Shadowrun: Death of a Salaryman

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Oh yes, I'm curious. Oh, and what's the current stance of the Megacorps on Same-sex relationships? (Just in case poor MC-kun is interested in women)
 
[X] Take a shower and have some dinner
 
[X] Get out of here and use the cash you've got to book into a nice hotel that's safely away from the enclave because you're paranoid
 
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    • Scheduled vote count started by FBH on Jun 1, 2021 at 6:08 PM, finished with 23 posts and 14 votes.
    • [X] Get out of here and use the cash you've got to book into a nice hotel that's safely away from the enclave because you're paranoid
      [X] Take a shower and have some dinner
      [X] Go see if you can find a way to speak to someone in the Taipei police
      [X] Get out of here and use the cash you've got to book into a nice hotel that's safely away from the enclave because you can have a good time there on the company dime.
      [X] Head over to the flood zone right away and see what things are like out there
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    • Part 15: Paranoia
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    • ​

    You pick up the case, then open your phone to think about ordering a hotel. You're torn between sleeping here and leaving to somewhere a little less in control of the people you're observing. It's paranoid truly. If something was to happen to you, surely that would put up even more of a red flag. You can relax here. Even if you were to leave the Taipei branch would need your contact details.

    Except.

    You have a feeling. You're not sure how else to describe it. A vibration up your spine. Something is telling you that staying here. That treating the Taipei branch-like friendly ground is dangerous.
    ​
    You pick up the case in your off-hand, make sure the chain is in place and that you can quick draw the pistol if you need to, then head out, up to the helipad and call for a shuttle into town. A security message pops up.

    <<Agent, you're heading into town already?>>

    You're already talking to a human. The feeling of worry ramps up another notch. <<Yes. I'm not paid to take a holiday.>>

    <<Where can we contact you?>>

    <<Route your communication requests through Osaka.>>

    Ichibangase might be annoyed at you conducting such a long routing. It's possible that icebreakers could break through the encrypted link and expose the message traffic. Network resources will need to be assigned to guard it. You think, overall, he'll understand. He told you once to trust your gut. Goto has said the same thing, or rather that young guys are afraid to trust their guts. Right now your gut is saying it's more important that Taipei branch cannot casually confirm your location.

    <<Alright, you're cleared out at this time.>> The security agent sounds dubious as a shuttle copter touches down across from you. You duck under the spinning rotor blades and sit down in the back compartment, then pick a touch-down point at random on the middle levels of the city center.

    Taipei is a big city, partly flooded, and built very vertically, with cloudscrapers, condocologies, and megabuildings in as greater proportion as Tokyo, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Most of the city's business goes on in a series of suspended layers, with things getting more slummy the closer you get to ground level, at least around the city's notional center. Other areas, such as the preserved old town are more lowrise, but right now you feel more comfortable in the crowds of the city centre. Your helicopter touches down in a neonlit pad, with buildings stretching upwards on all sides. Bright neon flickers all around you and giant screens advertise a trope of the latest Japanese idols, a K-pop band and a new season of a popular Taiwanese martial arts puppet show. You walk down the street for a while, looking around in your AR for what you want and find a coffee shop still open at this hour.

    It proves to be a small bar of seating with coffee along it, not totally ideal but it'll have to do. You sit at one end, order some coffee, acutely aware of your back to the street and the amount of money in the case, hinge it open slightly and plug into the cyberdeck, then close it most of the way. The most secure way to find a good hotel is to use the defences of your cyberdeck when you enter the local network.

    The first thing you want to do, being in a paranoid mood, is to check it hasn't been tampered with. Sitting where you are you can't check it physically, though it was showing all have the correct stamps and anti-tamper telltales. Instead, you run a series of diagnostics against a program in your commlink to check if anything is amiss with it. It gives you a clean record, except for the usual corporate surveillance system.

    Is that actually safe here? The data dump off of a company deck in company use is supposed to pass through an encrypted onion link back to a data center in Yokahama, where it's stored for later review. There is an EMCON mode, but it requires local security authorization, which you for sure don't want to ask for. Any official request for that data from the Taipei branch would immediately raise red flags. On the other hand can you really trust that nobody in internal security there has a friend, has cut a corner?

    You know it happens. You take a deep breath. You'll source a fresh cyberdeck in the morning. For now all you need is time. You'll have to let the Taipei branch know where you can be contacted anyway.

    Is it really safe to use this, even for that?

    There's really two things you could do. The first thing would be, after alerting Osaka to tell them the reason, break protocol and install third-party VPN software onto your deck. This would mean that all Yokahama gets to see is a bunch of encrypted logs. This seems justified to you, and you're pretty sure Goto and Ichibangase will go with it. It nevertheless could be a reason to trump up an internal security investigation against you, if that was what was wished. The alternative is to buy a new cyberdeck. That might cause some comment when your expenses come through, but that would be later.

    [ ] Buy a new, clean cyberdeck
    [ ] Download a VPN onto your existing cyberdeck.
     
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    • [X] Buy a new, clean cyberdeck

    Just remember: you aren't buying YOURSELF a deck. You're buying SHIAWASE a deck, and borrowing it for a while. Shop accordingly.
     
    [X] Download a VPN onto your existing cyberdeck.
     
    [X] Buy a new, clean cyberdeck

    The corruption here is so bad that a fucking Japanocorp's headquarters noticed and told us to actually do something about it while we're covering it up. People whose murders could make the news have already died. I feel justified in my paranoia.
     
    [X] Buy a new, clean cyberdeck
     
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    • Part 16: Hotel picking
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    • ​

    You read once, in an old British spy novel, that there is no one more lonely and afraid than agent alone in an enemy country. Perhaps one: someone who has just this moment realized that they are such. You take a deep breath, down your coffee and tell your comlink to find you an electronics store that's still open this late.

    It doesn't prove too difficult to do. Taipei, like all big cities, never really sleeps. You take the monorail a few stops, then walk down a covered arcade, passing various fast food shops, a book store, and then finding a large chain electronics vendor. The well lit shop is almost entirely white inside, but with only staff member at a counter, looking at something in AR. At least nobody will harass you to buy. That's good. You want to make your selection in private. The place is thickly stacked with electronics, and you see a rack of knew looking cyber decks.

    "Greetings." The store says. "Reminder: all display items are for display open and cannot be removed. If you see an item you like a brand new model can be brought from our store room."

    "Thanks." You say, then feel faintly foolish for thanking a machine, even as it gives you a bright 'you're welcome' as you look down the row of boxes. There's a lot of different ones to choose from but you have several choices. With a million nuyen in your expense account you should be able to pick anything you want though some are quite expensive. After a bit of browsing you narrow it down to four:

    [ ] Sony Cyberspace VII: (50,000 nuyen) An excellent and widely used cyberspace deck, representing Sony's latest and greatest offering onto the cybersecurity market. Uses a set of biochips believed to have been designed by a Renraku defector 2 years ago, and a number of black lab derived technology. Extremely pricy but top of the line, though known to be somewhat unforgiving and arcane in its automatic systems.
    [ ] Shiawase Cyber-4: (30,000 nuyen): The current deck you have and the one you're most familiar with. Of course if you come across another Shiawase trained hacker, then they'll be equally familiar with it. The cyber-4 is a deckers deck, easy to control, without the kind of advanced systems of the Cyberspace VII, but far more enjoyable to deck with.
    [ ] Renraku Tsurugi: (20,000 nuyen): A classic combat cyberdeck, known for its extreme lightness and durability. Favored by onsite HTRT hackers, assault teams and military special forces for its hardwearing condition and lightness. Not nearly as powerful as either the Cyberspace VII or the cyber-4, but still quite capable in the hands of a skilled decker.
    [ ] Fuchi Electronics K-Zero: (25,000 nuyen): A new offering from Fuchi, the K-Zero is meant to launch their new cyberdeck product line for corporate deckers and security spiders. It's good, and cheap, but also large and bulky, using a fairly strange and non-standard chip architecture that enemy hackers and attack barriers have a hard time breaking. The big advantage of the K-Zero though is the blowout function. Fuchi boasts a 100% survival of hackers using the K-zero against even the darkest of black ice. Still, it's an office machine and would be hard to carry around.

    Having spent so much on a deck, you decide you'll buy a clean laptop as well, which makes everything easier and buy a smart-looking sony Machine with a lot of ram and processor capacity to spare in case you need to do something that requires it. That costs you another three thousand nuyen, but it's well worth it. With your purchases made, you head out until you find a restaurant you can grab a connection point from, order another coffee and search rapidly through the hotels listed for one that looks like it'd suit your needs.

    Again, with a bit of work you're able to narrow it down to four. This will be your base of operations for the trip most likely so it's best to be careful with what you pick.

    [ ] The Miyako City Hotel Taipei: A reasonably mid-priced business hotel, fairly secure and with normal hotel facilities, including a pool, gym, network access and on-call armed security response team provided by Knight Errant corporation. Costs around 150 nuyen a night.
    [ ] The Mandarin Oriental Taipei: Renowned for being the most expensive hotel in Taipei. Extremely secure and luxurious hotel, package includes pool, gym, access to on sight trauma centre and trauma team coverage, secure and anonymous onion linked network access, car hire and access to both round the clock armed security on the premises and guest retrieval locator function, both provided by in house security specialists. Costs around 500 nuyen a night
    [ ] The Taipei Continental: A seemingly normal global chain that is known to have absolutely the best security and some of the best restaurants of hotels around the world. Costs around 300 nuyen a night.
    [ ] the Sea View Family Hotel: A dive hotel in the flood district. Costs 50 nuyen a night but would be very private. It would also be a very easy place to get snatched from if someone were to find you, but nobody would look for you there.
     
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