of food they'd never be able to supply in the meatspace restaurant. I think the plan was to lure people in with premium virtual food so they'd be suckered into spending more money on the ultimately disappointing meatspace fare. I kept copies of the files for my own personal use.
You'd be surprised how heavy the security can be on some real avocado on wheat-bread toast, and I didn't even touch the city's fanciest Matrix restaurants.
I was paid one thousand five hundred nuyen for that job – two hundred and fifty short of half a month's rent for only three days of work. Most of my jobs paid significantly less than that, but they also involved significantly less work.
My bread and butter consisted of cleaning up tags on stolen property. Nobody wants a washing machine that doesn't work because it's supposed to be tied into the DRM software of the corp that built it, or a car that wouldn't work if it was repaired with non-standard parts – meaning parts that hadn't been bought at a premium from the manufacturer.
The turnover was never high – a couple of hundred nuyen at the higher end, and a couple of dozen at the lower – but I could wipe the security in a few hours, max, and do it all from the comfort of my own little corner of cyberspace, without the need to dig through unfamiliar hosts and dodge hostile ICE.
But to get paid, I had to find work first. So I finished my morning the same way I always did – by slumping bonelessly into an armchair and unshackling my persona from my body, casting myself out and into the Matrix.
Most people who interacted with the net tended to make their persona a carbon copy of themselves, the occasional cleaning-up notwithstanding. This was because most people were boring. Given the chance to be anyone – anything – else, they chose to be a carbon-copy of themselves.
What my persona looked like changed almost every day, but I usually stuck to the same theme. Calling myself 'Bug' had initially started out as a joke. Back before I'd even heard of the term Technomancer, I used to think of myself as some sort of glitch in reality. Some bit of code that wasn't quite playing right, was messing with systems I shouldn't have been able to. So, Bug.
Consequently, most of my icons tended to be insect themed: a woman with chitin in place of skin and translucent wings growing out of her back; a swarm of wasps that would fly together in ways that suggested a metahumanoid shape; a silken woman manipulated by the threads of an ecology of spiders; even an oversized cartoon of a bee. When I accessed a device, I left a mark in the form of a stylised scarab – a digital trail that was an unavoidable part of life in the Matrix.
I drifted through the matrix, flying through the innumerable datastreams passing from icon to icon as each linked system communicated with each other. On the system below, I could see streams linking commlinks to shops as their owner walked past them, so that they could see at a glance where the nearest Stuffer Shack, gas station, gym or dive bar was and what their services cost. Longer streams tied servers to each other, with the largest stretching out of the city as they carried data elsewhere.
Most people who interacted with the Matrix filtered them out by default. Without the filters, the sheer number of datastreams would block out the stuff they actually wanted to see. From what I'd gathered, even deckers filtered them out unless they absolutely needed to see them for a job. It seemed incredibly limiting to me – like they were trying too hard to make the Matrix mirror meatspace – but, then, I'd never had any trouble seeing past the datastreams. Just another quirk of my biology, I supposed.
Some of these datastreams weren't heading from device to device, or from the city to somewhere beyond it. A tiny fraction – maybe two or three in a million – instead drifted away from the glowing brilliance of the Matrix, falling down into the inky black abyss that surrounded the Brockton Bay grid. There was no natural light in the Matrix, no world to exist beyond that generated by its inhabitants. High-traffic areas were almost brilliantly bright with the weight of their dataflow, while more remote parts of the city had small pinpricks of light like constellations of stars.
But below the city, deep beneath where the physical ground would be, there were no devices to generate data, and so the city floated like an island of light over an immense abyss. Most people in the Matrix paid no attention to that void, others found it uncomfortable to look at, but I found it strangely calming. If I ever felt I needed to step back from reality, I'd slip into the Matrix and stare into its depths, watching stray data disappear into nothing.
I wasn't interested in the abyss today. Instead I drifted through icons and hosts until I found myself in a network hub that received and transmitted hundreds of messages every second. I let the datastreams fade away and saw the space as its creators intended it to be seen; a bar on an immense scale with walls lined by individual nooks and booths, each containing a screen or screens that displayed scrolling text.
Hundreds of commlinks were connected to this host, their programming skipping the virtual space in favour of displaying their owner's chosen forum directly onto the comm's screen. The virtual space existed for those who were a little deeper into cyberspace, and wanted somewhere they could scroll without leaving the Matrix.
BayWatch was a message board service, local to Brockton Bay and largely dealing with regurgitating bulletins from the harbourmaster's office on which ships and trains were coming when, providing social spaces for dockworkers to meet and gripe, along with anyone else who didn't want to pay a premium for corp-owned social media, and hosting low-level help wanted ads on specific subforums.
A lot of them were either job adverts or people putting their resumes out there to see who's hiring. Others were simpler tasks like someone offering ten nuyen to anyone who could help them carry a new flatscreen up to their nineteenth floor apartment – apparently the elevator was busted. Some of the boards were dedicated to tech requests, and those were the ones on which I made my bread and butter.
Most of them weren't worth the data they were printed on – they'd either take too long for the money to be worth it, or the request was made by someone who clearly hadn't the slightest idea what technology was actually capable of – and I'd long since become used to filtering out the wheat from the chaff.
The jobs on offer today were poor at best. There were a couple of desperate attempts to remove the ownership details from stolen property, which I'd normally be alright with but they were asking for someone who could unlock some smartweapons. Guns were much too hot to handle – particularly for the money on offer. Other jobs were longer term, like someone asking for a skilled coder who could give their new fast food joint a proper VR presence. I'd taken on that sort of contract before, but not for that sort of money.
There was one job that grabbed my attention, in the same way that a poisonous frog might grab attention with its brightly-coloured skin.
»Subject: Tech Support. Skilled hacker needed for one-off job. Must be able to operate in a high-stress environment. 3,000N¥ on completion of job. Send a message,«
- Tt (08:56:27/15-2-70)
Obviously the pay was what first caught my eye. Almost an entire month's rent for a single job was the sort of thing that sounded too good to be true, which meant it usually was. Still, that was more money than I'd ever seen offered for a single job on this board before, and the job itself was a lot more vague, too. People were generally upfront about what they wanted doing.
Naturally, the money had drawn quite the crowd. A dozen different wannabee deckers had already thrown their hat in the ring, but I couldn't help noticing something about the responses. The thread had been up for almost two hours now, and yet the job was still open. It was possible that 'Tt' hadn't come back to the thread yet, but four of the responses had been posted within half an hour of the original message. If it was important, surely they'd have stuck around for that long?
The last post was someone condemning the whole thing as a hoax, but I was growing increasingly curious. So I let the virtual dive bar fade away, and saw the Matrix as it really was. If I focused, I could see the marks of all the devices that had interacted with this board, hidden within the code of their messages. There was no such thing as anonymous interaction, not truly. Everything left a mark.
It didn't take me long to find the mark left by Tt's post – a stylised eye with a slit pupil. It was recent, meaning they'd been on the site since the message was sent, but there were no datastreams connecting them to any of the people who'd posted on the thread. They hadn't spoken to any of them, no matter what resumes they'd listed. In fact, Tt had gone further; their account on the site was set to block all incoming messages.
That was what reconceptualised the offer in my mind. If it was a trap or a prank, they would have made themself as accessible as possible. Instead, they clearly didn't want to be contacted.
No, that's not right, I thought. They said 'send a message.'
Three thousand nuyen was enough to mean I wouldn't have to work for the rest of the month, and, with what I'd already gathered since the last payment, it would leave me with more than enough left over to actually treat myself for once. This was looking more promising by the second, and all I had to do was accept Tt's invitation.
Everything in the Matrix left a trace, no matter how hard it might be to follow. It was simply a matter of using the trail to find the source, and I could find an excellent tracker. A quick glance at the virtual bar showed that the other personas' attentions were firmly fixed on their own browsing. I reached out to the Matrix itself – to the resonant harmonics of its datastreams – and plucked raw data out of the air, weaving and compiling it into what looked for a moment like a kludgy mismatch of code fragments and data snippets before it seemed to curl in on itself and take shape as a luminescent dragonfly.
The sprite was a persona without any machine on the other end. It was a creature of the Matrix, with no presence whatsoever in meatspace. A Ghost in the Machine. It was life made by my hands, and with the compound insectoid eyes I gave it, it was a creature made to seek and find.
I held it in the hand of my persona, bringing it up to look at the mark left by Tt's device. I could feel its attention latch onto the small piece of data, as well as something close to eagerness as it waited for instructions. I let it skitter around my hand and onto my arm, bringing it up so I could speak to it directly.
"Find the owner of this mark," I commanded, "and send me its trace."
The dragonfly's wings unfurled and it took flight, flitting in-between personas as it darted out of the bar and into the wider Matrix. It would hunt for other marks left by the same device, and gradually build up a picture of its movements. Once it had found the persona, it would contact me before vanishing back into the resonance.
The process took hours, and I used the time to clear the copy protection on a whole folder of bootlegged films, but eventually I received a datastream from my sprite. It had found Tt's commlink, and the persona attached to it. She presented herself in the Matrix as an almost painfully beautiful blonde elven woman, with her hair worn down and a third eye open on her forehead. Her persona wore a skintight black outfit with a purple eye on her chest – fashion in the Matrix was less constrained by real-world norms. The same slit-pupiled symbol as her mark. Something about her screamed Shadowrunner, but I'd already come this far.
I sent the message.
»Re: Subject: Tech Support. Interested in the job.«
- Bug (12:34:51/15-2-70)
The response came back in seconds.
»Welcome aboard. We should meet. Come find me at 2pm.«
- Tt (12:35:01/15-2-70)
If nothing else, I think this served as a great introduction for Technomancers and as the lead in to Taylor's first job in the Shadows. It's also made me immensely curious about how much Lisa already knows. This could just be a standard "only looking for the smart ones" but at the same time, it could be more targeted.
Nice one Tats, application and interview in one go! "By successfully attending this interview you've passed the interview," very classy.
Digging the story, only drawback I can see is that this is going to make me play all of the games again! And now that I say that I see that the remastered collection is coming out pretty soon...
Tt's commlink was broadcasting from a café near the base of Charter Hill, a densely-packed district that largely provided low income workers to the more highly-priced financial district downtown. Cleaners, security guards and low-level office drones had to come from somewhere, after all, and a few of the tower blocks bore the logo of the corporation that owned them – and that owned the employees housed within.
It was a vertical neighbourhood, crisscrossed by elevated roads and walkways that cast deep shadows under which pop-up stalls plied their trade, while more illegal goods could be bought by those who ventured deeper into the darkened corners.
The café wasn't part of that side of the district. It sat in an elevated mall complex, a bridge of shops that spanned the trench between two long rows of apartment buildings, bathed in natural sunlight for most of the day. It even had a balcony, poking out the side of the bridge where it enjoyed a commanding view down the entire length of the artificial gorge.
Other bridges criss-crossed the gap, some wide enough to allow six lanes of traffic to cross while others were spindly things supporting elevated metro lines and the smallest were simple footways barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, though most of those were down on the lower floors.
I only knew this because I'd been to that part of the city before, with mom and dad. In the Matrix, all I could see were the digital signatures of the flowing traffic, the barely-protected systems of the shops in the bridge, and the constant flow of icons and personas that marked people out from the landscape.
One of those icons depicted a fairly basic security camera manufactured by Aztechnology before the Matrix went wireless, but someone had since jury-rigged it with a wireless connection. Because it was a jury-rig, it was simplicity itself to work my way into the system and take control of the camera, swivelling it on its axis to point right at the icon of Tt's commlink.
Simultaneously, I drew the feed's web-like datastream away from the CCTV box in the backroom and pulled it into my persona's eyes, letting me see Tt for the first time.
Her elven features were as breathtakingly elegant as they were on her persona, and the only real difference between her two was the absent third eye on her persona's forehead. Her attire was different, too; she was dressed much the same as any other relatively well-off young woman would when she out on the town, in a crop top and fashionably tight syn-leather pants. The crop top was purple – clearly her favourite colour – and she wore a simple silver necklace around her neck, with a pendant on the end. I couldn't quite make it out through the camera's poor resolution, but it looked like the same slit-pupiled eye.
Notably, she wasn't alone. There was an ork sitting across the table from her, dark skinned and built like he punched walls for a living. At six foot six, the difference between his frame and Tt's waifish body was stark. Like her, he was dressed casually, but in a noticeably different style. Rather than her girl-about-town look, he wore practical work boots under faded jeans and a drab green jacket over a black tank top.
He also had cybernetic eyes, though they had false covers that made them look organic, and looking at his signature in the Matrix I could see other cyberware laced discretely throughout his body: the cybereyes had an integrated smartlink feeding data to the pistol holstered in his jacket, his arms were artificial – metal coated with synflesh to keep the appearance of normality – and his commlink was an implant rather than a separate device. There was probably more in there, but it wasn't wireless. There was a UCAS System Identification Number linked to the comm, registered to Mark Andrews, but I could tell it was fake.
Tt's commlink had a SIN as well, again for the United Canadian-American States, but if hers was a fake then it was a much higher-quality job than the ork's. Either way, it identified her as Lisa Wilbourn, and unlike her counterpart she had no presence whatsoever in the Matrix. In fact, the only Matrix-capable devices on her person were her handbag and a pair of AR-linked aviator sunglasses sitting on the table, the lenses tinted purple. When considered alongside the third eye on her persona and the shopping bag for an occult store sitting next to her in the booth, I got a sneaking suspicion that she was a mage.
The two of them were slowly chatting about not much in particular, both of them nursing cups of soykaf like they were expecting to have to wait a while. I steeled myself, then sent another message to Lisa's commlink.
»Who's the muscle?«
- Bug (14:00:01/15-2-70)
Lisa looked at her commlink, smiled, and looked across the table at her colleague. Her commlink was already feeding me its audio, so I heard what she said next.
"They're here."
Mark – or whoever he was beneath the fake SIN – set his cup down and looked around the café. After scanning the people, his gaze landed on the security camera I'd moved to point straight at their table. He had a handsome face, with the sort of lantern jaw you'd expect from some trideo star, and he wore his hair in shoulder-length cornrows. His metatype came through in pointed ears and tusks, but they actually added to his looks rather than taking away from them. He frowned.
"Can they hear us?" he asked, leaning in and murmuring. Not that it mattered, when he was leaning over Lisa's commlink.
"Don't know," she replied with an easy grin. "I'm not a tech girl, that's why we're hiring Bug." Simultaneously, she was typing out a response on her commlink.
»A colleague. He's Grue, and I'm Tattletale.«
- Tt (14:00:53/15-2-70)
Shadowrunner handles, obviously. Tattletale didn't need much explanation, for all that it didn't tell me about how she operated, but Grue… I send off a query in search of information, and found a film that had come out about half a decade ago, in which a magical research lab had been unintentionally sealed and most of the scientists killed by a massive monster that struck from the shadows. The monster was called a Grue.
Almost without conscious thought, I dug a little deeper, peeling back the security on Grue's commlink. Tattletale was a closed book, digitally speaking, but with Grue I was able to find the real SIN buried beneath his fake. Grue was a registered UCAS citizen; Brian Laborn.
Satisfied that I had a little leverage in case this was a trap, I changed my persona to that of a nondescript human-looking woman, provided you ignored the fact her skin was formed from discrete chitin plates, and edited it to include a chair as I sat myself down at the head of their outdoor booth.
"I can," I said to Grue, his cybereyes and ingrained commlink overlaying my persona and voice onto the real world, along with all the other augmented reality features in this café. His optics widened as he saw me, and Tattletale latched onto that motion like a hawk before putting on her own AR sunglasses.
"Nice look," she said, admiringly, before turning to Grue. "Pay up."
"You took bets on whether I'd show up?" I asked.
"On whether you'd show up in person," Grue said, handing a crumpled nuyen bill to Tattletale. I couldn't see the denomination. "Shadowrunners put a lot of weight on face to face meetings. It's a sign of respect, and trust." There was a not-so-subtle rebuke in that.
"I'm not a Shadowrunner," I said, leaning back and shrugging. "Tattletale asked for someone who can hack, not some meat to catch bullets. Besides, why would I trust you? We've just met."
"Exactly my point," he countered. "It builds trust."
"Look, I'm here. You have a job. I want the money. I don't see the problem."
Grue looked like he was about to say something, but through the camera I saw Tattletale kick him in the shin. She must have been expecting me to be seeing through my persona, rather than still using the camera. Was that some kind of signal?
I left my persona's head facing forwards while I hurriedly scanned the nearby Matrix icons, but I couldn't see anything unusual.
"It's never as good as the real thing," Tattletale mused, drawing my attention right back to her. She was leaning back in her seat, looking out over the balcony while sipping at her cup of soykaf.
"What isn't?" I snapped, angry that they wouldn't let this go.
"Soykaf," she clarified, sounding a little confused, and my anger deflated.
I shrugged my shoulders. "I wouldn't know." I had the taste of beankaf stored in digital form from the restaurant job, but I figured Tattletale would insist that doesn't count.
"Tattletale keeps a bag of real coffee beans back at our place," Grue explains, looking a little less wound up. "I've had some, but I don't see what the fuss is about. So long as it's hot and wakes you up, who cares?"
"Philistine," the coffee aficionado shook her head in dismay.
"Your place?" I asked. "Are you two… together?"
Tattletale almost spat up her coffee at that, while Grue just shook his head.
"When I put the team together, I rented a place for us all to crash. Everyone chips in for the rent, and it means we don't have to worry about commuting in from across half the city."
"It's temporary," Tattletale clarifies. "I know I want to get my own place eventually, and I'm pretty sure the others think the same way. Things are a little cramped right now."
"So, why aren't the rest here?"
"We didn't want to overwhelm you," Grue explained. "Plus, there's no point in all four of us waiting around if you were late or didn't show."
"Right," I drummed virtual fingers against the table. "So what's the job?"
"How much do you know about how Shadowrunners work?" Grue asked.
I shrugged. "Only what I've seen on trideo."
Grue shifted in his seat a little so he was properly facing me, resting his elbows on the table as he accented his words with gestures. My conversations in meatspace were so infrequent I couldn't remember if that was a nervous tick or not.
"We're trying to move up in the world, which means getting an in with a better Fixer. A better fixer means a higher-quality of clientele, which means we're not stuck getting fragged by some street-trash gang in an alleyway behind a Mega-Mart. Or, if we are, we're at least getting good money for it."
He tapped his middle finger against the table, the metal beneath the synflesh making the tap much more distinctive.
"The Fixer we want to impress has given us a little interview job. Directly, rather than sending Mr Johnson our way."
"Is that normal?" I asked. About the only thing I'd picked up from the films was that Shadowrunners were always hired by 'Mr Johnson' – a euphemistic name used for any number of anonymous clients.
"It is, but then this isn't a normal job. Could be that the Johnson wants anonymity, could be that our Fixer doesn't yet trust us to interact with their clients."
"Could be there is no 'Mr Johnson'" – Tattletale piped up – "and this whole job is just a consequence-free test they cooked up for us."
Grue gave her a weary look. Clearly they were getting close to rehashing a discussion they'd already had.
"Regardless," Grue continued, "we've been hired to locate a specific package inside a specific shipping container."
"I can get you into the port authority systems," I said, already sending off a datastream with the backdoor password dad had kept on his computer for a rainy day. "I should be able to pull the container's projected route from there."
"Good to know," Grue said, and he looked impressed, "but that won't be necessary. No need to tangle with corp security today, because Lung's Clan already tangled with them. They waited till it was on its way out of the city, then jumped it before it hit the interstate."
"They want the package too?" I asked. "What's inside it, anyway?"
"It's not our biz to speculate," Grue said, even as Tattletale rolled her eyes. "As for whether they're looking for it as well… probably not. They raid shipping all the time."
"So what do you need me for? I've got no experience with Yakuza systems, if they even have one."
"They're not Yakuza," Tattletale interrupts. "Not real Yakuza, at least. Most of the core members are exiled Japanese nonhumans, which means the actual Yakuza families back home want nothing to do with them."
I think I remember mom saying something about that once.
"Semantics aside, I still don't know why you need a hacker."
"The Fixer suggested it. They've improved their Matrix presence recently – which is probably how they masked the container's RFID signal in the first place."
I thought it over, my persona completely motionless as my mind focused on other matters. After a moment, when their stares became a little pointed, I mirrored Grue's mannerisms and started drumming my virtual fingers on the table, consciously generating the sound of chitin on plastic to complete the illusion.
"They could have used a device wired directly into the container, or an area jammer. The former would be harder to track, but more wasteful if you need one for every container."
"We think they're storing the container in a warehouse along with the others they've lifted," Grue elaborated. "They'll unpack them one by one and slowly filter the contents onto the black market."
"Area jammer, then. Take it out and I'll be able to point you to your target, but I don't know if I'll be able to help you find it in the first place."
"That's my job," Tattletale said with a predatory grin. "I'll ask around their favourite haunts, do some investigating of my own, maybe even borrow one of the others to lean on a few people. Someone'll talk."
"So," Grue said, trying to look casual but it didn't quite reach his eyes – Cybernetic they might have been, but that didn't stop the muscles around them tensing – "what do you think?"
I sat there for a moment, my mind alive with possibilities. It sounded like there were a lot of things that could go wrong with this plan – and I'd be exposing myself to more risk than ever before – but on the other hand, the money was really good. Besides, maybe it'd be nice to be working with people, rather than for them?
"For three thousand? I can do it."
Some of the tension slipped out of Grue's shoulders, while Tattletale laughed happily, trying and failing to pat my virtual shoulder.
"We'll contact you when we know where we're going," Grue said.
"Actually," Tattletale jumped in, "I might get in touch if I need some tech support while I'm investigating. That alright?"
"Fine by me," I answered, nodding for her benefit.
I got up, letting my 'chair' dissolve back into nothingness as I walked my persona out of the café, turning the camera back to where it was before.
Or rather, almost to where it was before. I'd kept them in the corner of its vision, and I hadn't abandoned my hold on Tattletale's commlink.
"I don't like that she didn't show up in person," Grue said after a few moments, his eyes firmly planted on the door I'd just 'walked' out of.
"So she's shy," Tattletale shrugged her shoulders. "So what?"
"That's what you think it is? Shyness?"
"You noticed her persona, right? She doesn't want to present her real face to the world, for whatever reason. Could be body image issues, maybe. Either way, she had a point. We're not hiring her to block bullets."
"But the Fixer-" he began, before Tattletale cut him off.
"Let me worry about that. I can talk to her while I'm hunting this place down, get a feel for her."
"Fine," Grue replied, giving ground. "Got any idea how you'll start?"
"I figured I'd go put on a nice dress and hit the clubs, see if I can get some boasting out of a drunk Yakuza."
"I thought you said they weren't real Yakuza."
"They call themselves Yakuza," Tattletale said as she stood up. "That's what really matters."
I spun datastreams together, creating a dragonfly sprite to follow Grue – Brian Laborn – and see where he called home. If they were all living together like he said, that would tell me where I could find them.
After all, there's nothing wrong with having a little insurance.
Once the insect was on its way, I turned my attention to more directly following Tattletale's commlink through the matrix as she popped into a handful of stores and window-shopped in even more.
"You're still here, aren't you?" she said out of the blue, and if I was in meatspace I think I might have jumped in shock. As it was, I hurriedly scanned my surroundings looking for any hint of an ambush and seized control of the shop's security camera. There were no deckers waiting in the wings, or Grid Overwatch Division agents out to snatch me up. Or corps out to cut me up to see what made my Technomancer brain tick. She was just browsing the shop's discount rack.
"How did you know?" She still had her AR glasses on, and they had dermal speakers built discretely into the frame.
"Because it's what I'd do," she said, holding a top up to her chest and checking out her reflection in a mirror. "I get the feeling you're like me in that regard; neither of us can leave a secret alone."
"And you're not mad?" I asked, hesitantly. "Wouldn't your buddy call this a breach of trust?"
Tattletale let out a short, sharp, laugh. "Trust but verify, ever heard of that? Besides, I'd be a hypocrite if I got mad. Like you heard, I'm watching you as well."
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach at that, but I grudgingly felt it would be hypocritical of me to complain.
"So… find anything interesting?" I asked, awkwardly.
"Oh don't worry," Tattletale turned to smile up at the camera. "I can't do anything really thorough because the Matrix doesn't have an astral presence, so I'm mostly just relying on psychological guesswork. I figure you got more detailed information from Brian's cheap-ass fake SIN."
I fell silent, and from the way Tattletale's smile slowly grew even wider I could tell she'd taken my silence as an admission of guilt.
"Look, so long as your secrets don't affect me or the team, I'm not about to spill them. I trust that goes both ways. Find what you can, but be very careful how you use it."
She'd finally found a top she liked, a sleeveless one with a coiled snake printed on the front. She turned and made her way to the changing rooms, reaching down to the commlink on her belt and switching it off as she pulled the curtain shut.
I let my digital presence soar back through the city, pulling it back towards my own body until I awoke with a start, slumped over in an armchair and drenched in sweat. I pulled my legs up, curling in on myself as I sat there, shaking. My heart was beating at a million miles a minute, fear pumping through my system like a drug, but there was something else laced among the emotion.
This wasn't just some everyday job lifting copy protection off stolen property; it felt real. Mixed in with the fear was adrenaline, and my heart was beating with as much eagerness as terror. For the first time in a long while, it felt like I was truly living.
First off, I really liked the aesthetics of this chapter, I'm probably gonna stop commenting on stuff like this but you're doing a great job capturing the feel of Shadowrun. Second off, I really like the way you've translated the roles of the Undersiders into Shadowrunners so far, it's really cool and I'm curious to see what your plan is with the others.
First off, I really liked the aesthetics of this chapter, I'm probably gonna stop commenting on stuff like this but you're doing a great job capturing the feel of Shadowrun.
I didn't hear from Grue or Tattletale again until the next night, when I got a message from Tattletale out of the blue while I was busy watching pirated trideo.
»Hey, Bug! Could use a hand with some tech stuff, if you're free.«
- Tt (23:49:13/16-2-70)
Her commlink was pinging me from somewhere south of the docks, in the part of the city where the Yakuza tended to operate. She actually wasn't all that far from me, physically speaking, even if my neighbourhood had gentrified a bit over the last decade. More important than that was the fact that she was pinging me from inside a hotel – the Osaka Palace – that wasn't hosted on the public grid.
»Need a moment to access the metro grid.«
- Bug (23:49:23/16-2-70)
»Decker things, say no more.«
- Tt (23:49:31/16-2-70)
Technically, the Matrix was free for all. In reality, that only applied to the public grid, a world-wide web put together by the architects of the new Matrix largely so that they could say it was free, and so that even the most illicit activity still happened somewhere they could watch.
In reality, most civilised members of society interacted with the world through one of innumerable private or semi-private grids. Some of these were corporate owned and boasted access across the world, while others were set up by local municipalities. If a business was only on the public grid, it was seen as second class, and the same applied to the people who exclusively used it.
The Osaka Palace was on the Brockton Bay municipal grid. It was a mid-range place at best, but even mid-range comes with its own expectations and codes of conduct. If I wanted to do more than send text messages to Tattletale without exhausting myself, I'd need to access that grid – which I couldn't do legally because it was an expense I hadn't wanted to take on before now.
So I paused at the threshold, looking at the gateway to the municipal grid – shaped like the arch of a dockyard crane. I reached out for the datastreams around me, drawing them into myself rather than using them to form a sprite. I twisted them into motion, spinning them around myself until they took shape as a complex form.
For a moment, I felt as if I was a spider perched at the centre of an immense web, stretching out datastreams to anchor myself across the entire Matrix, without regard for the flimsy boundaries of the different grids. The effort of spinning this form was draining, and I could feel myself fading ever so slightly as I exerted my will on the Matrix itself. I'd already spent all day in the Matrix, and my physical and digital bodies were both tired.
Still, it was more than worth it as I drifted through the halls of the hotel like I belonged there, ignored by the security ICE programmes – in the form of simple geometric shapes – while I cast my senses out through the matrix, looking for any sign of a security Spider. There was nothing, which meant the hotel was too cheap to hire a decker to watch its host, instead relying on automated systems and occasional check-ups. Perfect.
The Osaka Palace wasn't much to look at. Its host was laid out like the meat-space version, presumably, but all the graphics were very low-poly, like an impressionist painting of the real thing. Clearly it wasn't somewhere that saw many Matrix visitors, and even a semi-regular security Spider would have spruced the place up a little – if only for the sake of their sanity.
Tattletale's signal was coming from room five-thirteen, a double-bed space with an en-suite bathroom and not much else. It's nightly rate was reasonable for this part of town, but I couldn't help noticing that the electronic door lock had been opened by a staff key, rather than receipt of payment.
Tattletale's commlink was resting near the middle of the room, probably where the bed was, and there was another commlink nearby. That was almost it as far as devices went, though the room's lights could be wirelessly adjusted, as could the trideo screen mounted on the wall. Tattletale's AR sunglasses were nowhere to be seen, but she had accessorised with what looked like a vibration-based speaker and a similar microphone. From their signature, I could see they were wafer-thin and meant to blend into the skin of her neck and behind her ears.
"So what am I looking at?" I asked through the speaker.
"Mean to say you can't see it?" Lisa asked.
"I see the comm's icon, but hotels don't put cameras in the rooms."
"Eh, you'd be surprised," Lisa replied, and I got the impression she was shrugging her shoulders. "But I see your point. Here, have a look."
Her comm's icon moved upwards, and I took control of its inbuilt camera, streaming its feed right into my vision.
The décor in the hotel room leaned a lot more towards opportunistic one-night-stands than the kind of place someone would stay in on a business trip. The sheets were red and had a plasticky sheen that was probably supposed to look silky, while the floor was mostly easy-clean red carpeting. More noticeably, there was a guy slumped over by the end of the bed, his face planted in the carpet and his fortunately fully-clothed ass in the air.
Tattletale spun the camera around, and I saw her lying back on the bed itself, wearing a lilac cocktail dress underneath a waist-length syn-leather jacket topped by a faux-fur collar. She'd dyed her hair red, and there was a confident grin on her face. From the fact she was still wearing the jacket and heels, I guessed she'd probably knocked the guy out the moment they were alone. She was also still wearing her necklace, with the slit-pupiled eye looking up at me.
I took control of her comm's screen, replacing the mirror image of her with a different avatar, this one of a vaguely female form buried beneath silken robes that covered her from head to toe, with spiders crawling among the folds.
"So, what's up?" I asked.
"Lightweight over there is a Yakuza foot soldier who's involved in their raids to snatch containers, something he clearly thought would impress the pretty elf at the club – who, of course, was just out to get laid."
I shook my head. "Typical."
"Hey, a stereotype can make a great weapon if you use it right," Tattletale said with another shrug of her shoulders. "You wouldn't believe how much information I've managed to squeeze out by playing up the nymphomaniac elf routine. Besides" – she gestured to the comatose man at the end of the bed – "it got him here, alone."
"Which is when you put him to sleep."
"Exactly! Normally this is the point where I'd rob the guy blind, swipe his commlink, and take it to someone who knows how to decrypt it, but since I've got your number I figured I'd cut out the middlewoman. Then lightweight wakes up tomorrow morning with a head full of warm fuzzy feelings and a distinct smell of alcohol on his clothes."
"Alright," I said, shifting my attention to the second commlink in the room. "I can take a look."
Of course, when I said I, I really meant a sprite. I reached out for the tangled skeins of data that passes through the hotel's host, gathering and twisting them together into a cohesive shape. Tattletale's faint digital presence had me thinking more about what I was doing; I knew I could do more than a decker, was more than a decker, and I guess some people might have called it digital magic. I wasn't sure it was that simple.
The dragonfly I'd used to track her comm was what I'd come to call a courier sprite. It's multi-lensed eyes were great for hunting down specific targets, and it's wide wings and narrow body allowed it to travel effortlessly through the matrix, relaying data to a target or back to me. The sprite I was weaving to break into lightweight's comm was different; a relentless woodlouse that would slowly but surely chew through any security in its path, but that lacked mobility as a result.
I wasn't sure where their forms came from – whether I was consciously making them that way or my subconscious was taking over. I hadn't spent much time on the few Technomancer forums out there – I was afraid they were traps meant to draw us out of hiding – but I'd seen some people had an almost shamanic attitude to their sprites, like they were spirits bestowed upon them by some patron deity. I thought that was too limiting a view, and one rooted in a very magical view of the world that was incompatible with the Matrix.
The woodlouse flew from my outstretched hand – unconstrained by the physical limitations of its assumed form – and landed on the commlink, where it began steadily unspooling the tightly-wound chains that secured its secrets. I whispered to it through gentle streams of data, slowing its pace to avoid unintentionally triggering any alarms. We had time to wait.
"Once I'm in," I said to Tattletale, "I'll copy any relevant data onto your commlink."
"Can't you store it on your deck?" she asked, and I instinctively froze.
Regular hackers had to interact with the matrix through a datajack and a cyberdeck, crude augmentations that provided by technological means what I could do simply by thinking, but the one thing they had that I didn't was a hard drive. In a way, I guess it was a blessing. Given the ability to edit my own internal memory, I wasn't sure I'd have been able to resist the temptation.
"You've been doing all the hard work," I flubbed. "I figure you should be the one who gets to bring the data to your team. Take the prize."
"Huh, thanks," she said, as I desperately wracked my brain, hunting for a way to draw her attention onto other things.
"So, what's with the necklace?" I asked. "Only you have the same sign on your VR persona. And your commlink's mark."
"Perceptive, aren't you?" she said with a chuckle. "But sure, I'll bite. How much do you know about mages?"
"Only what I've-"
"Seen on trideo, right," she cut me off, graciously leaving the 'you need to get out more' unspoken. "Well, one of the things you might have seen in your sanitized, sensationalised drek is the idea of a mentor spirit."
I thought back for a moment. "Yeah, I think it's come up a couple of times. Voices in your head, that sort of thing?"
Tattletale laughed. "You make me sound crazy, but honestly, you're not far off? This" – I didn't need to see her to know she was holding up her pendant – "is a symbol of my link to Snake. Some people like to think of their spirits as guardians, but I say it's more transactional than that. Snake keeps me safe, helps me work, and in return I keep her well fed."
"I assume you're not talking about the occasional dead mouse," I joked.
"Secrets, Bug," Tattletale responded, sounding deadly serious. "I feed Snake secrets. The less well known, the more carefully guarded, the better. So I hunt them down, no matter where it takes me or who it might piss off if I'm caught."
I paused for a moment.
"I have to say, that sounds like a compulsion."
"Maybe it is," she admitted, "but I know you're a borderline agoraphobe, so you don't have much of a leg to stand on there."
"I'm not afraid of open spaces," I replied, defensively. "I just don't need to go out. I can work fine remotely, can order groceries from my nearest Stuffer Shack. Everything I need is in the Matrix."
"Except it's not the space you're afraid of," Tattletale responded, cryptically, but I was saved from answering her as my sprite chimed up, having finished unlocking the commlink.
"I'm in."
Windows opened up in front of me, a branching web of file directories and message logs. One caught my eye, but not for the reasons I was expecting.
"Got a secret for you," I said. "Lightweight here has been writing a film script."
"Ooh, interesting." Tattletale preened with predatory glee. "Not the sort of thing he'd be bragging about to his street-gang buddies. It any good?"
"Got an elevator pitch. Um, 'Mai Murai is a regular in the New York nightclub scene, with an easy laugh, a love of the crowd, and a body to die for.' And then there's an ellipsis, followed by 'literally' and an exclamation mark."
Tattletale was clearly relishing every word, if her laugh was any indication.
"Let me guess, vampire?"
"Quiet down; you're ruining the flow of the pitch. 'This sweet-talking razorgirl has a dark secret, of the vampiric kind, and when it's exposed she finds herself on the run from a team of shadowrunners, but is there more to their leader than meets the eye?'"
"Another vampire?" Tattletale asked, eagerly, and I quickly started skimming the script.
"Nope. Looks like he's just hot. And an expy of the author, of course."
Tattletale's laughter gradually trailed off into smug chuckles, while I set the script aside.
"A hidden masterpiece that's only masterful so long as it's never seen by anyone besides the author. That's a good secret, Bug. Anything else on there?"
I flicked through the file directory, unfolding new webs of data as I sifted through the comm's operating system, muttering to myself and Tattletale in equal measure.
"Pics of a bike, pics of a girl, pics of lightweight and the girl, girl on the bike, mutual nudes, more pics of bikes. Let's see… recent texts from his mother, from his dealer, breakup text from the girl – hard luck, lightweight."
I switched my attention from the files to the comm's programmes, and immediately struck gold.
"Now this looks promising."
"What does?" Tattletale asked.
"'The Anarchist's Phonebook.' Looks like some sort of messaging programme with end-to-end encryption."
"Can you crack it?"
"Don't need to," I replied, with a little smugness of my own. "End to end, remember, and this is one of the ends."
I pulled apart the app, ignoring the front-facing messaging feature in favour of digging through the comm logs collected by the app as a matter of course. I could see a web of illicit work unfolding in front of me, and I felt like a true professional before a hidden programme within the app initialised, and I was confronted by an image of an old fashioned cartoon bomb with a lit fuse and a digital clock on its front, counting down from ten.
"Oh fuck." I murmured.
"Oh fuck?" Tattletale asked, panicked – though I barely heard her. "'Oh fuck' doesn't sound good."
I dug into the bomb, finding a simple numerical lock backed up by fiendishly complex code. If I was whoever set this up, I could input the right combination at the speed of thought. As it was, I could only frantically yet futilely dig at the code while the numbers steadily ran down. The number hit zero, and I almost jerked back as a stab of pain shot through me. It wasn't enough to kick me out, but it hurt like hell and I knew I'd feel it later.
"Data bomb hidden within the code," I said, futilely watching as a single datastream slipped past my code and out of the hotel, travelling out into the city. "Think it sent an SOS."
"Fuck the SOS," Tattletale snapped. "What's in the logs?"
I abandoned subtlety entirely, pulling apart the file directory of the hidden app like I was frantically tearing apart an office in search of gold.
"Got it." I said, triumph seeping past my urgency. "Escort route from the raid to the storage warehouse. Transferring to your comm."
As an afterthought, I gathered together a file on lightweight's drug running routes as well, hoping that it would be enough of an obfuscation to get the Yakuza to write this off as a raid by rival dealers.
"Tattletale, you need to get out of there," I said, as I spotted a steady stream of data broadcasting from the comm. "Comm's sending exact location data, down to the meter."
"Okay," Tattletale replied, doing a good job of hiding her panic – if she was even feeling any. "I'll need your eyes; I'm unarmed."
"You went after a Yakuza lieutenant, unarmed?" I asked, incredulously, even as I left the hotel room and soared through the walls and floors of the hotel like they weren't even there, hunting for the security office on the ground floor.
"I couldn't find a piece that matched the dress," Tattletale snarked back.
The hotel's CCTV system was as utilitarian as the rest of the place, with occasional inputs that told me someone in meatspace was monitoring it. That was encouraging, even if it complicated things. More to the point, there was no sign of an alert yet.
Might have seconds, but seconds are all I need.
The system was old and poorly maintained, and I was able to slip in my own data among the incoming feeds from the wireless cameras, tricking the monitors into showing a loop while relaying the real feeds straight to my brain.
Suddenly, I was bombarded by the images of sixteen different cameras across the entire hotel, from the garage to the rooftop. It stretched my consciousness, drawing upon my persona until it felt like I was fading slightly, losing my connection to the Matrix. With an effort of concerted will, I was able to wrest control of my mind and keep my hold on the surveillance system.
Immediately, I had every member of staff tagged. There were twelve in the building in total, not including whoever was behind the CCTV console, but only three were obviously security – a guard on the door, a bouncer in the bar, and a lone guard grabbing a bite to eat in a staff break room. Two of the three were armed, though the orc bouncer looked like he could get by with his immense fists alone.
Tattletale wasn't being idle. She was on her commlink, frantically calling someone marked down as 'Bitch' – which I chose to believe was a Shadowrunner handle rather than a character assessment – as she made her way to the lift at the end of the hall.
As I watched, an incoming datastream slipped past my hold on the security system, and the guard behind the console immediately started contacting his associates on the comms. The guard on the door stayed where he was, but the bouncer and the guy in the break room left their posts and made their way into the halls.
Surprisingly, an elf woman behind the bar started moving as well, ducking behind the counter and emerging with a submachine gun. Her and the bouncer were both dressed in sleek blazers, but below the waist she wore a miniskirt that displayed legs covered from top to bottom in Yakuza tattoos. The pair nodded to each other as they left the bar, moving for the elevator.
"Tattletale, skip the lift," I said, urgently. "Got two guards moving up, one armed."
"Stairs it is, then," she replied. "Think you can slow them down?"
I reached out past the security centre, my mind reeling again as I focused on maintaining my connection to the cameras while I moved my persona out into the hallway, close enough to snatch control of the elevator mechanism. I watched through the elevator's camera as the two guards got in, letting the doors close behind them before sealing it shut and sending it on a journey to nowhere – or, more specifically, to halfway between the top floor and the one below it.
"They're slowed," I said, "but they don't know it yet."
The other guard – the one from the break room – had moved to cover the delivery entrance to the hotel, his gun drawn as he tried to simultaneously watch the entrance and the exit. The guard in the security centre still had his eyes on the screen – I'd been selectively editing the feed to show the guards movements, but not Tattletale's. It wouldn't hold up much longer, though.
"Oh shit!"
Tattletale's panicked shout immediately drew my attention away, but she was out of sight of the CCTV system. A moment later, I saw her slamming open the stairwell door on the floor below. She turned back for just long enough to throw her high heels at some unseen target before sprinting barefoot down the corridor.
A moment later, a truly immense troll battered aside the door as it was swinging shut, ducking to get his horns underneath the door before barrelling down the corridor like a charging rhinoceros.
"Bug!" Tattletale shouted, the ponderous footfalls of her pursuer audible in the background of her audio.
Frantically, I took in all the cameras at a glance, my subconscious outpacing my mind as I noted the distance between Tattletale and the elevator in the middle of the corridor, and the two goons stuck a few floors above, who by this point had realised their predicament and were trying to pry open the elevator doors.
"Elevator!" I shouted, even as I pulled at datastreams, tugging on the elevator like it was a marionette. It was brute force hacking, and I could feel my presence in the Matrix fading from the effort of it all as I overrode safety after safety.
I let the lift plummet five floors, then nearly burnt out the motors as I brought it to a jarring holt only a few inches off from being perfectly aligned with Tattletale's floor. The thugs inside had first been lifted up by the negative g of the drop, then slammed into the floor by the force of the brakes.
It had knocked the elf out, and the ork was dazed enough that he wouldn't be an issue.
I let the doors open a couple of feet, and watched through the camera as Tattletale practically dove into the lift, using the ork to catch her momentum before rolling off him and shuffling backwards.
The moment she was clear I was already closing the elevator doors, and the troll was unable to stop himself in time to do anything about it as I sent the elevator downwards at a brisk – but still safe – pace.
"Couldn't have warned me about the troll, Bug?" Tattletale snapped.
"There's no cameras in the stairwell," I said back, paradoxically breathless with digital fatigue. "What was he even doing there?"
Tattletale jerked her head back in frustration, hitting the metal wall of the elevator, before pulling herself up to her feet.
"Fucking smoker sneaking a puff. I could smell it on him."
She gingerly moved the bartender's submachine gun away from her with a foot, but didn't pick it up herself.
"You've still got three guards on the ground floor," I said.
Tattletale sighed, her formerly perfect poise gone as she bent over, resting her hands on her knees and breathing heavily. Then she straightened herself up, checked her expression in the mirror, and her resolve seemed to return.
"The others aren't far. Think these doors can stop gunfire?"
"You're the Shadowrunner," I said. "Two of them have pistols, the third has another submachine gun. The troll could probably force them open, but he's got five flights of stairs to descend."
"We'll risk it." She turned to the semi-conscious ork, stretching out an arm and launching a ball of energy into him, the brief burst of magic messing with the camera feed for a millisecond. His eye's closed and he slumped over, properly unconscious now.
The next thirty seconds was maybe the tensest half a minute I'd ever experienced, even though I myself wasn't in any physical danger. Maybe it was because of that danger that I was having trouble treating this as just another job, but as the three gangsters tried to force open the doors with a crowbar, I found myself unable to look away from Tattletale, who still seemed unphased.
In the end, it was a sudden burst of movement on the lobby's camera that caught my attention. Like a lot of hotels, the lifts were set into the back of an open-plan lobby, behind a reception desk and a decorative sculpture of a Japanese castle that would be the first thing people saw when they stepped through the doors.
The doors at the front of the lobby were glass, and they shattered beautifully as a grey panel van reversed through them, crushing the flimsy plastic castle before coming to a halt just before the reception desk.
The rear doors of the van opened, and the lobby was immediately filled with gunfire as a GM-Nissan Doberman drone rolled out the back of the van on tracked wheels, already firing it's machine gun into the lobby. I could see the network it was part of – linked to the van itself and another couple of drones stored in the back – but the encryption on it was fiendishly tight. It was all tied to the driver, but she was outside the camera's view.
The three gangsters dove behind the reception desk, but the Doberman's bullets cut through their cover like it wasn't even there. Within moments all three of them had been hit, and one of them was definitely dead.
I'd never seen someone die before, and I knew it should have horrified me, but I could have cheered in relief as all the tension drained out of me. I let the elevator doors open, and watched as Lisa ran across the lobby, one foot landing in a pool of blood as she vaulted over the reception and dove into the back of the van. The Doberman trundled in after her, before the van doors slammed shut with a pulse of data from the Rigger's implanted control rig.
As a final fuck you, I let go of my stranglehold on the hotel's emergency lockdown, and heavy steel shutters clattered down over the shattered doors just in time for the troll to stagger breathlessly out of the stairwell, with nothing waiting for him but a bloodbath and a locked room.
"Thanks for the save," Tattletale said, her voice shaking a little. I couldn't tell if it was elation, stress or fear.
"Bitch," she continued, catching me off guard, "meet Bug. Bug, this is Bitch; the best Rigger in the city."
The 'best Rigger in the city' just grunted, her attention focused on her drones and her ride. Or she was just living up to her namesake. Either way, I could feel fatigue pulling at my persona. I'd exerted myself more than ever before in that hotel, and my presence in the Matrix had faded because of it. I needed to step back, gather my strength. Especially since I knew the actual job would be even harder.
So I said my goodbyes to Tattletale, telling her to message me when it was time to go, and gathered the last of my presence into a simple bedbug with instructions to wake me when that message came through. Then I pulled back from the Matrix, not even seeing Meatspace before I fell asleep right there in the armchair.
Interesting! Very interesting! While it's possible that I'm overreaching, just because it is, like, an actual thing in shadowrun, the hidden and incredibly complex data bomb makes me think that Bakuda's role in this is a Decker. Tats being connected to Snake is interesting, and I'm a big fan of Bitch being the rigger. That being said, while I'm sure we'll find out soon enough, I am immensely curious what Alec's role is going to be.
The Shadowrunners weren't in their shared apartment. I knew that much from the sprite I'd had follow Grue after I first met him. Instead, they were in an empty warehouse about a mile away from the one where the Yakuza were keeping their stolen containers.
I'd been brought here by a message from Grue, saying that they were preparing to launch the raid. Apparently what that meant was that Tattletale was scouting out the site in the astral plane, while the other three members of the team were engaged in more mundane preparations. Like linking me into their cameras to prevent me from getting surprised by another troll. Which was where the problems had started.
"Listen, uh, Bitch," I began, awkwardly trying to find a way to make her handle sound a little less insulting. "I can't help out if I can't see, and I can't guarantee there'll be CCTV cameras to look through."
"So what?" she snapped back. "Don't need a Decker anyway."
A datastream grabbed my attention, as Grue's cybereyes yielded to my request for access. He, at least, had no trouble letting me piggyback off his optics, and I saw the remaining members of the Undersiders for the first time.
Inevitably, Bitch drew my eye. She was standing protectively near her drones, arrayed in various stages of assembly in front of the same grey van she'd used to rescue Tattletale from the hotel. She'd laid out a case of tools in front of them, and each piece of each drone had been meticulously set out on a stained sheet of cloth that kept them off the dusty warehouse floor.
Bitch herself seemed almost as mechanical as her drones. She was probably more cybered-up than Brian, and unlike him her cybernetics didn't even try to mimic organic limbs. Her arms – what little of them I could see – were entirely mechanical, without any syn-flesh coating. They were gunmetal grey, and as far as I could tell they were meticulously well-maintained. Her eyes were similarly inhuman, with featureless camera optics set directly into her skull.
They looked like they'd been cheap when she bought them – most obvious cyberware is, for obvious reasons – but she'd clearly modified them since then.
Her outfit was about as practical as it came, and similarly looked like something she'd very carefully pieced together from whatever she could find. Her jacket was grey, military surplus, and had clearly originally belonged to someone taller than her. She'd rolled the sleeves up past her elbows, exposing her cybernetic arms, and the front was open, revealing an old Lone Star ballistic vest she wore over a black tank top. There were patches on the vest where she'd fixed up old bullet holes.
Her face was squarish and blunt featured, with auburn hair and a downright ferocious expression. She looked terrifying.
"Let her in," Brian said, forcefully. "We need her for the job, and she needs to see."
"What's wrong with her eyes?" Bitch snapped back.
I wished Lisa was aware right now, rather than sitting cross-legged in a ritual circle while she scouted out the site through some magic astral projection nonsense. She'd swapped the dress I'd last seen her in for hard-wearing pants and a black and purple shirt underneath a long trench coat, armoured and laden with obscure magical items. Yet she still somehow managed to make it all look sleek and expensive.
"My eyes are miles away," I answered. "Listen, they might have Deckers of their own. I can protect your drones?" I could tell it was the wrong thing to say the moment I said it.
"I don't need protection from you." There was venom in her words, but to be fair she did have a point. The wireless connection between her implanted control rig and its pairs in her drones was about as rock-solid as a wireless network could get.
"Bitch, you're being ridiculous!" Brian said exasperatedly, while I looked closer at her network.
It was solid, sure. Good enough to keep out almost anyone. So I worked at it from another angle – focusing my attentions solely on the ancillary systems. Bitch had paid the most attention to the joints, optics and weapons, because those were the most vulnerable and the parts she used the most.
She doesn't want to play ball? Well, fuck her. She can't shoot me while I'm halfway across the city.
I let go of my hold on Brian's optics, minimising the window while I reached out and grasped at the resonance around me. In and amongst the warehouses of this district, wireless networks were a lot sparser than elsewhere, but it was still on the public grid, still in the city. So I drew together datastreams and spun them together, as another sprite took shape. One I'd never made before.
I'd used sprites to slowly and methodically strip away security, but what I needed now was something a lot less subtle. Something that would hurt, and show that Bitch needed me. I wasn't about to lose out on this job because she was living up to her name… and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't invested enough to want to see this through.
So I taught my sprite to attack, quickly and violently, and its form took shape with manoeuvrable wings and a needle-sharp stinger ready to stab malware straight into anything I sent it at. A hunter-killer, in the shape of a wasp.
It dove at Bitch's GM-Nissan Doberman in a frenzied attack, slamming into her firewalls with brute force. I watched Bitch's firewall respond along predictable patterns, the systems around the most vital areas coiling tighter and tighter in an attempt to keep out the wasp's sting, even as other systems became exposed in the process.
I hit those myself, digging away at the drone's autopilot. It had to be aware of its surroundings, but it also had to be aware of the locations of the other drones, and that was my way in; the wireless link between her network, one that was far from the systems her control rig touched but integral to the drone's systems. A backdoor.
Bitch noticed, of course, but she was too slow to assert control of the drones. I'd already tagged the autopilot's optical senses, and a second window opened up in front of me showing the view from the Doberman's gun-mounted camera.
She wasn't a Decker. All she had was whatever firewall she'd put on her drones. It didn't matter how good that firewall was; one it was gone, it was gone, and there was only one option left to her. A moment later, the Doberman disappeared from the matrix as Bitch did what any luddite does when they come across malfunctioning tech. She turned it off.
"You fucking-" Bitch began, before I cut her off – kicking up the volume of the earpieces I was talking through.
"I fucking what? That could have been any Decker, and we already know the Yakuza has a good one on call." Bitch's drone finished rebooting, reappearing on the matrix with its firewalls reset. "How long was that? Ten seconds? That's a long time in a fight, I'm sure."
Bitch didn't respond. She just stood there, scowling at Brian since she couldn't scowl at me. His eyes were all over the place, darting between her and the drone. He knew something had just happened, but there wasn't any visual tell.
"Now, ask yourself, do you want it to happen again?"
Her scowl deepened, and I pushed the issue by sending her control rig a datastream requesting access to the drone's sensors. She didn't say anything, but a second later I had a quintet of camera feeds at my disposal.
The three drones and the dashcam in her van were expected, but she'd also given me the feed from her own cybereyes. It seemed like the sort of thing she'd want to keep private, and I didn't ask for it, but I wasn't about to try psychoanalysing someone who was more than a little bit psycho.
"You know, digital catfights aren't as fun to watch as real ones," the last member of the team piped up from behind Brian, and as Bitch's eyes snapped to him I saw him clearly for the first time.
He was human, like her, but that was where the similarities ended. Tattletale, at least, had dressed to fit her environment, but Regent could have been on his way to a club, with a silver shirt, white blazer and tailored black pants. The blazer was maybe a little stiffer than it should be, which suggested it had some hidden armoured fabric, but most of his gear seemed to consist of talismans worn around his neck. Unlike the more wild nature of Lisa's magic accessories, there was a formal elegance to Regent's gear.
Maybe they trained in different traditions?
Brain turned around, ready to say something to the obvious mage, but the sound of Lisa pulling herself to her feet drew him right back.
"Well?" he asked.
"They're in the A2B Freight warehouse," Tattletale confirmed. "Bug's intel was right on the money."
She dropped to one knee, dragging her gloved finger through the dusty warehouse floor as she sketched out a map. I could see the open main floor of the warehouse, with rows of shipping containers marked out, as well as several rooms to the side that were revealed as offices as Tattletale started marking out desks, tables and other obstacles.
"There aren't any wageslaves on site," she began, "but the company is legit, if small. They probably slip out the stolen containers along with legitimate freight. The employees must have gone home for the evening, which leaves ten guards on the premises."
"More than usual, for a warehouse." I could see Brian frown through the camera of one of Bitch's drones – an Aztechnology Crawler made for snooping around on walls and ceilings.
"Noticeably more," Tattletale nodded. "There's something else, too. Six of the guards were patrolling the site, with two in what I think is the security office with the tag jammer, two on the grounds and two doing the rounds on the warehouse floor, but there's something off about the other four. They're all here" – she tapped a random spot on the map, right on the end of one of the rows of containers – "and they're not moving."
"It could be a break room," I offered, but Tattletale shook her head.
"That's not it. There's something about them. It's hard to put into words, but something is wrong with them. Astrally, I mean."
"We have two mages, and a lot of firepower," Brian said, confidently. "If there is something weird going on, we can handle it."
"It'll be harder to hack their systems while the RFID tag jammer is active," I said, "and downright impossible to track the case."
"Then that's our first target," Brian said. "We pick our moment and storm the office, then push onto the warehouse floor while Bug directs us to the right container. We do it hard and fast enough, and they won't know what hit them. Any questions?"
Nobody spoke, and I watched through Brian's eyes as he stepped back from the map.
"Then let's move."
Bitch's van was an armoured GMC Bulldog, easily large enough to fit the team along with the three drones she'd brought – the Crawler and the two Dobermans, tucked away in compartments that, combined with the rest of her tools, took up the whole back third of the van. To my untrained eye, a lot of the gear seemed unnecessary. Like she could just take the van and drive off without leaving much of her life behind.
Grue and Regent were sitting in the middle third of the van, and the contrast between the burly ork in an armoured jacket and the waif-like mage in designer clothes was almost comical. There was a similar contrast in the front of the van, where Tattletale was leaning back in the passenger seat while Bitch focused on driving. She wasn't using a steering wheel, instead piloting the vehicle directly using her control rig.
I saw through both her eyes and the dashcam as we drew up level with the gates of the freight yard. Bitch slowed for a moment, looking at the simple metal barrier, before gunning the engine and spinning the wheels left.
"Brace!" she shouted a moment before the van hit the gates, knocking them off their hinges even as the impact sent a juddering shock through the van. Something flew off the gates, hitting the Bulldog in the windscreen, but it didn't even dent the glass.
Rather than slow down once she was clear of the broken gates, Bitch sped up, even as I heard gunfire pranging off the armoured sides of the van. In the back, Brian tightly gripped his rifle in one hand, with the other resting on the release buckle of his heavy-duty seatbelt.
The contest between a Rigger-customised, up-armoured van and the insulated sheet metal walls of an aging warehouse was an unfair one, and the wall practically disintegrated as the van slammed into it. Bitch hit the brakes, and the van came to a tyre-screeching halt in the middle of what might once have been a meeting room, if the half-shattered table that had been spread out across the opposite wall was any indication.
Bitch hit the door release automatically, and Grue was up in a heartbeat, throwing a grenade out the door even as he shouldered his rifle.
He wasn't quite as fast as the Dobermans, however, which rolled out of the open doors of the van and out into the warehouse yard. I watched through the lead drone's camera as Bitch guided its sights onto a uniformed security guard with tattooed arms, the crosshairs shaking with each shot as she pumped a burst of rounds into him. The force of the shots jerked him backwards, and I looked away. With the perspective of the drone's feed, it felt uncomfortably like I'd killed him myself.
Mere moments had passed, and Grue's grenade had only just burst, filling the room with smoke. His optics cut through it like it was nothing, sounding out the edges of the room and marking them on his vision with a green overlay. It wasn't perfect, and I did what I could to clean up the lines.
The others followed him, Bitch handing her drones over to the autopilot as her arm split open to reveal a hidden submachine gun. Her eyes were tapped into the same feed as Grue's, with Regent and Tattletale's AR glasses doing the same.
I watched through Grue's eyes as a silhouette appeared in the doorway, with one arm raised. Grue didn't even blink. He just strode forwards, raising his rifle and firing five rounds into the silhouette, his cybernetic arms automatically compensating for the recoil.
He stepped past the body without even looking down, even as Bitch left one Doberman to guard the back of the van and brought the other to her heel. Regent, for his part, almost lazily leaned out through the hole left by the van and, catching sight of the last remaining security guard outside, twisted his hands in a gesture that reminded me strangely of an old-fashioned puppeteer pulling strings.
I saw through his AR goggles as the guard fumbled, tripping, and a shot that might have hit the Doberman instead ricocheted off the ground. The drone's simplistic programming latched onto the gunshot, tracked it back to its point of origin, and retorted with a sharp burst of gunfire that had the guard scrambling back towards cover, even as Regent kept causing her to stumble. It wasn't enough to stop her completely, but it was enough to stop her from making it in time.
It almost looks like he's toying with her; keeping her on the border between safety and death. It must be a limitation in the spell.
Lisa, on the other hand, was ignoring the battle entirely in favour of getting a closer look at the guard Brian had gunned down. Unlike the pair outside, this one wasn't dressed in a uniform. Instead he was wearing the sort of padded red and green biker suit that was common among Lung's Clan, with the arms knotted around his waist to leave bare a torso covered in tattoos.
"We're in the right place," Lisa said over the comm, with obvious satisfaction in her voice.
"The guards outside are dead," Regent reported matter-of-factly as he ducked back inside.
"Good," Brian replied. "Bitch, keep watch out there. Bug, anything in the Matrix?"
"Uh," I stammered, realising I'd been so caught up in the camera feed I'd forgotten to do what they were paying me for, "one sec."
I stepped back from the camera feeds and focused on my surroundings. My persona had drifted along with them like it was tethered, and I found myself in the warehouse's sparse grid. It had the barest possible presence in the matrix, but there was still enough data to delineate the physical structure of the building.
I tapped into the team's cameras again, overlaying their position onto the Matrix. I could see Bitch's presence clearly – a mirror of her physical body, chrome and all, and Grue's cybereyes let me see him as well, but I had to manually add in Regent and Tattletale. It wasn't as good as actually being there and seeing the augmented reality with my own eyes, but it had the upside of a much smaller risk of death by gunshot.
Grue was creeping towards a doorway, letting the smoke cover his advance, and I drifted ahead of him, 'stepping' through the wall like it wasn't even there. There was a guard on the other side, visible in the Matrix by his commlink and a smartgun linked to a headset.
"Watch out," I said to Grue, even as I edited his cybereyes to mark out the guard's location. Grue nodded, bringing up his rifle and firing through the wall, but I was already drifting off to the office where we were supposed to find the RFID jammer.
While A2B might have been a legitimate freight company on paper, it quickly became clear this office was nothing more than a paper-thin smokescreen, and that if they ever managed to snag any genuine contracts it wasn't because of any deliberate effort on the company's part.
I'd seen corporate offices before – albeit rarely, and never for anything bigger than a local business – and each of them was a hub of neatly ordered Matrix devices as outsourced workers remotely interacted with domestic staff on shared documents that had to be supported from multiple computers at once. The warehouse might as well have been dead in comparison, with only the bare minimum needed to keep the lights on.
It meant that the room full of matrix-linked gear, emitting steady pulses of datastreams designed to soothe the twitchy programming of any number of RFID tags, stuck out like a sore thumb. This close, it was even affecting my presence. I could feel it draining away at my connection to the matrix, damping down the link between my body and my persona.
"Jammer's here," I said, marking the location in Grue's optics, "but I can't touch it remotely. You'll have to shut it down manually."
"Understood," he said even as my attention was grabbed by a strange flow of data in the ether.
"Look out!" I shouted, just as a heavily-armoured figure knocked down the door. I watched through Grue's eyes as a samurai barrelled down on him, its arms playing host to integrated blades that slashed down at the ork. The matrix revealed the mechanical form beneath the exterior – a bipedal Ares Duelist drone.
Grue ducked beneath one blade and caught the other on his rifle – the monofilament edge cleaving through the gun before becoming lodged somewhere in the middle. With his free hand, Grue delivered a withering blow to the drone that had it staggering back, its gyroscopic subroutines struggling to keep it upright.
I abandoned the feed to face the drone in the Matrix, seeing the same samurai rendered in digital space by Ares programmers eager to get that brand recognition across. It had no eyes for me, of course. It was built for meatspace, and only had a matrix presence to allow it to be linked into a network.
It didn't even react as I pulled together a web of resonance, collection it together into a spike that resonated with potential energy. As the drone moved to strike the now-unarmed Grue, I pounced, driving the spike into the machine's matrix presence.
The effect was immediate, the drone's leg seizing up as it struggled to cope with the damage I had done to its systems. Inside its chassis, fuses blew and circuit boards sparked, and Bitch seized on the opportunity, her Doberman finishing off what my spike couldn't touch.
I saw a last datastream leave the drone, heading for another in the next room, out of the Shadowrunner's sight.
"Got one more!" I reported.
"Mark it," Grue said as he drew his smart pistol, pointing it squarely at the wall.
The drone was quickly wrapped in datastreams that broadcasted its position through walls, and Grue's smartlink software latched onto that signal like a moth to a flame. His pistol was a bulky thing, and the crack of each shot was followed a microsecond later by the sound of microscopic jets lighting up on each bullet, guiding them effortlessly to the drone's most vulnerable points.
Each shot hit with the force of an eighteen-wheeler, with the first shattering the drone's kneecap and the second and third pulping the chestpiece and the vital control circuitry within.
"It's down," I confirmed, as Grue lowered his Ares Predator. "I can't see any more drones."
"Sorry I missed them," Tattletale said, hanging back behind Bitch's drone and Grue. "Drones don't have an astral presence, but I should have expected that."
"Not your fault," Grue replied as he moved up to the door. "That's three guards down. Have the four unusual signatures moved at all?"
Tattletale paused for a moment, resting her palm against the wall. Grue's cybereyes flickered for an instant, but not enough that he would notice.
"No," Tattletale answered, sounding concerned. "Do you think…"
Regent snapped his fingers, grinning with the satisfaction of someone who's solved a difficult puzzle with no effort at all.
"Bunraku dolls!" he exclaimed, and I felt physically sick. Sex workers implanted with tech that overwrites their mind, keeping them as unconscious puppets ready to be loaded with whatever software the 'client' wants.
"You can't leave them there," I exclaimed, and for the first time I actually wished I was anywhere other than my apartment right now. If I was there, I could open up their shipping container myself and set them free, rather than appealing to the morality of mercenaries.
Grue was hesitant, saying nothing, and my heart sank.
"There's no harm in it," Tattletale said to her boss. "We're not hauling anything large away with us, and even if we don't bring them in the van we can still send a tip-off to Knight Errant. It can't hurt our reputation."
"Fine," Grue conceded, even as he kicked down a door, firing a pair of shots into a yakuza thug who'd been trying to sneak up with a shotgun. "But we take out the jammer first."
The warehouse floor was a bare expanse of shipping containers, stacked two high in places. They bore the logos of dozens of different companies on the side, great and small, and some had been opened up already, though I couldn't tell if they were being loaded or unloaded.
Inevitably, my eyes were drawn to the container I knew contained the dolls. The Shadowrunners paid them no mind, with Bitch taking position at the entrance to the warehouse's small office while Grue prepared to lead the way in. He paused at the threshold, waiting for Tattletale to give the nod, before throwing his shoulder against the door and stepping in with his pistol raised.
The two Yakuza goons inside were clearly a cut above the hired goons outside, with one dressed in a pinstriped white suit and the other wearing mechanic's overalls. Both had their hands up, but the mechanic had an implanted commlink. I took a closer look, peeling back the layers of his defensive.
"Grue, the mechanic sent an alert."
"Unwise," Grue growled, and despite not hearing what he was replying to the pair of them shrank in their seats, "but not unexpected. Tattletale, secure them."
As Tattletale strode forward with a pair of zip-ties in her hand and a predatory grin on her face, Grue turned and fired a single shot into the signal jammer. In an instant, the matrix became filled with dozens of competing RFID tags, each sending off datastreams in seemingly every direction.
"The matrix just lit up like a Christmas tree," I remarked, even as I picked out the needle in the haystack. "I have the right box, but there's no way Knight Errant won't respond to this."
"Then we won't have to call them for the girls," Grue remarked, stepping out of the office.
I was about to respond when I was suddenly hit by a burst of crippling pain, feeling like my soul was being torn from my body. What's worse was that I could feel my physical body suffering as well, as the biofeedback built into the programme piggybacked off my connection.
"I think you've got bigger problems to worry about," a distorted voice spoke over the Runner's comm network. My persona shrank in on itself, my digital presence flickering. Another persona drifted past me, virtual hands caressing my shoulder before she flew up into the centre of the space. She'd deliberately overlaid her persona onto the team's optics, letting them see her as clear as if she were standing there in front of them, and her Decker handle was burned into every scrap of code. Bakuda.
"You're fucking with my operation," she said, and I looked up to see a figure wrapped in a cloak of living smoke, with a gas mask in place of a face. The lenses of her mask glowed with a baleful red light, and the matrix around her shimmered as she took control of the local network.
"I don't think I can allow that."
The doll's shipping container was torn off its hinges as a quartet of metahumans lumbered out of it, each of them tied to Bakuda by leashes of data. There was a female ork, two male orks and a lumbering male troll, each one of their bodies split apart and held together by invasive cyberware.
"I suppose this is as good a time to test the prototypes as any," the Decker gloated. "Honestly, sometimes I pity my peers. They see a device that can overwrite a subject's mind, turning them into anything so long as it can be programmed and put on a chip, and what do they do? They use it to get their dicks wet."
She sighed, shaking her head melodramatically before gesturing towards the team.
Well, I'll confess right now that I didn't see that coming! Cyber-zombies (or something close at least) are fun in a very "oh hey, this is really fucked up" way, and a strong start for sure. I love cyber-Bitch and the depiction of her confrontation with Taylor was really well done. I'm guessing that Regent is hermetic black mage?
Another persona drifted past me, virtual hands caressing my shoulder before she flew up into the centre of the space. She'd deliberately overlaid her persona onto the team's optics, letting them see her as clear as if she were standing there in front of them, and her Decker handle was burned into every scrap of code. Bakuda.
Yeah, they're not full on cyber zombies (Lung's Clan doesn't have anywhere near that sort of pull,) just kidnap victims given mildly extreme cyberware and with bunraku chips in their brains running custom-made drone software.
Thanks! Bakuda in Worm manages to pull off an intimidating entrance while cosplaying a character from an NES game, so I figured I had to do her justice when she's in her element.
Grue shouted out even as he dove to one side to avoid the troll charging down on him, his fingers replaced by razor-sharp claws and his already significant musculature enhanced by an exoskeleton drilled into the bone.
Regent responded by taking a step to one side and clicking his fingers again, except this time the gesture seemed to carry a lot more weight to it – the sound of it was harsher, like an audio glitch. Through the periphery of Bitch's cybereyes, I saw the air around Regent shimmer and distort in a digital haze until suddenly there was a figure standing next to him; a Greek Adonis with cracked stone skin that seemed to shift unnaturally, its feet seemingly planted on the ground by choice than any ties to the laws of gravity. The effect it had on Bitch's camera was… strange, the image subtly distorted as if the machinery was only grudging admitting it existed.
I caught a brief glimpse of its stone face, locked in an angry rictus, before Regent waved it forward with a dismissive gesture. The spirit charged straight into one of the enhanced orks, bowling him over before attempting to stave his head in. The female ork switched its attention from the Shadowrunners, turning her arm-mounted submachine gun on the living statue instead.
"Don't… Don't kill them." I managed to force the words out through the pain. "They're victims."
"Might not have a choice, Bug," Grue said, even as he drew his heavy pistol and tried to unload the rest of the magazine into the troll, only for the weighty rounds to fly off course. His smartlink had been hacked.
I tried to gather myself, forcing my persona to my feet as a psychological shorthand for drawing the streams of data that made up my virtual form back together. I reached out into the matrix and pulled, spinning strands into a trio of wasps before sending them to harass Bakuda's persona.
The trio of sprites compiled sequences of their own, generating an electron storm that engulphed Bakuda, shrouding her from sight behind the electric-blue tornado even as it wore away at her form like a belt sander.
It wasn't enough to stop her, but it would slow her down enough to let me get my head back in the game. The Shadowrunners were almost overwhelmed, with Tattletale forced to duck and weave beneath the extended blades of the last ork while Grue was gradually being battered into submission by a troll.
Regent's spirit was just about holding its own, but Bitch's Doberman had been scrapped by gunfire and the woman herself was in cover behind a pillar, firing at the puppets with the submachine gun in her arm while she called up her other Doberman from where it had been watching the van.
I reached out for the resonance again, stretching myself to compile another spirit. A spider this time; a black widow. The effort of it drained me almost as far as I could go, and I knew I'd feel it when I left the Matrix. Still, it worked, and I flung the spider at the ork attacking Tattletale.
In the Matrix, the four combat cyborgs were exaggerated parodies of their meatspace forms, with the flesh minimised in favour of emphasising the chrome. Each bore Bakuda's mark on their torso, neck or cheek – the same cartoon bomb I'd seen on lightweight's commlink.
The ork had jammed a blade through Tattletale's jacket, pinning her to the ground as it lined up another with her throat. The spider dug its legs into the back of the beast, stripping away its defences while the cyborg's mistress was occupied and causing it to malfunction. The cyborg's blades retracted back into its arms as the motors spun out of control, burning out in a shower of sparks and rendering the weapons useless. At the same time, Tattletale crawled backwards and held out a hand, firing a stunbolt into the cyborg that overwhelmed its organic components. It toppled over, unconscious for the time being.
My eye was drawn right back to the Matrix as the electron storm dissipated, the three wasps shrinking backwards with great wounds torn into their code. Bakuda herself hadn't escaped unscathed – her cloak was ragged and frayed – but the lenses of her gas mask were glowing with an even greater intensity.
I stood up, the flowing silk robes of my persona dropping into nothingness as they faded away to reveal a bipedal Arachne, formed from chitinous brown plates and with a quartet of spindly limbs jutting out of her back. I gathered myself into that form, loading complex forms of resonance into each taloned finger or razor-sharp spider leg.
I drove the legs into the digital 'floor' of the space, raising my body upwards even as the limbs drew in the surrounding datastreams, weaving them around my persona like a web. At the same time I recalled my fault sprites, and the trio of wasps began circling me as they awaited my command.
"Fancy," Bakuda chuckled, even as she reinforced her own defences. "But it's style over substance, Bug."
I didn't respond, driving my limbs into the virtual ground as I slowly swept forward. She was right, of course. Personas were just visual white-noise; a necessary feature to help the metahuman brain make sense of the digital world. Somewhere in the city, Bakuda was using technology to make sense of it in a different way. She had an implant hooked into her brain that took in the raw data and made it understandable.
But I had no such limitations. I used a persona because it was expected of me, but I never really saw it as a necessity the way everyone else did. If Bakuda was watching the datastreams rather than the Arachne in front of her – like I was – she'd have seen the sprite that slipped past her and latched onto her cyborg troll.
As it was, she only noticed once it was finished digging through the troll's defences and importing gremlins into its cyberware, causing it to miss a swing that would have pulped Grue's skull.
She turned in shock at being blindsided, and that was when I pounced. I drove a limb into her back, the tip loaded with a resonance spike that injected esoteric data into her persona, tricking the device with logical impossibilities and nonsensical information that overheated it even while spinning the fans out of control. Short of finding her in meatspace and shooting her in the face, the only way to deal with a Decker was to brick the device they were using.
She rebounded quickly, a skeletal limb darting out of her cloak as she tried to hit me with a data spike of her own, only to hit a sprite that I'd brought up to block the blow instead. As it withered and died, its code spilling out into the resonance, Bakuda jabbed out with a second limb and this time managed to catch me. The same junk data that would have damaged a machine ran rampant through my brain, the attached biofeedback causing synapses to burst. While I was in VR, I couldn't feel the physical damage, but I knew there was only so long I could last.
So I leapt back, sending the two remaining wasps to harass her even as I weaved datastreams around myself, layering them into armour that protected me at the cost of restricting my ability to move unhindered as I tethered myself to the passing data, using it to offload the lingering effects of her spike.
Bakuda hit hard, and she hit lethally. I couldn't risk getting close to her again, so I started to slowly shuffle backwards, roughly dragging another wasp out of the resonance even as I saw the edges of my persona start to fray back into raw data as I cannibalised myself to give it life.
It went to join the other two, and they darted around Bakuda. She couldn't hit them, but they couldn't do much to her either. Like me, she'd pulled together a defence that was more than enough to blunt their stings to the point where the damage was negligible. I'd surprised her once, but I wouldn't be able to do it again.
Not unless I stopped thinking like a brute-force Decker and started fighting like a Technomancer.
A sudden realisation ran through me like an electric shock, and I focused my attention not on her persona but on the strands of data linking it to her distant body like marionette wires. I reached out, drawing on those wires and clouding them with false data. I took advantage of all those systems that worked to make the unreal understandable, disconnecting them from reality with a heavy veil of resonance even as I loaded up my own information.
She saw my persona lunging for an attack, and responded to a blow that didn't actually exist. As she danced with shadows, I set the one surviving wasp onto her back and had it sting. While she fought shadows, and my spider disabled the female cyborg, that wasp slowly filled her data with poison and ate away at her persona, burning out her device as her defence became all the more frantic, desperate and futile.
And then she was gone, booted out of cyberspace with nothing but a crippling headache and a bricked cyberdeck for her troubles. The digital attack had ended as quickly as it came, with only the physical fight still ongoing.
One of the male orks was unconscious, and my spider had managed to shut down the woman's cybernetics, but even half-disabled the troll was still managing to threaten Grue. So, with a whispered apology, I drove a resonance spike into its cybernetics and crashed the governor system running the bunraku software. The troll collapsed, and I could feel the mind beneath the software stirring. He was terrified, the software told me – locked into a body that no longer felt familiar – but I couldn't risk any further alterations to the bunraku system. If I messed up, I could leave him permanently paralysed or braindead.
Miraculously, all the cyborgs were still alive, though the ork girl's inbuilt biomonitor was reporting several bullet wounds that would need attention at some point. The biomonitor of the only ork I hadn't touched, however – the one Regent's spirit had been fighting – was dangerously close to flatlinig, and I quickly pulled up the available camera feeds to see what was going on.
Through Bitch's Doberman, I saw Regent's spirit wrestling with the cyborg, its stone hands wrapped around the ork's neck even as he stabbed at the living statue with razor-sharp hand spurs that slid off the stone with a sound that didn't seem real. The statue's face was locked in a rictus of rage, and it was slowly throttling the ork.
I quickly tore into the defences on his cyberwear, forcing a backdoor into Bakuda's command and control system in order to cut his arms off from the cyborg's digital nervous system. They fell limp, the metal claws scraping against the ground, but the statue didn't let up its attack.
The ork had a SIN, buried beneath the bunraku software. Park Jihoo.
"You can stop now," I said over the comms. "They're down, and the Decker is gone."
Regent didn't answer. He just stood over the statue, watching the life slowly drain from the ork's eyes.
"You don't have to kill him," I pleaded. "Knight Errant will have noticed the RFID tags coming back online. They'll be here soon."
"Regent," Grue said, looking not at the ork but at the stacks of containers, "we have a job to do."
"Right," Regent answered, blinking uncertainly. He snapped his fingers again and the spirit disappeared, leaving Park Jihoo writhing on the ground until Tattletale stepped up and hit him with a stunbolt.
I felt the ground swaying beneath my virtual feet as fatigue finally started to catch up to me. I pushed through it, managing to mark out the right container on Grue's HUD, but I knew I was spent. It's like I was exercising a muscle I'd never used before; none of the work I'd done before had been half as intense as this.
"That's the container you're looking for. I have to go… throw up or something. Just wire me my cut, okay?"
I didn't wait for their response, drifting aimlessly back through the matrix as I reeled myself back along the datastreams linking me to my meat. All the while, I could feel myself fading away, my presence in the matrix growing weaker, until finally, I was out.
I woke with a start, my mouth filled with a bitter flavour. My vision slowly started to return, blotchy patches gradually disappearing. My head pounded like a dockyard crane had dropped a container on it, and as I looked down I saw that I hadn't been honest to the Shadowrunners; I'd already thrown up, and my shirt was stained with blood and vomit in equal measure.
There was a pack of tissues on an end table next to the armchair, and I wiped up the vomit as best as I could, obscurely grateful none had got on the chair itself. I hauled myself up onto trembling legs, stumbling across the apartment before half-falling onto the wall and using it to prop myself up as I staggered to the bathroom.
I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, and had in fact been weeping bloody tears down my ashen cheeks – more ashen than normal, that is. It mixed with yet more blood from my nose and mouth to leave me looking like nothing less than the monster in some low-budget horror flick.
Slowly, agonisingly, I pulled off my ruined top and pants and tossed them aside, wincing as each motion sent spasms of pain through my nerves, before stepping into the shower in my underwear. With my palms flat against the wall to hold me up, I looked up into the showerhead as scalding hot water cascaded onto me, staining pink as it washed the gore off my body. The heat helped me centre myself, and slowly I could feel the biofeedback fading from my nerves.
After perhaps half an hour, my connection to the matrix returned and I cut of the shower off as the graphic showing the ticking cost of the hot water appeared next to the temperature control lever.
Grue had sent me a message ten minutes ago, telling me that they'd retrieved the case and would be in touch later to discuss payment. In spite of how unbearably shit I felt, part of me was sad it was ending soon. That job had been the most hair-raising experience of my life, but I also felt alive while I was doing it. I didn't have anything waiting for me at home, and it was like I'd finally found a way to live through the matrix, rather than just exist in it. It had been days since I'd last gone on a trip down memory lane, trawling through mom and dad's files to try and recapture their lost memory.
Ultimately, though, I didn't give it much more thought. I wasn't really conscious enough for thinking, so I staggered into my room, fell face-first onto my bed, and immediately slipped into unconsciousness.
I slept through the rest of the night and most of the day, only to wake to an incoming phone call from Grue – with Tattletale's comm piggybacking off the link. I answered it as I rooted around in my closet for some clean clothes.
"Hello? Did the handover go okay?"
"Well that's what I wanted to talk to you about, Bug."
I was struck by another sinking feeling in my stomach, but I didn't have anything left to throw up.
"What do you mean?"
"We were wondering if you wanted to make this a more permanent arrangement," he said. "I thought we worked well together, and the team agrees."
"They do?" I asked, doubtful Bitch thought that way.
"Regent is indifferent," Tattletale said, "but Bitch said you 'might be useful.' Good job hacking her drones, by the way. Not a lot of people would have thought to do that, but Bitch is big on shows of force. She thought you were a coward, and you proved her wrong."
"So, what do you say?" Grue asked. "We're moving up in the world, and the payouts are only going to get bigger from here."
"I haven't been paid for this job yet," I countered. "How did the handover go?"
"Well," Grue sounded a lot more hesitant, "that's why we're calling. I told you this job was essentially an interview that would get us in with a new fixer, but what I didn't say was that the offer was conditional on us bringing a Decker onto the team. To fill a gap in our capabilities."
"I see," I said, but I'd already made up my mind. "Well, I'm happy to work together more, so mission accomplished?"
"Except the fixer wants everyone there for the handover," Grue continued. "In person."
"Well that's stupid," I snapped. "I can work just fine from the Matrix, so what's the point in dragging myself halfway across the city?"
"It's about showing you're committed, Bug," Grue answered.
"Fuck that," I snapped at him. "You know Bakuda was using biofeedback, right? I returned to meatspace in a pool of my own blood and vomit. I was in just as much danger as you were."
"Then what's the problem?" Grue asked, incredulous. "What's so bad about showing up in person?"
Tattletale piped up before I could respond.
"People don't get into Shadowrunning because they're the picture of mental health, Bug. We all have our neuroses, and it just so happens this fixer is obsessed with everyone 'having skin in the game,' as her contact put it to us. Look, I don't know exactly why you're hiding yourself away behind fake personas, but I've got a few educated guesses."
I didn't respond, and Tattletale let the line hang silent for a couple of seconds before continuing.
"The thing is, none of those guesses matter, because we're all a little fucked up. You saw Bitch and Regent, heard me talk about my pathological compulsion for secrets. Even Grue has his own neuroses and hang-ups that made him decide getting shot at for a career was the smart thing to do. We don't care if you're deformed, or on the run from a corp, or a rogue AI passing yourself off as metahuman. It doesn't matter."
"A rogue AI?" I asked, hesitantly.
"My profile of you gives it three percent odds," Tattletale answered. "Stranger things have happened."
The line fell silent, as I thought it over. I looked over myself – my ashen skin, my gangly limbs, the room full of oversized furniture that only made the few regular-sized items stand out more. I clenched my hand into a fist, feeling the weight of muscle and bone. I looked up, and saw the walls of my room. They were covered in memories: the notches on the closet where dad had charted my growth over the years; the few school prizes tucked at the back of a high shelf; paperbacks mom had bought me.
My entire childhood was laid out before me, but my childhood was a long time ago, and I suddenly noticed that there wasn't a single memory of my life after that. It was like the room was stuck in stasis, like I was living in a time capsule that had been buried the moment my dad died and the world dropped out from under me.
"Alright," I said, stamping down my nerves. "Send me the location of the meet. I'll be there in an hour."
Most of my tops were wide-necked – they had to be, to fit over my horns – so I threw on a zip-up hoodie over the top of it. Coupled with a pair of faded jeans, and I was about as nondescript as I could make myself while still being over eight feet tall.
I didn't have much time to reach the meeting point, but that was by design. It forced me out of the door and into the corridor, when I would otherwise have stood there until my doubts swallowed me. From there, there was nowhere to go but onwards, down the elevator and out into the streets.
I caught the metro, and there found myself face to face with more people than I'd seen in years. There were dozens of commuters all crammed into the carriage, pressed in side by side. I had to hunch over to even fit below the low ceiling, but I still had enough headroom to look out over the sea of faces. It made it easier to deal with, somehow.
The journey was just long enough for worry to start sinking in, but the metro wasn't going to stop just because I was having second thoughts. The streets were easier, in a way. I could focus on putting one foot in front of the other, and my paranoia kept me too busy with half-glimpsed shadows to make stopping seem appealing.
The neighbourhood was mostly industrial buildings that had emptied out as the evening rush died down, with only the occasional twenty-four hour factory still showing signs of life. The streets still held a steady stream of factory workers making their way towards the metro line, as well as other waifs and strays who were just cutting through the district on their way to other places, but all of them gave the Shadowrunners a wide berth.
Bitch's van was parked out the front of a failed factory, its doors chained and its windows boarded up. The woman herself was sitting in the open doorway of the van, fiddling with one of the components from her drones. Her cyberarm had split apart into an array of screwdrivers and tools that I couldn't even begin to make sense of, and she seemed to be wholly consumed by her work.
Regent was occupied as well, scrolling through something on his commlink as he leant against the van. Grue and Tattletale, on the other hand, were keeping their eyes open, looking up and down the street at the passing commuters. Grue actually looked at me a few times, his eyes passing over me as I drew closer and closer. Then Tattletale turned, scanned the crowd, and landed right on me with a smile that was at first satisfied, then genuine.
She nudged Grue with an elbow and pointed to me. Grue looked closer, but didn't seem to actually believe the mage until I awkwardly waved a hand at them. Then he looked at me again, his eyes focusing on my clothing before he shook his head and stepped forward, holding out a hand.
"Good to meet you in person," he said, "and welcome to the team. I'm Brian, by the way."
"And I'm Lisa," Tattletale piped up, "and those two are Rachel and Alec."
Right. Probably not the best idea to let on that I've known Grue and Tattletale's real names since our first meeting.
"Taylor," I reciprocated. "Is the contact arriving soon?"
"Any minute now," Grue answered, still looking me over. Having looked through his eyes enough times and become used to that frame of reference, it was disconcerting and strangely confidence-boosting to find myself looking down on him.
"Didn't you…" – he begins, hesitantly, before pressing on – "have anything more… I don't know, professional to wear?"
I looked around at the group, my eyes lingering on their leather jackets, magical accessories, body armour, holstered pistols and all the other tricks of their trade.
"Not really," I shrugged my shoulders. "You know I was just lifting copy protection on stolen goods before this, right?"
Grue looked like he wanted to say something more, only to stop as a bulky four-by-four with tinted windows rounded the corner.
"Alright everyone, look lively," he said, his voice raised. His left hand tightened its grip on a small grey briefcase – presumably the very thing we'd all been looking for. Bitch and Regent – Rachel and Alec, I suppose – set aside their distractions and stood up, watching as the Ares Roadmaster approached.
Tattletale sidled up to me, looking as pleased as punch, and stood on her tip-toes to whisper in my ear.
"I gave Technomancer nine percent odds."
I stiffened, looking around for an escape before I realised how pointless that would be, and that I probably didn't need to escape. Instead I sighed, and whispered back.
"How did you figure it out?"
"Astral perception. You don't have any cyberware at all, and when I try to get a closer look things become a little weird. Like my sight doesn't want to acknowledge you exist."
"Are you going to tell anyone?"
"Of course not," Lisa smiled. "Remember what I said about how a secret is more valuable the fewer people know about it? You should tell the others, though. If only because otherwise they might figure it out themselves and get all mad."
"I'll think about it," I said with a sigh.
"Speaking of astral perception," Lisa continued, a little louder this time so that Brian could hear, "the guy in the back of that truck is Awakened. Which means it's not our new fixer, but her head gofer."
The armoured car pulled to a stop in front of us, and the passenger door swung open before a truly immense figure stepped out. He was a troll, and with his horns he was easily taller than me. More to the point, where I was comparatively skinny he seemed to have been hewn from fat and muscle in equal measure.
He went bare chested beneath a long lather jacket that was covered in shamanic totems and fetishes, and when he spoke it was with a noticeable accent that I couldn't quite place beyond a passing familiarity to some of the Scandinavian dockworkers I'd grown up around.
"Grue. My congratulations on the success of your mission."
"Gregor," Grue nodded in acknowledgement. "We were expecting Faultline."
"For a simple handover? The case, if you will."
Grue stepped forward and held out the case for the troll, who took it carefully and held it in his immense grip.
"Then our business here is concluded. The funds shall be wired to your accounts," he fixed me with a weighty look, "Grue, we will send you your Decker's share to your account as we do not have her details on file. If that is acceptable, miss?"
"Bug," I answered after a moment's indecision. "I go by 'Bug.'"
Gregor nodded, turning and walking back to his armoured car.
"So, we're in?" Grue called to Gregor's back.
Gregor paused, halfway into his custom troll-sized seat, and turned back to look at Grue.
"Faultline will review your conduct and make a decision. We will be in touch."
We watched in silence as the Roadmaster disappeared into the city streets, taking the case with it. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering just what was in it that was worth all the trouble. On all the jobs I'd taken before this one, I knew everything there was to know about it, whether that was because the job was simple or because I was free to dig as deep as I wanted. I'd probably never be able to figure this one out, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that.
"Hey, Taylor," Lisa grabbed my attention. "We're going to have a few drinks to celebrate a job well done, then head back to our place. You want to come with?"
"That sounds perfect," I replied, surprised at how easily the answer had come.
